Upton Tea Imports

The dry leaves smell wonderful! Sort of a plum/berry and green tea. The wet leaves smell of barley.

Steep 1 (5min):
Color: Light yellow/green.
Taste: A bit of honey like sweetness, fruit like back note (sort of apricot and apple), also the toasty barely-like note I like in oolongs (Da Hong Pao), but lighter. Crisp finish, though not dry.

Steep 2 (8min – distracted by work):
Color: Deep yellow/gold
Taste: Very forgiving to oversteeping. The fruit/honey note is now just a background note. Wonderfully toasty though. Very good TGY oolong

Steep 3 (5-6 min): Lighter toasty. Maybe one more steep in the leaves.

Steep 4 (6-7 min): Little bit of the sweetness back because the leaves are about done. Quite good.

Sitting on my desk anyway so I steeped a few more cups.

This tea has an absolutely wonderful aroma in the leaves (dry smells of spiced apple cider, wet of orange zest and vanilla) and in the tea itself. I’ve been experimenting with flavored black teas lately and this one was another pleasant surprise. The cinnamon is the most notable flavor, but it blends with the apple and orange in a way that doesn’t make it at all overpowering. Makes me think of Christmas pies when I drink it.

So the first Tie-Guan-Yin I ever had really impressed me. I ended up adding it to my regular stock of tea. This one is good, but also kind of underwhelming. It’s a very green/light oolong that has a slightly dry finish. It has a toasty note that reminds me a bit of Da Hong Pao, but other than that I don’t have much to say for this one. I will either finish it or share it with someone else that wants to try it.
Ah! So I forgot that this is a second grade TGY. I bought this as part of a tasting experiment so it will be interesting to see how this compares to TGY First-grade, Special grade and premium.

The dry leaves have a sweet green, grass, apple scent.
Wet leaves have a pleasant green oolong scent
Only time for one steeping. :(

Feel like I should have steeped this longer.
Color: Pale green. Very light flavor, a little sweetness to it like honeydew. Bit of a grassy note, but not in a bad way. A good oolong, but nothing to write home about in this steeping. I’ll try again tomorrow with a longer steep.

This is really good! If you want a little more of the black tea flavor steep more towards 4 minutes, if you want the mango flavoring steep more towards 3 – 3:30 minutes.

Forgot to actually rate the tea _
This one is quite good. I’ll be happily drinking this one again. _

Aroma of the wet leaves is a mellow and pleasant mango. I’m sure I’m noting this because the cranberry black tea I had yesterday had an overpowering almost unnatural aroma to the wet leaves.

1st Steeping (3 min): Color – light amber. Aroma – subtle mango. Taste – Smooth blend of black tea and mango with neither overpowering the other. Has some fruity, floral notes going on. Pleasant dry finish. Really like that the taste of the black tea is still readily discerned. I probably should have steeped for an additional 30sec to give the flavor of the black tea a little more bite.

2nd Steeping (3.5min): Really balanced tea. I usually don’t like flavored teas because the added scents and flavors usually drown out the taste of the tea, but this one is a wonderful blend with a dry fruity finish

Ok, I shortened my steeping time just a little bit and man is the is yummy flavored tea. I’m generally not partial to flavored teas, but this one could grow on me. Still not sure I’ll buy it in any large amount, but I won’t hesitate to share a cup if it’s available! :)
The only negative for me is just how powerful the cranberry aroma is in the wet leaves after the first couple of steepings.

Wow, the aroma of the the wet leaves is unreal! Almost over powering when I initially opened the teapot.

First steep: Bit of a tangy note with a dry finish. Has a real fruity taste beyond the obvious cranberry flavor that’s hard to describe. I can detect almonds in the finish. That maybe part of the fruity flavor I’m trying to pin down.

Second steep: Tangy note is gone (perhaps I over steeped a bit on the 1st one) and the fruity note is bright and pronounced with notes of apple and plum. I don’t know that this is one that I’d keep regularly stocked, but it’s really good.

Third steep: That’s REALLY good! I think I should make the first few steepings a bit shorter. Has a nice sweetness to it now. Wonderful fruity flavor with a crisp dry finish and a mellow plum and apple aftertaste.

I’ll have to play around with this tea more. It may actually be better than I gave it credit for.

This was a surprisingly good white tea! Far more body than I ever would have expected in a white tea with pronounce peach flavor. The aroma is a wonderful, gentle floral and fruit combination. So good! This is the first time I’ve ever come across a white tea I want to keep in stock at home.

I’ve only tried 2 or 3 Tie-Guan-Yins and this one is by far my favorite. As long as you don’t oversteep this tea it has no bitterness though it does have a sort or astringent/dry finish that you’d experience with red wine. There is a pronounce woodsy caramel note to this tea, but I usually can’t steep it more than 4 or 5 times as the flavor has faded too much by then. Brewed in a 250cc Hei Liao YiXing teapot.

