Tea and Zen

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

You ever had one of those days where it's really hard to spell for some reason, and English/some language just doesn't want to come to you?

August 5th, as I write this, is one of those days for me. I'm currently learning German and that is coming to me easier than English is. That isn't a good sign. I am sure that this fog is due to the fact I haven't had enough sleep lately and almost every day I've been running around. Sitting down to have some tea was very nice. It gave my brain something to do. Plus, caffeine!

Dry leaves

I've had the Autumn Tie Guan Yin before. It was the TGY that came in my "5 teas for $5" a while back. It was pretty tasty, I liked it enough that I bought another 25g in my last order. I have around 10g left and I'll be using 5g here. If I don't use it soon it'll begin to lose it's flavor and aroma.

I'd hate to have that happen.

Here I used 5g/60ml, 100C water, washed twice, five seconds for the first brew and an additional 3-5 seconds for each additional brewing.

Brewings

As TGY should, it had a lovely floral aroma. It reminded me of vanilla and cream with orchids. The liquor was buttery smooth and had a hint of something green, it reminded me of wakayanagi without the astringency. The finish was very long, and a few moments after the liquor has left your mouth, an elderberry and raspberry flavor clung to the back of my tongue and a light melon and vanilla flavor to the front sides of my tongue.

In the second cup the aroma of orchid and saffron was very strong, but not overpowering. The liquor still reminded me of a bancha like wakayanagi, with hay and watercress, minus the radish-y part of watercress's flavor profile and not astringency.

Liquor

The third was much the same, but the mouthfeel was even more buttery. The sides of my tongue strongly tasted of saffron and the back of my throat of elderberries and strawberries.

The fourth and the fifth cup were more or less the same as the third, except a very mild astringency began to appear. The fifth also left a lingering taste of strawberries.

Brewing leaves

From here on out there is a light sweetness and the body stays fantastic. I mostly kept drinking it because of the hints of vanilla, orchid, and melon and that beautiful, smooth, buttery mouthfeel. It's not until the 15th or 16th brewing that it begins to become astringent, even though most flavor is gone around the 7th. I often find aftertaste to be more important than the initial taste, and long after the initial taste is gone, the aftertaste still delivers.

I'm going to take a moment to talk about the leaf quality in this TGY compared to other lightly roasted, rolled oolongs.

I did a review on Hojo Tea's Dong Ding Oolong. The opened leaves were big, beautiful, and full.

Leaf samples

You don't quite see that here. For whatever reason I didn't take a picture of some sample leaves from the gaiwan for Hojo, but just from the steeping and wet leaves picture you can see that it is damn fine.

For a moment, please take another look at the above leaf samples and the brewing leaves. You can see that they had a very hard time unrolling (even after 16 brewings). The price and the flavor and depth of the liquor already tell us this, but the leaves are not high quality. Hojo of Hojo Tea has a very nice article Tips of Tea Quality Inspection that goes into some detail about this. I think it's 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 new knowledge.

Rating

This tea isn't bad by any means, especially for the price. I like it, and I think that this makes for a nice everyday TGY. Overall I give this tea a 6. Hojo's Dong Ding is most certainly on a different tier so you can't really compare these two, but I thought this would be a good chance to show a difference in quality to price for rolled teas as a visual for why some cost so much more than others.

If you are interested in buying this tea, you can purchase it here.

Next I will be releasing a review of Verdant Tea's Reserve Tie Guan Yin. That tea is fantastic, so if you find you enjoy this tea, the Reserve Tie Guan Yin blows this out of the water.