2016 A&P

(drank in 2019) Maybe my storage was the problem, but I found this tea unpleasantly sour (and it attracted bugs to boot). I got some of the fruit and malt flavors that others have mentioned, but no chocolate notes.

Brewed this black (red) tea pretty strong western, a small-heaped tablespoon, roughly 5g at 205F for 3 and 5 minutes.

The dry leaf has an awesome aroma dominated by cocoa, molasses, tobacco, and berries with fleeting hints of red plum, brown sugar, coffee, barnyard, malt, sweet potato, and woody incense.

When it was hot, the tea tasted mostly of malt and leather. I approached the cup again after a lengthy cool down. Flavors of chocolate barley malt, leather and coffee presented in the oily and smooth brew. As Togo mentioned, it’s savory and earthy. I’m not finding any bitterness. There is a delayed light returning sweetness of dark brown sugar. Freaking delicious!

Brewed at this strength, it tastes like a flat English stout with some sweetness and a light finish not dry but one that tastes like marion berries and clotted cream.

I had been wanting to try A&P since it was released. It is not sold as a sample and I never felt like committing to a 100g cake. So thank you Togo for the opportunity to try it! I might have to order a cake for winter evenings.

Todays pairing: WHAT?! YAYUH!! OKAAAY!

Grandpa Style!

Brewed this as my first morning tea of the day; along side some cheese and grapes for a sort of a cobbled together breakfast. The grapes and cheese were actually_really_ good but the tea was a little bit underwhelming.

I think my biggest thing with the tea was just that I didn’t feel like it had a lot of body or nuance, and the present flavour notes were not super defined either. So while this was vaguely malty/cocoa-y with a bit of a brisk and somewhat lack luster citrus undertone the overall cup felt fairly flat to me. It also didn’t have a lot of life in the leaf; after my second water top up the brew was already very weak/watery.

I’ll continue to experiment with this cake of tea – try it Gong Fu and Western. However this just wasn’t an awesome brew and doesn’t make me feel all that excited to revisit this one.

Good standard black tea
Nothing out of the ordinary
Good taste and got a bit more steeps out of it then normal black teas

This is a unique tea in my collection, which means I end up drinking it often. There are a lot of different aromas present here. The dry leaves have a fruity, medicinal smell (blackberries), while the scent of the wet leaves has notes of leather, coffee shops, petrichor, barn, plant seeds and raspberries. And the empty cup actually smells of honey, not unlike a sheng would, although here it’s a sweeter and less floral aroma.

The taste is earthy and savoury, with just a touch of sweetness and a bitter finish. As it cools down, it becomes more tangy and citrusy. The aftertaste is quite medicinal and slighly cooling. Body of the liquor is medium and the mouthfeel is silky and lubricating. With some further aging, this should become a really elegant tea, right now it’s still a bit rough around the edges, which is not necessarily a downside. That depends on what you are looking for.

I brewed this both gongfu and western style.

Gongfu style:
the taste was unexpected. I thought it would be sweeter, but it was malty and reminded me of barley tea (in a good way). I liked it but wasn’t sure if I’d repurchase.

Western style:
brewed 4.8 g in around 12-14 ozs of boiling water.
First sip (while it was hotter) yielded similar tastes as gongfu style. However, as the tea cooled down, I tasted a bit of milk chocolate, which was a pleasant surprise. I’m actually more willing to repurchase this for western style brewing.

Now I just have to try this grandpa :P It might be a very versatile tea!

My cake is long gone but so that I remember.

Black teas made with large leaf pu-erh varietals can be hit or miss for me but I did enjoy this nice malty leaf.

Just got to trying this w2t club offering. I think it was pretty tasty. The dry leaf had a raisin and malty aroma with a slight hint of chocolate. After a rinse, they smelled mostly malty and fruity.

Thankfully, I enjoyed this tea a lot more than the last w2t hong I tried. It started out sweet and malty with a slight hint of caramel. The next few steeps got stronger quickly, and picked up a pleasant chocolate note on the finish. The tea continued much the same for a few steeps before it started to drop off around steep 6. I still got a few more nice steeps out of it before I declared it dead.

I think the fact that I’m so behind on teaclub drinking is because of those two months in the spring/early summer that were back-to-back black tea. It’s really not my favorite category of tea, though most from the teaclub have been enjoyable. I have to decide now whether I want to keep this tea around and see what happens to a caked hong over the next few years or swap it off. I’m leaning towards swapping it. I know a few teafriends who are pretty hyped about this tea, so I might try to exchange it for something I more readily grab to toss in my gaiwan, like some sheng puerh. Definitely recommend this one if you’re a black tea fan, though!

