white2tea

Gongfu!

Late night 2016 Trap Bird session from yesterday, with a new teacup; caught a fun reflection in it during the session! Very smooth, clean shou with great overall sweetness and a warm and inviting quality – earthy, but fruity as well as a little syrupy; like brown sugar raisins or even a more cooked down and dense stone fruit like a nectarine?? No sharpness/tang, obvioisly – just the sweetness.

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-mcnV3AvtI/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtQYsQsf26g

(This is such a fun song; the kind of that creeps on you with how catchy/sticky the hook is)

Sipping away at a Western style mug of this one currently. It’s going to be my last tea of the night; I just wanted something to drink while working on some reviews and Shou actually makes me sort of sleepy so it works as a before bed tea too.

I’m struck by how clean and smooth this one is, with a really thick and almost syrupy seeming mouthfeel. The balance between sweet and umami notes is also really nice; I can see it being even better if you were Gong Fu-ing as well! Main note I pick up on is wood, like cedar/pine. However, other notes are a sort of ‘semi salted’ Earth note, sweet smoke, and raisins/prune. More of those raisin notes in the top of the sip than anywhere else, with the more umami aspects coming out in the finish.

It almost seems like this would be a waste of the tea itself, but I can imagine this making a bomb as fuck soup stock or broth. Toss in like a handful of onions/shallots, some celery, carrot, pinch of brown sugar, and firm cubed tofu and you’d have an awesome dish. If I end up liking the rest of my sample Gong Fu enough to cake this, then I’ll try that out – but if I’m just gonna be working with this sample amount then I’ll leave this as an idea untested…

I was really interested in this tea, and lucked into a sample via a kind Redditor.

It has lightly woody camphor and pine notes, and a honeyed, fruity, yeasty funk like a good Belgian ale. Low bitterness, low-moderate astringency. Signs of it’s youth have mostly faded save for a few green spots in the spent leaves. Reminds me a bit of Repave, but fruitier and more accessible.

Full review on the blog https://themellifiedcup.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/white-2-teas-200x-wuliang/

I haven’t tried many white teas, but I very much enjoyed this one. It has a very floral aroma with a sweetness and thickness which both give it qualities of a black tea to me. The taste lingers for a while after you sip it. Definitely packs a punch and reveals nuances in the taste as you brew it — gongfu style in this case.

I tried it as a sample. The operative words for this tea are smooth and inoffensive. Way to many young puerhs that I had tried were acid-like in their astringency and sourness and required the unfailing precision in their steeping time and temperature to be enjoyed. This Daily Drinker is the opposite: it is smooth and very forgiving.

The tasting profile is actually pretty typical for young shengs and not complicated at all -floral, cranberry, some honeyed sweetness – with the commendable long aftertaste.

Now, for the bad part: this tea tastes very generic and fairly boring and does not produce many steeps. It is not going to turn anybody off but it will not wow anyone either. There are simply way to many puerhs that actually have some character and that’s why I will never return to Daily Drinker.

Snoozefest first opened up pretty strong to the grass and vegetal-like tasting notes, and showed signs of being very fresh. It later turned thicker as its tasting notes became complex with a certain degree of depth. Towards the end of the session, this tea tapered off very quickly and showed signs that it was still humid from pressing, and needs to rest.

You can read my full review here…

https://www.theoolongdrunk.com/single-post/2018/01/04/2017-Snoozefest-by-White2Tea

Swinedog 76 is a new 2017 fall tea released by White2Tea, and is described as bitter and powerful. Well, this would be a correct assessment because Swinedog 76 sure carried one hell of a punch, and was bitter throughout the session. Despite its bitterness, I could see where this tea would be favored by a lot of puer enthusiasts, mainly because of the punch and body feels that it carries.

You can read my full review here…

https://www.theoolongdrunk.com/single-post/2018/02/05/2017-Swinedog-76

Relatively herbal but not too bitter, able to finish 8oz without getting tired of it. It’s a pretty good, basic travel tea and is good with sweet or savory food.

This tea lived up to its namesake. It very clearly tasted like cream and Brandy, and if steeped too long became incredibly bitter. I found after several steeps the bitterness actually increased. It tastes best with sweets, and has a strong and astringent taste reminiscent of alcohol.

Steeped gaiwan style.

Didn’t care for this one at first, so I tried it grandpa style and thought it was tons better. I recommend trying it grandpa style if you thought it was lacking.

