White Tea Wu-Long Premium

I believe this is the last of my samples from Shang Tea… I am sad to see them go! Everything I have had has been good so far.

I didn’t even dump my whole package in the cup as instructed so I was surprised to see this tea liquor a dark yellow color. I did smell the wet leaves and they remind me of sweet clover and hay.

I am not so great at picking out flavors but luckily Ang. has written a great tasting note before me. :) I don’t believe I have ever had a white oolong before this. I am surprised to find the tea has the sweet and fruitiness of the white tea but also has some of the butteriness/nuttiness of a green oolong. This is exceptionally smooth and rich but at the same time maintains a sense of relaxed lightness that I often find in white tea. Between this and the jasmine tea i had earlier I am feeling quite elegant and content.

It also resteeps well…

I just checked the price of this one – $13.50 for 2 oz. is not that pricey at all and is a luxury I could definitely afford… mmm. On the list it goes!

White tea of the early afternoon. I’m having a ball with these white tea samples! This one confused me dearly because it says white tea yet is says wu-long which I know is another way of spelling oolong…mind blown. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it so I brewed it like I do any other white teas and I was very much impressed.

The dry leaves are dark brown and slightly curled with some fuzzy white curled leaves mixed in and smelled of apricot and stones. The wet leaves smell more earthy with hay notes…now I’m getting more confused. Taste…o_O sweet hay notes, sweet apricot notes, stone/mineral notes, a very smooth, creamy texture, like butter, yet it remains light. Is this a white tea or an oolong…I get notes from both types.

This tea is as confusing to me as it is delicious.

Diving into the package from Wombatgirl once again, and this is what I found. I haven’t really been feeling in the mood for white much for a while, but since I started the day on green (I was lazy. Couldn’t be arsed to rinse out the pot so I just resteeped) I was feeling more in that sort of mindset today.

One of the things that always tend to surprise me with a lot of white teas is the colour of the leaves. I want them ALL to be silver! Because, you know, it’s a white tea! But they’re not, and I can’t seem to get the fact into my head that a white tea can have primarily dark leaves. (It’s a good thing that I learned much later that oolongs are also sometimes called blue teas or I’d have been seriously confused!)

The next surprise came when I sniffed the dry leaves. Chocolate? Chocolate??? What??
I smelled several times, and I smelled after breathing on them first and the aroma insisted on being chocolate. I’ve never met that in a white before! It smells natural though. Not contamination-like. Oddness. O.o

It’s got a fairly deep yellow colour after steeping, but then I did steep a whole minute. Maybe that’s a little much, but I tend to have difficulties with whites and steeping time. I can’t seem to decide if I like them very shortly steeped or a little longer. I keep changing my mind. At any rate it’s a warm yellow, a rather lovely colour, really, and nicely transparant.

It smells very fresh now and the funny chocolate note is nearly gone away. It’s sort of spooking around at the very bottom of the aroma, but primarily I smell something slightly grassy and very floral.

It tastes quite nice. It reminds me of a Dragonwell actually, with that semi-salty viscous flavour. I’m not really sure how big a fan I am of that, but it’s not overwhelming here. After the cup cools down a little more it’s further subdued. At this point it’s got a rather floral taste. It’s like drinking a mouthful of little spring flowers.

It’s very nice and very delicate cup, but by no means something I could drink a lot of at the time. One cup seems to me to be just about enough, and then it’ll be a while before I’ll be in the mood for another one. A bit like if you eat chocolate with a higher percentage of cocoa, like around 70% or something. It’s still very good, but you don’t need or want to eat as much as if it had been milk chocolate.

I feel the need to give it a high rating even if it doesn’t reflect whether or not it’s something I would like to be able to drink often or whether or not I’ll miss it when it’s gone. Because it is good. It’s just also very filling.

I am loving just the concept of the tiny amount of tea at a time let alone the range of flavors I am getting out of one sample of tea. This is a really good. It started out nutty and almost like a roasty toasty oolong and now has turned into a very sweet delicate, almost green oolong. I was too busy pouring and sipping to keep track of all the “notes” that I tasted but this was yummy!

I swear I added a note to this one. Whatever.

Sipdown, and a huge thank you to Nicole! The other notes pretty much describe what’s going on with this tea: it is a combo between a white tea’s grainy-melon dryness and an Oriental Beauty’s starchy-honey sweetness. Dry oats, flowers, honey, and malt are what I get in every cup but in slight varieties. The first two steeps were the thickest, and the last few were the faintest and the most floral. Butter best describes the general texture.

I am glad to have tried this very unique tea, but I would not buy it again. Though the quality is bona fide, the dry profile is not something I would want to pay money for again and again. I would not say no if I were offered it again, however. This is a tea belongs to a crowd intentionally expanding its palette for sure, and while I think it is easy to drink for someone newly getting in to tea, the starchy floral dryness might detract them unless they have a very dry palette. This tea would be more comparable to say a sweeter Chardonnay or a medium White Zin….if that remotely makes sense. Please correct me if I am wrong. In the end, I recommend a sample of this tea before you decide to add this to your collection, or if you are a white tea lover, this oolong might suit your tastes just fine for novelty.

Nicole sneaked some Shang Tea samples in with my TeaLeaves order… I’ll pay her back soon enough though :)
To me, which is probably going to be different from others, the taste of this tea is like a strong white tea had a child with some Oriental Beauty and this is the child. The taste is brisk and reminds you of what you are drinking with a slap across your taste buds, but that slap is packed with flavor so it is welcomed.
The best part about this tea, for me at least, is watching the color come to life as you steep this tea. I steeped my sample size three times and then half steeped another to see if the dark liquid still came about. Almost a solid brown color unlike Shang Tea’s website, however preparations could be different as I used 190’ish. Yes, this is good; however, I am not a fan of Oriental beauty (which this is not) so the notes of ‘spice’ that come through the brisk flavor of this tea don’t appeal so much to me. The word rich does describe this tea :)

Sipdown! (146)

Another lovely Shang tea! The leaves are twisty and dark with a few silver tips. They smell of grain and slightly vegetal. I steeped the whole sample pack for 3 minutes.

This is really rather lovely. It’s sweet and grainy like the other Shang teas I’ve tried, but it has a noticeable vegetal or grassy element. Kind of like a combination of a white tea and a mild green. I’m ashamed to admit that I let half of the cup get stone cold, as I was playing a game. Oopsies? But it’s really delicious this way, which makes me think it would be great iced. It’s quite sweet and creamy and lovely! :D

Thank you Nicole for your generous sample.
brewed in 150ml gaiwan.
wet leaves smell roasty and nutty but not bold.
1st steep 185F 10 sec light yellow color, very clean taste
i decided to increase temp
2nd steep 195F 30 sec bright yellow like white grape juice. its like drinking champagne. delicate but pronounced, sweet and some slight tingling sensation.
3rd steep 195F 45 sec sweetness increased. its bolder but delicate.
I enjoyed this tea a lot. 100% repurchase