Vietnam Flowery Oolong
Origin: Moc Chau, Son La Province, Vietnam
Elevation: 1000m
Dry Leaves: The leaves looked fairly typical of floral oolongs although there was quite a bit of stems showing which was nice. In my experience the floral oolongs with stems tend to be of a higher quality than the floral oolongs that are just leaves (think Beautiful Taiwan Tea’s DaYuLing). Although the pellets were really small.
Temperature: 194oF
Brewing Time: One Minute (adding one minute each subsequent infusion)
Aroma: Floral
Flavor: Floral, Honey and Raw Sugar Cane
Tasting Notes: This is definitely a filler tea. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but it is a very non-offensive tea that I could easily see this blended in with a Taiwanese High Mountain Oolong. I’ve been hearing for years that Taiwanese farmers mix their oolongs with cheaper teas of equal quality from Vietnam and Thailand, and never really believed it until now.
While this is a very good flowery oolong, I am not sure if I would buy it again even though it is easily worth the $9.60 (as of writing this), but it has a lot of tough competition in this price range. I know Alistair has sourced some High Mountain Oolongs recently and I am curious how this compares to them. I can easily say that this is my favorite of these three regardless while I like more complex teas, this was quite nice. I said before that this is filler tea and I was considering trying to be more diplomatic about it, but I decided against doing so. While the leaves may have been rolled way too pass as a Taiwanese Oolong, it is the perfect tea to blend with more expensive teas without changing the taste. In fact I used my leftover leaves and mixed equal parts with Beautiful Taiwan Teas DaYuLing and a nonpareil DaYuLing that I got from Teavivre and I honestly could not tell the What-Cha/BTT Flowery DaYuLing & What-Cha/Teavivre Nonparel-Flowery-DaYuLing from the unblended DaYuLings.
[More at http://rah-tea.blogspot.com/2014/12/what-cha-discover-vietnam-part-1.html]
