Silver Buds Yabao

The buds smell like brown sugar. Soooo good. They still smell like tea, just with a great earthy sweet spiciness permeating them.
I went with western style brewing – I rinsed them, then steeped for 4 minutes. The liquour is such a delicate light color.
The liquour smells a little woodsy. Like taking a tree, deep red with rain and drizzling honey over it and brown sugar and then sticking it over a fire, letting the sugar crystals pop and spark into a molasses syrup imbued with the scent of the wood.
I’m honestly not sure if I like the flavor. It is a strange mixture of sweet and woodsy. It certainly isn’t bad and it is fascinating but it’s not necessarily a flavor profile I’m feeling.
It does have a really nice aftertaste of nectar or sugar.
I think I prefer brewing Verdant teas gongfu style. Today I just seem to lack the mental energy.

So this was the tea I wanted to try the most. Mainly because I still have some of the Sun-Dried Winter Yabao still left. I wanted to put them side by side and to taste them both. Yabao is a tea that I have been trying to find out more about. I have been to the Verdant website and read everything, but there is really nothing else that I can find on the internet about the tea. Different types? Health benefits?

I put the Winter in my gaiwan and the Silver in a tasting cup. Let it begin…

The dry leaf:
Winter- cedar with some spice
Silver Buds- sweet mustard

Wet leaf:
Winter- cedar
Silver buds-floral sweetness, marshmallow,baked peach.

Color:
Winter-dark yellow
Silver buds-Clear

1st steep:5mins, 2nd steep:10min, 3rd steep:20mins

Winter: woody and light, became sweet through the steeps.
Silver buds: marshmallow sweetness, became more floral after each steep.

I like them both, but the Silver Buds was the one that I would give to someone that is not a tea drinker and I wanted to show them something new and complex. I loved it! I ordered 2oz of the silver buds and Im glad that I did.

To bad I can’t add a picture of my tasting…:)

Sipdown
I still really enjoy this because it can give so many steeps!

Thanks to Bonnie for this very generous sample and many others I have yet to try

I was suprised when I tasted this Pu-erh! It tasted more like a white tea! When brewed the water (I was going to brew this “gaiwan style” but when I measured 6 grams on my scale it looked like a LOT of tea..but for western style it only needed 1.5 teaspoons..why is that? how come so much for a small 4oz gaiwan??) is almost clear and it takes awhile for the buds to “open up” a little bit. This tea had a very strange camphor/piney note which I can’t accurately describe, it wasn’t unpleasant..just different for my tastes. It had a very sweet, sugary aftertaste and the piney/earthy note lasted until the 5th infusion. This is my second verdant tea and I have to say that they have an extremely high quality of product!! I will definitely be purchasing from them again !!

This is fantastic (so glad I have two samples). This is like Bai Mu Dan and Shou Mei on crack. It’s Soooo sweet and a bit more herbaceous. Wet leaves smell like rosemary and artichoke and I taste candied rosemary and some melon in this third steep. Husband said it tasted like bath water or brewed rocks (okay so he may be onto something with the mineral note) and he does not taste the sweetness. How?! I’m getting a divorce.

First steep was for 15 secs but when I saw all the recommendations for longer steeps I set the timer for two minutes, however a smelled it at 1 mins declared it too good not to drink and set the tea maker on my mug. So glad I did! Third steep is just under two minutes. Would like to try it with tea in the cup and cold brewed in the future. I also would like to acquire more of this and age it. And I want a husband who has taste buds that work. Edit: sister stopped by and shared two steeps with me. She said it’s yummy. Also researching theanine and I do believe I am tea drunk. I <3 my yabao

Verdant Tea rocks my socks, not only for their amazing teas, but also for their out of this world customer service. I feel like David Duckler is a personal friend of mine, and that’s an awesome feeling to get from a company.

Like my wife said, we both got six months subscriptions to Verdant Tea’s tea-of-the-month service for each other, and David has wonderfully agreed to combine them so we get ten months of glorious tea. I see this being a subscription we definitely keep up with, we’re already so impressed!

Included in the package were two straight teas and an herbal to mix with the other two, a very detailed and incredibly interesting letter explaining a bit about the tea and helpful hints on how to combine them, and tasting notecards for each tea. Just lovely.

We tried this tea on its own last night and it is delicious. Spicy with a touch of sweetness, I was sad when I found my cup empty. I look forward to resteeping this over and over and being continually surprised by the full flavor coming from a tea that gives such a clear liquid.

I was nervous to try this one after reading the description. Floral aroma, woodsy. That’s exactly what it is, but it is soooo good! It smells piney and tastes a little piney. Happy this was part of the tea of the month, especially since it’s sold out now!

Fascinating tea. Again Verdant continues to amaze me with their complex and different teas. Upon opening the bag I didn’t really smell anything at all, I smelled a little bit of cardboard but I was trying so hard to smell something that I could have been smelling the cardboard for recycling behind me. The buds are fat and short and fuzzy, they kind of remind me of a Beech trees buds in the way the scales overlap but shorter.

The wet leaves smell was like walking through a wet mixed forest in fall after the leaves have fallen. It was a very wet woody scent. The infusion was more or less clear and had that same woodsy scent with stronger pine notes and a slight floral note.

Taste was clear and bright at first sip followed by pine and cedar notes with the wet woods. There was a spiciness I picked up, like black pepper and a sweet minty like aftertaste. In later steepings the pine/cedar notes take dominance with some sweetness, the floral notes fade, the minty aftertaste kind of hangs around but you have to look for it and the black pepper note disappeared around the third steeping. I’m interested in seeing how this ages.

I steeped this so far about 5-6 times and am about to make another cup. Steeping method is a 5 oz cup with an infuser basket with short steep times with 205F water. The first infusion was about 10 seconds and now I’m steeping about 20 seconds for the 6 or 7 steep.

A sample from Angrboda

I’d been curious about this one for a while, and I have to say it’s one of the most unusual teas I’ve ever tried. I’ve only ever tried one pu’erh, and never a while, so it’s been an interesting experience! I let the water cool a little, then added just over a teaspoon of the buds. They’re pretty well odourless, and the liquor remains a very pale yellow, really almost clear. I wasn’t convinced there’d be much flavour to discern, but it just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge a tea by the colour of the liquor!

I wasn’t sure what to expect on first sip. There’s something a little bit earthy in the taste…almost compost like, in a way, but very faint. There’s also something that puts me in mind of green tea, an almost vegetal note that reminds me somehow of asparagus. There are also aspects of the flavour that make me think of white tea…a sort of floral, hay-like sweetness. Some others have said sugar cookies, and I agree with that. It’s an overlying flavour, but definitely there, although subtle. Pretty much everything about this tea is subtle, actually. None of the flavours scream out or dominate, but they all occupy distinct layers of the flavour, and contribute something different to the whole. It’s a complex tea, and I got a lot from it. It’s certainly not a boring or straightforward cup, so I’m looking forward to trying this again. It’s probably not one I’d want all the time, but definitely worth a try. It’s an intriguing tea, that’s for sure! Thanks to Angrboda for sharing this with me!

You know what’s absolutely amazing with this tea?

Monkey bread. Seriously. I know that’s probably tea-blasphemy or something but it seriously works together in an I NEVER WANT THIS TO END sort of way.