Gui Fei Oolong

This is SO up my alley. It is downright juicy in how fruity and sweet it tastes. I love sweet honey notes in tea. I also love the floral aspect that doesn’t overpower anything. The second steep is less sweet and more toasted, which is also a note I love.

Methinks I’m going to be drinking Butiki only until the teas I have enough of get rehomed into tins. For the sake of not adding to the madness, everything in a small enough size is staying in the bags, out of the cabinet, and first on my to-enjoy list. Gotta make the Butiki love last somehow! :)

This tea is special and amazing. I’m sooooo glad I tried it before I lost my chance. Anyway, this is such a naturally sweet tea. It has a brightness to it while maintaining a strong taste of honey. The tea is still kind of vegetable, which adds a pleasant roundness to the cup.

I brewed this western style, but I’m going to gung fu brew it sometime this week. I’m so excited to try it that way, as it is truly great even brewed western style.

Anyway, I love this tea.

What a wonderful little tea to start the day! This is another tea, one of the many, many teas in fact, that we acquired from Butiki tea. The dried leaves are dark, tightly rolled balls. This is another one of those teas in which those little darling leaf-hoppers do their business and chew on the leaves. The tea tree releases polyphenols in order to assist in repair. These compounds are responsible for the unique taste of these teas.

There is a strong ‘oolong’ scent from the dried leaves. It reminds me ever so slightly of the wild mountain black. The mouth feel is silky smooth with an ever so subtle astringent finish. The taste is damn good. There are definitely honey notes. That predominates. It’s almost brown sugary. Slight hints of apple and roasty toastiness, and of course very floral. But not in a ‘your grandmothers potpourri’ kind of way.

I like this tea. I’m four infusions in and the flavours has still not abated. I brewed it, 5 sec rinse, 10, 15, 25, 35. The brewed leaves have an almost acrid artificial smell to them which I dislike, but this is a minor contention and only worth noting in passing.

This tea is soo yummy! Even then, I’m sure that I’m not getting the full flavor of it.

I just got my very first yixing vessel, a clay mug (also from Butiki). It’s nothing like I was expecting it to be, but very interesting nonetheless.

Anyways, I’ve done multiple (at least 4) steepings according to directions (1tsp, 4min) and it’s still going strong. The taste hasn’t really developed much, but that might be because of the cup. What I’m getting though is a smooth and sweet oolong. Not green or particularly roasted, but a good medium type brew.

As a grasshopper tea I was expecting much stronger honey notes. Maybe they’ll be stronger when brewing in a normal vessel.

Question though- I’ve decided to dedicate my little cup to oolongs, I drink oolongs the most- would it mess very much with the taste to brew flavored oolongs in it?

Happy (late T_T) New Year, everyone! :D

We had a pretty relaxed New Year’s Day (and NYE, tbf) at home, and as part of it, I brought down my lovely little glass teapot (~200 ml, max) and brewed up some of this wonderful Oolong for my brother and me! He’s really keen to try lots of teas, particularly ‘finer’ teas, and I thought this might be a good one to let him try next.

And, once again, he really enjoyed it (as, of course, did I!). It’s such a marvellous Oolong – it really does have that delicious, apple-y flavour and smell. I got a good five or six infusions out of a fairly generous 2-and-a-bit tsp (and, tbh, I could probably get another tasty one or two out of it).

Plus, we got to drink it out of my lovely new cups from Verdant – they really are rather beautiful.

EDIT: I did indeed get another four good steeps out of it – though the last was a much milder cup, it still carried that lovely red-apple note and a general round, fruity flavour. Lovely!

I’m not sure why I still have a few Butiki teas that I haven’t tried yet, even though I bought them in July. This one is tightly rolled with a surprising amount of stems attached. The color ranges from caramel to dark chocolate, and it pretty much just smells like roasty oolong. I steeped mine for 4 minutes at 185 degrees.

Once the tea is brewed, it still has a fairly strong roasty aroma. It also smells creamy and nutty, with a little bit of fruitiness. This is probably my favorite of the roasted oolongs I’ve tried so far, although I’m not sure the genre is for me. The main flavor is roasty with nutty and sweet undertones. I taste a little bit of fruitiness that reminds me of apples, and there’s a lovely lingering sweet aftertaste, not quite honey but nectar perhaps? Overall, quite tasty. :)

Thanks Stacy for a sample of this one. It is really fun to get these samples, especially when they are not something I would have picked out for myself!

So I may have underleafed this one. I know Stacy usually sends exactly one serving in her little sample baggies, but it just really looked like more than 1 tsp to me so I used half. It took forever to steep it enough to get some good strong flavor going but I finally accomplished that. I will use the other half of my sample in my teeny 4oz gaiwan at some later point. Typically heavily oxidized oolongs are not my thing, but this has some impressive fruity and roasty cocoa noted like a fancy black tea might. Very complex and interesting! So glad I got to try it :)

I’m not working right now so I can afford to have oolong Gungfu sessions in the afternoon, yay!

A Steepster member inspired me to drink this and read my book under a blanket, so that’s what I’m doing! I feel a little guilty though… Cause it’s a beautiful day outside…

How come tea wins over sunshine?

Oh, yeah, that’s right…tea wins over everything!!

So I’m having this beautiful tea. It is medium roasted and I have had it many times, just never logged it.

This one is a leaf hopper bitten tea, so you know it will be sweet! Using 7g in my beautiful Butiki Gaiwan.

The third steep is really the one that starts to give. That’s when the leaves start to unfurl. The difference between the second and the third steep is an explosion of sweetness!

This is all about lightly burnt toast and honey to me. Like really, if I burn my morning toasts a little and melt a bunch of gooey honey on top, this is what I’ll get. I so love that oven roasted quality, and it’s not smokey, not at all. It’s hard to explain, but this tea feels a bit like an alcoholic beverage, it numbs the tongue a little, like pu’erh does sometimes. It’s got nutty and fruity notes as well.

I have so many steeps in front of me… «Near…Far…WhereEeeever you are….My tea will go on, and on….» just sang my inner Celine Dion (oops, the windows are open, sorry neighbour)

Oolong teas are one of my favorite types… this tops them all!!!

I had this tea on my wishlist, and TeaTiff sent it my way in our hepatite swap!
Thanks so much, TeaTiff!!
This tea is everything I thought it would be and more…. it’s fruity, with honey goodness…and I can even taste the almond that’s mentioned in the description. The spun sugar aftertaste is beyond delightful.
I’m only on my second steep and I’m sure I’ll get a few more out of this one….
So, so yummy!!