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After months of looking for part time work, today I landed a cashier job at my local Home Depot in the garden department. This calls for celebration tea! The obvious choice was to break into my sample of the pricey wild grown Guo You Lin Yiwu from YS.

The leaves in my sample are medium sized and fairly broken up. Using 5g in my 90mL jian shui pot, this tea brews a medium yellow and is quite potent. I’m immediately hit by the thickness and aroma of the broth. It’s super thick and coats the mouth and throat with bittersweetness and wildflower aroma. The flavor is shitake mushroom with honey, pine, green wood, wild flowers, and steamed vegetables. As I brew it out I begin to notice the qi, first in my head and then in my chest and arms. Nothing stonerific, but nice calming, tingly sensations. Five grams lasts my whole 1L kettle.

This is a very nice and potent young sheng. Worth the price tag? Maybe not for me; it’s really high quality, but just doesn’t have enough “special” to it for a tea with such a big price tag. Very glad to have tried it though, and happy to have had it for a celebration tea.

I really enjoyed the aged white tea that I sample from Nannuoshan a while back, so when I placed my Teavivre order for fresh greens I picked up samples of their 2011 and 2012 Shou Mei cakes.

The leaf isn’t pretty, it looks a lot like mulch or something you would rake up in the yard, but and smells a bit like raisins. Brews a gold-orange color. Thick in the mouth and moderately sweet with tastes of raisins, hay, peppercorn, and dried herbs.

It’s a nice and comforting brew, and I look forward to seeing how it compares to the 2012.

Brews a medium orange, not quite as dark roasted as I expected from the name, it’s actually pretty similar to the Fo Shou that I had the other day.

Tastes of roasted barley, though not at all burnt or coffee-like. There’s a moderate herbal medicine note and moderate fruityness, though I struggle to identify any particular fruit. There’s a little bit of the same dried seafood note that I found in the Fo Shou, a little bit stronger, and just a hint of floral character. Moderate honey-like sweetness.

Overall it’s pretty nice! Not as clean in the mouth or fruity and mineral as the more expensive Fo Shou, but pretty nice none the less and a good daily drinking Wuyi oolong. I’ve heard that roasted oolongs often improve with a little age, so I’ll try to keep an eye out for any changes in this one.

I love fresh spring greens! While most of the year I prefer to drink darker teas, tis the season for the lightly oxidized. I got a few in my Yunnan Sourcing order, and have a few more coming from Teavivre sometime this week.

The leaves are fresh and soft with lots of silvery buds. Brews almost clear with a light floral and vegetal aroma. The taste is light, fresh, and mineral with notes of edamame, chestnut, and milder mushrooms like oyster or enoki. It’s somewhat sweet and feels round in the mouth. A very enjoyable green, especially when it’s so recently picked.

Today I took my last exam of the semester, and I’ve got about two weeks before summer semester starts. That translates into two weeks to drink lots of tea!

This is a very nice Yunnan black that brews a dark orange. The leaves are really pretty; they’re long and pressed into straight needles with many furry gold buds.

It’s a medium bodied brew with lots of malt and milk chocolate with a bit of yam and a doughy/yeasty quality. As mentioned by someone on Reddit, this tea tastes like chocolate chip cookies! It’s not the most complex tea, but it’s really tasty and goes among my favorite blacks from YS.

A hong cha from Bu Lang? How could I say no?

The dry leaves are big, twisty, and beautiful with a good number of golden buds. Some of them barely fit into my pot. Dry aroma of malt and raisins with a floral touch.

Brews a medium orange, this is a fairly mild black tea. Flavors of malt, mineral water, and raisins with a light, almost jasmine floral quality. Mild caramel sweetness with a medium-light body. Lasted quite a few infusions.

This is a pretty nice lighter bodied black, especially if you like some floral notes to your black tea. Not at all bitter or intense like you might expect a Bu Lang tea to be.

A very mild and friendly tea with beautiful leaves! http://imgur.com/69ZAMpp

Unfortunately I think it got a bit heat damaged by the squelching Florida summer. The first few steeps have sort of a greasy potato chip aroma that I’ve noted before in teas that I got during the summer.

Still, this is a nice tea. Very mild with slight grassy, melon, and sugarcane notes on a mineral background. This is a much lighter brew than I normally like, but it’s nice for a change.

My big YS order came in today, kind of a surprise because I was expecting it Monday or Tuesday. http://imgur.com/LxXminp Decided to start it off with this one.

Brews a light orange and emits a very cinnamon-y sweet and spicy aroma. The flavor is very complex; its strongly mineral, strongly fruity, somewhat spicy, and a little roasty. Notes of ripe melon, underripe citrus, wet rocks, toasted barley, nuts, and warming spice. Strong, fruity lingering aroma in the mouth. Later steeps are less fruity and aromatic with prominent woody notes. There’s a marine backnote that becomes more noticeable as you brew on, something like dried shrimp that might sound unpleasant but is actually quite nice.

Overall very nice and a good place to start with my shipment.

Another tea I forgot I had. This one could almost qualify as “aged” as I think I’ve had it since 2012 when I first ordered from Mountain Tea. I remember not particularly liking this one as it was very floral. The dry leaves seem to have lost most of their aroma and are a little less green.

Brews up floral though! Honeysuckle, gardenia, maybe lavender. Slightly buttery, slightly herbaceous. It has a slight sparkling quality that reminds me of watered down ginger ale.

This might be a pretty good tea if you like floral teas like green Tie Guan Yin, but it’s not for me. I didn’t even make a second steep.

Brews up a medium orange with a sweet and savory aroma. This tea has a super clean taste and mouthfeel for a black tea, no maltiness to speak of. The main flavor note that I get is maple syrup/molasses, though it’s only slightly sweet. It’s slightly fruity like citrus and red apples, though slightly vegetal like artichoke. I’d also say that it has a bit of umami and mineral/spring water.

The small, black lumps unfurl into nice, big, dark oolong-like leaves. Lasts a decent number of infusions, but not as infusible as most oolongs or some blacks can be.

Overall it’s fairly nice and may be a good black tea for green tea and oolong drinkers. It’s been I while since I drank it, but it’s very similar to how I remember Mountain Tea’s Black Pearl tasting.