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Feel like you want to brew some longjing but you don’t have any? Love a few funky mushroomy notes here and there? This tea is for you! Good energy and duration. It brews like a sheng, tastes most like a green, and smells like oolong. Weird combination but it’s great. It has a tendency to go astringent, so dont brew too hard…unless you like it that way. I ain’t your mother.

The aroma of this tea has you almost burning your nose to get a whiff. It’s great—wildflower honey, a hint of tobacco. The flavor carries through with the honey, which is the main attraction of this tea. There’s a bit of bitterness if you brew it too hard while chasing the honey. Soft and luxurious mouthfeel too. Overall it’s mostly a one trick pony, but it does that one trick pretty well. It’s honey water—texturally, flavor, and aroma-wise. I’m not sure if the aroma has me tricked into thinking it’s sweet, but I think it is at least. Good tea and worth sharing.

If you are at all a fan of smoked teas, this is a pretty good one. The smoke is there but not acrid, and there are still some interesting tea scents around. Good texture and overall balance for a pine-smoked tea. I like this better than most lapsangs, and this might the one smoked tea I keep in my collection for those cold nights.

My first introduction to aged mandarin peel was in the form of a pu`erh orange. I hated it. I was expecting a similar experience with three treasures but instead found this one to work. The flavors are well-incorporated with nothing really standing out other than the citrus—but at least it’s not standing out and waving its arms trying to steal the show. You get that funky medicinal flavor that evolves towards bitter, but also the balancing herbal sweetness from the aged white tea. This is a good tea to share—it’s distinctly weird in a good way and something far from what non-teaheads would be used to.

This one is temperamental. Brewing parameters are pretty important to get a delicious result out of this sheng, but when you get it right it’s pretty darn good. The cha qi is also invigorating and uplifting without being jittery. Notes of leather, latex, smoke, honey, and lychee. After every sip your tongue becomes a battleground of sweet and astringent which lingers for minutes until they fade away, neither side having won the battle.

Occasionally I want the elevated Lipton experience which this offers pretty well. This is the kind of tea I’d drink iced laying out in the sun beside the pool, or after pulling weeds in the garden all day. Naturally bright and sweet. The description on W2T says it’s somewhere between an Oolong and a Hong, but I put it squarely in honcha territory. Solid ‘tea aroma’, but there’s not really any frills here—not a lot of fruit, flower, leather, or any particularly interesting characteristics. Good body and makes a great iced tea, but a gongfu sessionable tea it is not, at least to me.

It’s so good. A summer tea has no right to be this delicious.
This one can get 10 steeps easy too, which is rare for a white. You could probably get 20 to be honest. The herbal quality is lingering, soup is thick, and there are notes of wildflower honey that transport you to a warm, sunny spring day.
Cram your gaiwan or pot full of leaves. You can’t oversteep this—it just becomes more incredible the harder you brew it.

Bamboo is a weird grass. Who thought to shove tea inside and then roast it I guess really liked the flavor. The prominent flavor here is Chinese-takeout chopsticks. I kind of like it—much more than some of the dank lumbery pu`erhs I’ve had. The bamboo is well, woody, but in a tannic-but-not-resinous kind of way. Somewhere past the bamboo there’s a vegetal brightness akin of bean sprouts, and then lingering still there’s a touch of cocoa dust drying the tongue. No dusty basement here. Just thick, well-incorporated, warming, and enduring bamboo. Pretty approachable and something I’d share with friends. Overall I don’t regret buying the full 200g before trying it. The value is good to boot.

Sometimes you read a description and decide you need to buy the item described. I wanted to love this. It’s white. It’s black. A mysterious experiment.
However for me, tasting this tea in 2024, it misses the mark. It’s not bad, just not notable. The oxidation is too high and sends the expensive bud material into hongcha territory. The result is strawberry flavored water with an awkward dryness. It’s not a tea to collect nor worthy of serving to guests. It leaves me irritated that it’s not at least the sum of its parts, but instead less than.
I’ve got another 14 grams to get through but I’m just going to give it away and hope someone else finds it to be their cup of tea.

Have you ever found a perfect tea? This might be it for me. It’s loaded with ripe papaya and rose, silky in texture, and lingers without being soapy. It’s not a red, white, or black tea distinctly, but what it is, is nothing short of amazing. Did I mention this tea is just 20 cents a gram?