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Another green tea I got from CS. I was intrigued by the description, and the tea didn’t disappoint – it is indeed quite unique for a Japanese green tea.
The floral aspects are very strong, mostly in the aroma and the aftertaste. At times it even reminds me of a Taiwanese high mountain oolong. However, it has lighter body and silkier mouthfeel than those tend to have.

Smelling the dry leaves in preheated kyusu produced an association of poppy seed pastries, and some flowers. The latter were then complemented by a sort of meaty aroma after the rinse. The colour of the liquor is fairly light, but still bright green as you’d expect. It tastes crisp and fresh with good amount of bitterness and very little astringency. There are notes of rapini, green apple, and distinctive sugar sweetness.

Lin Xia Sheng Tai – last tea for the day. I found it to be an interesting mix of the unusual and the expected. It has a great texture and a layered taste, both of which I enjoyed quite a bit. The tea didn’t strike me as being overly complex at any point, yet there are a lot of associations that came up over the course of a session. However, at this price and with its specific character, it may only appeal to a fairly small set of people. I may be wrong about that though. In any case, anyone who values texture and likes their sheng bitter and herbaceous – this is a tea for you.

Dry leaves exude a sweet aroma with the characteristic gasoline note and some cranberry in the background. After the rinse, I detect more of a woody scent with a distinct root vegetable note.

The rinse starts out super thick and oily, with a metallic and honey-like taste. Soon afterwards, the bitterness appears. Even though it is strong, I never found it overpowering. The astringency is also in check. The tea taste very “clean” and has notes of camphor, ammonia, asparagus, almond skins, green wood, pear, and alcohol – quite a diverse range of flavours with some unusual suspects. There is not too much sweetness present, but I do get a light honey fragrance throughout the session.

The aftertaste is then sweeter of course, but not too much. It is throat-cooling and displays notes of artichoke, butter, ash, passion fruit, and some sort of spicy wood.

As I mentioned already, one of the main highlights here is the mouthfeel. It is thick and mouth-watering with a bubbly, slick texture to the liquor. This Jinggu tea doesn’t fall behind much in the cha qi department either. I found the energy to be all encompassing and rushy, complemented by a chest-warming sensation.

Among my hei cha samples that constitute my initial exploration of the category beyond ripe pu’er, I still have a couple without a note. In an effort to remedy that, here are my thoughts on this Liu Bao.

It doesn’t have much aroma either in dry or wet form. However, these kinds of teas are rarely fragrance focused. The taste is sweet and savoury with a bitter finish. It is a combination that reminds me of Sugabow gyokuro karigane hojicha and dark roast coffee. The green aspect is still present, especially in the somewhat astringent, grassy, and nutty aftertaste. Later steeps are smoother with some woodiness, a warming, peaty finish and slightly sour aftertaste. There is a bit of an aged sheng note in the aroma too.

There is not that much taste complexity overall, but it is a nice tea to drink and it definitely has aging potential. I also enjoy the somewhat creamy mouthfeel in spite of the average thickness. I sense a decent amount of caffeine and a sort of clarifying energy during and after the session.

This Kabusecha is a delicate and well balanced tea with little bitterness or astringency and a velvety mouthfeel. It doesn’t seem have any sharp or particularly strong characteristics, although the sweetness can be quite interesting at times – it reminds me of both Yi Wu shengs (Yi Shan Mo) and light-roasted high mountain Taiwanese oolonsg (Shan Lin Xi). It’s a great morning tea for days with savoury breakfast; my default choice for morning tea with sweet breakfast are blacks.

The aroma emerging from the preheated kyusu bears resemblance to pastries, rye bread, pollen, and cut grass. It gets weaker throughout the session though. Taste is crisp, bready, tart, and savoury, with a decently strong spinach note. It transforms into a sweet, floral, and marine aftertaste.

I rarely get to try a sheng this fresh, but after more than a month long journey from China to Ontario, I felt compelled to give it some time to rest and only broke into the cake I got today. Having been hit by a car while cycling earlier today (I came out lucky with no serious injuries), I won’t remember this day for the tea that’s for sure.

In any case, the tea didn’t leave a very strong impression on me in this first encounter of ours, I will try reserve my judgement though. It may need more time to show its true character. At the moment, it is quite crisp, grassy, sweet, and salty, with notes of seaweed and tropical fruits. The body is medium thick with a powdery and slightly astringent mouthfeel.

White Crow is a delightfully aromatic white tea that I am almost positive will age gracefully. It brews quite dark for a fresh tea, but it’s still safely within the white tea category.

