I received a sample bag of this through Liquid Proust for the 2017 Sheng Olympiad. I drank this sample once before and didn’t take notes. It’s been in crock storage for awhile with the rest of my sheng. Strangely, the smell in the bag is like sweet barbeque sauce. I don’t remember that from before…
A rinse and sniff of the lid confirms it – it’s a super rich and sweet scent. It’s making me hungry for some Kansas City barbeque. It steeps up pretty clear and light. There’s a savory spice note but that’s about it. I think the leaves need a little more time to get going.
The second brew is darker in color but still pretty light on taste. I can detect some faint sweetness and florality in the cup. There’s a cooling camphor aftereffect happening as well.
Rolling the third steep around in my mouth, I get a sweet and slightly sour taste on the sides of my tongue – I think this is where that barbeque sauce scent was coming from.
Four steeps in, the soup is pretty thick and dark in color. The taste is still pretty light but vaguely sweet. The main feature of this tea so far is the camphor aftertaste. This stuff has it in spades.
At this point I bumped up the temperature. The result is a thicker, woody brew.
With longer steeps, the soup is a light orange and some astringency comes out of the leaves. It has some body to it but there’s just not a lot of flavor. I’m using pretty light parameters here because I’m working with a smallish sample but I would recommend leafing harder than usual for this tea. I think I would’ve had better results with ~7.5g/80ml instead of 5g/80ml.
It seems like people really love this tea so who knows. I’ll have to come back to this again later on.
