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There isn’t much of a smell to the dry leaves, but they are big and pretty. The brew smells incredible—like a Yunnan—with heavy notes of sweet potato and cocoa. Usually I get a bit of earthiness from a tea that smells like this, but it’s all sweet potato and no earthiness.

Taste-wise, this is an odd black; it’s kind of how I would imagine a Chinese-Indian black hybrid to taste. It has the sweet potato notes with just a hint of cocoa, but it’s also bitingly bitter, malty, and peaty. This brew is strong (and yes I brewed it strong), so it would hold up well as a breakfast tea with milk and sugar if you desired—definitely robust and full-bodied.

This is another one of those shous that smells like crab boil to me—dry leaf, wet leaf, and brew—although the wet leaf smells a bit earthier, and the brew has a hint of a sweet smell to it. I don’t mind the crabbiness, as it doesn’t mean that the tea will taste fishy, and as a Floridian, I’ve never found crab spices offensive. So it works for me.

The brew itself is mineral, dark flavored, sweet, and thick. That tangy kind of ferment flavor is strong, but again, it’s not fishy at all. I pushed it a little around steep 4, and it got a bit bitter in a way that reminded me of a black coffee, which was nice. It did get a bit astringent toward the end.

Yikes! Too much for me. Has that sour, vegetal taste like zucchini. It’s bitter and astringent with that shengy kind of flavor that I can’t really describe yet.

The smell of this tea reminds me of the first shou I ever tried, which I think was some kind of Numi puerh. It reminds me of crab boil, so I’m guessing it smells like one of the spices in Old Bay Seasoning. I just don’t know which spice it is.

Fortunately, this smell didn’t really translate into the brew. I was expecting the brew to be much fuller bodied, but it was very light. It tastes woody, smoky, and sweet. There’s also a bit of lingering spice, perhaps sandalwood? I’m not good with spice identification.

After steep 10, it starts to get less woody and more smoky, sweet minerals. Very enjoyable, but nothing I would buy to keep around.

The aroma of the dry leaves is stronger than the regular, sweet and chocolatey with a bit of a bread scent. I brewed about 4g in 50ml at 205ºF, ranging from 10 seconds to 3 minutes, and the color brewed into a nice dark, golden honey color that smelled of earth, yams, and chocolate. It’s a dark, seductive kind of flavor that comes up the palate and out the nose. There’s also a very slight bitterness and peppery flavor on the finish.

The cocoa and sweet potato notes are highlighted more on subsequent steeps, but caramel and honey are also introduced after steep 4. After a while, I started to lose counts of the steepings, but I got a little dark honey bread flavor toward the end.

Full post and pics here: http://www.catlaittea.com/2016/08/28/review-verdant-tea-2016-laoshan-and-reserve-laoshan-black/

Breathing in the dry leaf yields some differences from the Reserve. There’s the predominating aroma of cocoa, of course, but there’s an underlying sourness that reminds me of very dark brown honey wheat bread. There’s something yeasty about the smell.

This aroma is reflected in the brew, as it has a bready chocolate scent.
The first steep definitely yields a less-sweet flavor, more like a gassy, yeasty dark bread with hardly any chocolate. This changes in subsequent steeps to a chocolate honey bread. Perhaps if they made a pain au chocolat out of a dark wheat flour and drizzled a bit of honey on top, that is what this would taste like.

Stephen, my non-tea-drinking husband, took a sip and proclaimed that it tasted like a dark chocolate beer, so we’re pretty close in agreement.

Post and pictures here: http://www.catlaittea.com/2016/08/28/review-verdant-tea-2016-laoshan-and-reserve-laoshan-black/

After a good 15 second rinse, I brewed this bag for about 5 minutes in boiling water. Honestly, I think the recommended 9-12 minutes’ steeping time is overkill; it’s not as though I am going to impart some new exciting flavor in that extra 5 to 8 minutes.

I think it was the rice that made that yeasty, corn chippy scent and flavor. I could kind of see how the smell was related to rice, but it just tended toward the side of dog feet smell. Even my coworker, sitting three feet away from me, commented on how this tea smelled like dog feet. It tasted much like it smelled: heavy on the ricey, yeasty flavor, but add in some wet wood flavor and just a hint of fishbone from the shou.

And yet, despite this disgusting description, I still drank the entire cup. I’m not sure what this says about me and my palate. I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed this tea, but it was a certain sort of experience.

Blog Post: http://www.catlaittea.com/2016/08/26/review-rice-ripened-loose-pu-erh-pyramid-tea-bag/

This was a really nice early morning pick me up for a day at work that I didn’t feel like doing.

Both the dry leaves and the brew smell sweet and floral, with an undercurrent of vegetables.

The brew is thick and creamy, with spinach and floral flavors. It opens up nice and strong, but it’s got quite a bit of astringency in the later steeps. Lasted a good 20 steeps or so too; I lost count after 10.

I stopped into this shop during my trip to Chicago, and it was a great experience! I only ended up buying one tisane, but they threw in a free measuring spoon and this sample.

I’m wondering if it’s a bit stale though, as it brewed up a golden color instead of the highlighter green I am used to with this type of tea.

This was a nice tea—light with no bitterness and only the slightest bit of astringency. A lot of the gyokuro I have tried gets bitter as it cools, but this one didn’t. There was a slight, bright grassy note with just the smallest bit of sweetness coming up the palate after swallowing.

I absolutely adore gyokuros, but this one was so very expensive that I couldn’t imagine actually getting it.

I’m starting to lose track of all these Chinese blacks. I think I will need to do a comparison session one day to see how they relate to each other.

The brew smelled like a chocolate malted sweet potato, and pretty much tasted the same. The main flavor was a malty sweet potato with an aftertaste of cocoa. A very nice tea, but not the best I’ve had.