This tea is from winter 2023/2024. When I bought it in the middle of January, a nice Baozhong sounded wonderful. This tea is lightly roasted, but according to the vendor, it’s not noticeable in the taste. I steeped 6 g of leaf in a 120 ml porcelain pot using 195F water for 15, 20, 25, 30, 30, 35, 40, 50, 60, 90, 120, and 240 seconds, plus some long, uncounted steeps. I also used the same parameters with my 150 ml Zhuni-Hongni pot, though the steep times may have been a bit longer because the pot has a slower pour.
The dry aroma is of lilac, gardenia, orchid, and zucchini. The first steep has notes of lilac, gardenia, honeysuckle, orchid, jasmine, butter, zucchini, minerals, and grass. The heady florals are lovely! The next steep adds herbs and ripe apricot to the floral bouquet. Steeps three to six feature apricot, sap, grass, coriander, and heady florals over a mineral, herbaceous backbone. I get a little nuttiness and a touch of astringency, and the lilac and gardenia are particularly prominent in some sessions. Subsequent rounds are still quite floral, but the vegetal, herbaceous, buttery character gets stronger. The final steeps are herbaceous, mineral, nutty, and vegetal, and I can sort of suspect that the tea has been roasted, though probably only because I was told about it.
Steeping in clay doesn’t seem to affect the tea too much, though I remember detecting more minerality and less of a floral aroma.
This tea is definitely for people like me who love drinking flowers. If I’d stopped at steep six or so, I would have given this Baozhong a 94. However, the lovely florals get overwhelmed in subsequent steeps and the tea becomes quite grassy and vegetal. This is still a lush Baozhong with lots of complexity.
Flavors: Apricot, Butter, Coriander, Floral, Gardenias, Grass, Herbaceous, Honeysuckle, Jasmine, Lilac, Mineral, Nutty, Orchid, Perfume, Sap, Sweet, Vegetal, Zucchini
