Verdant Tea (Special)

Welcome to day 2 of little terri’s Ultimate sipdown Extravaganza!
I’m starting my day with a sipdown gongfu session with this tea, from last may’s reserve TOMC. This is a golden dian hong, rolled up into the bi luo style, with a dry aroma that is lightly earthy & creamy, & brings to mind milky milk chocolate. I put it in the hot little teapot & let it sit for a moment to warm the leaves, & the aroma bloomed into honey & canned condensed milk!
5G + 4oz (rinse) X 15/30/45/60 sec.
I like to do my gongfu sessions in rounds of 4, back to back, so that I can see the color of the steepings, side by side, & taste them that way as well.
This first round presented an immediate yunnan thick mouth, light cream & honey, & the 2nd cup was, “Oh yeah, Baby! Bring on the milky cocoa!” My favorite cups were 3 & 4, a rich & substantial cup of honeyed deliciousness, with a growing tongue tingle.
2nd round: 1.5/2/2.5/3 minutes
This set started out a deep mahogany, so rich, thick, & satisfying. As the bass note expanded, the cream faded away. In the final cup there was a hint of bitter wood.
3rd round 4/5 min
I only did 2 cups, as the color & flavor have faded down to a pale caramel color & I was ready for a change.
This brings my total to 397.

At my desk this morning, I already booked a wedding, fielded a series of emails, while drinking a cup of Organic Superfine Keemun from Teavivre. I don’t have anything new to say about it, so I’m just logging it here. During my breakfast break I drank a pot of Red-Tailed Hawk, & I’m sure I should also give it a separate review, but I really need to stay on track & get somethings (taxes) done!

Now I’m drinking this Hand curled Golden Buds Dianhong.
5G + 4oz blue lotus tiny porcelain teapot X 15/30/45 sec….etc

First off, this tea looks exactly like Yunnan Sourcing’s Pure Bud Bi Luo Chun, with roughly the same ratio of gold & everything. YS’s gold is slightly more golden in color, like just a hint of orange to the coloration. Neither one has much in to offer in the dry aroma department, but the wet aroma of these leaves is distinctly that of honey! That’s all I’m going to give by comparison of these 2 teas today, but I have enough of this one to drink it one more time, & I believe a full on comparison will be happening then! Just sayin’ :)

So, this tea IS delicious. It’s honey & cream, honey wheat toast. I think I’m on the 6th steep, & now back to my taxes.

I finally got a chance to dig into the TOMC bundle, & this was the first one I wanted to try, as I love Dian Hongs.
I didn’t take any notes, just brewed multiple steepings back to back. On each steeping I poured half into a tiny cup & the rest went into a pitcher. Those tiny cups cool quickly so that I could have a small sample of each. Then I went & sat down & relaxed, drinking from the pitcher. Then I started the process again, refilling the pitcher 3 times over the course of a few hours.
I can’t say that the flavor & aroma were all that different from Golden Fleece: rich & buttery, with a breadlike aroma, very croissant-like. Later there was a hint of chocolate, but it wasn’t really all that present to me. A tasty tea, a visual novelty, a pleasant relaxing break after a few hours of gardening.

Reminds me of CTG’s sticky rice pu’er tuo cha. I think I liked the wild arbor tea from this factory more than this one.

I’ve never seen a tea that was naturally blood orange before. The flavor is so rich! It’s almost like a wine. The tea lasted for over 10 steepings.

Very surprised with this one :) I had CTG’s Silver Needle and didn’t really love it. It had a similar flavor to black tea, which I don’t like. However… this one was so much more!! It was so beautifully floral! The buds were so soft and downy too. I’m glad Verdant is bringing me out of my shell and forcing me to drink things that aren’t oolong or greens!

Sipdown!
This is a good Keemun, but most certainly not a Reserve quality tea, nor the best Keemun that I had. Nevertheless, a good tea.

This is almost the final sipdown of this tea, from Verdant’s Reserve TOMC. I love Keemuns, and was highly expecting this to be a really special or extremely good one, it being on the Reserve Club list and all. But honestly this tea felt quite flat for a Keemun, and not even excellent for a black tea. It was like going to a highly anticipated concert of your favourite band, paying for front row tickets, and then discovering that the drummer fell ill, so he’s replaced by an OK-but-not-spectacular-guy, and the singer just broke up with her boyfriend, so she’s singing at an 80, not 110, and the sound is somehow off. Not way off, but just enough to make everything sound slightly muted.
This is an 80s tea that gets downgraded to a 70s tea because of its outrageous price tag (outrageous for the quality of the tea you get). For me Keemuns need that rich, sweet, slightly smokey flavour that brings to mind a great Jazz trumpet player playing in a small, smoke-filled club in Paris, and this tea just doesn’t have it.
F&M’s Keemun still takes first place in my cupboard.

This is a very good Qimen/Keemun (I just read Terri HarpLady’s notes and I agree with them entirely – the tea’s red liquor is smokey, but not overwhelmingly so, and brown sugar/caramel/maple like in sweetness), but I wasn’t floored by it. I have a F&M Keemun which is just as good, and so I’m a little surprised that this tea was part of Verdant’s TotM Reserved club. Once again – this is an excellent tea, for western and gong fu brewing, it just isn’t quite as unique as I expected it to be.

