Tea and Zen

This is part of my Sample Demolition: Verdant Tea series.

Dry leaves

I have so much of this tea. I have 50g of unopened leaf and another 15g of open leaf after this, freshly opened when a friend came over for tea time. 65g is a lot of one tea for me. My package originally got lost and/or stuck in customs for over three months, so I sent VT an email, they couldn't figure out what happened, and sent me a new, complete parcel of my order. A month after my new parcel showed up, my original one did in a very beat up, unhappy looking box.

So now I have a ton of this tea. I had 100g but was able to go through the first 25g pretty quickly. The rest? Not so much. If you'd like 25g of it shoot me an email. I'd be more than happy to swap it for something!

I have serious doubts about the age of this tea. For one, it's hard to find an aged oolong over 20 years. Up to 20 isn't super easy, but they exist. Right now What-cha offers the China Fujian Anxi 1996 Se Zhong Oolong Tea which is one example of a 20 year old aged oolong. I'll be reviewing that later. Hojo Tea also offers a Vintage 30 Years Oolong and it is much pricier than this tea. It is $23.68 (at the current exchange rate) for 30g while this tea is $12 for 25g. Hojo's is almost double the price for 5g more. I would like to review this tea sometime in the future, I currently don't have it.

The other thing that makes me doubt the age of this tea is how much they're selling. I've seen this tea go out of stock and come back in stock many times. With how old this tea is supposed to be, when it's gone, it's gone. There also, theoretically speaking (and almost always) isn't much of it.

Brewing leaves

Verdant Tea has had an issue with the ages of various things, like the age of the trees their puerh was coming from. If you'd like to learn more, check out my Sample Demolition: Verdant Tea post. I love Master Zhang, he is by far my favorite farmer from Verdant Tea, but due to the past shenanigans of Verdant Tea, I don't know if they are exaggerating/lying or if they were duped by Master Zhang.

Who knows.

I used 5g/120ml, 100C water, washed thrice, 10 second steeping time +3-5 seconds for each additional brewing.

Gong Fu Brewings

The aroma reminded me of malt, peat, chocolate, bran, and honey.

The aroma from the first cup reminded me of all the above, plus vanilla. I think I should have washed a fourth time because there wasn't much flavor aside peat and cedar, and even that was incredibly light. In the aftertaste there was a hint of vanilla and lilikoi blossoms. The liquor was full, medium weight, and smooth with a hint of astringency.

Liquor

The aroma was the same. The liquor of the second cup was a beautiful amber color. The liquor tasted like honey and toasted bran with hints of wood. The aftertaste was like lilikoi blossoms mingled with vanilla and kumquat.

The aroma was mostly of wood and lilikoi blossoms mingled together. The liquor tasted of wood with a hint of vanilla. There was a slight aftertaste of vanilla and melon.

Since this is darkly roasted like a wu yi, I decided to sip on some water. A very sweet berry flavor flowered across my pallet. I couldn't decide if it was more like blueberry or blackberries.

Wet leaves

The liquor in the fifth cup reminded me of vanilla and wood as well. There wasn't much of a difference.

The remaining cups tasted exactly like the 4th on. I went up to 11 cups. It didn't lose it's flavor, it continued to taste like vanilla (the taste of wood slowly disappearing), but didn't evolve either.

Grandpa Style

I think I like this tea better when drunk grandpa style.  It has sweet hints of vanilla and honey mingled with cedar. There isn't a whole lot of aftertaste. It is mildly astringent and has a full mouth feel with medium body. The down side? Similar to the gong fu style brewing, after your first, and certainly after your second top up, the flavor begins to disappear. After the third it was extremely weak. Thinking perhaps I hadn't stirred the leaves enough I poured even more vigorously on the fourth and well... I had brown water with a hint of cedar and honey. It didn't even last an hour despite my attempt to make it love that long. The aroma was just like the gong fu style brewing, except a little weaker.

Brewing leaves, 1 min/6min

Leaves in cup once done

Rating

This tea is a five, through and through. You don't get get much out of this tea. The leaves are very unwilling to open up. I mentioned this in a previous post, but in case you didn't read that, I recommend reading Hojo's very nice article Tips on Tea Quality Inspection that goes into some detail about this. I think it is a good, educational read. If you're familiar with tea it'll reinforce knowledge you probably have, and if you're new to tea it'll offer some knowledge.

It is normal for it to take many brewings to properly open up an aged tea, they rarely fully open. But after 10 gong fu brewings and an hour grandpa style? No. The fact these leaves are so unwilling to open in both the grandpa and gong fu brewing is a bad sign. At least the reserve TGY was much more willing to open when brewed grandpa style.

Gong Fu leaf samples

Grandpa Style leaf samples

The tea doesn't develop much. It changes in the second and third brew, but then it flat lines and slowly fades out. The body is average, the flavor, while nice and initially complex, dies quickly. The depth is inconsistent the various times I brewed this tea gong fu style with the same leaf to water ratio. There is next to no after taste, and what there is, is pretty dry.

As the five implies, the tea is very average. Not bad, not great, average.

If you're interested you can purchase this tea here.