It’s getting late. I need to go to bed. Instead, I’m sitting on my couch with one of my cats while attempting to fashion a coherent tea review from the rat’s nest of hastily and sloppily scrawled notes that I jotted down during my review session. It looks like some sort of octopoid monstrosity vomited black ink all over a sheet of paper. Was I having a seizure or a full-blown nervous breakdown when I was drinking this tea? The answer to that question is definitely the latter, though I can’t entirely rule out the former possibility. Somehow I actually remember drinking this tea. It was another weird one, though not nearly as rough or challenging as the Lao Xian Ong I just reviewed.
I prepared this tea gongfu style. After a 10 second rinse, I steeped 6 grams of loose tea leaves in 4 fluid ounces of 203 F water for 6 seconds. This infusion was followed by 16 additional infusions. Steep times for these infusions were as follows: 9 seconds, 12 seconds, 16 seconds, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, 1 minute, 1 minute 15 seconds, 1 minute 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes, and 10 minutes.
Prior to the rinse, the dry tea leaves produced aromas of jasmine, orchid, cream, custard, vanilla, and nectarine. After the rinse, aromas of cinnamon, butter, roasted almond, gardenia, and baked bread showed themselves. The first infusion brought out banana, grass, and steamed milk aromas. In the mouth, the tea liquor offered up notes of cream, butter, grass, roasted almond, custard, and baked bread that were chased by hints of green bell pepper, steamed milk, gardenia, green wood, peach, nectarine, orchid, vanilla, and jasmine. The majority of the subsequent infusions added aromas of green bell pepper, coriander, white grape, and green wood as well as a subtle mushroom presence. Stronger and more immediately detectable notes of green bell pepper, steamed milk, gardenia, vanilla, and green wood emerged in the mouth along with notes of minerals, cinnamon, banana, orange zest, coriander, mushroom, white grape, lemon zest, green apple, pear, and watermelon rind. I also found hints of turnip greens, sour apricot, sour plum, radish, spinach, earth, nutmeg, and caraway. As the tea faded, the liquor emphasized notes of minerals, butter, grass, cream, green wood, green bell pepper, green apple, white grape, lemon zest, baked bread, and orange zest that were chased by hints of roasted almond, sour plum, sour apricot, turnip greens, radish, earth, mushroom, spinach, jasmine, and gardenia.
What a strange and confusing tea. It was all over the place in terms of what it had to offer. While I was truly impressed by its depth and complexity, I distinctly recall some of these aromas and flavors not always working well together at all. There was also a tendency for the tea liquor to turn into a muddy rush of intense, ever shifting, and often distinctly uneasy combinations of aromas and flavors. I still do not know quite what to make of this tea. If this sort of profile is typical of Ye Lai Xiang, I can see why it may not be a more common offering.
UPDATE: I was able to uncover a few more thoughts about this tea from my mess of notes. Apparently, I actually came to enjoy it significantly more than I did during my review session and thought the muddiness was less prominent during a subsequent review attempt. I also found the previously clashing flavor components to be mellower and to work better together than they did in my initial review attempt. I did not assign this tea an exact score, but noted that a score in the low-mid 80s felt fair based on my experience with it. I also kept emphasizing the word “radish” over and over again. Make of that what you will.
Flavors: Almond, Apricot, Bread, Butter, Cinnamon, Coriander, Cream, Custard, Earth, Fruity, Gardenias, Grass, Green Apple, Green Bell Peppers, Green Wood, Jasmine, Melon, Milk, Mineral, Mushrooms, Nutmeg, Orange Zest, Orchid, Peach, Pear, Plum, Spinach, Vanilla, Vegetal, White Grapes
