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Very nice white tea with both mango and pear (and you can actually taste both). Subtle flavor profile, that makes a really enjoyable drink.

This Jin Xuan Tea is from the farm of Mr. Ye Bu Guang (see http://www.sannetea.com/about-our-partners/) and was harvested in Spring 2015 in Wuhe, Hualien, Taiwan. Mr. Ye Bu Guang does not use any pesticides or herbicides, but practices complete organic farming! Apparently the Taiwanese standard for organic farming is much more strict than the US one is, so that’s only good news.

On to the tea itself: it consist of dark green, very tightly packed, balls of tea, that emit a nice flavorful smell. Upon steeping the balls start to unfurl, but it takes several steepings before they are completely unrolled. At that point they reveal that the balls actually consists of twigs with more than one tealeave on it.

The steeped tea has a strong dark green roasted vegetable taste (all in a good way!), and has a thick, smooth consistency. The roasted vegetable taste became less prominent in latter steeps. It makes for a great tasty tea!

I never drank a tea with roses in it before, but LiquidProust provided me with a sample of this tea. Based on it’s name I was expecting a very “lovely” floral taste. However, I got a strong wooden taste that I didn’t like. I’ll likely retry the tea in the future to see if the wooden taste was just a fluke.

I prepared this tea without looking up what the name meant. After reading this information, I can only agree: one really taste the whiskey barrels. Be careful to not make the first steep too strong (the tea has a strong taste), like I did, because there was some harshness to the taste, which disappeared in subsequent steepings.

This is a review for the 2015 Oriental Beauty. The leaves were picked in August in Pinglin, New Taipei (Taiwan), by Mr. Chen Shi Yi (http://www.sannetea.com/about-our-partners/) and it’s 100% organic tea. In fact the green tea leaf hopper is encouraged to eat from the leaves, as the reaction of the tea plant leads to the release of some natural chemicals that lead to the taste of Oriental Beauty (see wikipedia for the more detailed story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongfang_Meiren).

The dried and curled leaves have a wide variety of colors, from black over all kinds of browns to white, and they smell wonderful. The tea itself tastes great: very smooth and fruity, with some honey-like sweetness. After a few steepings a much more floral, fresh green tea taste emerged. The tea never had any astringency in it. I really liked the flavor profile.

Very floral taste, with a sweet fruit taste in the background.
Even unbrewed, the tea smells really nice.

This tea looked nice, it smelled fantastic, and it also tasted great. Not sure of all individual tastes, but the combination was great!

The tea really smelled well. The hibiscus taste was very strong, with the plum more in the background. The tea itself was also a bit overshadowed by the hibiscus. But since I really like hibiscus, I don’t have any problems with that.

The taste from this tea surprised me: it definitely tasted smoky. In a second steeping there was also some wood in it (which I associate with the pit of a peach). Overall the taste combination worked very well.

I drank some Japanese green tea with matcha from a sample from LiquidProust. The green tea tasted very “leafy green”, combined with the taste of Trader Joe’s Mochi green tea (if that makes any sense ;-) ). Unfortunately there was also too much bitterness to it for my taste.