First off, the dry leaf is beautiful and smells great. It’s a mixture of big juicy silver buds and larger fully oxidized leaves. It smells somewhere between a puer and hong cha. It has the light sweet hay smell characteristic of puer with a pronounced fruitiness that reminds me of hong cha. Warmed up, the dry leaf smells like sweet dried apples.
In the cup, this tea is incredibly soft and gentle. Feels like being wrapped up in a nice, plush blanket. The front of the soup is all sweet, mellow hay, while the back half is subdued spices and malt. It’s exceptionally clear and there’s almost zero sediment in my cup or strainer.
2 or 3 steeps in, this tea really starts to thicken up. Not surprising given the presence of all those nice fat buds. It gets darker as well with a bold yellow color. There’s something really refreshing about this tea. It reminds me of the feeling, but not the taste, of biting into a fresh, juicy cucumber.
Later steeps start to trend more towards the malt that was once in the background and the liquor is a nice deep orange color. It eventually steeps up a rich orange-red if you keep at it as well. This tea is really dynamic, which makes it a lot of fun to drink. Can’t decide between white, black, or puer tea? This is perfect! It also has great longevity without even a hint of astringency. I steeped the same 5g of leaf about 15 times and it still wasn’t ready to give up. I would absolutely recommend this tea to anyone interested in trying something a bit different from Yunnan.
Flavors: Hay, Malt, Spices, Sweet
