Tea Drop

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This is a tasty enough Chinese green, nothing special though.

It has a mellow and light vegetal flavor with nice nutty and grainy notes. Also getting a touch of minerality and plenty of dried apricot, especially at the end of the sip.

Enjoyable, but a bit boring IMO. On to the next!

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Another little swap sample. I don’t know why, but Da Hong Pao just doesn’t stand out to me. I did try one from Mandala once that I remember liking… But otherwise they’re just kind of generically roasty?

This one is the same, very smooth and drinkable but a bit boring. The roast is fairly mellow – mostly autumn leaf and wood with some little hints of nuts or grain. And that’s mostly it really, it’s very one-note to my palate. A bit of sweetness appears at the end of the sip, which is nice.

I don’t know, maybe I just need more experience with roasted oolongs in order to be able to appreciate them more. Or maybe I just prefer hojicha when I want a toasty tea… ¯\(ツ)/¯

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Well, this is odd. Despite being called “Honeydew Green”, this tea has apricot flavoring and only has honeydew pieces, which I seriously doubt contribute anything to the flavor.

Mostly it tastes like a strong and somewhat astringent green tea with a subtle apricot flavor that I would assume was natural if I didn’t know better. It actually reminds me of a Lu An Gua Pian green tea that I had earlier, with the same astringency and somewhat harsh flavor, and obvious apricot notes.

It’s not bad, but the name is really misleading ha ha, and it’s certainly nothing special. I would say it needs more apricot flavoring at a minimum.

I don’t like this at all (I’ve actually never found a mango oolong that I like, and they are two things that just seem like they would go together). There’s no freshness in this and the tea is almost undetectable. It just tastes like perfume. Bad perfume.

Hot tip, self—next time you go to the hairdresser, go for the fruit tea. They can’t burn THOSE leaves.

Mostly reviewing this to note the tea company for further investigation, because my sample at the hair salon was served too hot and oversteeped. Burnt leaves, very astringent. I can still smell that apricot, though—I wanna see how well it can come out when properly brewed!