1113 Tasting Notes
On to the second one, randomly grabbing something that sounds like Tekken when you’re drunk of something???
Starts out tasting like grass like cotton candy. Smooth texture with a sweet note throughout. No overpowering green enemy of the meat diet or blades which we wear shoes to avoid.
This is unexpected as the leaf is darker than the previous leaf as well as… stem’ish?
Steep two is quite the same actually which is really pleasant. No bitterness coming out or changing notes.
Steep three is when the vegetable notes actually come out which is later than you’d think, even if we are taking about one to three. I would say something like squash laying around grass on a cool spring day while the sun is shining. Sweet and enjoyable.
The leaf ends up becoming larger than I thought it was as it absorbs the H2O. Continues to brew out longer than your typical green which is great. On to steep five with no reason to continue to comment as this is extra credit and all. This is a pretty solid leaf with longevity and my favorite part about a green when brews long, correctly that is, there is no dry mouth as I sip away cup after cup.
No idea what to expect… but here goes South Korean tea day.
This one was first because I was thirsty and green tea needs less time to heat water and bathe the leaf : )
Yellow tint to the liquid and low aroma. The leaf is really small, but whateve.
The first brew is really smooth. Comparing this to my usual Japanese green will point out that this is wet seaweed opposed to how Japanese teas will be dry seaweed with grass notes. This has that slightly buttered vegetable feel to it that I somewhat like, but usually associate with oolongs. Rather light and easy to drink.
The second brew brought out a bit more color as if the leaf opened, normally something you don’t need to worry about with a green tea. The seaweed taste is backgrounded and now the tea has more of an upfront asparagus taste; no longer a grassy light taste but a hot vegetable.
The leaf has expanded a bit more showing off its choppyness in my 100ml kyusu I use for Japanese greens. Looks a bit more tasty this way. The liquid brews out bit darker and takes on a slight mouth pucker with the darker vegetal notes now as the lightness of the tea is gone. A little mouth dryness from the liquid.
The next few steeps were dying out, but when a green tea dies out it tends to leave a sweetness on the tip of the tongue so I drank a bit more of the next few steeps to see if anything changes… creates a dry mouth : p
Drinking this right now as I pack up beginner bags for people and each sip just brings ‘holy shit’ to the front of my thoughts.
The creamiest of all shengs I’ve ever encountered; rather mind blowing how creamy it is. Though the texture alone is enough to make me say this is in the top of all pu’erh I’ve had, there is a floral note at the back of the mouth like an aroma coming from the back of my throat and a slight sweetness at the tip of my tongue.
This is an absolutely wonderful tea which has now caused me to seek out more Hojo products. Maybe the Japanese palate for pu’erh is much different, through it’s all personal preference. As the steeps go on, it gets more of a sweet note coming through that the really young pu’erhs tend to have while bringing forward a more leaf vegetal taste. Beautiful tea, couldn’t have picked a better one to do what I am doing right now.
Ahhhh, I want more.
I decided to do a 10g brew on this. The incredible strong brew for me was perfect for breakfast time. Dark, middle level astringency. This is the type of tea that goes right next to a piece of toast that makes it wonderful as they compliment one another.
Drinking black teas outside of the Yunnan area really points out why I don’t drink the others. Other than Sun Moon Lake, I’m pretty sure that Yunnan is the only area of blacks that I drink. Fun tea to drink for sure that shows kind of where the whole ctc thing comes from… you have to just drink it and then use your imagination.
I ruined this tea with people… https://www.instagram.com/p/BJjAR9fAnWw/
Used 175f without knowing it was suppose to be 195f because that sounds so odd to me. I drink Japanese greens so I’m not use to killing the leaf.
Brewed it on my own at 195f and found a thicker texture and stronger taste. It’s odd that it requires 195f, but if you do it this way it’s more like a thick baozhong oolong than a green tea. Going to open another bag and mess around with it because this group buy flopped which means experiments : )
For an old raw brick, the 40’ish cents per gram is actually a pretty good deal but there are some things to know about this. While this is an easily brewed tea with a great dark color to it with a taste that comes out like a week ripe and then transition to an old raw tea that is more of an outside drinker.
This tea is certainly good, yet I know it can become better. The storage seems to be quite dry and since it is highly compressed, I really think this would be a nice brick to break up and put into a clay jar where humidity would be at a higher level so it could reach the majority of the leaf. The reason I say this is because there a depth to be brought out of this tea that I believe some wet storage could provid.
Hari brought this over today. It’s actually quite cheap for its age so it makes sense about what I thought about it.
The leaf is insanely dark as if it hasn’t really breathed while it has aged. The aroma at first is faint, but once it is brewed you get a strong smell of cooked old stuff. This smell fades a bit, yet the leaf stays black throughout the entire 10ish steeps we had of this.
A tea that can brew out forever, with a lovely dark red hue to it. Loose stored and aged., which is not, however it just doesn’t seem to have done anything but mellow over all this time. All of that powerful ripe’ness is still in there. For the price it would be something nice to buy and store in some more humid conditions for sure.
Lots of backlogs to enter today from written notes on paper. Yesterday I drank a 2013 Shi Ping high roast tgy from Tea Masters. Too lazy to add an actual entry :P
Highly roasted with just a mild dry after mouth feel. Pretty good, but I can’t give it the Tea Master’s greatness achievement because thus far everything has been flawless… but this, it might just need more time for the roast to die down so some sweeter notes can pop out and say hello to the insides of our mouths
:)
Taste testing some cheap sheng I bought because I had over 20 message exchanges with this seller… not the best stuff, but it passed the test for sending out to others. This sheng is quite smoky so it provides the ability to show some how a smoky sheng taste. Interestingly enough, this isn’t bitter and barely has a dry after feel which is quite impressive for such a CHEAP tea. Thought this would be a crock experiment, but… it’s drinkable now and brews much nicer than I thought it would; somewhat similar to some XG stuff.
Drank some oriental beauty from Owl. Can’t read is this is Summus, Summit, or Summis… either way: This stuff had a spice like chai.
Chai OB, that’s OP.
