Year of the Monkey Jinhua (Golden Flowers) Fu Zhuan Tea

This was my very first fu zhuan tea. The outer part of the brick does not show any golden flowers, but when you dig a bit deeper into the brick, the tiny beneficial mold spheres reveal themselves. It is repulsive because we are conditioned to not ingest anything so scary looking, especially from a foreign country labeled in a language we cannot completely read, but a relief to verify that I had found the right thing on the first try despite acquiring it unopened and brand new from a grandpa I do not know who was downsizing his tea collection. I tasted the outer chunk first after two long rinses. It is really a perfect digestive beverage. You can feel the large meal you ate actively dissolve with great haste within you after you drink this. Later in the day, I tried the inner chunk dotted with golden flowers. As promised, the leaves smelled convincingly of dark honey and the soup tasted sweeter than the first chunk. The color of the liquid ranges from a deep gold to a warm red depending on the length of the steeps, but it loses most of its flavor by around steep 8. In the latter steeps, it tastes more like a strong black tea than anything else, but the early steeps are quite unique, I imagine, to this genre of “golden flowers”. It is such an interesting tea. I will be drinking it regularly this winter to learn more about it. I don’t see how anyone can refrain from eating more food after a session or two of this tea, though. It is like 15 out of 10 on the munchies meter.