Mi Lan Xiang Phoenix Mountain Dancong

I’ve been drinking a lot of Verdant teas lately lol, sorry for not much variety in the way of companies :P anyways, I decided it’s time to have a yixing session again..it’s been much too long. I feel bad for neglecting my little pot :( so yes, this tea is in there today, my favorite roasted oolong. Two rinses and about 5 second steepings for myself and the boyfriend. Delicious, perfect tea. Roasted and grapefruit and honey, everything I love! Going to have quite a few steepings of this today! See previous notes :)

yep..still don’t like this one. Oh well, not a problem since there are plenty out there that i do. there’s just something about the taste to this one that makes me like this a lot less than other roasty oolongs that i don’t fancy.

This is the 2nd tea from the April TOMC. The dry aroma is a light incense, the warm aroma is of red grapefruit & sandalwood. It’s very addictive. I sat breathing it in, & I love it.

The first time I tasted Mi Lan Xiang Phoenix Mountain Dancong, it kind of freaked me out. I’d never had a tea with the vaporous after-aroma incense-like sensation in my sinuses. I also didn’t really care much for the feeling like I was drinking incense mixed with grapefruit juice. It just wasn’t right.

Amazingly, each time I drink it, I enjoy it more! It’s a very complex tea, best suited to a gongfu session. The early cups are gently sweet grapefruit, with a bit of the bitter rind, a pinch of clove, & the after glow of sandalwood, & with each steep it builds, like eating a sweet grapefruit in a Buddhist temple, the air heavy with incense & flowers.

I redid this one using my new yixing I dedicated it to (not the bad one I just got and found out was a fake). I know it’s still absorbing a lot of the flavor but I wanted to see how much different it tastes this way. I used boiling water, did a quick rinse followed by ten steeps, most of them at 3-5 seconds. At steep 9 I went up to 9 seconds, at steeps 10 I went up to 10 seconds.

Steep one was mostly roasty, sandalwood, juicy, fruity flavor.

Second steep was the same but with a hint of jasmine and a citrus texture to it.

Third steep got a little interesting. It was sandalwood, a dark floral note, a citrus texture and juicy mouthfeel. It seemed there was a hint of melon at the tail end, but it was so fleeting. By the time I even formed the thought of melon, the taste was there and gone.

Fourth was the same as three but with the dark floral note turning into orchid and something silky creamy starting to peak in. Possibly the orchid?

Fifth steeping was more woody than sandalwood, with orchid, jasmine, juicy, a note of clove, a silkyness to it and a citrus texture, with that ever fleeting hint of melon.

Sixth reverted back to sandalwood, orchid, clove, juicy, and silky.

Seventh was the same as the sixth, but the mouthfeel was beginning to become thicker, mouth-coating. Also, the jasmine made a fleeting peak at me at the tail end of the sip.

Eighth steeping started to become a softer sandalwood, the orchid becoming more prominent, the mouthfeel thicker.

Ninth, I should stop soon, I’m starting to feel buzzy from too much tea and no food. This was the same as number eight but with the addition of the sparkling citrus coming back in for a minute. One more, then I need to stop and get some food!

Tenth was soft sandalwood, orchid, silky, with a thick heavy mouthfeel that coats the entire mouth and lasts forever like a greener oolong does.

I’ve been drinking this tea for about four hours straight, no food in longer. I’m hungry and shaky and jittery. I love this tea and the yixing seems promising, but I need to stop and eat, like now. I’m one of those people that bounces off of walls when they have too much caffeine…it’s worse on an empty stomach!
This is me right about now! ZOOM! ZOOM!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXd20B2Oj5U
Or for those who want to skip straight to the ZOOM! ZOOM! ZOOM! part!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NnkhMGXrp8

Drinking this lovely tea right now :D

One of my favorites! This tea always makes me happy. So seductive and aromatic. One of my favorite teas of all time, for sure. I get aromas of aloeswood and exotic flowers. Tastes a little sweet and dark and tangy. So, so good.

Sample courtesy of Verdant. As soon as I rinsed the leaves, I thought I smelled grilled peaches with a dark woodsiness creeping up from behind.

Flat out, the taste is also very roasty and toasty, kind of like when toast is nearly burnt, but not quite. I’m also picking up one some of that fruitiness. No longer like peach, but mixed fruits, which again, have been grilled. The sweetness is dark and syrupy, especially in the aftertaste.

It’s good but not something I’d ever want to reach for, especially when it comes to oolong. But I appreciate it. Thanks, Verdant!

Yum. Used about 4 tsp (the best tsp one can make with such wiry, long leaves) for about 8oz., and I think this is a good ratio for this tea. It tastes much like Butiki’s Gui Fei Oolong, though perhaps sweeter and less “dark”, however, I also infuse the Gui Fei for considerably longer – this cup got 45s, while I infused Gui Fei for 8 minutes.

