2016 Beneath an Emerald Sea

From a fresh CLT order. First time trying their teas. The flavor did change some over the 10 infusions I did to become more my style, but still not in love with it. Pretty thick mouthfeel with a mildly bitter aftertaste in the initial infusions. Leaves still appear quite green.

Flavors transition was raisin + floral → bitter + vegetal + bread + cream → (infusion ~6) pineapple, honey.

Definitely like this tea and it’s the best of the CLT samples. However, the price tag of $0.75/g for a cake seems outrageous to me. It is simply not that high in quality. Sorry, CLT.

Half of the sample that remains. This one is yummy. Fragrant. Juicy. Sadly sold out, but CLT provides many options.

The cake has beautiful looking leaf. Upon the first steeping there is a pleasant blend of floral and fruity notes, medium thickness in the mouth with notes of caramel and cream. Cane sugar sweetness. Clean. Flatter the second steep. Not as syrupy. Pineapple, and mango. Third steep it continues…background sweetness, with a fruit forward, and floral flavor. Subtle, sweet cream, and vanilla tones. Round and very relaxing. The fourth steeping, the fruitiness has taken a back seat, more bittersweet and astringency has come forward. Lots orchid, almost nectar type flavors.

The tea rounds outs is still very comforting to drink, lots of soul to the tea. Not a ton of energy, but more of a relaxing energy.

This is definitely one I enjoy, it’s one where it is hard to describe the experience. If you get the chance to try it or purchase it, please do. This is one of the best I’ve had from CLT …IMHO. I need to purchase another cake. The humidity here in Florida ages these quite quickly.

This is a nice floral, sweet, and full-bodied tea with a long-lasting aftertaste. There is enough complexity, but the taste profile remains fairly balanced. One of the better teas I sampled from CLT. The taste is profile is a little strange, but I attribute that to the fact that the tea is in its transition period already.

The dry leaf aroma has a gin and woody quality that turns into a mix of cream, grass compost, camphor and tobacco later on. Towards the end of the session, I can also smell some white peach.

As for taste notes, I noticed flavours of fenugreek, lemon zest, nutmeg, fresh dates, walnut shells and bread. It is somewhat juicy and bitter taste with heavy sweetness and a strong floral component. The aftertaste is dry and tart with notes of honey, dandelion leaves, and guava. The huigan is strong and lasts for a while too.

One of the highlights, and a reason why I think this tea might age well, is its very thick mouthfeel. It is also fairly slick and soft though, with a slight foamy quality that should get enhanced over time. On the other hand, what the tea does not seem to have is a particularly memorable cha qi. However, I don’t really see that as a problem, I don’t necessarily want every sheng I drink to have a hard-hitting qi.

There was a time many years ago when I was snorkeling off the coast of a tropical island. Something about a cruise ship group outing involving a sunken ship. I slyly wriggled my hydrophobic self away from the school of us landlubbing flubbers as I often do in these situations (I went through Alcatraz backwards! without wearing those self-guided tour headphones! How edgy!). Doing my own exploration, I floated and bobbed in the warm sea, letting the sun warm my back as the soft waves carried me out. The ocean whispered a lullaby, one of those sung by the sirens of nefarious intent. Oh look at this, how curious. The continental shelf. The rays filtered through the salty emerald suspension, illuminating the last reaches of the inundated sandy coastline before shearing off into the black abyss. This is bliss. I would be ok with dying right now, peering down, down, down.

Wait, no.

Never whisper your deepest stirrings to the sirens. They answer your call, upset that you’ve had thoughts of breaking free from their enchanting chords, transforming sweet notes into an uproarious clang followed by waves of salty terror crashing into your lungs and when, in desperation, you call for help, the only thing that will come out is watery sputters of what you saw and heard, unintelligible to the flippered fools from whom you foolishly floated away, and thrashing cries of “Let me live!”

Never trust the ocean.

Luckily, this is tea. What could go wrong?

Nice sweet floral aroma that is supplemented in the mouth by whipped cream, a lemon high note, some green bean, asparagus, moss, wood, spiciness, mushroom broth. Soft, sweet and round with a moderate yet soft bitterness giving way to both astringency and minty cooling in the throat before depositing a defined and long-lasting baked mango aftertaste. Becomes more floral as the steeps progress then transforms into a buttery, nutty sweetness with a light layer of oily wax lining the mouth. A healthy-looking blend in the spent leaves. Cha qi seemed absent but then I turned into a bit of a wacky caffeinated jester good for creating some Saturday Night Lulz.

