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Birthday tea #2

Let me just say that I am very grateful to be able to have a tea from my birth year; also, I am very thankful for members on Steepster who organize group purchases which make it more accessible to try/purchase pricey teas that came in larger quantities such as 100g or a whole cake.

Before even drinking this tea I went back to my memory of drinking Butiki’s 1991 oolong. Those thoughts reminded me of the smoothness of a tea that comes about through aging which is true with my experiences with pu’erh as well. This piqued my interested in an aged roasted oolong. Oolongs may be my favorite variant of tea, but many times I grow tired of a roasted taste as it leaves the mouth dry’ish.

Looking at this leaf doesn’t really tell me much to be honest and neither does the smell. I suppose this is to be expected with something that has been aged (in this case 26 years). Since this is in an aluminum bag inside a tin, I decided not to use my hands not a scoop to get the tea out; I simply just tapped the bag gently and let it flow out.

The first steep was quite bizarre in a way I cannot explain fully. It didn’t taste like an oolong at at. What I did taste was a roasted caramello bar. It sounds odd, but I am 100% serious when I say that there is a cocoa note in this which is not separate from the caramel. With that being said, I went online to look this tea up because I was utterly confused by what I was drinking. Tasting notes for this tea are rather low, if any at all.

Second steep, third, fourth, fifth… this tea goes on for quite awhile and it stays smooth and sweet (with such a mild roast taste that gets overpowered by the unusual caramello taste).

Pretty crazy tea, in a good way. This is the kind of stuff I am looking to buy to put together a taste testing group buy in which I will purchase 5 expensive and 5 inexpensive teas that have great reputations (company wise) and just labeling them with numbers. However, I’m holding back on this because I don’t want to have some sort of weird issue with being a tea company myself to promote certain other companies; but lets be honest, for instance: If Butiki was still around I would ask for all my customers to try their teas out since I view tea as a collective type of product. No reason to not support all the other people out there doing it. Everyone who talks to me eventually realizes that I hate the restraints that come about with the concept of fiat currency (aka, money).

I’m quite excited to be able to showcase and share this tea with 12 different people who are coming over for one of my hosted tea events on August 22nd. They are all in for a treat :)

Birthday tea #1

I was pretty excited to get this as a gift; considering it didn’t come with octopus tentacles in it I had no plan to purchase it; this is actually misleading, I’ve just never had this companies tea which made it hard to decide to commit to a whole tin or not.

I drank this for breakfast… though many will say:
Wait, no you didn’t because https://instagram.com/p/6Kc2apRYLZ/
But really, this was my breakfast :)

Yunnan’s black tea integrity shines in this blend and I find it quite enjoyable, even the bitterness to it.

Instead of reading something from me, you should go read the best review I have seen on a tea to date (which was on this tea) by Marzipan
https://tealover.net/2015/07/andrews-dunham-black-sunshine/

Global Tea Hut’s August tea arrived in July which was interesting, but it wasn’t until tonight that I drank it.

I drank 4 steepings of this tea because the first one was not very appealing as it was my first time drinking it. The second steep became a little more familiar to me and I was able to enjoy it’s brisk flavor that is similar to many black teas, yet there is something quite fresh and new about this tea that I find to be a complex flavor that one just has to experience. There is a malty taste that is somewhat like that of Yunnan teas. This is either a very unique tea or something I haven’t tried other variants of. While the leaf is beautiful and I can see and taste the quality, I’m not sure if this is a tea for me. Out of all the teas I have gotten from Global Tea Hut this year, this is probably my least favorite which is interesting because this is also the one tea they repeat each year and give out for free because of the different process they have the farmer go through. Maybe I’m not accustom to its liquor…

I drank about 11 steepings of this and came to the conclusion that this is pu’erh… like, this is pu’erh. Basically it doesn’t stand out as amazing or terrible, it walks that middle road quite well like a supermarket doughnut; sure it’s not Krispee Kreme but it’s also not a Walmart doughnut (sorry if you like Walmart doughnuts… they seem to be really old around here because they sit around)

Drank this last night and couldn’t keep wanting Wild Monk from Mandela instead. The reason for that would be connected to the strength of sheng being present in a younger tea. Personally I like my sheng mild which is a personal preference. This is nice, but everything that I have observed on here and IG leads me to believe that W2T has much better offerings to which I shall look into. For those who like a strong sheng, this would suffice.

