Yu Lan AAA Winter 2014

I asked when my last tea orders were harvested, got a bit of nice info from Jing:

’Dancong can be classified into 3 families: “baked”, “unbaked”, and the Lao Cong. The unbaked ones are the high fragrance teas like xing ren, ba xian, yulan, zhi lan… Those are better in winter because the aromatics are high and the tea taste is low.

The Lao Cong (old trees) and baked (song zhong dancong and milan) are only harvested in spring.’

Always nice to learn a bit more… On to the tea:

Woah! Wide leaves – chunky & nice looking. The aroma is creamy & thick & floral. I did my usual of 90c & let the liquid cool a bit to ~70c. The flavour is of flowers & very subtle thick milk or cream, full in the mouth with no bitterness or the nice nutty green notes you get from some other Dan Cong. Its exactly as described on the website – balanced, clear white flower, deep. Totally pleasant nose. It really is on the subtle side, but very good with it. A bit like the Yinzhen of Dan Cong, if that makes sense? Which is no bad thing at all. A perfect tea to have when you just want something totally pleasant. So pleasant I reckon you could possibly steep this for a long time and it would still hold up.

So I tried & a nice astringent huiguan appeared, still with all the nice flowery yum present before.. a bit more buttery than milky maybe.