Tie Guan Yin (Superior)

This was the tea that got me back into drinking tea. I stopped drinking coffee back in November, 2015, after running out one week and noticing that my anxiety dropped like a stone without. I’ve been careful about caffeine since. I stopped in Ku Cha on a whim and puttered around before settling on this TGY superior.

I’m very, very new to tasting tea, so most of my experience comes from tasting wine and spirits, forgive me if I misstep here. Dry, the tea is clean smelling, dry-but-not-dusty vegetal, with some overt notes of jasmine and honeysuckle that just sort of peek through without being POW in your face jasmine or anything. Wet, the tea smells much more complexly floral, without a focus on any one specific flower. The vegetal scent is still there, but it’s clean, rather than forest-floor, almost like fresh cut romaine or something. New is the scent of honey, a clean one like Tupelo.

The taste is wonderful. It’s thick without being creamy. Floral and clean without much of what I’d associate with either Jasmine or green tea. This is my first oolong, that I know of, so maybe it’s more typical of that. On the fore, it’s mostly floral, jasmine, lilac, and honeysuckle. In the mid, it settles down into a very clean cut grass and vegetal flavor. The aftertaste is very, very sweet, without being cloying, almost like someone put honey in it.

I brew this by the pot and fairly weak. It’s good strong, no doubt, but I find that it starts to pick up some astringency I’m not as big of a fan of. I can get a few brewings out of it this way, too, though I’ve yet to go beyond three.

Glad to be back in tea land!