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Got my sampler today! I greatly enjoyed the 2012 Wild Monk maocha that I tried a while back (the leaves in my profile pic came from it) and I’m excited to try the new batch as well as the other offerings.

Dry leaves: Medium-small leaves have a peppery aroma, light brown-green color.

The first steep is very pale and clear. Mild taste with a nice round mouthfeel. Bready rye flavor balanced out by tastes of olive oil, fresh camphor, and a slight nectarine sweetness. Little astringency, bitterness is nearly non-existent.

Second and third steeps reveal more sweetness and tastes of glutinous rice, honeysuckle, and minerals. Cha qi becomes evident in later steeps, and I would consider this tea pretty strong in it. The tea provided me with eleven infusions, and I might have been able to squeeze out one more.

The spent leaves are very attractive. Medium-small size with a few budsets, but mostly single leaves. The leaves are delicate but have nice thick veins and a rounded tip.

Overall this is a nice clean tea with good stamina, but a bit too mild for my tastes. Very similar to Yunnan Sourcings Ailao shengs.

Today I felt like having something a little different, so I mixed together three different Yunnan blacks.

-2013 Hong Yun Yiwu Mountain Wild Arbor black tea cake from Yunnan Sourcing: A very fruity, floral, almost sheng-like hong cha
-Some cheap dian hong from an AliExpress seller: A very earthy, malty black with a honey sweetness
-And bit of Adagios Yunnan Gold, which is a very silky and smooth tippy Yunnan

Three different extremes of Yunnan black tea that balance each other quite well :)

Brewed in my black tea yixing, which has started to take on a really gorgeous patina

I dropped (and broke) my gaiwan in the sink the other night while cleaning it out, so I’m brewing this in a glass measuring cup with a gaiwan saucer over it. Sad to lose my gaiwan, but it served me well over the past two years.

I’m really enjoying this tea tonight. It’s very tasty, but has a different flavor profile than most. No “peach and tobacco”, but softer flavors like olive oil, grain, bamboo, and white wine. It’s not super sweet, but the sweetness lingers in the throat for a long time. It makes a good many brews, a bit more than average, and has one of the strongest cha qi’s of pu’erh I’ve tasted.

Soo, since I’m in desperate need of a new gaiwan I’ll be pushing up the Yunnan Sourcing order I had been planing (they also have some celadon cups I’ve been eying). I’ll probably just stick to the tea wares, some black tea ,and some pu’erh samples since I need to keep this fairly cheap. Any favorites you think I should try?

Creamy texture and caramel, spice, and fruit notes. Slight mineral quality, excellent cinnamon/floral aroma.

This is the best Wuyi I’ve had, though that being said I haven’t had very many.

Today I’m having something black and delicious and Fuijan-esqe. Though i’m embarrassed to say I don’t know what it is. It was in a plastic baggy, probably the last of a sample from Teavivre or Yezi or something I got in a swap.

Very sweet and thick with a slight salty note. Yammy and chocoalty and has a good buttery pastry-like quality. Needless to say I’m enjoying it

Rediscovering just how much I like Taiwanese oolong! For a while now I’ve been drinking mostly pu’er and Yunnan black, neglecting the first tea I fell in love with.

This is a very good one, still delicious despite not being very fresh. Mellow and juicy. Green-ness that reminds me of the amaryllis bulbs my grandma used to grow, balanced with notes of vanilla, cinnamon, and coconut with the bright tang of tamarind.

The dry leaves have a thick aroma of ripe fruit and tobacco. Most are medium-large leaves in a deep purple black hue with high contrast of bright red, green, and gold leaves standing out.

Initial infusions have a strong smoky quality. More of a bold “charcoal” flavor than the lapsang barbecue type. The smoke was much stronger, but has faded over the past months.

The tea brews a gold-orange color. Clean, pure, wild taste with a thick mouthfeel and a fruity aroma that stays in the mouth long after you drink it. Strong tropical fruit flavors (something I associate with purple tea) like guava, longan, and plantain. Very tangy, but also very hearty with tobacco, barley, and dark beer flavors.

The charcoal taste fades in the later steepings, and is replaced by a nice mineral quality. I’m left with strong qi feelings running along the forehead and feel strong and steady like a mountain. This isn’t my favorite tea from Yunnan Sourcing, but it is quite nice and I enjoy the unique purple tea qualities. Good bargain.

I’m really itching to place a big YS order, it’s been almost a year! I’ve been saving up money for it, but this past week the vacuum tubes in my guitar amp have gone microphonic, so it seems my tea acquisition has been set back yet again.

I’m sad to be finishing off the last of this tea, it was really good!

Flavor profile is similar to Yunnan golden bud teas, but distinctly different. Honey, milk chocolate, wheat, mildly floral, and has a unique fresh cherry taste and creamy mouthfeel. Lots of natural sweetness, perhaps the most I’ve had in a black tea.

I’ve been on a tight budget lately, so I haven’t been buying tea, but as I noticed I was almost out of back teas I found that I had a ton of loyalty points built at Adagio. I’d had their Yunnan Noir before, which was pretty nice, but I decided to go for the more expensive Dragon Pearls and Yunnan Gold. The gold was great, really above my expectations, but these Dragon Pearls are just really bad

I’ve brewed them a few different way now, but even when I brew it strong there’s hardly any flavor. Just hot brown water with a touch of bitterness, and a slight fruity aroma which tastes to me like something it might have picked up from a flavored tea. I’m not sure what to do with the rest of this tea, it’s really not worth drinking.

This is a nice slightly aged sheng, and pretty economical. It brews a deep fall orange and has a mixture of dry and juicy flavors. It can be pretty bitter if brewed with lots of leaf, and must have been a real bruiser when it was young. Light camphor flavor, peach, sandalwood, tobacco, walnut, and fall leaves are the flavors/scents that come to mind.

This is the first tasting note I’ve posted for quite a while now, and it feels good to be back on Steepster. I like the new interface, and it’s great to see that the pu’erh loving community here has expanded.