2012 Miles' Birthday Blend Spring Raw

This wonderful sample came to me from Stephanie.

Having lots of new sheng since May i tend to overleaf them.
I wasnt thinking and put whole 7g of the sample in my tiny 75ml shibo.
Its a first time i recognized immediately my mistake.

This tea is very powerful. It hit me from the very first steep. I was tea drunk right away. Looked up on their website they recommend 6g/100ml.
Transferred to my 100ml yixing. Much better.

This tea is incredible. it is very thick, very sweet and smooth . Starts from yellow but on a 2nd steep it becomes pretty orange. And bitterness comes in. Not slight, pretty pronounced along with some astringency. Followed up with sweet aftertaste, but not like honey sweet, more floral syrupy.

I continued the next morning ,its pretty long lasting. Bitterness faded away. It was just smooth and pleasant. then i decided to increase the time to almost a minute and it was quite punchy and bitter again.

Thank you Stephanie for sharing this incredible tea with me. it was a great experience.

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I ordered 30 grams of this tea along with another Gua Feng Zhai blend a couple of weeks back. Upon arrival, I was rather eager to get this one into my Gaiwan. As usual, I go with about 6 grams to 100 mL of water. The wet leaves have a pleasant look – complete intact leaves with a brown colour with a subtle green tint to them. I really enjoy the nose off these leaves. The wet leaves produce a pleasant soft, sweet, fruity fragrance. I suppose one can say its typical of the region. The liquor isn’t too light or too thick in the mouth but rather nice. Definitely a nice sweetness and mouth feel to it. The Hui gan is definitely there as well. Easily lasting up to 20 seconds. I feel that this is a great tea to drink, however, I wouldn’t pick up a full bing at the asking price. I’d give this tea an 85/100 :).

I completely love the story behind the wrapper! From the dragon arms pointing to time Miles was born to the significance of the trumpet! Got to love Miles Davis!!!!! In fact, this entire tea session was accompanied by Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue!

Why oh why does this have to be so good?! It has all the nectar notes of GFZ along with something slightly bitter. I’m still trying to place if it is a menghai or mengla type of bitter… I haven’t ever had LBZ straight, but know TU likes to blend with it, and there is a very light almost bulang bitterness… So I’d guess there is some of that in there. Maybe 10% with another 10% of another source, since it isn’t too prominent. The bitterness makes me think of manzhuan, but it doesn’t have the raw sugary after taste manzhuan or other yiwu sources seem to have to me.

The after taste lingers and lingers. This is fabulous ambrosia. I can see why it’s almost sold out.

I’ve been enjoying this sheng all afternoon. This is another one of my huge batch of TeaUrchin samples I got for my birthday :D

Lovely sweet and somewhat mellow. I’m digging the vibe and creamy mouthfeel. Flavor is bright and fresh with hints of floral.

This is just a tasting note/book review. I just returned from vacation and while on vacation I read a copy of the English translation of “Pu-erh Tea” from the Appreciating Chinese Tea Series which is an excellent book by the way. The most important thing that I learned from this book was that I was steeping me tea incorrectly. So today I decided to put the techniques that I learned from the book into practice. Let me just say, I was BLOWN AWAY. Those techniques turned this excellent tea into an incredible tea, they really did!!!! I still want to know what that secret 20% is.