This is currently my favorite shou. I agree with another reviewer, this tea is definitely approachable, despite the description on the website. I will be buying a cake of this in the future.

The last of the samples I’ve ordered from white2tea. So far I’ve not been impressed with any of their teas, but perhaps my mistake was ordering fresh 2017 spring productions instead of going for teas from 2016. Anyway, this one has some age on it so it should not suffer from being too young at least. I’ve only tried around half a dozen or so semi-aged raw pu’ers so far as I’ve been quite content with drinking and sampling young raws for the time being, so bear in mind that my experience and palate when it comes to these teas is still quite limited.

I used 12 grams in my 180ml teapot made from clay from Dehua. The sample smelled extremely dank when I received it, which is why I’ve given it several months in my pumidor to air out. Fortunately this worked and I didn’t note any off notes in the smell or taste during this session. I rinsed the leaves for ten seconds and let them rest for five minutes before I began brewing proper. I did a total of nine steeps, for 10s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 75s, 2 min. and 3 min. The wet leaves have a scent of pinewood and bark. Perhaps slightly wet or decaying in the beginning, but it moves toward more fresh wood over the course of the steeps, eventually resembling warm wood stacked beside the fireplace.

The first steep surprised with its honey-like sweetness. It wasn’t nearly as intense as some of the sweetest young raws I’ve had, but definitely the sweetest of the handful of semi-aged shengs I’ve tried. The sweetness was accompanied by a dryness I’m accustomed to with every aged sheng I’ve tried. Note that this dry character does not often mean the tea is actually drying as well, although some steeps with this tea were a little bit of that as well. The mouthfeel was quite interesting and something you definitely took note of. The second steep was still quite sweet. It had now moved from honey to somewhere between honey and apricot. The dry finish was naturally still there as well.

The sweetness was gone by the third infusion, with the tea beginning to taste a bit sour now. There was also some bitterness in the finish now as well. So far the mouthfeel had remained the same. The next steep provided very typical semi-aged flavors. Dry, smoky, a bit bitter and prickly on the tongue. After a few small cups, the tea starts tasting a bit creamy. It got even creamier in the fifth steeping, with more pronounced flavors across the board, including the bitterness, but it was by no means any sort of bad kind of bitterness.

The tea started getting better in the sixth brew. The sweetness from the beginning was now starting to come back while the dryness was beginning to fall off. While the seventh steep was clearly a strong extraction, the flavors were beginning to taper off. The taste was a basic aged dry bitter taste. The tea was still quite drinkable though. It was slightly refreshing, but the dry finish also demanded you to keep drinking more. Even at this point the tea still retained most of its original mouthfeel.

The eighth steep was pretty basic now. The tea had a sort of slightly sweet woody taste. The mouthfeel was nice, slick, actually now somewhat oily. I actually quite liked this steep and it was possibly my favorite of the bunch. I could have possibly extended the brewing time for steep nine by more than just a minute as it ended up being slightly sweet, but clearly quite watery now. However, I thought that this tea was pretty much done by this point so I decided to end it there.

This tea was pretty decent. Clearly not made from high-end material, but not low-grade stuff either. As far as semi-aged teas go, this was actually the best one I’ve had so far, although not something I liked terribly much either. A couple of steeps were pretty good, but overall this is not a tea I would purchase for myself. However it is something that I can recommend for someone who is looking for a semi-aged sheng that doesn’t break the bank to try. Some people may enjoy drinking it now, but with further aging I would expect the bitterness to gradually die down and the sweetness to become even more pronounced. I think the price for this one is right, so if you like it go for it.

NOTE This is based of an old sample so I won’t do a regular note for it

I liked this tea back when I bought it, but god it has come along really well.

The tea has an underlying vegetal note when dry with a little bit of sweetness. As soon as you introduce humidity you get an intense scent of maple (that chocolatey/caramel spectrum of maple) and some vegetal that resembles olive oil and this evolves into a more floral version of it as you keep steeping.

The taste is very similar to the scent, perhaps less vegetal in taste than the scent and you get a lot of that oily sensation together with the vegetal note that reminds me of olive oil, but the taste play between that savory note and that rich sweetness. The taste follow the trait of the scent, evolving into a floral version with each steep.

I can’t say that I recall how it tasted when I first tried it, but I have to say that it is thicker than I remembered.