Farmerleaf

I bought this tea some years ago, and at first, I wasn’t very much into it. The tea was ok, but nothing remarkable.
I put it away and forgot about it.
Recently I’ve been in the mood for white teas, and I have been trying a lot of my stack.
Today I had a session of 2018 Jangmai Moonlight, and I was impressed by the brew.
It’s much sweeter and thicker, as I remember it, and it keeps going.

I did 18 steeps in total (5gr in a 126ml white Yixing teapot I only use for (aged) whites). 10-15-20-25-30-35-40-50-60-80-120-150-180-240-300-330-360-400 seconds.
It kept on going; I could have had more steeps; next time, I have to start drinking this tea earlier in the morning, so I can keep going all day.

Too bad it sold out. Otherwise, I would have bought a tong of this.
I’ll try the 2021 version soon (I hope the .fr website will get some stock soon), but it will probably also take a couple of years to develop fully.

Decent pu-erh! I got this tea from my Farmerleaf order and it’d be a great daily drinker. Beautiful leaves with a beautiful aroma and a beautiful liquor. Flavour was decent, nothing special but it holds its own weight. Character was mediocre but I wasn’t expecting much for the price either. Texture was juicy and unexpectedly good. Finish & aftertaste was decent and prominent, cha-qi was decent, good buzzy and heady feeling, and steep longevity was decent lasting up to steep 10+.

Decently nice tea! I got this tea from my recent FL order, and it’s a good example of a white tea. Great leaves with great aroma and vibrant liquor, decent flavour lacking a bit of richness and nuance with smooth yet juicy texture. Character is a bit lacking, where the finish & aftertaste were lacking too. Cha-qi is average to mediocre and steep longevity is really good.

Decent pu-erh! I got these little squares of this tea from my recent FL order, and it really was a nice brew. Beautiful leaves compressed into these cute squares, with a beautiful light, dusty (in a good way), floral aroma which was paired with a vibrant liquor. Decent flavour but lacks richness and a bit of nuance, with great texture that was quite juicy, an average finish but a great aftertaste. Character of this tea is decent but the cha-qi is unnoticeable. To end it off, this tea has a slightly better than average steep longevity. Good tea but could be better.

Wonderful tea! I got this tea from my recent Farmerleaf order, and this tea really is a juicy bomb. Beautiful fine picked leaves with a high bud ratio, paired with a decent wet leaf aroma and a decent liquor. This tea has a wonderfully nuanced taste that strikes a balance between bitterness, sweetness, fruity and minerality. It could’ve been slightly more potent, but that’s beside the point really. Intensly immense juiciness in the texture paired with a permeating astringency, with the juiciness lasting strong into the finish which is also accompanied by a fresh minty feeling and a nice honeysuckle aftertaste. Beautiful character that this tea possesses, changing its flavours and profile between the different steeps, making for an interesting session. The biggest complaints about this tea that I have is the lack of a potent cha-qi, with a mediocre, but nice, buzzy and warming cha-qi present, and a relatviely average steep longevity compared to other shengs.

If those aspects were present, this tea could’ve easily been a 85+, but nonetheless a good tea for honestly a decent-ish price.

A decent young raw! I got this tea from my recent Farmerleaf order, and I’d say it’s above average or mediocre. Beautiful leaves full of buds with trichomes topped with a decent aroma and vibrant liquor, this tea had plenty to offer in terms of a slight bitey texture paired with a strong aftertaste that lingers for hours. This tea however didn’t have the most potent or complex flavour and it generally lacked a potent cha-qi and good steep longevity. Overall, a good tea for a decent price.

I pulled this one out to add to the TTB. Its nicely roasty, slightly nutty and not astringent or bitter. I don’t mind it but I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to purchase. It’s not quite boring, but not too exciting either. The first steep became a little bitter as it cooled, and the second steep was much the same as the first.