If you bought this, don’t read unless you have drank it.
Anyways, I guess I lie a lot… I said I would drink this on my birthday but I changed my mind and dank it today because I received tea from a few Steepster members as a gift so I would like to drink those on my birthday instead :)

Anyways, here’s my few words on this tea: https://liquidproust.wordpress.com/2015/08/08/tasting-nostalgia/

P.S. it’s also this tea https://instagram.com/p/6IHb6wRYGr/

Oolong for breakfast today as I go through Amazon and look at future apartment items and what not… let’s just say I can browse up to 1000 items every 30 minutes and find it enjoyable.

Today I found out that ‘rape blossoms’ are a real thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed
Which means I could make a ‘Rape Blossom’ tea, but wouldn’t that sound sketchy ;p

Anyways, this is a rather smooth liquid with some nice sweetness to it. I’m not sure if I should have detected some ginger taste as I did not, but the leaf is beautiful and the liquid taste rather good so I have no complaints wit this tea except it probably isn’t a morning cup. I should have drank this outside later in the day, this is my error.

With my birthday coming up I decided to do what I do every year by intellectually stimulating myself with the issue of ‘suicide’. I read a bit more of western and eastern perspectives on the issue in terms of philosophical ramifications for such things as ‘life’ and ‘death’. This is a topic I strive to know intimately as I believe life is the most important thing period (aka time) and therefore I try to understand it as much as possible which leads me to the study of suicide… blah blah blah, more stufffff

Anyways, tonight, for whatever reason I blended Yunnan White Yasmine from Verdant and Tangerine Guayusa from Butiki. I doubt anyone else would try such a weird thing…. but hey, I am a crazy person when it comes to tea.

Sipped away at this while my niece was over… I literally cannot imagine the experience of having your own child go through all the stages of life. I’m emotional over all the simple things in life such as a child learning to use a new sound. People are just amazing, I’m pretty glad I am one of them.

Oh my…
I was drinking this last night at 11pm, stopped that session and started back up before work.

I was feeling this tea and got on Amazon to see that the Halo edition for the Xbox One is coming out in October… there goes $500 soon for just one game. Why? Simple, I love my brother a lot and this is something we would spend hours on and honestly as a teenager, his older brother (me) isn’t as cool as he once was… perception of a teenager, you know?
But hey, when I was a teenager everyone who was older than 18 was ancient and I wonder why they didn’t have kids and their own lawn to go mow… I was a mess though.

My best friend came over tonight which means I drank about 30 cups of liquid. Tonight was a top contestant hard cider from 2013 that got a 98 rating during the World Beer Championship (even though it’s not a beer) and then we moved onto some 2015 dragonwell, 1989 suncha, and 2009 Meghai Dayi; suffice to say, I treat my bestfriend with the best of the best because I love her for discussing all the nasty stuff about life that I contemplate- that is kind of misleading as I enjoy her for being herself, as I do with everyone being true to who they are.

I mistakenly went into this without reading about it :/
All I knew was that this is a pu’erh blend from 1989, I had no idea of the smoky content or else I would of used it on another day as we just drank some rather sweet cider.
This is a complex tea! I only steeped it 14 times, but I can say that it starts out by making a camp fire in your mouth and slowly the night beats the fire down until there is just a wind that blows by with hints of the aftermath to remind you of what you just experienced. Megan claims that this taste like expensive smokey sea salt from the store but without the salt… I told her to shut up because that sounds unappealing; to that I got a laugh and not hearing it being compared to a seasoning salt.

I will need to try this again sometime with nothing else drank or ate within an hour because there is a lot to pick up and notice within this tea. I will admit I prefer the latter steeps to the earlier, but this is true with all pu’erh I have came across because I like my mellow and sweet notes :)

p.s. this is my first sheng/shou blend which made me happy to finally try!