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I like this tea quite a bit. Good complexity with the blend bringing an interesting session. This is really what I’d expect in just an everyday shou for me.

The cake has a mellow aroma – hardwood and molasses, no funk now while there was maybe a touch at arrival.

Taste is very multi-dimensional with ginseng and dark chocolate with more bitterness early on. Personally, I love some bitterness in shou and I’d say this is a fairly midline bitterness, nowhere near the Hai Lang Hao LaoMan’E ripe. Middle steeps are more or less chocolate while later ones are more like that antique shop taste of aged shou.

This has a nice warming energy to it and steeps for a good time as well.

All in all, I’m happy with this. If you liked the 2017 Crimson Rooster, grab this.

You know how sometimes you’re feeling kind of bleh and know tea would help? Yeah, that was last night. It had been raining all day but it was hot and I had a dry throat.

I pulled Whispering Sunshine from out and it was perfect. Cucumber, lemongrass, and some vegetal flavor later on. Good balance of sweetness and bitterness. Great qi. I was really feeling it around the jaw and inner ear, just warmth, lightness, faint tingling.

Normally, I’m not in the proper mood for this tea, I have some maocha from Hidden Song that I prefer to day to day drinking as it has more bitterness, but last night this was a 10/10. I can see why Glen takes his hiking.

Finally, the wait is over! These are my first impressions of Yi Wu Rooster! I heard about this from Scott back in December and I’ve been impatiently waiting for it to be released. Technically, I got this three days ago but to my parents’ house not my apartment so it’s had a small chance to rest.

This is everything I wanted it to be! Dry leaf smells crisply sweet and oddly floral with a classic Yiwu wood profile and a hint of pile. The tea soup is perfectly balanced with a lot of sweetness and bitterness, had obvious Yiwu character (even from the beginning). There is also a lot of floral flavor that emerges later on and smells amazing in the cup and cha hai. I do get some flavors that remind me of a good pour over coffee but disregard this if you haven’t had that kind of coffee specifically. I also get some duiwui throughout the session but it isn’t fishy or unpleasant to me. If you love Crimson Rooster then this is for you! It is much more complex and maybe not as much an intro into shou as Rooster King (which is super friendly) but for a premium shou this is exactly what I want!

Very tasty! The dry leaf has an interesting smell, reminding me of fried doughnuts. The texture of this tea is definitely the highlight for me – super silky and buttery! Flavor is nice – floral with hints of bitterness and herbs but overall sweet. I’d assume that backing off temperature would reduce the hint of bitterness and would add sweetness but I liked it as it was. I chose to drink first as this because it was the cheapest of the high mountain oolongs I bought but I was not disappointed at all!

Shiuwen reminded everyone on the last live stream that reviews help so I’m going to revisit a bunch of teas and post the reviews. I managed to catch the first baozhong livestream a month or so ago and it was so interesting I bought the box with 5 baozhongs before it ended and I hadn’t even had a light oolong I liked before this purchase!
Only two of them are regular items as far as I know and being competition style this one is floral, buttery (texture and to an extent taste as well), and has a hint of citrus which really makes the tea more enjoyable for me. This handles boiling water very well, which Shiuwen recommends, and I tend to always use boiling water so that works out well. It also holds up for plenty of infusions. All of the baozhongs are distinct but this one is as enjoyable as the competition winning ones.

First ever darjeeling – Goomtee Estate from Yatra Tea Company.
So, going into this I’ve never really had Indian tea before so I can only really compare this to Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese teas. I made this two ways – gongfu like I would a Chinese black and as the instructions said: 2.5g to 177ml for 3-4 minutes.
Gongfu – it tasted like a blend of a traditional Yunnan black and a Yunnan Yue Guang Bai white tea but with more fruitiness.
Per the instructions, it tasted kind of vegetal and kind of fruity and the empty cup smelled faintly of gummy bears.

I preferred it gongfu, but that’s probably just what I’m expecting to do when I make tea. All in all, I’m happy with this purchase, especially at half off during a flash sale.