Yunnan Sourcing

This is not a complex tea, nor does it have strong flavors. Seems best suited to a blend. In spite of this, the material is of the highest quality and the aroma is pungent so I cannot give it too poor of a rating. May not do well with gongfu style brewing will try again and update.

A sipdown! (M: 3, Y: 3)
Last 8 grams… what to do with this tea from Michelle and Rich? Thank you!
Split in half and have two weak sessions?
Brew all at once, hoping it will be fine?

Decided for the latter, with long steeps… 20/40/60 seconds, a few uncounted, and one roughly 45 minutes long one, as I have added the water to the gaiwan and forgot about it as I was called for a dinner. The longest one was the last one; I think that the tea doesn’t have any qualities to steep anymore, haha. But drank that one too.

Well, definitely higher amount of tea helped this tea — with more stronger flavours; but didn’t reveal anything else that I haven’t noticed. It is nice and fine shu, but honestly I don’t notice anything in particular. It’s pretty “generic” shu, with excepted flavour profile, woody and mushroomy, the last one was a bit earthy and coffee-bitterness was there a bit.

Whatever, but sipdown is a sipdown, so another tea removed from cupboards.

A puerh from Michelle on courtesy of Rich, thank you both!

Sadly, it isn’t much remarkable to me. It was fine, but not much to write about.
It wasn’t even much thick (considering I have used the half I had) and it has got some basic shu notes — as woody, a little mushroomy, a nicely earthy. But nothing was distinctive and nothing that would say this is great flavour note.

Good daily drinker in conclusion and I wonder if it was like that when new or it was just aged taste. Steep time is the average I did. So I did rather longer steeps this time.

Had this one over the week…sample from crowkettle i think? or a previous order. Enjoyable and something i likely might have picked up myself someday but now i don’t have to! nothing special.

Stepping away from my Puer for a bit, I decided to re-visit this Spring 2022 Feng Qing Golden Pekoe #100 Dian Hong black. It’s been quietly sitting in a sealed jelly jar in my dark tea cabinet for over 2 yr now. The dry leaves are wiry strands about an inch long, and cocoa-brown in color, with a pronounced scent of dry cocoa powder. I brewed a heaping tablespoon in 16 oz boiling alpine spring water western style for 4 min.

Bang! This stuff packs a punch! The clear golden-brown brew is highly aromatic, smelling of chocolate vegetable and prune stew. And the taste is phenomenal, with powerful dark chocolate and malty raisin-like tones, sweet yet umami flavors, and if you look for it, a residual assamica note as well. A long-lasting and mouthwatering aftertaste enhanced my savoring of this delicious tea. Nothing astringent or bitter or sour at all. Just a mouthful of chocolate-covered plums and raisins.

This will be a nice counterpoint to the season’s pumpkin-spice pungence that just swept in, and the peppermint & cinnamon candy-cane flood on the horizon. I’m looking forward to diving into the yet-unopened quarter kilogram bag of this in my back closet and sharing it with friends!

Wow! This is a truly delicious tea, and the description by Yunnan Sourcing is spot-on. The aroma is heady and I can immediately sense its assamic descent. Taste is rich, malty and sweet, like stewed stonefruit. Some astringency arose in the second steep, also greatly enjoyable. I’ll buy more for sure! Steepings #3 & 4 were 12 hr later and also satisfyingly tasty.

I received this packet as part of the “Smoky Tea Lovers Sampler Set” form YS, not because I particularly love smoky teas, but because I wanted to try some of the varieties available and see what was out there. These leaves were supposedly harvested in spring 2021, and so they’re just barely one year old. Nevertheless they were deep dark brown as dry leaf, and stayed dark brown through steeping. I’ve added a photo of the spent leaves. The tea liquor was a deep honey color. There could be no doubt that this tea was intentionally smoked over wooden fires. In the first steeping, I got an overwhelming fragrance of pine smoke very reminiscent of the aroma in my jar of smoked paprika. I was unable to smell anything else. Flavor wise, although I detected sweetness in the back of my mouth, the overwhelming flavor profile was as though I had been inhaling campfire smoke through my mouth for an hour. I didn’t really taste anything else, probably because the smoke residue deadens the sense of taste, and I actually developed a numbness on my tongue and the inside of my lips. I would only pair this tea with very strongly flavored foods, and I have a hard time imagining when I would want that level of smokiness except, perhaps, when eating meats. The second steeping was much less pungent and far less flavorful, and I see no reason to try a third steeping. They might as well have smoked wood shavings or forest leaf-litter to achieve an equivalent product. I just don’t like this and now I have to try to get the flavors out of my mouth. As bad as it is, I’d still drink it over rooibos. Maybe this will come in useful as a dry rub for oven roasted meats. I’ll have to try grinding some up.

Another smokey, raw pu’erh from YS. This one came as part of their “smoky tea lovers sampler set“ which I bought not because I particularly love smoky tea, but rather I am unfamiliar with it and wanted the experience! A sampler set seemed to be a good place to get that experience, especially if they are teas selected by lovers of smoke!

