Yunnan Sourcing

Very good tea. Balanced, light and cheap too. No more than three brews.

A good black tea, although I’m not that much into black ones.
I like to brew it strong like coffee. It has a cocoa/chocolate aftertaste. I’ve liked it better with a cooled down water.
5g, zhong 12cl : 45",1’00,2’00,3’00,5’00.

Good oriental beauty with strong spicy taste.
The taste lacks a bit of complexity but for this price it’s a good bargain.
I’ve tried brewing it in a teapot and a zhong :
5g, 12cl, 35",30",1’00, 2’00, 3’00.
I’ve liked it better with a water that has cooled down a little.

A good white tea with a nutty taste. Most of the time brewed in a zhong: 45",1’00,1’30,2’30’,4’00

This is one of the best Jinuoshan TF You Le cakes I’ve had. Probably the second best. It’s rather quickly aged, however not too much, no wet storage smell is there.

Very powerful, fruity, flowery, definitely an easy-drinking and enjoyable tea with good potential for further aging I dare say.

I rate it a little lower than the 2004 Jinuoshan TF You Le early spring 400 cakes as it is not as refined and complex. Still a great drink…

Very solid little shu… I don’t like shu much though.

This is a very young raw pu-erh cake with good potential for aging. This note was done on 12/25/2011 and I echo the comments made by Yunnan Sourcing about the orchid fragrance. It has a well balanced taste which has changed over the steepings done in my yixing teapot, and it does have a penetrating taste/aroma. I bought a sample of this tea from which this pot is derived, and will purchase a cake for medium to long term aging.

I’m still new to preparing and brewing pu-erh, however this tea proved to be very nice right out of the gate. It is a loosely compressed “mini brick” with beautifully visible full leaves displaying abundant silver fuzz. Really nice even to look at. I used about 5g leaves in a 120ml pot in short gong fu bursts with boiling water. Resulting liquor is a pleasant orange hue that puts off only vaguely smokey whiffs amongst a slightly grassy and maybe even floral scent. The first few steepings have slightly heavy undertones and only a smidge of astringency, but the most wonderful lingering aftertaste – on the sides of the tongue a sweet fruitiness that melts into a mouthwatering craving for the next sip. I love that feeling. Going to continue brewing this one and see how it changes, but I wanted to post a note about what a nice tea it is – reasonably priced and sized for tasting, easy to break apart, and easy to brew. Definitely worth checking out!

Wow, this has changed a bit over the last 3 months. Still a bit astringent, it has integrated its flavors nicely and now has a nice floral note to go with its green flavors. It is beginning to develop some depth. Good stuff.

This is a very young raw (sheng) pu-erh which is quite astringent now (12/2011). It has a strong and vibrant flavor, green with a stony, earthy quality, and with a savory note that bodes well for aging in my view. I’m going to bury this cake deep in my stack and come back to it in four or five years. Very good potential.

If you enjoy green tea, then this is a very good “sheng” or “raw” pu-erh tea to introduce you to the complexity to be found in this type of tea. It is wonderfully aromatic, astringent, slightly bitter, and very complex. The flavors in the initial steepings are a combination of freshly turned soil, fresh hay, with light camphorous aspects and only a hint of floral notes in the background.

After 3 short steepings of approximately 30 to 45 seconds each, the next few take on aspects with more sweetness and hints of dried fruit. What a nice journey! :)

I ordered a 25 gram sample through Yunnan Sourcing’s new US website (http://www.yunnansourcing.us), along with two other organic sheng pu-erhs so I will be sharing further notes when I try this tea head to head with the others over the next week.

Just an example of good menghai shu and it’s my favorite YS ripe pu.
Main notes: chocolate, walnut, little bit of spice and bitterness (in a good way!). Very similar to the best Dayi offers but much cheaper.
Recommended.
Oct 2011

Very strong but unpleasant to me. Too young to “drink it now”.
In a few words it’s just a lot of smoke.
Aug 2011

I’m a big fan of White Peony overall but this tea didn’t impress me. The brew feels watered down, very light on flavor. There are definitely some fresh grassy notes present with a little bit of smokiness mixed in. That’s pretty much it… Drinkable, but wouldn’t repurchase.

