“My notes on this tea are incomplete, so I will need to try again. Here is what I have; dark with much fruit, lemon, melon, honey, slight jasmine, dried apricot, slightly tannic, juicy.” Read full tasting note
“On nights when I have on-call duty, I like to have something caffeinated in the evening. Since I need to sleep lightly and be up and out the door on a moment’s notice, it’s a good idea for me to...” Read full tasting note
“The scent reminds me of candied Corsican clementines I used to buy all the time in Paris + wafts of lychee. The flavor, too, is a mix of those scents, together with a minerality and pleasantly...” Read full tasting note
“I picked this tea up several months ago, during the big sales event, and am just finally getting around to it. I haven’t been in the mood to write reviews for several months, plus I wanted to...” Read full tasting note
This intriguing varietal is sometimes literally translated as Concubine’s Smile (or laugh). However, this doesn’t quite capture the feeling in Chinese. The tea is actually named after a type of lychee fruit, which is called “Concubines Smile” – a fruit that was so loved by the famously beautiful concubine that it always made her smile. In that sense, the name is referring to the fruity aroma of the varietal. We think it is best left in Chinese, as at the end of the day, “Feizi Xiao” now refers to the varietal of Wuyi Oolong and reads like the proper noun that it is without the direct connotations.
This tea is processed like a Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong in terms of the signature black, thinly twisted leaves, but the name’s reference to the lychee becomes super obvious when we start brewing. The aroma is overwhelmingly fruity, perfumed just like lychee.
The first sips yield a balanced and elegant tea. The tropical lychee fruit flavor is astounding. This black tea is as perfumed as a Tieguanyin, but deep, dark and grounded. The aftertaste is full of not only lychee, but also orchid, like a wet tropical garden.
As the tea steeps out, we get creamy notes, honey and of course the rocky mineral Wuyi flavor. Everything isl balanced with an incredibly consistent lychee fruit flavor. Drinking this, we can only speculate that this naturally-occuring flavor profile must be the inspiration for all fruit-flavored black teas.
Company description not available.