Well, this tea did not disappoint. Steeped to a golden hue (after 10s rinses in hot tap, then boiling spring, water). A great smoky flavor, soft mouth feel with low astringency, and a good lingering aftertaste. Clearly well aged, but without “humidity“ in the nose and no trace of fish, compost, or dirt on the tongue. This tea would stand up to, and complement, a bacon & egg breakfast, with the sweet smokiness echoing smoked bacon! By the third infusion, the leaves had opened up to reveal a dark green chop with a few stems, and the soup had transitioned to a honey-brown hue. Fourth infusion still had some fines at the bottom of the cup and the flavors had tempered—still smokey, but time to lengthen the steep time considerably.

Yup, this is smokey. And had bitterness & astringency in my first steep (after a rinse in hot tap water and another rinse for 10s in boiling water). Deep golden colored brew and very aromatic. The leaves were still quite green as you can see in the right-hand dish of the photo, which belies the teas youth and drier storage. By the 3rd steep, the smokiness had diminished but the astringency remained potent. Perhaps this tea will age to a smoother and sweeter brew in 10 or 20 more years, and if so, perhaps my heirs will be enjoying it.
UPDATE: I continued sipping this, now on infusion number 6 (five minutes). The bitterness and astringency have tempered, but the soup remains a beautiful, clear, deep golden color. Nice, round mouhfeel. Bumping up my rating by 5 pts. though the tea still needs more age. This, too, was part of the “smokey tea lovers sampler set” and I’m glad to have tried it.

Gongfu Sipdown (1616)!

From the rinse, this sheng has a fleeting sweetness in the top notes before taking a hard turn into a pleasantly biting floral body flavour. The finish is a bit more brothy with kind of an oceanic salinity to it. There’s not really any astringency though; just that really nice balance of bitter and medicinal notes offset by those sweet top notes and a great huigan. There are a lot of very dynamic flavours captured here, which makes for a pretty dang interesting session w/ the lovely bonus of adding a hint of fruitiness by snacking on some fresh raspberries in between the steeps!

Thanks Togo for the sample!

Tea Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CanRU8BOVaC/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab-UOSb5KeI

smooth thick and creamy, no catch in throat. subltle huigan. has a “classic YS” flavor. hint of smoke, hint of dry storage and bitterness, hint of higher register florals, and calming/soothing. liquor is extremely thick and smooth, gelatinous. mouthfeel is the biggest feature of this tea, and it overshadows any flaws The flavor is a bit tannic/higher register, acetic but by a hint of smoke/ash. This is a “I need a scotch” sort of tea IMO. Not something I’d drink regularly but as another reviewer said a medicinal tobacco like quality. It did get monotonous and after about 8 steeps I didn’t want to drink any more

This was one of my sipdowns from right around the start of the year and one of a number of Wuyi oolongs I had been storing and aging since 2017. While most of my experiments with aging Wuyi oolongs at home turned out fairly well, this was one of the less successful ones. The results, however, were really not that bad. I had never tried a Jin Yao Shi prior to trying this tea and had no clue what the cultivar was supposed to bring to the table, but I found it to be a light, fruity tea with some typical earthy, nutty, grainy, and vegetal qualities.

I prepared this tea gongfu style. After a 10 second rinse, I steeped 6 grams of loose tea leaves in 4 fluid ounces of 203 F water for 5 seconds. This infusion was followed by 18 additional infusions. Steep times for these infusions were as follows: 7 seconds, 9 seconds, 12 seconds, 16 seconds, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, 1 minute, 1 minute 15 seconds, 1 minute 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes.

Prior to the rinse, the dry tea leaves produced aromas of bread, blackberry, blueberry, black raspberry, and black cherry. After the rinse, I detected aromas of roasted peanut, smoke, and charcoal. The first infusion added roasted almond and cinnamon aromas. In the mouth, the tea liquor presented notes of bread, blackberry, black cherry, black raspberry, charcoal, and roasted peanut that were balanced by subtler notes of smoke, blueberry, grass, plum, and dark chocolate. The majority of the subsequent infusions added aromas of plum, roasted barley, and minerals. Stronger and more readily detectable notes of grass, plum, and dark chocolate appeared in the mouth alongside impressions of minerals, roasted barley, cream, roasted almond, red grape, and toasted rice. Hints of cinnamon, rock sugar, green olive, caramel, and pine could also be detected here and there. As the tea faded, the liquor emphasized notes of minerals, bread, roasted barley, cream, roasted almond, and black cherry that were chased by hints of blueberry, blackberry, toasted rice, red grape, grass, and plum.

This was not a bad tea, but it was clear to me that it was a little past its prime. The tea liquor was thin and fairly flat in the mouth. I also noticed that some of the aroma and flavor components consistently stuck out, so balance and integration were nagging issues for this tea as well. I would have liked to see all of its parts come together a bit more to get a better feel for what this cultivar can do. Overall, this tea was pleasant, easy to drink, and had some very nice aroma and flavor components, but it was noticeably lacking in other respects.

