iliketea Send Message

This is fantastic for gongfu brewing. Starts off with a beautiful aromatic floral note (exactly what the dry tea smells like) and moves on to some chocolate malt flavors in a slow transition. Very nice tea, and when I stopped getting much out of the gongfu, I put it in my basket infuser and started brewing western style. This gives a much better western style flavor than just doing that. I’m real happy I picked this tea up.

The 2010 V93 are hitting a good sweet spot for taste. Nice rich cocoa flavor with some sweetness and pleasant flavors. This is a different tuo from a different source and different batch, so I wanted to compare the two. This one needs a little more time brewing to hit the same flavor notes but it still lasts nicely.

This is from a sample I bought on a whim from eBay. Nice loose cake with good looking leaves. Starts off a light straw color with mild flavor, hints of tobacco. Works some astringency into the picture with some interesting flavors. Dropped the temperature and kept the steeps short and it brought out some sweetness and took away a bit of the astringency. Much more pleasant this way. Need to experiment with this more.

This tea is nice sized whole leaves, unusual for an Assam. I underleafed a bit because the smokey smell from the bag was a bit overpowering. Even with that, it is all smoke and not much malt or other flavor. Might underleaf even more and add some regular Assam to it and that might make it more palatable. Not great but I’m still going to work through this.

This one has some nice sweet cocoa and vanilla notes to it, hints of pleasant earth. Overall a very nice quality shou. Got mine as a sample size sonI just grabbed a chunk that was close to the weight I wanted and it took it’s sweet time to really open, but it has been providing nice tea all along the way. This is one I’ll gladly buy the whole cake of.

Maybe I didn’t get a good example, but I’m glad it was just a sample. It is fairly mild all around, you can get some sweet cocoa notes, but there’s also some of that woody leafy taste hiding. All around very mild, so I don’t mind drinking it, but isn’t a sample I’m eager to finish.

I’m not a huge fan of Earl Grey, but this is a very enjoyable tea once in a while for me. There’s plenty of black tea flavor and a nice amount of bergamot to compliment it but not over power it. Nice and refreshing, I may not buy more but I wouldn’t complain about getting it in a sampler again.

This is a nice tea that is similar to a first flush Darjeeling, except there seems to be no issues with astringency when brewing at high temperatures. Nice a floral and a little fruity. A nice value too.

This is fairly tightly compressed so it is annoying to get a nice chunk off of the small size brick, but it is worth the effort. It brews up nice and thick and dark with a sweet flavir, a bit of cocoa in there. Not too complex and it doesn’t last too far, but it is a very nice shou for the price.

This is fantastic and right from the start you can tell it is from older material than the pressing date. Starts off with some sweet tobacco and earthy notes, slowly evolving to a greener pleasant mild astringency. This brews up real nice and is a bargain at the current price. Will probably be even more amazing in a few years.