Yunnan Sourcing

So confused… i’ve had this tea for sure before AND written about it..and yet i’ve got 0 tasting notes for this? grrrr….

I have had this three times now. I don’t know what I did, but the first time I made it, it was excellent.

I agree with what my mom said “It’s mild.”

It has a little bit of a chocolate taste and some dark fruit. I’ll try more leaf next time and see how that goes.

Bought 50g of this a while back and am just now getting around to trying it. It is relatively good. There is a slight malt note. There are some chocolate notes. Also, I’d swear I’m getting a roast note. I don’t think this tea was roasted so maybe I’m misinterpreting something else. Overall I like the tea. As to is it as good as Verdant’s? I don’t think I’ve ever tried Verdant’s so I don’t know.

Steeped this one time in a 16oz Teavana Glass Perfect Tea Maker/Gravity Steeper with 3 tsp leaf and 200 degree water for 3 min.

Sample from the puerh plus TTB

Rinsed this once. 1st steep tasted like cream with a hint of apricot and brewed up a light green yellow. I could smell smoke coming off the next steep, but there was only a bit of acrid flavor in the cup. A bit of ruddy color started to come out here. 3rd steep came out just slightly bitter, it was more of just the feel of the astringentcy on the tongue than anything else. I also got a strange hint of melon flavor in there. The bitterness backs off on the 4th steep and the tea ends up mellow and sweet. It continues to steep up like this with increasing steep times and temperature until it quits around steep 13.

As it is now I’d say this tea while not terribly exciting, was pleasant. Probably a good thing to absentmindedly drink.

Allan’s review of this was pretty spot on. This tea is weak. It still beats all of the bagged black tea that I have tried though.

This is an excellent puerh tea. It was quite sweet tasting at the start. A little bitterness crept in after a couple of steeps but didn’t last. Didn’t really pin down the sweet note but perhaps one of the flavors on the steepster page would fit. I think both fruity and honey fits although it was not as sweet as honey, I think it did have a bit of the taste. As far as rating this tea I will make a comparison. It is really quite good but not as good as the 2014 Yunnan Sourcing Autumn Bing Dao for about the same price. It is a good tea overall. It had a very thick tea liquid at first, what you would call a thick mouth feel I guess. This is one I hope ages well because I bought the whole cake. Brewed this in my new Japanese Shiboridashi.

I steeped this tea twelve times in a 120ml Shiboridashi with 8g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min, and 2 min.

Man I hate losing tasting notes! Not sure what happened this time. I started recording notes in a text editor since Steepster doesn’t save notes in progress, but I could swear I saved the tasting note and thus thought it safe to delete the one saved in my text editor.
\-_-/
So working from memory…

Steep times: 10,10,15, 30,30, 60, 60.
The leave, both dry and wet, smell amazing! Toasted barley, sweet candy/gummies and fruit.
The taste is so consistent I stopped trying to right anything from steep 3 to 7 which could almost be deemed boring, but every single cup is absurdly delicious. Very robust tastes of chocolate and fruit with a lovely toasty backdrop.
When I initially saw just how much I’d purchased before tasting it I began to worry that I might have made a mistake. Now I think I didn’t quite buy enough.

I’m having the 2016 spring version of the tea. I’ve had it a few times now. I prefer the light roast over the plain version. It’s definitely a bit different to me, but is pretty tasty.

It has roasty wine, pepper taste. That’s about all I can come up with.

My first tea from Nan Jian. They’re more well known for their tuos, but based on the price and interesting description I threw this one in another order from YS.
Still on the young side, which is reflected in early steepings, but steeps a nice dark orange. The first eight or so infusions aren’t really anything too memorable. No bad notes, just a general youngish sheng profile similar to other Ai Lao material I’ve had which I generally find boring if not outright unpleasant. Longer, hotter steepings later on are when this tea shines however. This cake has by far the strongest sweetness I’ve ever found in a sheng. I was shocked the first time I had this and hit cup number 9 or 10 to find it unbelievably sweet. Up until recently I had never found a cake that had the kind of in your face huigan others have noted, but this was crazy. I’ve had puers with sweet notes, but nowhere near this prominent or that only came out so late on. This makes me want to try a few other cakes I have seen described as having a barbecue smell and strong sweetness. That’s a strange description, but pretty spot on with the aroma when I first opened up this wrapper. It was a very strong, distinct smell of barbecue.

I have to agree with the YS description—this is a unique tea with a challenging flavor profile. I can tease out some pepper, nuts, and chocolate flavors but the overall body and mouth feel is unlike anything I’ve tasted. Maybe a hint of Rou Gui and mountain stream water when you hold the tea in your mouth for a bit.

Overall, it’s very tasty and intriguing—a good choice when you want to sit down and focus your attention.

This is a strong and bitter sheng. It was noticeably bitter for at least the first eight steeps. It was fairly smooth though. Somewhere around the eighth or tenth steep more of a sweet note emerged. I don’t think I would use the term apricots with this sheng. Despite it’s bitterness I did enjoy the tea. I think it is a good quality product and am hoping another six months of age will take the edge off.

I steeped this tea fourteen times in a 70ml teapot with 5.7g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min, 2 min, 2.5 min, and 3 min. I think this tea would have gone twenty steeps but I did use a lot of leaf.

