Fall 2016 Jingmai Natural

i really enjoy William’s teas, but i can’t say i really like this one.
it has no negative issues like bitterness or smoke or harsh aroma.
but the positive effects are near to none also.
the aroma is only slightly there, like when you want a hot shower and you get lukewarm water or you need a strong beam in the shower but only get a third of the pressure.
yes, it’s autumn, and of course it’s not that powerful, but this one combines the lesser autumn power with a lukewarm aroma.
the aroma itself has no interesting tones for me while the ones it has are rather good than bad ones, but they are so powerless.
the price for it is very low, like 10 euro/100g, so the price is ok, but you have to ask yourself the question: would you want a great tea for an appropriate amount or a tea that has near to no power and near to no intense aromas for for less money.
maybe it’s because the bushes are young and it’s autumn..
maybe some people might enjoy it nonetheless, but for me it’s between :/ and :), and that’s just 50 points here. i add 10 points for quality and rather good than bad aroma, but i can’t really give it a full 67 smiley face. sorry.
aroma is like: sheng, mild, slightly sour, slightly autumnal sweet fruity
intensity starts slowly (first steep is watery) but you can get quite a lot of steeps from it.

A quick session for today while scrambling to get my holiday shopping out of the way on a somewhat decent schedule for once. Light and fruity in a citrus way in the standard young Jingmai fashion, the flavor has a sour pineapple tinge in addition that I found interesting. There’s a bit of a honeyed tone that you can pick out if you search for it in the early steeps, but it succumbs to the focal sour citrus flavor quickly.

This is one of their cheaper teas, I believe, and an autumn production. While it is not particularly complex in flavor profile, it is very approachable, possessing a decent vegetal depth to the fruitiness while having no astringency and very little bitterness to it, I’d say it was quite solidly pleasant for the price.

I liked the pineapple notes I got from this (I’ve only had one other tea that I got pineapple off of before) and consider it quite light and pleasant, although this is not difficult to turn distinctly unpleasant if oversteeped. It is surprisingly generous with the resteeps at this price point as well, and I’m curious to see how that pineapple flavor would age, but I prefer something with a little more complexity to my tea, so I’m looking forward to see how the taste progressions change as I drink my way up the ladder of Farmerleaf’s offerings.

This is the first puerh I’ve gotten into from my Farmerleaf order. I was very pleasantly surprised by this. It’s really dirt cheap, coming in at about $0.06/g if you buy a 357g cake. The aroma off the dry leaves, which looked nice and green with some silver strands in there as well, was sweet and floral. After a rinse, I smelled mostly tobacco, and a green floral note, maybe with a bit of honey.

This tea is a light one – maybe the best illustration I’ve seen thus far of the differing characteristics of Autumn vs. Spring puerh. It’s got an airy sweetness to it – with boiling water, it was a bit grassy and vegetal. With 200F water, that flavor was more of a clean corn sweetness (it still vexes me that I can’t list that as a flavor on Steepster). The finish, bleeding into a slightly lasting aftertaste, is a rush of aromatic floral taste. Not sure what kind of floral it is – maybe honeysuckle? There’s also a barely tangible fruity undertone present throughout most of the session – it came and went, and I couldn’t pin it down. Probably the fruitiness which is often part of Jingmai teas. It has a surprising longevity to it, going 15 or 16 steeps. Despite the light and crisp, almost green tea-ish flavors, it does leave a bit of a lightly oiled feel in the mouth, especially in the earlier steeps.

I really need to do something to get my different floral flavors down – anybody have any suggestions? Should I go to a florist and just smell all the flowers, taking notes like a weirdo? Should I chew on them? Incense? Oils? Anybody have any experience with this? I guess it sounds a little crazy. I can tell that different floral flavors are different, but can’t place them due to lack of experience.

Anyways, regarding this tea – It’s a great value for a light daily drinker. After seeing that this is indeed a quality tea, I’m really looking forward to getting into the rest of my Farmerleaf order.