The rinsed leaves smell intensely refreshing. The scents are fresh and foresty, in a sweet way. The brew is really sweet, syrupy, mouth-coating sweet rather than foresty. This is a very pleasant and comforting tea. It remains sweet, never becoming grassy or harsh in later brews. It seems like good value to me, but it’s a little bit above my budget to buy a cake of. Maybe I would if it would really click with me, the sweetness is very nice, however this doesn’t feel 100% my thing, I guess it lacks that bit of edge or mystery for me. It’s just too accessible and pleasing perhaps. Really great tea though.

I would not really agree with the ‘medium oxidation’. As visible in the image quite a lot of green shines through these leaves, making it relatively light for a dianhong. That also doesn’t make it a ‘classic Yunnan black tea’ for me. It is pretty complex, with flowery, fruity and even somewhat vegetal aspects, and it lacks the classic honeyish, caramelly, sweet, thick and smooth dianhong thing.

If you don’t expect this to have that typical dianhong profile, it is a nice, lively and refreshing black tea with much character for its price.

Still in the throws of Covid. Though they are becoming gentle punches. It is more like a cold now. Be careful my friends. If you feel a cold coming on test for covid so you don’t spread it to our more vulnerable population. Ah, but I was truly worried I would lose my sense of taste and smell. Which I did for a bit but it is back now. Perfect time for this tea. It starts off with an aroma of sweet woods and then moves to hay. Composting hay and burnt squash. The flavor is similar but no burnt notes. There is an earthy depth to this tea that is somewhat difficult to wrangle.

Not a fan of this tea. It’s not terrible. This is already my third steeping but my palate doesn’t seem to jive with it. The initial aroma was nice. Woodsy. But the wet aroma is sparse. Slightly reminiscent of a cold day. There’s that something in the very cold air that is also found in the cup. The flavor is all over the place. Earthy but I can’t quite place what I am tasting. Like a brittle desert wood. With a rose?

This is a smooth, sweet and deep tea. The aftertaste is inspiring. I notice hardly any bitterness or astringency and really no strong upfront flavor notes, but there is a lot of hard to define but really present ‘intensity’.

2020 version. Delicious, full-bodied, very sweet. You cold say this has most of the mouthfeel, sweetness and aftertaste of a normal young sheng tea, but without the bite and higher aromatics. Nice stuff.

So apparently quite a bit of tea from this part of Laos is masqueraded as eastern Yiwu as it borders the area and has similar material. The alleged story behind this tea is that Covid shut down the border making it impossible to sell the raw material in Yiwu so those who harvested the tea had to process it themselves which was done in a somewhat primitive manner. The result is a tea less complex and thick than a GFZ or WanGong but still pleasant and most importantly deep powerful qi that’s almost as good as tea from the above area at a fraction of the price. The flavors remind me of other Laotian teas I’ve had which is to say they taste like lemongrass to me. Culinarily speaking, this is a bright refreshing tea that goes well with a summer hike or a bowl of pho soup. None of the deep complexity of a good Yiwu but all the qi and an excellent tea for grandpa style brewing on a hike. If you want something with qi almost as good as GFZ area tea and don’t mind a simpler flavor profile with little mouthfeel (for $90 a cake instead of $500) this is a tea to try . Note, this tea also seems to be processed in a manner that retains a bit more bitterness, resinous notes and a whiff of smoke that I reckon may make it more suitable for aging than most newly pressed sheng. My stomach problems have forced me to cut my consumption of young sheng way back and most of my tea consumption has been natural Taiwan stored Yiwu…but at this price I bought a few cakes and threw them into heated storage for the long haul 6 months in and the smoke and acrid off notes are already faded.

wet leaves: rich toasty green like hojicha, plus a complex background of hay, violet. Liquor is smooth, coated mouth with green tea toasted feeling. lingering gritty aftertaste, simple and pleasant.

after: cooked candied roots, sugarcane sweetness. Liquor stays thin compared to more expensive stuff. also aftertaste fades quickly to a memory of burned stevia.

