Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe) Wuyi Rock Oolong Tea Fujian

This has been a long day! First I woke up at 5:30, drank a cup of Imperial Breakfast (Verdant), brewed a resteep to go, & left the house at 6:30 to go play the final early morning Harpy HoliDaze gig of the year. When I was setting up to play in the lobby of the building I spilled my tea.
(;_;)
I cleaned up the mess, played for awhile, & one of the catering people offered to fill my go mug with hot water. Great! He filled it, I dropped in some of Mandala’s blooming black, only to discover that the ‘hot’ water was lukewarm.
:p
I finished the gig, came home & brewed a quick cup of Wu Liang Hong Mao Feng (Yunnan Sourcing), drove to Maryville University for my student’s jury. I had a few sips along the way, & was really looking forward to enjoying that tea, only to discover when I arrived that I had somehow spilled the whole cup in my car.
This has been a long, mostly tea-less day..sigh…
This Da Hong Pao is my reward! Such a lovely oolong, peachy, roasty, so satisfying.
Thank you Angel of Teavivre for saving my day! :)

My best friend came over with cheesecake today! Yay! She is a teacher and we took advantage of her day off to spend some time together even though youngest and I did NOT take the day off. We are doing a few extra days of schoolwork because she is going to Northern Ireland, Ireland, and England next month!

With sweet food, I like a contrasting tea. Nothing astringent, mind you, just something to “cut the sweet” and clear the palate so that dessert is delicious instead of cloying. One of my favorite teas to serve with really sweet food is Teavivre’s Fengqing Black Dragon Pearls. My friend had those recently at my house, so I thought we would drink this so she could try something new.

Oh, what can I say? I really love Da Hong Pao teas. One of the first ones I tried (by a different company) was anemic and uninteresting. This one has the fresh walnut flavor, the woodiness, the hints of unsweetened cocoa, that I love in DHP. The dry leaf in particular smells like a chocolate flavored tea! Steeped, the chocolate becomes a hint of cocoa and the nutty flavor comes to the forefront.

I am on the second steep and will be making at least one more with this even though I am making it western style and by the pot. So good!

I think this might be the oolong that I preferred most out of all the Teavivre samples I recieved! It’s just so dark and roasty and perfect for fall. I think if I had a bag of it, I’d be able to experiment more with temperature and steep time to play upon different notes.

It’s too bad you can’t order 50g packs from Teavivre! I think it would take me at least a year to get through 100g of an oolong…

thank you cavocorax for sending this one my way. I struggle with roasty oolongs. There’s something about SOME of them that i dislike, while others i love. I dislike the aroma from this one in dry form. However, as a brewed tea, the flavour that i don’t like in roasty oolong isn’t present. There’s an earthiness to this that is rather pleasant and if nothing else, this is a smooth brew.

You may consider this a continuation of the post I wrote a couple of days ago, and which you can find here http://steepster.com/Angrboda/posts/106070

If you can’t be bothered to go link hopping, I wrote about this tea in multiple (4) short steeps but didn’t come to a rating conclusion because I found the four infusions so vastly different from one another. Some had elements that I really like and some had elements that I dislike, so it was all rather confusing. Over all though, I found it a bit wan and as though there was something missing.

This time I’m having it steeped western style. This is what I mostly do, so I have more of an idea of what to expect here. In my experience western style usually yilds a darker and deeper sort of infusion, where gong fu is more about picking up on smaller nuances. Compare it to impressionist paintings. Western style gives you the big picture and only that, where gong fu allows you to step closer, inspect the technique used in painting and the combination of colours and then piece it all together into a whole yourself. I suppose that makes gong fu an exersize in tea tasting, where western style becomes more like having the answer sheet handed to you.

This in turn leads me to wonder if the reason I tend to prefer western style may in fact be due to being lazy.

Anyway, I have made it western style today, and I do indeed now sit here with a considerably darker and deeper sort of brew.

This time I’m getting none of the floralness that I had objections about in the earlier attempt. The aroma is all bready and toasty, and with a certain amount of autumnal notes to it. Like the smell of leaves on the ground in the forest in mid-autumn. A bit earthy and a bit wooden as well. Mostly though, it’s toast and freshly baked goods I’m getting. If I really really concentrate, there is a mild chocolate note in it as well, but I can only find it if I’m searching for it and then only if I hold my nose in a very specific distance to the cup. I suspect it’s some of the toastiness that gets transformed under these circumstances.

The flavour is all dark and earthy now, and there’s a nutty top note on it. It’s like I first get the basic earthiness and then the nutty note pops up at the top of the mouth and works its way downwards to the tongue. A bit wooden, but mostly nutty. And lets face it, most nuts are kind of woody in flavour anyway.

As with the aroma, I’m getting a lot of toasty notes in along with the nuts, but it no longer gives me any baked goods associations. Toasted nuts, perhaps? That makes sense, actually.

There’s an intersting difference between my gong fu results and my western style results. Gong fu gave me the barest hints of caramel, but in this round the barest hints of caramel has turned into strong hints of chocolate. Apart from both of those being sweet flavoured, they’re not really related flavours at all. I think it’s the deeper feeling to the western style flavour that does it.

As it cools a little, the nutty notes take over and it’s a very toasty and nutty sort of profile. It tastes a bit like it should be a little astringent, like many nuts are, but when you pay attention to that, you find to your surprise that it’s not astringent at all.

