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Dried apricots, lemon juice, the liquid from canned mandrin oranges. Minerals. Cured tangerine rind.

It doesn’t smell very impressive when it’s dry—just like a standard inexpensive Dan Cong, really—but wet the leaves with hot water and the aroma is an explosion of stone fruits. Dehydrated apricot, nectarine, peach pulp. A 5 second rinse tastes sweet and viscous with nectarine juice, and a 10 second steep is a delightful peachy hue with a heavy mandrin orange taste. Another 10 seconds and the sweetness morphs into the light tang of lemon juice. Step up to 15 and you get tangerine rind in the mix. A bit longer still, and the taste is eerily similar to a tangelo. Longer, and it’s orange and lemon droplets squeezed into a mineralic rock oolong. Go beyond that and you have a dry floral with a bite. It doesn’t even taste like tea until the 6th infusion. Not one of those “squint really hard after taking a sip and maybe you’ll find some flavor notes” teas. It genuinely tastes like citrus.

Haven’t been on Steepster in a bit, hauled around 1500 pounds of 4-inch electrical conduit into a ditch today and glued it together, my clothes are covered in dirt and sand, there’s concrete in my hair, and I still haven’t showered. However, this tea is so dang good that it reserved a rating right after finishing it. This is easily my new favorite and I’m going to covet my remaining 21 grams.