What-Cha

A little goes a long way!

So, I got this Tie Guan Yin because I wanted to see how well it matched another Tie Guan Yin I’d had previously. I actually think What-Cha’s Ding Dong Oolong matches what I was looking for better, but not because THIS tea is bad.

The tea comes rolled into little dry balls. I made the mistake of adding too many to my teapot, and when I came back to look at it—leaves, leaves everywhere! Almost spilling out of my diffuser. The little balls had rehydrated into HUGE tea leaves. I felt a bit put-out I’d used too much, but I recovered the leaves and will use them for a second pot later…I’ll just use fewer of them. (Still surprised how big they are…two or three teaspoons of dry ended up being split between FIVE small teacups when I took them out to save for later.)

Anyway, the tea itself has a wonderful floral aroma. I steeped a little longer than I intended to…I was aiming for 2 minutes, I think it ended up 3 or 4. Didn’t harm the tea, it had no bad notes and no bitterness, just ended up stronger than I’d intended.

It’s a good tea. I use sugar with my tea, so I don’t know what it’s like without it, but it definitely matches the description—vegetal with sour finish. Not an unpleasant sour. And the floral smell/taste is great. It’s a bright, cheerful tea, if I can say that. :)

The leaf on this one is really distinctive. I know that silver needle tea is supposed to be long, thin, and needle-like, but these look like tea leaves on steroids! The buds are easily 1-1.5 inches long and covered in a fine fuzz.

Dry, they smelled like sweet hay, with notes of lychee. Wet, they smelled a bit smoky but still sweet and hay-like.

I decided to go gentle on the tea and used water heated only to 70°C. However, that wasn’t really the right choice; I got notes of hay, peaches, and maybe a little strawberry and fruit leather, but the tea was in general so mild and unassuming that I kept on going “I can’t really taste anything! I can’t really taste anything!”

The tea was pale not only in taste but also in colour. All of the steeps were generally a pale wheat/straw colour. Gentle, but not that striking.

I brewed the same variety of tea a few days later using water just off the boil, but that was pretty similar. A little hay, a little smoke. Maybe a deeper, richer scent. Oh, and the colour of the tea was a bit darker too, sort of a deeper straw shading into orange. But still, the flavour was kinda hiding around in the background rather than dancing on centre stage on my tongue.

I will need to play around with this a bit more to see how to get the best flavour out of it. More leaf? Longer steep times? Different gaiwan? So many variables.

Full review at http://booksandtea.ca/2016/03/comparing-two-types-of-silver-needle-white-tea/

A very nice, kind of sweet tea, with a flavor profile that starts with strong notes of hazelnut, and after several steeps is more like a roasted green tea . And all variations in between.

Tea that is supposed to taste like sticky rice? Count me in!
And this tea did not disappoint! A strong sticky rice flavor, that continued to be there after several steeps.
I liked it so much that I put the spent leaves in a water bottle in the fridge overnight, resulting in guess what refreshing sticky rice flavored water!

this is definitely out of the ordinary. will review better after another few steeps. out of time but wanted to make it known that i have imbibed the dark tea!

I really like this. I was alternating pots of tea (over the course of a few days) between this and What-Cha’s Assam Heritage Green Tea and the Taiwan Green Dong Ding Oolong, and this hit a good balance between the two of those. I use sugar in my tea, and this tasted like a bit like white chocolate to me. The package says “gentle nut tones” which I agree with. It’s a little bit savory, as opposed to floral or sweet or fruity, but it’s not at all astringent.

I think I’ll eventually add this to list of regular-buys.

My first steep of my new batch had a slight floral scent, and a somewhat nutty apricot-like taste. Second steeping the nutty taste was gone and apricot was stronger.

I like how the scents/tastes are distinct and change so much between steepings. You won’t necessarily get the same thing as you tasted before, but what you get next will be good too.

Got a sample of this with my order of mystery teas. I’ve made two pots of it. First obviously had most of the taste, and I definitely enjoyed it. Second is a bit weaker (expected as I didn’t start out with much tea) but still good. I like it.

Very sweet (I tasted sweet corn), fragrant, and creamy, with a big, round mouthfeel. A little bit drying in the back of the throat at the finish. A seaweed-like savoriness came forward in the 2nd and 3rd steeps as the sweetness faded.

I drank this tea back-to-back with two other What-Cha green oolongs which don’t seem to be listed in Steepster. The Taiwan Ali Shan Jin Xuan tasted very clean and creamy with a sweet, nutty flavor from the start. The 3rd steep brought lots of floral and milkiness that I recognized from other Jin Xuans (particularly those from Tea Trekker, Maitre de Thé, and Teavivre). The Taiwan Ali Shan Qing Xin had a lovely round mouthfeel (I’d say even a slight bit more than the Thailand Winter Frost) and seemed the most floral in taste and aroma of the three teas.

I’ve learned that I prefer oolongs with more roasting and/or oxidation, but these have still been fun to taste!

I got this white tea with a bunch of other “Mystery Teas” I purchased from What-Cha.

At first glance, I wasn’t particularly excited about this tea. The tea is broken leaves and dust, and very floaty when I poured water into my pot…I had to stop pouring a few times because the particles were clogging my infuser’s holes. (Usually that only happens with certain chais…)

Once brewed, I expected it to be terribly bitter…I much prefer whole leaves since I have to abuse them more in general before they turn bitter.