2013 Cha Yu Lin “Hua Mei” Hunan Tian Jian Tea. I have no idea what the name means, but I can attest that this is a dark tea. Both the leaf, which is rather stemmy, and the soup, which was clear and oak-brown in color. I’ve never tasted smoked peat, so I don’t know if I can concur with that part of the YS description, but I sure don’t get fruit or chocolate. Instead, the first impression in my initial three steeps was of seaweed, reminiscent of nori used to wrap sushi. Both in aroma and flavor. No compost or fishy notes, but definitely a taste of the ocean! No astringency or bitterness or undesirable notes, but nothing really appealing either. A longer 4th steep smelled faintly of dirty socks and both color and flavor were petering out. Not complex at all. No lingering flavor either. Someone put in the listing that this is a pu’erh? Okay….

Sipdown 7/22-2022

Logging the sipdown- truly can’t remember anything about this.

Mastress Alita’s Sipdown Challenge February 2022: A tea paired to a favorite fairy tale – “The Ugly Duckling” – 2021 Spring Harvest

Ok, this isn’t technically a sipdown, but I couldn’t resist. Also, on a tangent – I’ve had the misfortune of actually having tasted duck poop (advice: don’t scare the ducks into flight, and if you do then don’t immediately stick the lollipop you were holding into your mouth). I’m glad to say this tea tastes nothing like that avian pond sludge.

Aroma: Butter, Butterscotch, Ice Cream Waffle Cone, something Earthy and Roasted akin to Mocha (dark chocolate and heavy roast coffee beans).

The aroma is pretty spot on in alluding to the taste. There is a charming violet cream (Tieguanyin-like) flavour. The earthy mocha turns out to be kind of bitter and very much unsweetened, but tones down as the cup cools. There’s a note of metallic astringency that puts me in mind of an acidic wine (red, for sure). Something fruity-floral sweet and light emerges too (longan or lychee-ish, honeysuckle). Second steep keeps the violets and the earthy roast, albeit on a gentler scale, but introduces a very strong fruit salad cup (honeydew, mixed berries, pomelo). Third steep is kind of creamy, with familiar oolong notes (floral, veg). I’ll need to do a gongfu session for this sometime soon.

I don’t completely love it, but it’s interesting and makes me want to explore Dan Cong varieties. I’d previously written off these guys early on in my tea journey (roasted flowers were a nope at the time), but this has as much “butter” as some milk oolong and that interests me greatly (ever in search of “the great butter”)! If anyone has recommendations or favourites (doesn’t need to be buttery), drop me a line.

Steep Count: 3

Upfront grassy, floral and vegetal. Light notes of apricot, honey and bitterness. There is a mental vibrancy and focus. This is a get stuff done kind of tea with the first couple infusions.

infusions 5-10 naturally mellow out the astringency and you’re left with a playful well rounded cup of stone fruit and lightly sweet finish.

Infusions 1-5, warm milk with a teaspoon of nesquik and a touch of earth. 6-10 dark chocolate with a mellow sweet finish.

Apricots upfront with a honey nectar finish. Light veg. Cerebral and calming. 10-12 infusions.

This is the kind of Dan Cong I really like. It is complex, more on the savoury and sour side with substantial bitterness. Perhaps I just wish it had a bit more engaging mouthfeel at times. On the flipside, it is a rare oolongs that brews for longer than many assamica teas (e.g. pu-erh).

Dry leaves smell of milk apples, black locust, and shea butter. During the session, the aroma reminds me of jasmine flowers, honey, dragonfruit, and lemongrass.

First infusion is sweet, flowery and milky. Soon the impression changes, however, and we get more savoury, sour and mineral character coming through. There is a strong flavour of limes, as well as of chard, egg yolk and plant roots. The aftertaste is salty and a bit spicy with a hint of eucalyptus.

The tea has a medium body, with a mineral, dry finish but not that much astringency overall.

This is one of a few Zheng Shan Xiao Zhongs that I bought at the end of 2019, and it’s from the spring of that year. I didn’t know that Fujian black teas don’t tend to age as well as those from Yunnan, so they should be consumed more quickly. I steeped 6 g of leaf in a 120 ml teapot at 195F for 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 90, and 120 seconds.

The dry aroma is of baked sweet potato, caramel, chocolate, and malt. The first steep has notes of sweet potato, caramel, chocolate, malt, rye bread, and earth. The aroma is much stronger than the taste, which is fairly light. The next steep takes an unusual turn, adding notes of glazed carrots and vegetal umami while maintaining those savoury sweet potato, chocolate, and bready flavours. The veggies are a bit less prominent in the next couple steeps, though they’re still present, and there’s a long aftertaste of sweet potato and stevia. Carrot, sweet potato, brown sugar, other starchy vegetables, earth, and malt feature in the next few rounds. The final steeps have notes of malt, minerals, earth, tannins, wood, and faint sweet potato.

While I enjoyed the sweet potato and chocolate in this tea, its weird vegetal notes and high amount of sweetness put me off. I’m not sure if these things are due to age or to processing, but for me, they take away from the balance of the tea. Derk, Daylon, and Martin, let me know if you want a sample after reading this glowing review. :)