This tea isn’t well liked by the reviewers on Steepster, but I happen to like this tea. The taste is disappointingly mild for a black (at first), but the wet leaf aroma is really interesting. It has lots of typical Yunnan black flavors such as dark chocolate (possibly with a trace of orange) and caramel, but it also has some earthy notes sort of like wet forrest floor, but in the spring when it’s very wet and warm and all the leaves are decaying. The aftertaste is a lot like coffee, which wasn’t my favorite.
By the third steeping I brewed it for 3 minutes to get a stronger flavor. The fourth steeping was about 4 minutes, and was too long. The fifth steeping was only 10 seconds and seemed like just the right amount of time. You really need to adjust the time for how little or how much the tea brick has separated. I like this tea pretty well, but it certainly wasn’t the rich, sweet taste I was expecting from the description.
The harvest date for these was Autumn 2012. I am considering ordering some of the spring 2013 bricks from Yunnan Sourcing. I tend to find that I like spring Yunnan blacks better than other harvests.