This is a backlog. I wrote down some notes on an index card the first time I tried it. I just found the card and thought that it would only be fair to include the notes. I steeped it in a Gaiwan. I didn’t write down quantity, temp or time. It was bitter the whole way throughout. There was a celery/cilantro/burnt flavor that I didn’t find desirable in the first steeps. When the flavor was pretty much dead there was some caramel and smoothness to it. Certainly less one dimensional sounding than my other tasting note. At the time I remember it not being complex, and not liking it, which is weird given what I wrote about it. Go figure.

I got some samples from Upton and couldn’t resist a black Japanese tea, I never knew such a thing existed. I’m expecting some unique new flavors but no dice. It was a standard black, nothing special. I love tea, so I enjoyed it like I would just about any tea. It pretty much just had a “black tea” flavor. It would make a pretty good iced tea, too. I guess that would be malty. It’s not incredibly expensive but not a bargain either. For the price, there are other teas that are far more complex and interesting. If you can get it for cheap I would recommend it, but unless the yen crashes I doubt that will happen with any Japanese tea.

I’ll do a full tasting note of this later. Just a few thoughts. I got this as a sample from Upton when I was getting some herbals from them. I’ve never done too much with Darjeeling, was curious and they had a lot of them, so I got a few samples.
There was a definite grape must/wine flavor to it, a medium-high amount of bitterness, medium thickness body. Other flavors in there but I drank it a couple hours ago and didn’t get a work break until now, so I forgot them. I enjoyed it. I just steeped up a small amount. About 3g in a 110ml gaiwan and wasn’t filling it all the way for a lot of the steeps (8, I think) steeps lasting between 5 and 45 seconds, temp 180F.
The tea says FTGFOP1 but I couldn’t find one full leaf in there, so that designation shouldn’t be on there. FTGBOP would have been more appropriate. If it is the last of their stock and all that is left on the bottom is broken leaf that should be accounted for in the description. Maybe this is something that is normal with Darjeeling but I was certainly surprised by it. I only spent a few bucks on the sample, so not that big of a deal financially, but I’d really like to know what the tea is like full leaf. I’m guessing less bitterness, which would let more of the flavor shine through, different body, thinner? thicker?

I’d be curious to know what the more experienced Darjeeling drinkers think about the broken leaves?

Here’s a picture of what the leaves looked like.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BD0306hEX0G/?taken-by=thecheesenerd

I always look forward to the first flush options from Upton. I have a goal, thwarted most years by problems (storms &c.) either with first flush harvest or follow-up harvests to someday have more than one flush from the same estate in the same year, in order to do detailed comparisons of how timing affects flavor. Maybe this is the tea and this is the year!

I brewed this using a large tempered glass measuring cup so that the leaf had lots of room to open up and so that I had a wide-mouthed vessel to fish the remains out when I was done my session. Consequently I did have to use a screen to ensure that only the water, not the leaf, got into my cup.

Nonetheless the results were thick, full, dense and delightful. This tea reminds me a very great deal, to the point I had to keep reminding myself what I’m drinking, of a bai mu dan white tea. Very fuzzy, soft, notes including warm hay as well as floral, green brightness &c.

This is excellent leaf. A “good year” for first flush.

~100ml yixing
~7g

Leaf color: spectrum from brown via green to silver
Dry aroma: nutty, then rich with muscatel
Wet aroma: sweet, sweet muscatel
Steep taste: faintest tropical fruit, flower, not complex ( is that camphor at the back of my throat, in my chest)
Steep texture: light, dry
Quenchless: mouthwatering, then descends to rest & warm a sweet spot in the belly
Chaqi: buzzy, feels like my ears are about to pop

A sad moment. I’m sipping down the last of my mist valley. Also, an embarrassing moment, since I discovered that I haven’t taken the time to write a review for Steepster.

This tea isn’t great, but is a very good, solid Darjeeling-style second flush tea from Nepal. It is resistant to oversteeping, so when I just dump some in a pot and then oversteep, it still comes out well. Classic Darjeeling taste with a bit of stone fruit.

~120ml shi piao yixing
~4g

Smell of the dry tea in the warmed pot is so delicious, delightful. It’s summer. It’s sweet, nutty (odor of baked nutfruit bread wafting out a window?).

Chaqi is strong & bright, like getting hit with a tidal wave of freshwater.
Or a vigorous massage with tingly oil.

Mouthfeel makes the cheeks, then both sides lower, salivate.
Dries up the roof of the mouth, then the front half of the tongue.

The aroma is simultaneously light and rich; gushes up the back and out the nose.

Wet leaves look like freshest red leaf lettuce.

Muji porcelain teapot
2 heaped t
95-100º C;
steeped 3min

Green! ranging from white to ash green and various shades of brown. Plenty of thinly twist-rolled, hair covered leaves.

Amber liquor. Beautiful brilliant clarity. Nutty sweet aroma. Easy to drink, light, spring fills mouth.

Multiple infusions (5m, 6m, etc) until sweet water

Today, I drank the last of this that I had in my stash. I did 2 teaspoons in 500 mL water at 190 for 3:30, which is more tea than I normally use. This is a light oolong with good floral/grassy flavors, and it brews up to a light golden color. I like this one a lot, and will probably get some more at another point in time.