New Tasting Notes

This tea is now sold out unfortunately, but if it comes back in stock, I would highly recommend it. With the inflated prices of Oriental Beauty in recent years, it is hard to come around such a great example at this price.

The tea has a lot of depth and complexity and is more robust than some of the Taiwanese high grades. The dry leaf aroma is super sweet with notes of flowers, nectar, beeswax, and maple syrup. Wet leaves then smell very perfumy. There are notes of petrichor, soap, rose, and forest floor.

The taste is generally very sweet. Floral and woody notes dominate, with fruity ones in close succession. There is, however, also a sort of mineral, savoury undercurrent, as well as mild bitterness, which helps to keep it a thoroughly engaging session. Some specific flavours I noticed include peach, charcoal, and sugarcane. The aftertaste is very long, a bit drying and refreshing.

The tea has a medium body and a pretty soft mouthfeel, it is not super thick, but very pleasant to drink.

This tea is from summer 2023. It’s the first hongcha I’ve seen from Da Yu Ling, so of course, I jumped at the chance to try it. I steeped 6 g of leaf in 120 ml of 195F water for 25, 20, 25, 30, 30, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120, and 240 seconds, plus some long, uncounted steeps.

The dry aroma is of brown sugar, honey, smoke, plum, and spices. The first steep has notes of brown sugar, honey, grain, wood, and vague plumminess. It kind of reminds me of a Bai Hao without the muscatel. I get something like oakwood and smoke in steep two, along with the honey, grain, spice, and brown sugar. Steeps three and four are very sweet, with lots of honey and brown sugar with woody undertones. I still get some fruitiness, though it’s hard to identify specific fruits. The next few steeps are very similar, with honey, brown sugar, nectar, pine, malt, and wood. The final steeps fade elegantly into fainter brown sugar, honey, and wood, with none of the bitterness or tannins typical of the last few steeps of a black tea.

This tea is incredibly sweet and well balanced without having many identifiable flavours. The steeps didn’t change too much throughout the session, and it was a pleasure to drink for at least sixteen infusions. I tend to enjoy fruitier hongcha, but this is a personal preference and the tea is very nice. Is it as amazing as one would expect from Da Yu Ling? I found it very similar to the Lishan Black, so I would have to say no.

I can’t believe I had this matcha in my cabinet for a year and it’s my first time trying it. Probably have too much matcha! Delicious as an iced matcha latte with chai sugar and oat milk. The oat milk really brings out the flavor. 3 leaf definitely has the best flavored matcha’s. I will definitely keep this in my cabinet. Now I have a lot of matcha’s from Sipology to try.

Quite a lovely tea! Very “zen”-like. Something you could imagine yourself sipping if you were at a spa.
On all accounts, it really does live up to its name. It truly is calming and I can see how this could be used to relieve your stress. I’m sipping it on an already lazy Sunday afternoon but it would make a great cup to have after a long day at work as well.
Very herbal but what I predominantly taste is chamomile, all the lemons (balm/myrtle/grass) and spearmint. Everything else is blended together to give you that “herbal” impression.
I enjoy it and will be choosing this one quite often.

I bought a cake of this about 3 years ago, and it has improved since then! I love the mild briskness, and the maltiness on the tongue. Slightly floral scent, too. The cake was easy to pry apart, though the leaves were fragile and prone to shattering. Still for sale at YS, though at $30/250g it’s perhaps not the value previously reported — though it has improved, so perhaps it is actually still a value? It is surely potent. I brewed (western) 5g in 8 oz boiling spring water for a mere 15 sec each for three infusions, and 30 sec for the 4th, and the liquor has deepened from golden amber at start to golden brown on the 4th, with no drop in flavor or aroma yet. If anything, the aroma of honey has intensified, and the malty flavor is persisting. This is surprisingly good tea! I’ll rate it at 83 and have hopes that more aging will provide continued pleasure! Nice aftertaste, too!

Day 4 of the Inoki Bathhouse advent calendar. Love Japanese greens, so this was right up my alley. Off the bat, I really liked the color of the steeped leaves – a slightly less green version of how cooked spinach looks. As for the flavor, I was expecting something hojicha-esque but this wasn’t really. It was more like a mix between sencha and a light hojicha. Vegetal with a bit of nuttiness. This got finished off quickly!

Maybe my expectations for this Mini were too high, maybe I was preparing it wrong…

This is fine tea, and I was steeping it with several 30 seconds steeps (including rinse), and many longer ones. The dragon ball never fell apart; but keeps releasing nice and slightly astringent flavours typical somehow for sheng. And here comes the twist; yes, it’s definitely astringent and there are unripe stone fruit notes; I would describe them as unripe apricots… but there is, in my opinion, slight smokiness (or it’s roastiness — ?). That switches the flavour a little into oolong territory. Later steeps were definitely more oolong like.

I used whole litre in my thermos and honestly, I have to say, this is unique tea but somehow I feel it should be even a bit better. Or it’s again Yancha like and it seems I am not so big fan of those.

I would like to hear other tea enthusiasts thoughts. But this tea doesn’t seems to be for me.
That’s me problem, not tea problem.

I’m not a huge white tea fan, and white tea is the main flavor here. Still, I don’t dislike it since it’s quite high quality. I taste some strawberry along with the base, but I know I’d prefer this as a green tea. It’s a little straightforward for me, but I suppose I do notice some marshmallowy flavor that’s nice.