The weather has been so awesome the last couple days, I have been loving it! Previously this week it has been cool, mostly sunny, but cool…perfect windows open days. Yesterday the fun started, first with a bit of drizzles then intermittent storms, and then wow, last night was a storm party! Granted it was when I was trying to sleep, and I am pretty sure a tree up the road was lightninged into oblivion meaning very loud booms, but I don’t care. I will lose sleep anytime to storms! In fact it just finished another storm about half an hour ago, with more promised during the rest of the week, this makes me giddy!!

Today I am taking a look at White2Tea’s 2016 A&P, a Dianhong they included with the July teaclub (along with some killer sweet balls) which is conveniently also for sale in their shop for when I inevitably run out and need more. It is how I am with the deliriously tasty reds, they are addictive and I always need another fix, ALWAYS. Honestly I am tempted to get another cake to just put away for aging, since it was made from Lincang Puerh materials and sun-dried leaving it a bit raw meaning it should improve with a few years age on it.

Except for a few exceptions I love most my reds with a little age on them, usually I find any harsh notes will mellow out after a year or two…assuming they last that long around me. So after admiring this lovely dark cake in its pristine form I hacked a bit off for closer examination, with my nose.

Well hello there you chocolaty cake of goodness, it smells like the batter for the rich triple chocolate molasses cake I make when I am desperately craving chocolate, very sweet and thickly chocolate. There are also undertones of cooked plum, sandalwood, myrrh, and malt. Fun fact, when I first opened this bad boy up it smelled lightly of cocoa, a few weeks later the cocoa increased, and now in the middle of August when I am writing this it smells like a blasted cake! I think in a year it will gain sentience as the embodiment of chocolate, it is the only explanation.

So after a first steep the aroma is nothing short of oomph, it is a little bit malty and a touch nutty, but the strongest notes by far are sweet cocoa and woody sandalwood. The combination of this tea’s notes are mouthwatering, sandalwood is a great love of mine, like on a primal level…is this tea trying to seduce me? The liquid once free from its leafy restraints blend notes of creamy milk chocolate, peanuts, sandalwood, molasses, and caramelized brown sugar…it is like all the parts of a really tasty candy but separate, and with sandalwood. Yum.

So I make a show saying that I am not a social person which is why most my teaing is done in the privacy of my tea lair, but really I think it is because the noises that good tea elicit out of me are just not sociable, and I don’t like holding back! I have this same problem with food. This tea had that effect on me for sure, from the first sip I was dancing in my chair and making all sorts of happy noises. Starting with a thick mouth (this is a theme that will stick around) it is sweet, like the most perfect ripe cherry and plum exploding in my mouth with a fantastic chocolate shrapnel to the face. Then for the finish it is like someone gave me just the caramelized sugar top of a creme brulee, the aftertaste of brown sugar lingers for a while.

The aroma of the second steep ramps up, stronger cocoa, more intense molasses, juicy plum and brown sugar dance with sandalwood for one outstanding thing to sniff. It is still thick as all get out, like almost fruit nectar thick but blissfully without the sticky, super creamy and dense. It starts with overly ripe bordering on cooked plums with malt and molasses, building slowly until the midtaste is chocolate. Starting with milk chocolate and moving to dark, never getting to bittersweet. The finish is a blend of pine sap, myrrh, and sandalwood, cutting down the sweet ever so slightly but adding a richness that is almost blinding.

Surprisingly my mind is not mush by this point, it feels like it is almost at the point, sensory overload for sure! This steep does not change much from the second, it pretty much stays at status quo until steep five where it starts fading away into chocolate, plums and molasses until nothing is left several steeps later. This tea has longevity, aging potential, and it almost turned me into a gibbering mess (I needed time to process before I could get this written, it was like a chocolate tea Eldrazi…the MTG card no one knew they wanted) so yeah, if you have the money I say give this one a get. I plan on attempting to leave my cake alone for at least a few months to see how it changes.

For blog and photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2016/08/white2tea-2016-a-tea-review.html

Good lord, I would not mind having a few cakes of this twinofmunin. This is one of those “chocolate note” Dianhongs to the max.

I’m getting a sweet, sweet malty chocolate taste to this tea, which I can only say for a few Dianhongs that I’ve had before. The kind of malt is on the border of sweet potato that you normally get in this variety of tea, but it is there. The chocolaty profile is also there and pretty obvious compared to the others that dared claim the taste. The sweet black base for Thai Iced tea is the only other thing that I can realistically compare it to since it is so “sugary” for a straight tea gong fu.

I brewed this starting at 15 sec with lord knows how many grams-probably 4-5 in 6.5 ounces, but darn it is good. The flavor overall is not super complex, but again, it’s that sweet malty chocolate goodness that you normally get from an Alishan black or a Laoshan in Dianhong cake form. If only this were released sooner when I was looking for a daily black.

I have a lot more to say, but I’ll leave it at this.

Or I don’t. Steep five and six are purely malty. A good malty black, but just that. I’m still impressed.