The taste of this tea is pleasant, I could hardly say anything else considering the fact that I like drinking Nannuo teas very much. I enjoy their combination of flavour, aroma and aftertaste.

The leaf is perfectly separable with bear hands, you don’t need a knife or a pick, it goes apart itself as if it hasn’t even been pressed. It smells intensely and the leaf seems to be of high quality: long, clean and dark green (not too dark though). When you see the sample, you must admit it definitely is a very nice cake that smells after blossoming flowers.

The smell however, again as with 2010 YiWu Zheng Shan, reminds me of fresh green tea which does not belong to my most preferable characteristics. Despite the fact that I nearly overstuffed my teapot with the leaves and therefore expected a higher level of kuwei in first few infusions, I was surprised by its unchangeable and rather weaker character. Since there were no bitter highs, there were no sweet lows either and the huigan was nice but absolutely in tune with the flavour of the tea. It just tasted the same from the very beginning to its very end.

I identified a strange presence of astringency in the first infusion and was expecting its higher intensity later, it however turned out to be that special kind of “numbness” people often describe when drinking ancient tree cakes. In this particular tea this tongue-paralyzing effect as if you were chewing mint leaves is quite high. It therefore as if suppressed the rest of other taste traits and it was quite hard to feel anything else. The tea got suddenly weaker around the tenth infusion and with the intention to squeeze the leaves up a little bit I was getting very similar results for the rest of the session.

To read the whole review, see my blog:
http://teadropping.blogspot.com/2011/10/2010-yunnan-sourcing-nan-nuo-ya-kou.html

If I’d tasted this particular tea a few months ago, I would’ve probably said: what a lovely green tea! It smells wonderful, like a fresh meadow full of blossoming trees, the colour of the tea broth is sparkling yellow with a fresh green undertone. It just smells, looks and even tastes like very good fresh green tea.

Well, these are the qualities I am not usually looking for when buying a sheng sample. Why do I buy samples from 2010 then? Good question. Having tried many samples from previous year I’ve found out that the year is not always the most important deciding factor when considering the potential taste. Even some very young sheng cakes can really surprise you. I would definitely say it about 2010 YS Yiwu Purple cake for example. Yiwu Zheng Shan is, however, not the case.

The smell of dry leaves is fruity, but not very intense and rather citric than sweet. The smell of wet leaves is not sweet either, it even offers a trace of smoky tone but very very tiny. The taste is best described as above mentioned fresh green tea, not bitter though, just slightly astringent. I must admit I did not even find the typical yiwu flavour or aroma in the infusions , despite trying hard to find it..

What I like about this tea is the huigan which comes back powerful, refreshing the mouth and tongue with a sweet mouth-watering effect and stays quite long to give this tea higher credit just in time. It might be simply one of those cakes which is good to be put aside to your tiny tea storeroom (if you happen to have one). Then you can wait a year or two and meanwhile enjoy some other well-ripen treasures.

If you want to read more about this tea session, see my blog entry:
http://teadropping.blogspot.com/2011/10/2010-yunnan-sourcing-yi-wu-zheng-shan.html

http://jakubtomek.blogspot.com/2011/09/2009-ys-ban-zhang-chung-qing.html

http://jakubtomek.blogspot.com/2011/09/2009-ys-bu-lang-shan-yun.html

It’s an interesting tea. I believe that shu lovers will like it mostly. I’m not one of them, therefore this tea is interesting rather than perfect for me.

This is my favorite tea. It’s sweet and clear with hints of cinnamon.

It has been 9 years since I first reviewed this tea. It has gotten even better, richer, more mellow, with integrated flavors , and it is delicious. Fruity and deep, this is a lovely cuppa.