DirkWolters Send Message

As every year, very nice. Light, fresh, lively and happy tea. Flowery, vegetal, sweet, satisfying astringency.

I like this a lot. The cake offers a nice mix of leaves and buds, and the leaves are pretty large, but impossible to tell of course if this is really from `ancient trees’.

The aroma profile is of a pretty classic, robust dianhong. Plenty of caramelly, sugarcany, smokyish sweet flavor, and full malty body. Creamy texture and little astringency, although the peppery aftertaste gives it some nice `bite’. Very enjoyable and satisfying. I think it is very affordable as well.

Wow, these leaves are huge. Big, unrolled leaves that aren’t even 100% oxidized, lending this tea a really wild and unpolished first impression. Cool. Dry leaves are very aromatic, as is the brew. Full and complex aroma that is flowery and fruity, in the spectrum between roses and sweet potatoes. It is the type of black tea that is on the high, aromatic side, drinking more like for example a Dan Cong oolong than like most other black teas, since it doesn’t really have that full and malty body I associate with most black teas.

Nice puerh. It is soft and honeyish and the brew is nicely thick. Well-rounded with not a lot of ‘younger’ stuff going on. I feel I personally would like it to have more of the ‘aged’ pu-erh aromas for complexity and body. Maybe it needs a few more years? Or perhaps this puerh is just more on the high and flowery side.

Right now I like it best when brewed pretty strong. Then it exhibits a very interesting and challenging bitterness and astringency, which builds up within every sip just almost to the point of becoming too much, only to suddenly develop into a nice sweetness after that. Interestingly, most of the flavor comes of this tea comes after swallowing.

I bought this one in January 2018. It is a beautiful-looking cake. Leaves are large, lots of white hairy tips, looking very neat. Loosely compressed so that the leaves come off nice and whole.

Dry cake smell: nicely woody and tobaccoish. Wet leave smell: nicely sweet, crisp and fresh. Color: nicely yellow, bright.

This tea really needs a couple of brews to really start to loosen its flavors. It isn’t a highly aromatic tea in a smelly kind of way. Most of it happens on the tongue. It is nice though. Each sip leaves a nice astringency, which quickly develops into a very fresh, citrusy kind of sweetness that keeps on lingering. Thoughts of grapefruit cross the mind (no bitterness though). It is also very vegetal though. Sweetly-grassy. Sometimes I noticed some of the woody undertones I often associate with raw puers, but only very faintly. I’m guessing those notes need age to develop (this is the youngest puer I have drank so far). When brewed stronger, the vegetal aromas deepen into something more savory, reminding of licorice. Would like that side of this tea to develop more as it ages (yep, I bought 3 extra on Taobao where they are only 10$ per cake).

Update after 1 year of storage: this tea has certainly not gotten worse. I do think it has changed somewhat. It feels less vegetal, less sweet also, and has more of a herbal, dry honeyish thing going on.

Very nice, balanced hojicha. Nice unity of subtly-roasted and fresh aromas. One hour ago I drank this hojicha: https://steepster.com/teas/lima/82328-roasted-bancha , and this one is just so much better. The roast in this one fits perfectly with the tea itself and there is a nice, pleasantly-astringent mouthfeel that adds to the body of this tea. Hoping to order this one again in next year’s shincha order.

Dark leaves, I would say the roast is more than ‘slight’. Accordingly, the roast is very present in the smell, the smell is on the verge of burnt actually. Some sweetness in the mouth, the roast is dominant though. For me it needs some more body and sweet notes to balance out the roast, it feels a bit watery and in every sip feel like something is kind of lacking in the taste profile, which is a unsatisfying.

The jasmine aroma is nice, but this tea has a funny note to it that I don’t like, a bit like terpentine or paint. A bit strange.