Perhaps a bit too sweet for me but I think you can trust immersing yourself in this emerald sea.

Clean, solid, dynamic tea.

First tasting of this was in a thermos with 150ml boiling water per gram. Was immediately impressed. The dry cup smell was out of this world. I really love dry cup smell and it is a big factor for me in choosing cakes.

Enjoyed this tea gong fu as well with my 60ml gaiwan using 3.5 grams. There’s some smoke in the first couple steeps which I’m not into, but after that all good. Very clean. Just enough bitterness. Not too vegetal. I’m pretty new to pu’er so not sure if lack of veg flavors is because it’s had a couple years to rest or if it is inherent to this tea. Would like to know. Good session.

Brewed up more of this sample today. 7gr in 110ml porcelain teapot. Lately I’ve been brewing tea doing 10 second steeps from start to 8, 10, 12 steeps or whenever a tea seems to be needing a push and then I put the leaves in a 500ml thermos for at least half an hour. The short steeps are nice for enjoying the more subtle flavors and enjoyed the progression of this tea. Even without the thermos portion of the session this tea is recommendable and worth buying a cake. But with the thermos steep this tea shines even more. Very thick but soft mouthfeel. Warm maple sweetness. Amazing puckering bitterness. And a huigan that stayed with me for nearly an hour.

If you have not brewed tea this way I suggest you try it. There are some things that just won’t come out of tea leaves without a thermos or boiling but boiling boils off a lot of flavors. Basically once you are two thirds of the way through a session is a good time to feed the thermos. And I’ve noticed that the better the tea, the better the results.

I’ll start off by saying I brewed this in the Jian Shui and I usually don’t like reviewing teas with the added variable of brewing in clay for obvious reasons. Taste being the most drastic.

So, I cracked into my cake after taking the day off yesterday and threw a bunch of this in the Jian Shui. Smooth, sweet and soft. All while maintaining a thick body throughout the session. Tastes were strong but lacking in bitterness. The lack of Qi was of note. Some mouthfeel.

Overall, I think this is a pleasantly easy drinker. Again, I prefer to brew in the Gaiwan to review but I wanted to use my clay teapot for a long day of drinking. I should review this tea again down the road.

Great Sheng. I’m still pretty new to pu erh, but I definitely tasted the floral and sweet notes immediately. In later steeps, I think I tasted a bit of green pepper too (which was interesting bc I don’t usually like green pepper).

I’m going to be blunt: I love this tea.

It’s sweet, bitter, sour, fruity, and floral. After watching Glen’s YouTube video (Click Here), I bought a beeng without sampling it, and it was the right move, 100%. At $50.00USD/200g, it’s literally at the cut-off of what I personally consider to be budget-friendly: $0.25USD/1g.

(I’m in the process of creating a post to establish this blog’s price brackets, hopefully I’ll have that posted by this weekend.)

If I had a larger budget, hands down this would be in my daily arsenal. The quality of this tea speaks for itself: the leaves have incredible endurance and appear expertly-processed: I’m hard-pressed to find any burnt edges. In a nutshell, this is an incredible choice for all levels of drinkers. This is the perfect choice for drinkers who are no longer beginners, and are willing to pay a bit more to see what the next price-bracket of teas have to offer without breaking the bank…

Read the full review at: https://shenggut.wixsite.com/shenggut/single-post/2017/08/16/Crimson-Lotus-Tea-Beneath-an-Emerald-Sea-Spring-2016

This tea is stout. I did a rinse, then a steep of 20 seconds. Bam! Flavor was off the charts, intensely bitter but not astringent. First few infusions remained rather intensely bitter. I kept dropping my time back until I was at 10 seconds. The liquor then took on a sweetness, but still has plenty of bitterness and a bit of sourness. It produced a creamy mouth feel. I’d like to taste this one in 10 years. I admittedly have a hard time describing young shengs. I saw one of the flavor notes someone posted was warm grass. That’s a good description of what I experienced with this tea. It’s the Fourth of July, and I feel like there are fireworks going off in my mouth with this one.