But it’s actually it’s a completely serviceable tea. There is a tiny bit of bitterness, but I think that’s because I overbrewed it because I half-ignored it while cooking breakfast. I think I left it brewing over 5 minutes. It’s a white tea, and my tea came out looking red…if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it a lighter black tea. I expect if I don’t abuse it, the hint of bitterness wouldn’t have been there and my white tea wouldn’t have been a reddish color!

Overall, I’m not terribly excited by this tea, but it weathered my overbrewing better than I expected. I’d be perfectly content to drink this if it’s given me, and I expect to use up the rest of what I have.

I’ll leave another tasting note when I brew it under better circumstances. I did brew it once prior to this, and I recall liking it just fine.

I really enjoyed this. It is super resteepable, sweet, flavorful, and is good with and without honey.

Tasty and savory, but also sweet. I enjoyed drinking this one. I actually preferred the second steep. Normally I enjoy resteeping for cost effectiveness, but I still prefer the flavor of the first steep. I think I like greens a bit more mellowed out.

Got this in an assortment of mystery teas, and it’s delicious. It has a floral scent and taste. Smooth, no bitterness or astringency. I could drink it every day.

I got this tea in an assortment of “mystery” teas from What-Cha. I find this to be an…interesting tea. I didn’t pick up the fruity or citrus taste that the bag claims, or that other reviewers tasted. Instead, I got a taste that reminded me of the pu’ers I have tried, but much fainter. I’ve found I don’t like pu’er teas at all…but that taste in this green tea was actually interesting.

I do think I over-brewed this one a bit—either my water was too hot, or I let it steep too long. But I am enjoying it, because it’s interesting but not overpoweringly interesting! (Ha.)

I received this tea in a mystery tea assortment from What-Cha. This was the first tea I tried out of all the mystery teas I’d gotten, and I admit it made me do a double-take on the wisdom of buying so many mystery teas at once as my very first order.

At first glance after opening the bag, I was charmed by the idea of all these little white/yellow buds. They were interesting to look at, and faintly fuzzy. I hadn’t had any tea like this before. But when I brewed them, the tea was rather bitter, but not the type of bitterness one usually encounters with tea. It has a peculiar taste that I can’t identify, and you can actually smell the bitterness when you sniff the unbrewed tea in the bag. At the moment, I won’t recommend this tea to anyone, but I’ll probably do another brew at a lower temperature later and see if my opinion changes, as it’s entirely possible I just didn’t brew it properly. Or maybe I’ll use the buds as decoration in a glass jar, as they’re pretty to look at…

I received this in What-Cha’s mystery tea collection (among a bunch of other teas). I’ve been rotating through the other mystery teas, but I’ve already drunk all 50 grams of this, so I count this one as a winner, even if I’m undecided if it’ll go on my permanent “buy” list.

It brews well, only the teeny tinest bit of bitterness when I brewed it for a very long time with a large amount of leaves, but is head and shoulders above other unflavored black teas I’ve had.

The packaging says “Gentle brisk tones with a malt finish” and I won’t disagree with that.

I brewed 5g in 110ml Gongfu, the aroma was smokey for the first 3 steeps then went to a wet grass smell, but the taste was mild wood, wet sunflower seeds at back of tongue, but a lingering sweetness around, with some floral notes to it. Very silky and smooth tea.

This tea is very good! I got 8 steeps out of it! The quality of leaf is great. I found it to be very sweet for a tea as dark as this one. Very enjoyable.

Yum! I wasn’t sure what to expect because a 30 second infusion didn’t seem like enough to me, but it was perfect! Smooth, earthy cocoa, and a wee bit of fruitiness that lingers. Second infusion (45 seconds) is more malty and earthy, perfect for what I was looking for this morning! Though I don’t know if I could get on board with using big balls like this regularly, they’re cute and fun for once and awhile though.

Sooo I think this is the right tea. It has such a long name, lol. Anyway, I haven’t been doing many reviews lately because I feel kind of intimidated by everyone else’s eloquent reviews and kind of powerless to articulate what it is that I’m tasting in the tea. But I guess I’ll never get better without practicing . . .

I think this is the first real high-quality Darjeeling I’ve tried (most of the samples I’ve gotten over the past months have been Chinese tea) and I was worried I wouldn’t like the difference in flavor but apparently I really do. It somehow manages to be floral without being too astringent, and it’s great on its own or with milk and sugar. I didn’t steep it as long as recommended because it reached desired strength before that, which means it’ll probably be great for several steepings (though I haven’t got there yet). Of course, I don’t know how representative this is of other Darjeelings, so I guess I’ll have to look around for some more samples so I can compare them all. Thanks for sharing, JK7ray! :)

Now I just wish my neighbors would stop singing “eeeee” in such a pained tone of voice. I mean, what possible purpose can that serve? If it’s so important to sing “eeeee,” at least try to sound happy about it. Maybe I should go ahead and do some opera singing today just to make things even.

Balanced perfectly between sweet, savory, malty, fruited, and bready, without being overtly any one of those. That’s what I find so hard to describe about these Georgian teas, they’re very subtle in their complexity. This one brews to a lighter hue than some other the others but is still stout, flavorful, with hints of acidity but no bitterness or astringency.

Pleasant and mild with a slightly tannic aftertaste.