Yunnan Sourcing

Also from Nicole (and I suspect originally from boychik). I figured since I tried the “regular” version of this, I might as well try the imperial grade next so I could compare! These leaves look like miniature versions of the others, but they have less golden color, which I found weird. The dry scent is very mild as well, maybe with a touch more honey? I used the same brewing parameters.

I get the same dark bread and molasses aroma, but with maybe a touch more earthiness and a more toasted scent. The taste is very roasty, which is amazing! Like a slice of dark wheat toast with a little bit of roasted unsweetened nut butter along with the molasses. And I love that so much about this tea! I also get a hint of raisiny goodness. The earth note is still there, but it seems more mellow and refined, I couldn’t compare it to smoke anymore. And I think I catch a hint of floral in the aftertaste? Couldn’t tell you what kind of flower it is, though.

There was a little bitterness in this brew, especially when taking multiple sips in quick succession. So next time I make this I might try a lower water temperature and/or a 2m30s steep. Very good though!

Another one from Sil! The leaves look as I would expect for a jin jun mei – they’re thin and somewhat wiry but still soft looking, and there’s a nice tiger stripey mix of black and gold. Dry scent is somewhat sweet but it also has a touch of savory to it.

The steeped tea smells quite roasted with a bit of clear sweetness. Wow, this is an interesting one! It does have that roasted rye bread quality that I tend to associate with Fujian teas, and it does have quite a bit of clear sweetness to it. It’s also quite malty and thick and overall very satisfying. There’s a bit of dark chocolate flavor here as well, which is easier for me to find because of the sweet quality. Quite good!

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Yum! It’s been long time since I first tried this one, and I’m not sure where my palate was then, but this is definitely better than an 85 now. I made this a bit strong, with a teaspoon and a half of tea, and it’s quite lovely this way. Nice and malty, there’s a teensy bit of smoke in the background but I actually love the effect it has. Very nicely balanced dark and rich tea! :)

This sample came from Nicole. :) I thought I would try this one since I haven’t tried many Fujian varieties and I would like more experience with them and knowing their “typical” flavors. This one’s leaves remind me of a smaller version of a tippy Yunnan. They’re kind of randomly twisty, half golden and half dark. Their smell is quite mild; I can detect malt and cocoa notes with some honey sweetness. I let it steep for 3 minutes, seems pretty standard for western style.

The aroma is all dark things: brown bread, molasses, raisins, and bitter cocoa. And the taste is quite similar. I definitely get some toasted dark wheat bread with molasses over the top. There’s also a little earthiness that could border on a mild smokiness. The overall texture is very thick and it coats the mouth, further forwarding the molasses note. Overall, a very rich and tasty tea. I see definite similarities to Yunnan with this one, which I didn’t experience as much with Whispering Pines’s Fujian Black. It’s fun to compare! :)

This is a great value tea for ripe pu erh lovers. Nothing terribly special, but a good tea for daily drinking. It has a sweet slightly nutty, mildly earthy flavor that is pleasing. You will not be blown away by this tea but for $15 (as of posting) for a 357g cake, I think you’ll be quite pleased.

This bi luo chun is tightly rolled with about 50% of the visible leaf being silver green downy buds and the other visible portions being a spruce grey green. Once exhausted and unrolled the leaves, the buds and the attached stem are visible and seem to be of good quality.

This is a nice tea with the brightness and sweetness of an early spring tea combined with the nuttiness and density you often get in this tea type.

I steeped 1 TSP of leaf in a 150 ml Gaiwan and using my regular progression of 45 s + 15… I made 6 steeps of this tea.

This tea like the Yunnan white bi luo chun I had ( also from boychik, thanks by the way!), had nice spicy gardenia like floral notes, which in this case were tempered by a lemony note. It also had deepening over time chestnut and plum notes, snap pea, spinach, alfalfa, cream and orange rind. It was slightly astringent while brewed in the low to mid 80’s but had a nice thick and creamy density.

Altogether a really nice tea and a good change from the lighter and very sweet greens I tend to drink most often!

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Another lovely fuzzy tea from Nicole. I did the 1/2/4m method tonight, and all three steeps basically tasted the same to me, which is interesting. They all had that nice cucumber/honeydew in the beginning of every sip, and then turned into lovely light bread and pastry notes. There’s definitely a very light floral at the end somewhere, maybe a mild lilac? Overall, this is definitely a unique tea. I would absolutely consider stocking this just because it’s nice and light and refreshing. Lovely for afternoon or early evening. Thanks Nicole! :P

My first tea from Yunnan Sourcing! Thanks go to Nicole for sending me samples of several of their teas. I chose this one to try first because the leaves are so beautiful, like soft golden pine needles. They’re fuzzy and completely gold in color. The smell is all honey, with just a little malt and sweet fruit. I did a 3 minute steep.

