The great Da Hong Pao taste off
OK, so not so great maybe…
I have had the opportunity to purchase 6 Da Hong Pao and I thought it would be fun to do a side by side comparison.
Please note that this is only my limited opinion YMMY. Also the aroma, flavor palate, leaves etc. varied widely. I tried to hold this into account, but I have personal bias just like anyone. What I prefer may not be what you prefer or what is considered the typical standard. In fact, I have found it very hard to find standard flavor profiles for tea ( whereas, say wine, there seems to be a consensus ), this is probably because I am not Chinese, nor do I speak or read Mandarin.
The teas tasted were Verdant Reserve Big Red Robe, Yunnan Sourcing Wild crafted Da Hong Pao, Yunnan Sourcing Purple Da Hong Pao, King tea Yellow Rose Da Hong Pao, JK Imperial Zengyan Da Hong Pao, and Whispering Pines wild crafted Da Hong Pao.
I tried to make the tasting as consistent as I could using tea pots of same size and clay make up, water temp 195 F, equal weight of leaves, etc.
So, here are my thoughts.
There were two distinct flavor and aroma profiles: The first a fruity aroma and flavor with floral highlights, the second a more savory and somewhat more roasted profile.
The Verdant, YS wild, YS purple and King Yellow Rose were more the fruit and floral type ( though the King tea had elements of both ), and the WP and JK were the more savory type.
The real standouts for me were the YS purple which had a wonderful room filling intense aroma a nice fullish mouth feel, and great palate with some nice complexity, this was my favorite. The Verdant was very similar to the YS, but not quite as intense and did not show some of the complexity of the YS purple. The YS wild had a somewhat more delicate aroma and flavor with some vegetal undertones, I did not like this one quite as much, but is is still a nice tea and worth trying.
The JK was interesting, the leaves were mostly smaller and broken and the color of the soup was much darker looked like a black tea. The aroma was a bit light, and very savory with some roasted notes, the palate was similar nice full mouth and and interesting sweet finish/echo, I did not care as much for some of the flavors, but it was interesting and for me somewhat enjoyable, I think it would perform better in more of a gong fu style with very short steepings, it also might keep for a long time.
I found the King and WP teas disappointing. The King tea lacked focus, and had a seashore note that really did not blend well with the other notes. The WP was my least favorite, it was very similar to the JK, but weaker, thin, and just not much there…
So go to it!
I have also compared some nice Dian Hong blacks and will write more later about them.
I also had the same experience with the Whispering Pines Da Hong Pao. Don’t get me wrong, I have had some incredible teas from WP, but this has to be my least favorite of all. I am looking forward to trying the YS Purple.
I love that purple ZHP, it has a weird citrus complexity and doesnt taste like anything else. Its well worth a try
Yunnan Sourcing’s Golden Guan Yin DHP is one of my favorite teas of all time. Give it a try the next time another DHP taste off comes around!
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I just tasted a Da Hong Pao over the weekend, Cindy’s, compared with her Qi Dan. for some that would ring a bell, since it’s one of the two cultivar types supposedly derived from the original plants (5, as I remember, although the legend based numbers tend to vary). Bei Dou is the other, per my understanding derived from early generation cuttings. Da Hong Pao is usually communicated as being a plant type but in actual practice it’s perhaps more typically a blend now, which would mean the “type” would vary a lot, since it could be anything, and could relate back to anything in terms of mixes of cultivars.
It was good. It tasted like Da Hong Pao, a bit on the earthy side, nicely balanced and clean flavored, in a dark wood range, not unlike leather, with some mineral undertones, leaning a little towards spice. Qi Dan wasn’t like that. It was smoother, “rounder” in some hard to describe sense, and more aromatic, if I’m getting how Chinese people use that description right (like perfume, or liquor, with a different taste range than those). All that is just from memory; I’ll post a review of it before long.
Cindy is Cindy Chen, mentioned in another discussion here, a tea farmer in Wuyishan. Usually when someone says online that they are a tea farmer you might want to doubt that, but she is, a particularly well documented tea farmer.
yeah, DHP for a someone like me (not being able to get at the ‘real’ stuff) is definitely expecting a certain style of roast. Bei Dou is the closest I have seen to actual DHP, and with a price to match.
Ah ok, I think i’ve seen a cindy around here. :)
Yeah, I guess I consider DHP to be more of a style than an actual specific cultivar. I have not found a really good source for Bei Dou, so hard to know what one is actually getting.
Cindy hasn’t posted here before, I don’t think. I was just talking to her by message yesterday about DHP and blending and she had some interesting things to say about her take on it. I’ll clean up the language use a bit and add it to that post. The short version is that DHP is usually a blend, and people blend DHP differently. The main factors she was talking about were matching up teas with strengths in aroma and engergy to balance those (the cha qi idea; not really something I’m clear on myself). It sounded a bit like wine blending, except neither of those is really in the same completely flavor based scope. I’m sure flavor also factors in, she was just talking about other things. One thing she mentioned—which is a bit obvious, once one considers it—is that the roast level has to match in the different teas used as inputs or it won’t work. It’s not something she said but it occurs to me that DHP would sometimes just be Shui Xian, the main cultivar used for restaurant teas, which can be made into better versions. It would probably sound better and sell better as DHP.
I didn’t mention it about her varying her offerings (related to the initial post, about sending samples, or not, or changing sales plans) but she really is busy with making tea sometimes, out picking leaves and such. The reason tea farmers never do what she’s trying to do is because they’re already running complicated businesses, so it’s not just about technical challenges, it’s also about demand conflict from conducting a broad range of business. She and her family already distribute teas in different ways, so in a sense it’s not new, but it adds complexity, more demand. She’s already overloaded during harvest and production seasons.
I finished that post comparing a Qi Dan and a blended Da Hong Pao. The short version of that is DHP refers to either tea produced from one of two closely related tea plant types, Qi Dan or Bei Dou, or it’s a blend of tea plant types. This review compares examples of both from Cindy Chen.
http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2017/03/comparing-da-hong-pao-and-qi-dan-what.html
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