The dry leaf aroma is nice – sweet and floral, but the real party for the scent receptors comes after the rinse. There is a kind of nutty, spicy, floral note I am familiar with from Silver needle teas. Underneath it, there hides a complex bouquet reminiscent of burnt food, roasted corn, bread toast, black cherry, cranberry, and others.

The liquor tastes more savoury than it smells. It has a very nice tartness as well as flavours of wood, nutmeg, apricot, light hay, and honeysuckle. After swallowing, one is presented with a strong expansive aftertaste that comes with a cooling and drying sensation predominately in the throat. It has a sweet & sour character with a noticeable muscovado sugar flavour. Texture-wise, the liquor feels quite light in the mouth and is somewhat bubbly I’d say.

I still have a couple of samples from derk to go through, this being one ticked off the list today. It’s a nice semi-aged tea that’s different from the ones I own in a similar age category. Instead of being herbaceuos or fruity, it is more on the nutty and bitter side.

In the aroma, I could smell some wet storage notes, but this didn’t translate into the taste. Instead, the profile was sweet, vegetal, bitter, and nutty (walnut skin, chestnut). The aftertaste was nicely warming with a touch of a camphor note to it.

I also quite liked the mouthfeel, something I often find to be a weak point of these kind of teas. It was soft and active with good viscosity, but felt light in the mouth at the same time. I also got a hint of a sedating sort of cha qi.

In my recent CS order, I added this sencha. It is much more expensive than your average sencha, but based on the description I wasn’t sure why exactly was it special. Having tried it now, I can see why its uniqueness may be hard to convey in words.

There are no specific aspects of it that are very unusual on their own I would say. The tea has an aroma of freshly cut grass, while the taste profile has a strong umami, nice grassy sweetness, good minerality and almost no harsh bitterness or astringency. It is very elegant and balanced, yet strong tasting. There are many fleeting notes to be uncovered, let me just mention lime and pine nuts, others escape my mind now.

The aftertaste is long, grassy, expansive and cooling with an interesting returning fragrance. Later on it gets a bit more spicy and herbaceous. Texture wise, the tea is viscous, thick and buttery, plus I get a good body warming sensation.

All in all, this is just such an elegant and tasty green tea that I think it might even be worth the high price for special occasions. The fact that it lasts almost twice as long as an average sencha just underscores that.

Here’s a yearly report on my Crimson Rooster cake. About one year after I got it, there are no off fermentation flavours left as far as I can tell. I can detect more umami, woody and creamy notes than I remember, and overall the complexity seems to have improved. I really like the cocoa bitterness present, which doesn’t seem to have faded since a year ago. The aftertaste then has a good nuttiness to it. As far as the aroma is concerned, a bit of leather and spices appears in the dry leaf smell, while the wet leaf aroma has notes of cream, chicken meat, clean wet earth on top of the ones in my previous note.

As far as I can remember, I haven’t had a purple (Zi Juan) varietal made in sheng before. I’ve had a the Purple Beauty green tea, which although I found very unique, I couldn’t quite get behind; and then also some Kenyan white and oolong teas. I am also still yet to try a black tea from this varietal, which I think should work well. In spite of my inconsistent reception of Zi Cha, I decided to get a whole cake (albeit a small 100g one) of Dragon Blood, aiming to try to understand it better than a couple of sessions from a sample allow for. And after my first session with the tea today, I am glad I did. The profile is reminiscent of Purple Beauty, but the overall experience is more positive.

The dry leaves smell of forest floor, smoke – a sign of things to come. On the other hand, the aromas emerging from the wet leaves are so unique I can’t place them at all. The scent is a bit cedar/forest like, a bit like an aged sheng, but also unlike anything I know. Maybe if I were familiar with the dragon blood incense, I could make a better comparison. The aroma in the empty cup is then very woody and sweet, which matches the aftertaste to a certain degree as one would expect.

The rinse is already very flavourful – citrusy, mushroomy, and metallic. It has a frothy texture and a buttery aftertaste. The first infusion has the profile of an aged sheng, with a good sweetness and a strong note of citrus zest. It is very smooth and viscous initially, then a little powdery, and sandpaper-like after swallowing, without much astringency. Some astringency does however appear from 2nd infusion onward. The taste profile then becomes more woody and smoky, with flavours of conifer trees, carambola, copper, bok choy, and charcoal roasted aubergine. There is a strong woody sweetness throughout that persists into the aftertaste, which also displays notes of licorice root and pine needles.

I was also happy to learn that the tea has a strong defocusing cha qi, which is exactly what I needed today. It helps me fight some mild paranoia and makes me want to dance at the same time.

Song pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEOYY4rLJrE