The aroma is full of honey as well, with that same malt and a sweet fruitiness that I would describe as golden raisin. But interestingly, the first thing I taste when sipping this is fresh, bright cucumber. Cucumber? In a black tea? But there it is. Alongside malt and a light honeyed fruitiness. I just kept sipping to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and then I asked my boyfriend who agreed that he tasted cucumber. Success! As I let it cool further, the cucumber transformed slightly into honeydew melon, similar but sweeter. The aftertaste is surprisingly floral with a touch of stonefruit.

This is definitely a different flavor profile than any other Yunnan teas I’ve tried so far, and I enjoyed it. Honeydew is one of my favorite flavors and even though it’s odd for a black tea, I thought it worked really well to lighten this tea and add freshness. Definitely recommended!

When I place an order from YS, I’ve sort of fallen into the habit of picking out a few puerh to sample. There is a sidebar on the right hand side of their page that lists their new featured products, and this was on that list awhile back, so I got a sample.

I started drinking it yesterday, ran through several steepings & then today after breakfast I gave it a rinse to refresh it & have been drinking it ever since. The dry aroma has that well aged hayloft aroma, but also the promise of a meadow of sweet clover. It really smells good! It’s a very ‘clean’ tasting tea, with a decent energy to it, & although I enjoyed it, it sort of seems a little generic to me.
(Don’t shoot me, I know nothing, Jon Snow!)
Maybe it’s just that the greenness is aged out of it, so although it has a hint of citrus & doesn’t taste bad in any way (obviously, since I have been drinking it on an off for about 24 hours now), there is also nothing that stands out about it, for me. I didn’t find any changes in the flavor profile, for instance.

Of course, what do I know? :)

Bad Steepster, just ate my note :(((
Ok, this tea is a free sample with the purchase – thank you Scott
5g 100 ml 212F
Rinse/pause/10/10/15/15/15/20/20sec etc
This tea is very rich. Dark burgundy color and very thick, almost viscous.
Woody and sweet but not overly. Some plum and cherries detected. Very strong sweet aftertaste
I had a very nice gongfu session and will continue tomorrow .

This came to me from Terri Harplady.

Well ain’t that a beauty. Long downy bright golden strands. Pure buds indeed.

The taste did surprise me a little. I was expecting a candy sweet cup, but it’s got a little more character than that.

First, it’s provides a very interesting texture. It feels thick and powdery in the mouth.

I’m a little perplexed by it. It’s brisk and bright, the way fresh green bell peppers are. It’s also a bit earthy and woodsy. I also get plums and flowers. It’s not overly malty and I get no cocoa in this at all.

I can’t say this is my favourite type of black, but I like that it surprised me and gave me a good morning cup.

Thank you Terri for helping me narrowing down my favourite Yunnan Sourcing teas. I don’t think I would order this one, but I’m so happy I got try it but also see it cause it’s so beautiful.

I don’t know what has got into me lately. Tried to be a good girl and drink my peaceful and contemplative premium 2014 longjing. After all, it is delicious and so pure. Must be the alcoholic side of the family coming out, because this longjing is like lite beer and I just wanted a damn drink. Mind you, I don’t drink alcohol, I drink tea. It is this puerh collection of mine that has me hanging over the bar with my tongue hanging out. Ruining me for anything else. So bad that I more or less dissed a super fine gyokuro yesterday.

Somebody give me a drink. Right. Found this in my pile of samples from Scott. 8 grams into the Yixing with 90 ml of water, not messing or wussing around. First rinse cloudy, ditto second rinse. The third I drank, some yellow-white powdery sediment at the bottom which clouds when disturbed. By the fifth steep I didn’t care. Tongue hanging out.

Got the nectar and smoke, this is surprisingly cooling on the tongue, not just the throat. Green tea taste underneath, slight bitter but not much, just enough to get the saliva going. Dug around in the pot and the Baggie to find the source of the sediment. Seems like a few white tippies got their hairs a little crushed in the bag, is all. White tips and orange leaves mixed in.

I like it. I feel good. I could buy a tong. I really shouldn’t. Not when tea drunk. I feel so much better though. I can actually think about eating right about now, all salivated up.

Nice oak aroma with very nice young muscadine contrasting astringency and sweetness. There seems to be plenty of immediate numbing to the back of the tounge and warmness to the lower jaw and upper chest. This one has good strength and and the liquor is full in the mouth.

I am drinking the Autumn 2013 harvest of this tea, which I believe came to me courtesy of boychik :) :) :)

I slightly underleafed this but I can tell it is a winner. Nice and sweet and malty with cocoa notes. Heck yeah! Next time I will use a lot more leaf. Big leafed teas are hard to measure and I need to get in the habit of weighing them.

