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5g in a 12oz glass grandpa style, 175F water, then hotter to top up.

This is the first real, quality longjing I’ve ever had so I can’t compare it to other productions. I am kind of blown away by this tea. I’ve never been a huge green tea drinker but this has made me a little more open minded about that.

I didn’t really take notes on the flavors or aromas, what really stuck with me was the full body and mind effect of this tea. About an hour into drinking this I was feeling so good. I don’t really have the words to describe it and I sort of refuse to call it qi. I just felt incredible. Heavy limbs, eyelids, etc, just incredibly calm but mentally alert.

This tea is a little bit beyond what I usually spend but I would (and will) buy it again next year if it comes back.

I’ve had this grandpa style a couple times now and it’s pretty nice. Light hay and grass flavor with a big floral nose (not sickly sweet floral, it’s gentle but big if that makes sense). A little bit of umami as described on the web site.

I brew it with 6-7g in a 12oz glass, 175F water initially then ~190F water for the re-ups (topping up with water when the glass becomes ~2/3 full). It floats for the first half hour or so so you’ll want a lidded cup. Drinking pretty slowly and lazily it lasts a few hours this way before it’s just hot yellow water.

Awesome daily drinker at a very low price point. It’s also easier on the stomach than most greens and doesn’t dry out my mouth.

Beautiful dark tea. Very strong smell of earth and smoke after a rinse. Smells like Scotch Snuff which I would guess very few people reading this have smelled before lol! 5g to 80ml which is standard for me. I’ve been reading through the archives of MarshalN so I’m trying to take his advice and leave tasting notes out. This review is mainly for me to have a list of what I want to buy a cake of when the money comes. There is a lot of body warmth happening with this tea, and even a tingling in the nose now and then a bit like when you burp after a heavily carbonated beverage. There is some bite on the tongue and cheeks and a long-lasting dryness in the mouth. Hitting my stomach rather hard considering it isn’t empty. I’d be very curious to try this cake again in a few years! Not sure I’ll be buying one right away but it’s fairly cheap and I look forward to drinking the rest of this 25g sample.

I’ve been drinking this exclusively for the past 3 days as I await my YS order that I placed in a panic earlier this week after realizing that I was completely out of sheng. I can’t tell if this is really a fantastic tea or I just haven’t had enough shou to know any better. Either way it doesn’t really matter, I guess, because I’m enjoying this tea a lot. It’s cheap enough that I can brew 10g at a time in my 180ml clay and not feel guilty about it. It’s not particularly complex and doesn’t really evolve much across steepings but that’s not what I really need out of this tea. What I need is some consistent, forgiving, soupy, rich shou and this is it. I suspect it’s good grandpa style as well.

Breaking in my new unglazed pot from TaiwanTeaCrafts while trying this sample. Very excited to have gotten my hands on this pot!

Had a rinse then rested for ~5 minutes. 1st steep is sweet and bright. Citrus, iodine, licking a rock. 2nd and 3rd steeps have rising astringency but I can still taste through it. 4th is getting pretty robust and full. Astringency is there but it’s also sweet. 5th+ was all pretty similar, it did not develop a ton. Astringency kept going down slowly. Flavor was pretty consistent.

Compared to the 2014, this was a bit easier to brew and drink. Tamer I guess would be the word? I liked it more. Awesome for the price, will be ordering a cake.

Relatively high astringency for the first 3-4 steeps, hitting my empty morning stomach really hard. Plenty of flavor coming through, though. Tobacco and earth. Had some bread to settle my stomach and came back to the tea a bit later.

5th steep is nice! A little smoke and mushroom and dirt. Goes back and forth between bright/grassy and dark/deep/woodsy. Astringency is quite low now. Very manageable. Later steeps are even more mellow. Beautiful tea.

At 8.1c/g, this is an instacop. In my mind is rests between a sheng and a shou in terms of what type of flavors I’m craving. It has a edge and power of a young sheng with the some of the deep, rich, darker flavors of a shou.

1st steep: thick liquid, sweet, slight hay, stone fruit, hits the throat. 2nd steep is starting to seem more like a nice ripe puer. The soup is much darker than the young shengs I’ve been having lately and it has some of the really nice dirt and tobacco notes that I love about ripe but without the funkiness. 3rd steep is similar but the sheng brightness is coming through more. Some smokiness. 4th steep tastes good but it’s starting to feel a little one-dimensional. 5th and 6th are still nice, taste pretty ripe. Nice little astringency to it. 7th+ are the same really.

At 2.3 cents/g (before shipping) from mx-tea, I will absolutely be ordering this with my next Tao haul!

Quick rinse and the smell is very bright grassy with camphor. Mellow liquid, sweetness already. Nice quiet first steep, still pretty compact since I didn’t break up the chunk. 2nd steep has mild bitterness, nice astringency, and a pretty nice texture. Tasting rice and dried grass. 3rd has growing bitterness but still low astringency. Increasing grassiness, still tastes more like dried grass than bright fresh grass. Some mineral. VERY nice body, one of the more interesting shengs I’ve had, texturally. 3th steep is very creamy and thick and sweet. Less grassy now, more rooty and mushroomy. 4-6th still good. 7th and 8th getting sweeter and slightly more boring but still has awesome body and full flavor, just flatter.

Real good. Awesome price. Will cop a cake for sure.

Awesome awesome awesome. I wasn’t taking notes when I had this yesterday but man it was really good. Very easy to brew and drink, mellow and sweet. Would be an excellent daily drinker, especially at 7.5 cents/g. I will definitely be buying a cake!

Note: very broken up leaves in this sample, impossible not to oversteep in the early steeps. I’m flash steeping this one every time in a ~160ml gaiwan.

Sweet and slightly smokey rinse. Med astringency on 1st steep, still sweet and higher smokiness. 2nd steep way too high astringency, dumped it out. 3rd steep mellowing out a bit. 4th steep mellowing more but still too astringent to taste anything else. 5th steep was finally drinkable but not that interesting. 6th steep and the astringency is pretty low and the tea is starting to have some nice flavors.

7th steep is very mellow and actually fantastic even though my bias of the earlier steeps being awful wants me to still hate this tea. I didn’t eat a very big breakfast and this tea is DESTROYING my stomach. Time for some bread. 8th steep (still flash steeping btw) is VERY nice. Grassy but soft and deep rather than crisp bright grass. Minerals and chlorine. 9th steep about the same. 10th is getting much sweeter. 11th steep I finally let it go for 5-10 seconds before I poured it off. Very nice flavor, ideal sheng for me but I can’t get over how bitter and astringent it was at first. I’ll probably get 15-20 steeps from this!

Don’t think I’ll be buying a cake of this, I just can’t justify buying a tea where I want to dump out the first 6 steeps.