Premium Dragon Well Long Jing Green Tea

Tried it again, this time with much softer water.
So much better.
Taste of custard and so much more.
To sum it up: use soft water!

I won a gorgeous scarlet tin of this tea during Teavivre’s Black Friday event. Very grateful, thanks so much Teavivre!  Somehow I haven’t tried this yet, even though I’ve tried most of what Teavivre offers. It is so nice to have a fresh green tea.  The leaves are lovely.  The flavor is so layered and exceptional.  Hints of minerals, very beany, nutty, sweet, lingering, both vegetal and fruity at the same time, with the slightest hint of butter.  Like I said, very layered!  It’s the flavor of health.  I love a great fresh green, so this found a great home to stop at.  Hopefully the red of the tin will scream at me to enjoy this one more often than not. 
Steep #1 // 34 minutes after boiling // 1 1/2 minute steep
Steep #2 // 34 minutes after boiling  // 2 minute steep 
2020 Sipdowns: 7 (Upton – China Keemun Heng Ru)

Definitely, a tea to help relax oneself.

Tense couple of days for me. I found out that my nephew’s ex-girlfriend said he was “cyberstalking” her. After hauling him in, keeping him for 48 hrs, he’s out. His new girlfriend is there for him, said his ex is just angry and jealous. I have experience in criminal law (before I decided to put my chemistry background with my law) but he is in California, and I’m in another state but I did what I could and got the facts (or lack thereof), and spoke to people. I believe the charges were dropped. I looked at his FB and saw a few of his posts that read “Happy birthday. Will love you always.” and a few other sweet posts. Going to sound like a typical aunt here but he’s such a good kid. Good work ethics, has a samurai personality, always wants to help the less fortunate out. Hopefully, it’ll all work out for all involved.

Ah yes, the tea. :)
It’s quite savory, with chestnut aroma, slightly nutty, some floral notes, grassy and very subtle astringency, and a very nice sweet aftertaste. I didn’t get the toasted walnuts mentioned but a continued subtle chestnut flavor, floral and mineral notes. Vegetal, seaweed, marine. As I continued it got slightly bitter, but will drop it down a notch in temperature next time. Boiled chestnuts are the star here. In the later infusions, I got an interesting cantaloupe note.

Gaiwan (silver): 110ml
185℉ / 85℃
5 steeps: rinse, 15s, 25s, 40s, 60s, 90s

In my kitchen cupboard reserved for tea, I have an artificially created black tea shortage. I store my black and green teas on the top shelf and my oolongs and whites on the bottom. However, I rarely drink my green teas, and many of my black teas are either Darjeelings (which dwindle slowly because I Western steep them) or too expensive for regular consumption (SLX Black, that Lapsang from TheTea). I therefore go through my oolongs much faster, relegating many of my black teas to the “tea museum” in my closet. In an effort to change that, I’m trying to sip down some of my old green teas, notably this one from 2016.

Using Teavivre’s instructions, I steeped around 4.5 g of leaf in a 120 ml teapot at 185F for 15, 25, 40, 60, and 90 seconds, plus a few uncounted rounds at the end of the session.

I always get a kick out of these flat, fuzzy leaves. The dry aroma is of chestnuts, green beans, and umami. The first steep has notes of chestnut, butter, beans, spinach, grass, and asparagus. The second steep is even more vegetal, with lots of cruciferous (a.k.a. bitter) veggies like bok choy and broccoli, but a sweet aftertaste. The next couple steeps are sweeter, with lots of chestnut balanced by beans and cruciferous vegetables. The nuttiness fades around the sixth steep, which is when Teavivre tells me to stop, but I got another couple vegetal steeps because I’m a cheapskate.

I Western steeped my remaining 2.5 g at 185F for 3, 4, and 6 minutes. The sweet, buttery chestnut is a lot more prominent in the first steep, with beans and asparagus in the background. However, subsequent steeps are milder, with spinach, green bean, and mineral notes and a faint sweetness.

