poikkeus Send Message

The leaves are intensely aromatic, spicy, sweet-smelling like caramel; I’ve rarely smelled a tea that’s so enticing. While some Yunnan teas can be overbearing, these buds are flavorful but pleasingly sweet. A backbone of spice makes this tea seem exotic. Rich flavor is what Yunnan Golden Buds is all about, but it’s the kind of taste that you always want to come back to. Especially nice paired with a light biscuit.

Aroma from the leaves is intoxicating – spicy, pungent, rich. This tea steeps into a liquor that’s a deep amber, but the flavor is modestly flavorful. Spicy notes persist on the finish, though I didn’t detect much of a Muscatel profile; it’s appealing but seems more like an everyday tea rather than a special one.

A very balanced, good-tasting tea. The liquor is medium amber, and there’s a pleasing touch of smokiness and a “dark oolong” flavor. If you steep at the recommended temperature (around 200˚F), you can definitely detect “rock tea” in the aftertaste. Not cheap, but this is the real thing. Easily the best DHP I’ve tasted.

Dragon House has four basic grades of DHP: Da Hong Pao Yancha, Supreme, Nonpareil, and cake. The first is their entry-level grade, and nonpareil is quite expensive; premium is a fine oolong that, at its best, offers two main flavors: a floral greenness and a pleasing backbone of smokiness. You may experience some variability, year by year; 2010 was a great year, 2012 merely average. The effect can be not unlike drinking a genmai-cha – toasty but thirst-quenching.

The individual leaves are 3/4" and regular. Steeped, the liquor is a light green and clear, offering a refined taste. The elegance is a contrast with garden variety Mao Feng, which can vary, but can be grassy with a touch of asparagus taste. Appealing, but understated almost to a fault.

Some tea drinkers like young sheng; but for me, this Menghai was unsatisfying on several levels. Sampled at 200˚F, the liquor was somewhat bitter – the kind of thing that happens when a green tea is scorched. Sampled at 145˚F, the bitter notes vanished, but that taste like an understeeped green oolong; the liquor was a light green, and wan in flavor.

Part of the problem is that puerh consumed this early is going to be substandard, since it hasn’t even begun to age. And then there’s the controversy over young sheng; some tea drinkers like the experience, but drinking this is not dissimilar to brewing an inexpensive Tie-Guan-Yin at 212˚F; you’ll get the same harsh, overcooked flavor, and that’s going to be the case with most young sheng.

The dry tea is raisiny, aromatic, almost sweet, and the leaves are a uniform dark brown. These leaves aren’t large, so avoid oversteeping. The liquor is a red-brown; this qualifies as a “red tea.” While Sichuan Zao Bei Jian is flavorful, it doesn’t have a lot of dimension.

Full, somewhat malty, low on astringency – and an outstanding value.

A well-made tea, an oolong with a floral backbone, somewhat sweet, but full-flavored. This is an extremely popular tea, and it comes in a wide variety of grades. This Special Grade has pungency and stands up to repeated steepings; with a gong-fu cup, you’ll discover a variety of flavor notes.

For me, the tea’s natural astringency left me less than satisfied – though I fully realize that this is a satisfactory example of this tea.

Eastern Beauty uses leaves picked in summer, when insect damage may consume a certain part of the tea crop. But this has unanticipated effects: the flavor becomes more subtle, and the leaves naturally oxidize prior to being processed into tea. The leaves themselves have jigsaw shapes, but the eventual tea is light copper in hue.

Subtlety is the keynote here. Don’t look for rich, overly tannic tea. What’s left of the insect-nibbled tea leaves is smooth and very easy to drink; this tea is delicately sweet. Eastern Beauty is best complemented by biscuits or some other light edible to contrast with the tea’s refined character. On the other hand, this tea is a little too subtle to drink just by itself.