The aftertaste is woody and nutty as well, and unlike the gong fu session, here it’s very long, prickling on my tongue and palate long after I’ve swallowed. I always appreciate a good long aftertaste IF it’s a pleasant one (green and white teas for me often aren’t). It’s like it makes the cup last longer.

Maybe it makes me rather a philistine or perhaps I’m just too bone idle to really appreciate gong fu, but I do prefer western style brewings most of the time. Gong fu is fun to experiment with, but for me that’s all it is. I like the depth that western style provides.

A very floral and hash like flavored oolong. Hey my parents where hippies and I grew up in the 70’s don’t judge me lol
A slight sweetness with a drying sensation on the throat in the after taste.
A very good oolong but not one of my all time favorites from Teavivre.

I am currently enjoying my third and fourth infusion of this tea. It’s really quite lovely. It started out with a distinct mineral-y/charcoal-y kind of taste, with notes of flower in the background, and a warm, toasty kind of overtone. Now, I notice some of the mineral/charcoal notes have begun to wane, and a woodsy note seems to have taken their place, and this melds wonderfully with the warmth of the roasty-toasty taste. The floral notes have begun to reveal a honey-esque tone that is quite lovely.

I like that this tea is not overly floral, offers hints of fruit (I notice a slight peach-y undertone), and that it has such a warmth to it, especially since I’m kind of dealing with COLD bones because I’ve been working off and on in my studio, and dang it’s cold in there! I come in here to warm up with a cup of tea, and this tea does the trick.

Lovely!

OOOfffffph! I am so bloated from last night Thanksgiving dinner. Though weirdly, I’m still hungry for it as it tasted so good. Time to oolong it out of me!

Hmmm. I am haunted by an excellent Big Red Robe Oolong I had at the LA tea festival that blew my feathers off. Sadly, this oolong didn’t blow me away like that one did. However, this Teavivre oolong is still pretty good and an interesting round of tea. Great roasty, nutty, oak, golden flavors with later steepings of rocky minerals and cream.

Full review at my teablog, The Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/da-hong-pao-oolong-teavivre-tea-review/
Octopus substitute!

Looking at the Teavivre site, I’ve realized that I may have steeped many of their teas wrong. Sometimes it calls for 2-4 teaspoons. Usually the sample packages mention the time and temp but not the teaspoons. And back when I got these samples, I only had the dipper infusers that would only hold one teaspoon anyway. So if I have any of the previous samples from Teavivre left, I plan on steeping them properly soon!

This one actually calls for 3-4 teaspoons and I must have only used one back in the day. But from what I remember, the flavor isn’t much different now. It’s weird that some of Teavivre’s black teas are supposed to be steeped at 185 degrees but some of the oolongs are boiled. This one is a Fujian oolong, so I associate this with a charcoal flavor. And this one has that flavor the most, rather than a floral or a vegetal oolong. But I’ve had another Fujian oolong before and it literally was like drinking a cup of charcoal. This one is much more delicate, as most of Teavivre’s teas are. I prefer my fruity, floral and vegetal oolongs to dark oolongs, but this one isn’t so dark so I don’t mind it!

First steep: boiled: 45 seconds Second steep: boiled: 1 min 30

Not feeling very talkative right now since I’m dealing with a migraine this morning that was developing when I went to bed last night. But I decided to still try a new tea anyway. Let’s see how that goes.

Following Teavivre’s recommendation of steeping for 30sec, 1min, and 2min in boiling water. I used one whole sample of 7g in 200ml of water.

1st steep: I was surprised opening the pack when I got the strong scents of burnt wood and roasted peanuts. There was a real sweetness in the background of it all, best I can say was like stone fruit. The wet leaf had these as well, but also the definite smell of cooked vegetables came first…the sweetness reminding me of Brussels sprouts (a good thing—I love them!). In the cup the combinations of all these aromas made me picture peaches and plums grilling over a wood fire, and still the nuttiness of the roasted peanuts. As I write this, it sounds absolutely delightful and like something I would normally rave about. But I’m not feeling like that. I’m chalking that up to the migraine. Apparently my senses are working, or I wouldn’t have got a lot of these flavor-pictures (if you know what I mean). But the emotional aspect just isn’t clicking right now. It’s more like I’m doing my duty of reporting for you and the benefit of my memory, but I’m not begrudging it.
2nd steep: Now I think I understand what people are saying about oolongs changing flavors with each steep. It’s still smooth and thick feeling, but there’s just a touch of astringency developing. And it’s still got the roasted aromas but more of grains rather than nuts this time. But now that’s joined by the sharp sweetness of dried apricots, and maybe a little spice. It feels juicy and almost “chewy.”
3rd steep: Still smooth and thick, and absolutely no astringency. The roasted aromas continue with a buttery sweetness that reminds me of baked apple.

I wouldn’t have thought until very recently that I would like smokiness in tea at all, and roasted flavors also just didn’t sound like something I’d really go for either. Well, there’s been a little bit of smokiness in a couple teas I tried last week, and it was added a nice depth to those. And today’s exploration into roasted flavors really brought out some new flavor profiles to my tea experiences. It danced around with a few different fruit flavors through the steeps and it worked really well! I’ll have to try this tea again when I’ve got the full capacity of my senses and my emotions so I can be as deliriously happy as I think this tea wants to make me!