For something I’ve been avoiding for so long, this is an inoffensive, surprisingly drinkable tea with pronounced chestnut notes. I’d say gongfu is the way to go, since I got more out of the leaves this way.

Also, apparently I’ve reviewed this tea before, but have no memory of it.

I decided to do a couple of green teas back to back, tonight. Teavivre had sent a sample of their Dragon Well Long Jing, so it was prepared after tasting First Flush Mao Feng. I prefer Dragon Well above Mao Feng for a hot green tea, but for a sweetened cold green tea, Mao Feng is my choice. I did a few infusions hot of Dragon Well, then decided since I had already gone rogue by sweetening mao feng, I’d do the same with dragon well. I kept the prep the same. Simple syrup and a squeeze of lemon, and multiple short infusions poured over ice. I kept trying for the flavor notes, and I was dancing around grapefruit, then pear. Obviously, I had added a citrus note with the lemon, and then it hit me. Canned yellow peaches. It tasted just like canned yellow peaches in heavy syrup. I’m not going to fill out the flavor profile, because I don’t want to wrongly influence someone to be expecting peach with a normal preparation of Dragon Well. If you like canned peaches, try this Dragon Well sweetened with lemon.

A new Vietnamese restaurant opened up near my house, so today I stuffed myself with pho! It was quite good too. There’s two other pho places relatively close by, but this one was by far the best. On par with some of the ones I used to eat at in Orlando.

The dry leaves are nice and aromatic, brews an almost clear yellow-green. Very buttery and chestnut-y and fresh with a hint of fruit and floral aroma. Moderately sweet but more savory. Later steeps are more mild and some minerality becomes apparent.

When I smell this tea, I smell hot water from a bathhouse in India. Steaming hot water with scents of the earth that stew in a water tank before being heated through some pipes and being collected in a giant plastic bucket, which you carry off with you to the shower room to use how you please. A slight scent of Dettol soap. A scrubbed clean feeling, this how clean water can get, that you may find bubbling in a volcanic spring on the top of a mountain.

This is 90% an odorful tea, the 10% is in the taste. The taste is slightly bitter, that is all. Sometimes teas are for smelling, and the drinking is an afterthought, and that is okay. It was nice to be reminisced about the olden days, days of rajahs and ecumenical times.

Notes of scotch, only because the cup had scotch in it prior to the pouring of the tea.

i did 4 steepings, 30, 60, 60 and 60 seconds. The first was quite good, very light and refreshing with just a hint of astringency in the finish. The second was a bit more astringent so perhaps 60 seconds was too long for the second steep. The 3rd and 4th weren’t as good. The water was probably too cool at that point and I was feeling too lazy to go get fresh hot water. Still, I enjoyed this tea and am looking forward to trying it again.

Can’t go wrong in the morning with a cup of Dragon Well. It’s a mystery to me why I never seem to keep a solid supply of this stuff around the house (and all my friends’ houses).

Premium dragon well long Jing green tea from teavivre review.

Ru Yao dragon teapot gongfucha.

Dry leaf: green, sweet, grass, freshly cut grass.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFouAzEp4_x/

Wet leaf: green, sweet, grass, freshly cut grass.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFouEVrp4_5/

1x short rinse

Light steep: I taste/smell: light hay.
Medium —→ sweetness, grass, freshly cut grass, honey.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFovSbvp4ye/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFovWTAp4yn/

Medium steep: I taste/smell medium hay. Strong —→ grass, sweetness, honey, freshly cut grass. Slight bitterness.

Heavy steep: I taste/smell; medium —→ hay, sweetness, grass, freshly cut grass, honey. Little to no bitterness

All in all an amazing tea! The tastes, smells, the cha qi! Lovely!

I rate a 100

Thanks teavivre, for giving me this since you ran out of the other kind :)

http://www.teavivre.com/premium-dragon-well-green-tea/