Avery F. Send Message

I found this tea very mild, even after a long steep in very hot water. Certainly not objectionable. It has a faint taste of burnt sugar, some bamboo scent, and a lightly roasted flavour. Overall, it’s fine, but too mild for my taste.

I tried the autumn 2016 version of this tea. It was refreshing and vaguely fruity; a pleasant enough tea, but not especially memorable. It has no strong spinach-y notes or other flavours likely to be objectionable, so it’s probably a good introductory white tea.

It is also very fluffy. I put together a tea sample pack for a friend recently as a holiday gift, and included this tea. A mere 10g of it fit into a size of jar that held an average of 18g of most other teas, and 32g of a more finely chopped tea.

This tea is a bit fiddly to brew. If I use my normal method, it’s not bad, but very mild; kind of unexceptional. Brewing it in duan ni improves it significantly; it really brings out the flavour. In porcelain this is a 40 – in clay, it’s a 65. The combination of better heat retention with the removal of a typically bitter edge helps showcase the subtler (and more delicious) tastes in the tea.

Strong taste of sweet potato, mild taste of chocolate. Not my favourite flavour profile, but for a very tea-like tisane, it’s the best I’ve found! It reminds me of a few roasted oolongs I’ve tried, so if I’m looking for something like that late in the evening, it’s a great option.

Small leaf pieces and a standard, basic shou taste. Because of the leaf shape, it’s easier to brew this Western-style than gongfu, but I did try both. It didn’t impress me either way; that said, it’s less expensive and more widely available than many similar teas of equal quality, so for someone just getting into pu-erh, it’s a good option.

There’s a taste here I can’t quite identify. Is it acorn squash? It reminds me of a holiday meal, and has an almost caramelized edge. The smell is the same way. The aroma is faint, and matches the taste and scent.

Needs a low brewing temperature. Quite vegetal, very spinach-y – almost like a green tea. Very fluffy; it’s hard to fit an adequate weight into a gaiwan. It’s a decent tea, but not really my thing.

A balanced hei cha. It didn’t really impress me. Mushroom flavours predominate early on, followed by some mild honey-like sweetness, followed by nuttiness. A bit more shou-like than most non-shou hei cha, though I could still taste that ‘golden flower’ sweetness. Medium body.

This one is kind of hard to describe, honestly. It really is like no other tea. The flavour is mild in the sense that no one note dominates it – it’s a gentle tea – but the overall taste is quite strong. It’s softly sweet, I suppose. I’d recommend it purely on the basis that it truly is unique.