Got a few cakes of this 2022 material a couple yr ago and found it to be underwhelming at first. Now it’s aged 2 more years (70°F, 62% RH) and I am enjoying it! Serial infusions of 5g in 8oz boiling spring water for 30s, 45s, 60s, 2-1/2 min and 5 min, using a stainless infusion basket. The light green leaves are large, fuzzy, and the cake pulled apart easily. The first steeping was very mild and smooth, pale yellow, sweet but watery, revealing olive green leaves. Third steeping was more flavorful and coated the mouth nicely, with the floral and grassy notes promised by the YS description. Last steeping was after the leaves had sat out overnight, and todays brew was wonderfully potent, golden yellow in color, with now a little bitterness — and sweetness becoming more pronounced as the tea cooled. Yes, I do feel a little guilty for drinking the threatened C. taliensis species, but hope it will stimulate increased cultivation of the plant. I look forward to finding how this tea continues to develop with more ageing. YS is now selling a 2024 harvest, so I can recommend it for tea explorers! I’ll give my 2022 cakes a rating of 80, but note that I have very limited experience with white teas.

Loved this one, perfect blend of oolong, black tea, and marigold petals (can’t taste the former). Steeped five with one cube of sugar, delightful.

So, I am WAY out of order with these countdowns, but does it really matter? I’m behind, you guys all know that.

Good news: my legs are pretty much healed up (my cellulitis!) The skin is really delicate still, though – but at least I don’t have to go to the wound care clinic any more. Going twice a week every week was a bit trying on the soul. I still get bouts of pain with it, I’m still not able to stand very long on my legs, but, they’re definitely way better than they were a couple of months ago.

Anyway – this tea! I love this tea. I don’t work with currants very often, mostly because availability of the fruit is not a consistent thing. But I do enjoy the few times that I have worked with currants – including this! It’s tart, but not too tart. It’s sweet, but not too sweet. There is a lovely creamy tone to the tea. It’s smooth & delicious. Something I could easily drink all day long.

I just updated the inventory for this particular tea, so it will no longer appear as sold out – until – well – it sells out again. :) Grab some while it’s here!

Edited to add: this resteeps well! The second steep is even better than the first infusion!

Ashmanra’s sipdown challenge – February 2025 Tea #7 -A breakfast tea

Definitely a breakfast tea and an actual sipdown!  It was a good one. Brisk for breakfast, sweet and flavorful.
2025 sipdowns: 11
2025 unique sipdowns:10

First steeps of this little cracker are the best. Honey coated dried fruit. Really rich, complex flavor. Slightly floral. Subsequent steeps have more of a hay/dried twig quality.

Given as a sample in a recent Verdant order and I can’t remember anything about it, but I remember liking it.

The coconut is certainly the strongest flavor here. I like this best cold sweetened with almond milk. The rooibos is a great base for the coconut. Coconut isn’t one of my favorite flavors, so I’m not sure why I bought this blend, but I’ll enjoy my 2 oz!

Sipdown 11 – 2025

Very easy to drink so went through this fast. Not something I necessarily need to purchase again, but perfectly decent.

Iced!

Doubled up on the stick packs once again to be able to make a very large tumbler worth of this. I’m getting quite close once again to finishing it off, and now I have to decide whether I want to repurchase for a third time. The tangy, deep red flavour of the pomegranate and punch of ACV is so satisfying and I feel like I always am in a better mood after finishing a cup of this off. Plus, I do really like having it as a probiotic source.

Just… so expensive.

I got an order from Volition earlier this week with Qing Snake (their lunar new year tea) and their third gin barrel aged white, and this was included as a small sample with the order! I’m not sure when I’ll be ordering from them again because, even though I adore their teas, the shipping amount to Canada is about as expensive as the teas themselves and with the impending tariff situation I feel like it might get worse…

So, all that said, it was nice to get a little bit of a top of for my tin of this tea, which I already owned from buying the whole Trapped In Amber series last year. I made a mug Western-style for my commute home from work yesterday. I have to say that, while this probably is a tea better brewed gongfu, there was something deeply satisfying about sipping on the smooth vanilla, maple, and oak-y flavours of this brew while trudging through feet worth of snow on the streets. A cup of something hot with a little bit of whisky is in a lot of ways exactly what you want to come home to after such an extreme Canadian cold, but having that comfort during the commute? Yeah, very nice for the soul.

If anyone remember the older ceramic latte mugs from DT (like, the 30-ish ounce ones), I have one of those in my office at the tea lab and I’ve been using it quite a lot lately to make a big amount of one tea at a time when I know I won’t have a chance to get up and make another mug for a while…

I ended up doing that with this one earlier in the week, but primarily because I wanted to pick out a tea I’d like to finish off sooner rather than later. This is a fine blend overall with a thicker kind of cream note and a bit of sweet almond alongside (primarily) cardamom. Maybe a few other spices, too. However, it’s probably one of the more underwhelming blends I have from Magic Hour and something about the mouthfeel kind of bugs me in a way I struggle to describe.

It made for a fine tasting cup, but I was mostly just glad to have finished a large chunk of the bag off. Not quite a sipdown – but soon, I think!

Sipdown (2791)!

For the most part I’ve finished off these samples from the Plum Deluxe advent, but I have a small amount of straggler samples that I want to focus on finishing off. I vaguely remember being somewhat unimpressed by this tea when I first tried it, but I thought this mug was pretty solid! Not mind blowing, but smooth with a gentle roast and minerality from the oolong that suited the sweeter marzipan-like nuttiness of the almond and the sort of creamy undertones and finish. At times it gave cherry, as almond is want to do, and I didn’t mind that at all.