I made a solid western steep of this one & sipped it while adding more primer to my front porch, this time on the stair rail. The re-steep was nice too, & although I prefer this one gongfu, I just don’t have time for that kind of tea drinking right now.

Day 3 of the Qimen Quandery.j
So, yes, I’ve been hoarding this Qimen, which was an offering with the reserve TOMC, and which I bought extra of, & so it’s time to include it in the Keemun reviews. I have mostly drank this one using my tiny 4oz porcelain teapot, with short steepings, but I felt that in order to get a fair comparison to the other keemuns, I should use the same parameters.
And without a doubt, this one beats them all! First off, it’s very nicely smokey! The flavor of this one is so rich, even deep, with nice elements of incense, caramelized brown sugar, & chocolate pudding. The resteeps were also wonderful. I still have more drinking to do, but as it stands, I think my preferences are:
1 – this one
2 – organice superfine fragrant – teavivre
3 – either keemun hao ya or keemun grade 2 – both teavivre
4 – keemun grade 1 – Teavivre

On friday I plan to go to the London Tea Room to sample their keemun, which I haven’t had for quite some time, but which I recall had really nice brown sugar taste to it.

I’m having a bit of a qimen morning. I enjoy a good Qimen tea, & this one is pleasant enough. I divided the last of my stash, which was 4G. I put 1 tsp, which was roughly half of it, into a regular steeping basket, & put the other half into my little 4 oz teapot, which I only filled halfway with each round. The smell of the dry leaf is sweet, lightly smokey, & very nice, definitely more fragrant than any of the other Keemuns in my collection.

The gongfu session was first up. I was teaching, so I didn’t take notes, but I thoroughly enjoyed each cup, as the flavors gradually built up layers of flavor:Fruit, chocolate, creaminess, smoke, incense.
Definitely a very nice representation of what a Keeman can be, & what so few really are.

I don’t know how many steeps I ran through, but as the flavors died down, I made a regular mug of Qimen, steeped 4 minutes. I wanted to have a cup to compare with another Keemun in my collection, because I’m really trying to figure out if THIS one is really all that. I also thoroughly enjoyed it. All the flavors were there, it’s a nice rich cup. If I had more, I’d probably go a little heavier on the tea.

Some of the Keemuns I have in my collection are ok, & very drinkable, but not of this same profile. They tend towards the earthy profile, with maybe some brown sugar and/or smoke, but don’t have quite the nuances that this one has. And that’s the end of that. Sipdown.

This is one of the Reserve TOMC teas from April. I drank from these leaves a few weeks ago, along with the other teas in this collection, but didn’t really get around to writing anything.
I enjoy this variety of tea, & have several in my collection from various sources, from the smokey brown sugar variety to TeaVivre’s highly fragrant version that smells like roses to me.
To me, Keemun teas have a nice rich middle flavor, but not so much of a bass or top note, which is probably why they get blended with other teas, such as Assam (very bassy). Anyway, I enjoy them.
So…I’ve been trying to decide what makes this one so special that it deserves a place in the ‘reserve’ club. It is very nice, but I’m still not sure. I’m lousy at comparing teas, just like I’m not an expert in visual arts, but if I see a painting that I love, I know I love it. If I taste a tea I love, same thing.
This tea appears as small black strands with red tinges.
The dry aroma is rich, earthy, sweet, with a hint of chocolate
The moist smell (heated in hot empty Gaiwan) = brown sugar & light smoke
Wet it smells of all those things, plus caramel apples & cream.
My formula: 4G + 4oz (quick rinse) X 3 sec

I wish I could say that I’ve been taking notes on every steeping, but I didn’t. I also didn’t write those things down last time. I don’t always know how to describe things, but I can say it tastes like Keemun! The smokiness is very refined, not an in your face kind of smoke. It’s a nice, earthy, caramelized brown sugar & apple. There’s also a light floral quality, & a sweet incense quality. And there’s chocolate. Of course, these are all subtle, & I have just enough of this to try it one more time. I plan on making the last cup in an regular cup with a longer steep time. Basically, I’ll brew it the way I brew my other Keemuns, to see how it comes out!

This is from the Verdant Reserve TOMC. Due to it’s dark color, I originally thought this was going to be a Shu Puer, but all the other Yiwu’s I’ve tried have been Shengs, so I was a little unsure. Reading the tasting notes, there was no indication either. But the steeping instructions make it sounds more like a sheng. So I steeped. It is a Sheng, without a doubt. I’ve been enjoying it all afternoon. Here’s the basics of my tasting notes:
Dry appearance: Dark brown & gold leaf
Dry Aroma: Fresh bale of straw, loaded with mintiness, as if mint were growing in the field when it was mowed.
Wet aroma: Ohh..ahhh…sweet caramel apple!
3G + 4oz X 5 sec (plus 2 per each steep afterwards)

So the early steepings were nice, sweet, & aromatic. Definitely got a eucalyptus thing going on. There’s almost a genmaicha underflavor as well. This is probably the sweetest sheng I’ve tried, with a nice rounded out flavor, & I’m really digging the aromatic quality, which is tingling my tongue & my sinuses, & spreading throughout my system, along with a nice Chaqi feeling. One of the reasons I enjoy Sheng in the late afternoon is the sense of clarity it tends to bring on. Right now I’m feeling very clear headed, very ‘fresh’, revived & focused!