Heartbeat accelerates , brain activity slows down and freezes while somehow keeping the anxiety high.

Thanks for including this sample in the package Martin! I really enjoyed it and am glad to have tried a black tea from William.

Somehow, it lands somewhere between an aged white and a more typical sun-dried black, which is most probably due to the short oxidation in large measure. It is a woody and sweet tea with hints of sawdust and smoke in the aroma. In the mouth, some additional notes of peach, malt, licorice and autumn leaf pile come forward. I also found the effect on the mind to be quite defocusing – a fairly common aspect of Jingmai teas actually.

Backlog from March 2021. Sample from Martin of 2018 harvest. Thankee :)

More aromatic than flavorful; bright and oily; deeper, unique flavors brought out by higher temperatures. Too much of that weird, primal, ephedra-like energy I get from high quality Jingmai teas.

Rich and juicy, thick with a layered, honeyed mineral upfront sweetness. Balanced astringency and minimal bitterness. It reminds me a lot of oatmeal: notes of honey, apple, cinnamon, osmanthus, citrus and tobacco tones, peaches and apricots, oats, dry grass. Floral, fruity and deep, not as sweet as some Yiwu teas. Lordy that is good! If only it weren’t so high in caffeine. Great Jingmai tea. Powerful, clean, tasty for only 20c/g.

Thank you, Martin :)

Five grams from Martin in the pot, a few completely empty resteeps and even more grandpa-ish refills. This tea is really smooth and gives the impression of being full-bodied but it manages to water down quickly beyond the sip. The flavor and the body d i s a p p e a r

Tastewise, for some reason it reminds me of game meat spiced with herbs like wintergreen. It’s not gamey but it has a rich, meaty quality to the taste (at least what’s there at the beginning of the sip), so maybe like venison? Other mild associations include sauerbraten, gravy, dense whole rye bread. Strange brew! If only it weren’t so thin and watery!

This is the first tea I’ve tried from William ‘Famer-Leaf’ of Youtube fame. So I have some high hopes!

The leaves come apart easily when I prod it with my pick from the edge. It’s simple to grab about 4 grams of whole leaves. I’m just sampling this right now, so I’m using a 75ml porcelain Gaiwan and boiling spring water.

Initially, it tastes very ‘green’. Kind of like a bitter sencha whack (which makes me a bit worried, I’m not expecting sencha flavours). It’s a rounded flavour note. Bitter without being astringent at the start.

It definitely makes you sweat and it has a bit of body to it. Not ‘thick’ or particularly ‘oily’. The soup is pale yellow with a slight green hint. Mouthfeel is pleasantly soft.

By the third steep I’m tasting the dry subtle tartness of asian Pomelo fruit and maybe grapefruit-seed oil. Bitterness is getting stronger and slight astringency. So I take a swig of fresh water.

The lid smells like citrus rind.

Boom. With the fresh water comes sweetness. Sweet like sugarcane syrup all the way down my throat moving to a more buttery/golden syrup. It has a nice ‘lasting’ flavour on the tongue.

Later steeps and I’m in pomelo territory again but milder and a little sweeter, a bit more floral (orange blossoms). It has that bitter edge I like in a nice marmalade. It’s definitely in the pomelo territory, less the orange.

Nice. I’m going to have to give this more of a shot and play around with brewing parameters. So I won’t mark it as ‘recommended’ for now (which is a bit pointless, I think his stock is all sold out). I’ll put another note up once I’ve given it a few more tries. But this is a very solid first impression.

I’m a bit stuck though, the leaf smell is like a citrus hinted green tea. Which I didn’t expect at all from a young sheng (then again, I don’t drink that much young sheng).

Energy is strong though and I probably shouldn’t have tried this at 11pm.

I’ll mark this as 80 for now and I’ll revisit it over the weekend.