So, I used this beautiful tea in my tea photo project but I’ve never written a note on it? WTF? https://www.etsy.com/listing/192822968/beautiful-tea-poster-photography-collage

This tea came to me from boychik. THANKS! I love exploring these gorgeous yunnans. This one is not as sugary sweet as I expected based on its appearance. There are haylike flavors that remind me of a white tea, with malty and mushroomy notes asserting that this is indeed a black. It is also pretty mellow like a silver needle white. Thick and creamy too. Really interesting beast this one. And of course the dry leaf is just gorgeous.

I bought a sample of this ages ago and just discovered it again in the big box of samples as I was looking for a sheng to drink. It immediately told me that I should open the sample bag and set to. When I say a sample, I mean a 100g bag. It is a very generous sample bag. The size of the sample is massively impressive. I had wanted to buy a whole basket, because, I mean, basket of tea. Who wouldn’t? Anyway, I did not because of the additional cost and what if I did not like it? I guess I should have bought the basket then. I like this tea.

I started with a rinse and a 25 second steep. Then I added 10 seconds for each subsequent steep. This seemed to work well and I am now half a dozen steeps into the tea with it only beginning to lose its potency now. It produces a thick dark brew that has woody, cedar and leather notes to it. It’s mellow and sweet, and you can tell that it is produced in similar fashion to shou puerh. The liquor is an almost black dark brown. There is a residual sweetness and a slight mintiness that cools the breath as the aftertaste emerges. Yes, this tea and I are getting along quite well together.

This tea reminds me a little of pain au chocolate, or at least a pâte sucrée dusted with hot chocolate powder. It has really has good notes of chocolate and honeyed butter pastry for at least the first two steeps, which it manages to present despite being rather dry on the tongue.

The tea is comprised of flat, folded downy copper gold buds.

I got 4 good steeps out of this, but I think this may be a tea I might prefer western style brewing for as the last two steeps had increasing floral and artichoke notes instead of butter croissant.

The first 2 steeps, at 1 & 2 minutes, had fragrance notes of honey, cocoa, butter, cinnamon, ovaltine, and developing citrus notes, with faint malt.

The flavour contained these notes, as well as oatmeal, chocolate orchid, plum, and cream. As it cools the pastry and malt tones become more apparent.

The last two steeps (3 & 4 min) had increasing floral notes, as well as artichoke mixed with dark honey all mixed in with the fading previously discovered notes.

All together the pastry notes were really delicious in this tea and I would like to try it western style. Thanks boychik for this lovely sample!

This is my last black Yunnan from boychik’s generosity. :)

This smells fruity and dark. Initial steep at 1:30 was fruity and golden tasting with a bit of sharpness. At 3 min it was sharper and the scent reminds me sooo much of Taiwanese Wild Mountain Black from Butiki. The flavor is raisiny like so many have mentioned with TWMB but this is not quite as sweet and the sharpness on the tongue is more noticeable.

It’s an excellent tea. Not sure I’d keep it over TWMB but that may be sentimentality speaking as that was the tea that really supercharged my interest in all of these malty, bready, deep blacks, even though it is not a Yunnan. :)

Om nom nom. This is buttery, thick and yummy. Everything I want in a Yunnan. The dry leaves didn’t hold a hint of what was to come. It wasn’t until I caught a whiff as I carried my cup back to my desk today that I got really interested. :) This one certainly goes on the wishlist for a future order! Thanks, boychik!

I drank this tea this morning, but then was pretty swamped at work and didn’t get to write about it until just now. Lots of coworkers on vacation right now, we don’t actually have more work to do, just less artists!

Anyway, thanks so much boychik for the sample. This was DELICIOUS though I do not remember details. Very very nice though!

Generous sample from Terri HarpLady – thank you so much
I love Yunnan Sourcing blacks and this one is no exception.
Gongfu method
5g 130 ml gaiwan 205F
Rinse/15/20/30/45 sec etc
Leaves like black needles with gold tips. I suggest to use scale not to underleaf it
Golden amber brew, dark chocolate, honey, malt. So rich and satisfying . It will keep me busy for numerous steeps.
Thank you so much Terri, it’s awesome tea

Enjoying a cup of this sweet & creamy tea, rich with pastry & honey tastes.

Is June already over? Really? Geez…
It’s time to update my tea list & straighten out my cupboard…tonight!
I feel like I haven’t drank enough tea this month! I’ve barely nicked my cupboard.
Oh well…whatever…
I started the day with this lovely tea. I gave it the 1min/2/5min treatment, & it was very tasty, but I prefer going with the shorter steeps.
Still, it’s like toast & honey in a cup, & it was great to walk around my garden with cup of tea, picking & eating a handful of blackberries & some red raspberries, bringing in a shallot & some asparagus to enjoy for breakfast. A wonderful start to my day!

This is a mysterious looking little wiry black tea. Quite magical when steeped! Rich and satisfying and complex enough to keep my interest. Chocolatey, malty, and fruity sweet!

Great stuff. I’m going to hoard the rest of the sample boychik sent me. Thanks!!

Edited to state that I’m REALLY loving the lingering aftertaste of this tea….mmmmm!