Ho Hum. Just another in a long line of delicious old/wild arbor black teas from YS. This is not raisiny and malty like the Yi Wu mountain Assamica tea, with more brightness on the tongue, some caramel sweetness and a little bit of that leather/cherry flavor that you find in Keemuns. Amenable to all kinds of brewing approaches with absolutely no harshness.

Finishing this off today. It was my second favorite of around 8 spring black teas I got from YS. First being the classic Laoshan.

Malty, caramelly, sweet potato, and a hint of chocolate are what I’m getting.

Drank this delicious tea earlier today. I also prefer this western a lot more. Brings out lots of the chocolate taste. This one also had some dark fruit stuff going on—mostly raisins.

Today was a good day. Recorded a new song. Had a successful appointment. And drank some good tea.

Dry leaves smell smoky with a hint of plums. Wet leaves smell of prunes with a hint of smokiness. 10s rinse with a 10 minute rest.

Steep/Time: Notes
1/10s: Sweetness immediately apparent with a bit of astringency. Probably should have steeped 8s, but it’s not at all over powering. Very interesting flavor. There’s a sweet smelling pipe tobacco that the taste of this tea reminds me of with the addition of a slight floral note. A very good first cup.

2/10s: Smokiness a little more upfront with the sweetness still in the background. Smoked prunes and tobacco. Bit of sweetness at the back of the throat with this cup.

3/10s: The tea is taking on a wonderful fruity, slightly grassy aroma. Less crisp, but still has the sweet aftertaste.

4/15s: Same as previous, but with the sweet, crisp finish again. No cha qi to speak of so far, though there was quite a break between the first and second steeping.

5/20s: Sweetness has faded, though the finish is still crisp/dry. Tastes lightly of grass and moss now.

6/30s: Wow, the grass/moss taste is still there, but this tea is pretty much done for sweetness I think.

7/40s: Same as above. No cha qi in sight.

Started out nice, but petered out really quick.

Silver needle white teas are slowly growing on me as my tea palate develops. I use to think white teas in general had very little flavor. Now, I am able to pick up on the flavors and recognize and know how the tea is supposed to taste.

The dry leaves smell really nice. Slightly fruity, slightly sweet, with a hint of hay. The wet leaves tend to smell a bit more like wet hay. Not as appetizing.

But the good news is that brewed up, this tea retains more of the qualities you get from the dry leaf. Slightly sweet, minimal hay flavor. While this tea isn’t something that pops and demands your attention, it IS a very smooth and tasty drinker. I found myself drinking this way faster than I do most teas. And not because I wanted to be rid of it either. This is a tea I could absentmindedly drink all day and be very satisfied. A good daily drinker.

Wow, I like this significantly more western style. It was really tasting like sweet potatoes and bread when I gong fu (panda’ed) it. Now, the chocolate is there and still some sweet potato and bread flavor, but a better amount.

Drinking my second cake of this lovely tea now. Until now I have enjoyed every cup of this. This black tea really has its own personality, with a very distinct smell that I associate to dried fruits such as raisins or apricots. A strong smell for a black tea. It does not easily become bitter, and the cup is nicely full-bodied. This isn’t a ‘fancy’ tea really, it isn’t complex or very refined, but it’s just very enjoyable, every time. And the cake shape makes it a lot of fun!

I almost finished this packet and never wrote about it. I got a 50g sample of this about 4-5 months ago, and it’s about gone, so this must be the 8th or so session I’ve had with it.

This tea smells and tastes powerfully of dirt, or maybe wet stone. Seriously, drinking this has deeply warped my tastes, so that I no longer consider heavy humid storage to be a deal-breaker defect.

The leaf is dark brown nondescript lumps and bits strongly reminiscent of shu.

I used 5.5 g of leaf with a “standard gaiwan” and near-boiling water. 1 rinse of ~10 sec followed by short infusions, a couple each of 5, 10, 15s. The rinse smells of dirt, the gaiwan lid of wet stone. The taste changes from dirt to wet rocks over the first few infusions, and there is a slight mouth coating that becomes a little fruity. By about the 5th or so steep it’s getting pretty astringent, and soon the dark soup begins to lighten up some. There is some definite pore-opening perspiration-inducing power with this tea. Even at the 10th or 12th steep, each cup raises a fresh sweat. Eventually it becomes light-copper, stone-tasting, slightly sweet astringent water, after maybe 14-15 steeps.

I don’t think this tea has the staying power of some older raw puer, but on the other hand I have not tried brewing 8g of it at once. This tea is probably worth trying just as an example of 20-year-aged tea, but might be too humid for some. I’m interested in finding an example of the type that has drier storage, I think.

This tea is very good in my opinion. It definitely reminds me of the two earlier productions with more fermentation flavor. There was a fair amount of fermentation flavor to this tea. But it was not unpleasant or fishy. It lasted maybe four or five steeps and then was largely history. I won’t disagree with the reviewer who noticed a dark bittersweet cocoa note although I really didn’t notice that myself. I noticed a bitter taste at first slowly turning to sweet. Even a fruity note in later steeps. I really enjoyed this tea.

I steeped this tea twelve times in a 150ml gaiwan with 12.2g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min, and 2 min. The tea was not done at twelve. I could have kept going but want to move onto something else.