Ooh this one is interesting! This is the type of oolong most companies use as the base for Milk oolongs (Including Zen tea’s Milky Oolong, which I reviewed rather extensively here: http://steepster.com/teas/zen-tea/56529-milky-oolong) since it’s regarded as a Milky tasting tea already and that they add to that with flavouring. If your mind went straight to davidstea’s Quangzhou milk oolong, yes they use a different base tea. Anyways yes so Jin Xuan is often referred to as Milk oolong just on its own.
Right okay I should probably talk about the tea,
The first couple steeps for me were really vegetal and almost more like a black oolong rather than the green oolong it is. The tea’s pretty bitter and astringent, at least while steeping according to Zen’s GongFu instructions: 2 tsp, 6oz water and 2.5-4 mins for about 5 steeps, which I listened to at first but then I put too much water into my Perfectea maker (yes, this is how I brew gongfu okay) and poured maybe 2oz out straight away and it was almost as flavourful after 5 seconds of steeping as it had been in about 3 minutes so I started to feel like they were messing with me and i went for like 30 second steeps. Granted, at this point the tea had lost a decent bit of its flavour. Alright anyways.
I should maybe talk about the tea at least a little.
So after i started doing shorter steeps, the tea was actually really creamy and a bit milky, with hints of seaweed and vegetalness, .. wait, vegetality? vegetal.. lets go with vegetal flavour. You know what, I liked vegetality. I’m gonna say that from now on.
Anyways, yes, so the vegetality is rather light amongst the creaminess, but at this point im getting a bit of that taste of an empty flavourless oolong (you guys know what i mean by that right?)
This review was weird. I like weird
I’m gonna make more weird reviews
Flavors: Astringent, Bitter, Creamy, Milk, Vegetal