I’ve had only one Dong Pian before, and my experience with it wasn’t that great. However, I picked up 25 g of this early 2023 harvest from Ethan because I’ve never been disappointed with his teas. I steeped 5 g of leaf in a 120 ml porcelain pot at 190F for 20, 15, 20, 25, 30, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, 120, and 240 seconds, plus some long, uncounted infusions.
The dry leaf smells like lemon cookies, plus some more generic citrus and orchids. The first steep has notes of cookie, orchid, honeysuckle, lilac, cream, grass, and faint lemon. Steep two has more lemon, along with narcissus, pineapple, and another tropical fruit. The next couple steeps are full of lemon, coconut, orchid, honeysuckle, cookies, narcissus, grass, and the tropical note I’ll call guava. Steeps five and six have a sweeter lemon flavour, with lovely aromas of pineapple and guava at the bottom of the cup. In some sessions, the coconut persists until the eighth steep, though in others, it’s almost absent. Subsequent steeps have fainter floral and lemon notes and more vegetal, herbaceous, and grassy ones, with a bit of astringency.
This is a lovely tea with lots of floral and fruity notes. It was a bit inconsistent across my four gongfu sessions, though that could be due to user error and to the bag being open for a few days. Cooler and shorter steeps seemed to emphasize the lemon, while slightly hotter and longer steeps emphasized the coconut and were a little more vegetal. This tea is now out of stock, but I hope to be able to try larger quantities if Ethan gets it again in 2024.
Flavors: Citrus, Coconut, Cookie, Cream, Floral, Grass, Guava, Herbaceous, Honeysuckle, Lemon, Lilac, Narcissus, Orchid, Pineapple, Tropical, Vegetal