Either way, this is yummy and sweet and I do wish I had time for more infusions tonight, but if I can manage to pass out soon, I think that would be the best thing to do (well, I have two more teas to try first).

ETA: Second infusion (1 min/boiling/half the water) was sweet-ish, with the leafhopper notes and a bit more woodiness. Still tasty. The next infusion will definitely need 2 minutes, I’m thinking.

At first I was like, “This thin wiry spinach smelling stuff is supposed to taste like mi dan dancong?” But then the hot water hit the leaves and I was a believer! Smells fantastic!

Steep one: Heavy woody spice. Cinnamon? no…nutmeg? hmm, yeah, more like nutmeg. There’s honey and lychee of course. Autumn forest with a distant fireplace going. …and because I just gave my dogs a treat, I smell faux bacon. yuck.

Just from this first steep, I would say that I prefer Canton Tea’s Mi Lan Dancong. Theirs is less heavy and has more fruity lychee flavor. Not that this isn’t excellent and complex, because it is. It might be even more complex, but I find I like the more joyful flavor of Canton’s version. This one is a bit…moody. Like a ponderous man who’s lost all hope in life. But so complex and dark and mysterious. It’s tastes like cloudy.

Steep 2: Mmm… more honey and lychee in this now. Raisins, a little. yummy. I’m going to cold brew steep 3 overnight. :) It’s gonna be high 60’s tomorrow so a cold drink would probably be quite welcome. :)

Happy Monday!

I finally got around to this one, and it’s just as well, because it’s taking up a lot of space on my desk. I’ve taken to keeping the teas I haven’t posted about yet on my desk next to the computer so that they don’t disappear in the collection or end up like the four red fruits black from Le Palais des Thes which we’ve gone through 200 grams of and I never actually posted about it. I thought I already had!

So yes. New system. This system keeps them in full view at all times, and encourages me to get to them faster so that I can get my desk back!

This one is from the Verdant order I made some time ago and had been standing there un-opened, taking up a lot of space. I usually have pretty good experiences with Dancong and tend to find them very similar to Da Hong Pao, but somehow more me.

I suspect this is one I’ll be drinking throughout the day today. It’s wednesday, which means I’m off work (oh I luuuuurrrrve working part time!) and I’ve got a to-do list the length of my leg. Well, nearly. Two pages anyway, with half the usual margins and slightly smaller font size. 116 items. Many of them are tiny things that will take maybe five minutes but which I’ll forget to do otherwise so that’s why it’s so long. This approach worked out awesomely for me last week with nearly 80% completion and Husband commenting on the all-round tidyness of the house when he came home, so I’m repeating the success. So here we go. A tea that can be repeated easily throughout the day.

To that end I started out with twice my normal amount of leaf and half my normal steeping time, and the result is something that smells remarkably like honey. And milk, somehow. Or at least sort of creamy. The aroma isn’t very strong, so that’s all I can pick up at this point.

It tastes like Dancong. That’s my first thought when I tasted it. Tastes like Dancong. Um, right. I should sincerely hope it would! O.o And also like oolong. (Duh, brain. Pull yourself together with the associations, please!) That sort of dark, slightly woodsy and kind of humid oolong-y taste that all oolongs must have. If they don’t, it’s a serious flaw for me.

I also like my darker type oolongs to have a sort of caramel-y note. Not outright caramel flavoured, because for some reason I can’t actually imagine that would work, but a natural swet and creamy note that invokes caramel. This is not a requirement in the same way that the oolongness is, but I do prefer it.

Third, it must not be too floral in flavour, and this is where Dancong and Da Hong Pao part ways for me. Da Hong Pao has a tendency to be more floral for me than Dancong. This is not always so, but it seems to be a tendency.

This one has the oolongness and the honey-y, caramel-y creaminess and none of the floralness that I could find. The flavour is somewhat delicate though, and I suspect I could actually easily have left my steeping time at my usual two minutes, even though I had used more leaf. I didn’t really take the volume of the leaf properly into account when I thought I doubled it, so I suspect that I actually used close to my normal amount although it looked like a lot.

Mind you, this is very nice, but do hope that I can bring some forcefulness out in the flavour in the next steeps.

The second steep is back to my normal steeping time. The flavour is the same as the first steep, only stronger this time. All the notes are there and in the same amounts compared to each other. They’re just less delicate now. This is what I hoped would happen.

I’ll take a break with it now and leave the computer before this hospital e-learning course drives me completely batty! It’s mandatory and involves watching a little film which I have now restarted more times than I can count because it just won’t play right. I officially give up! throws up hands