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From Hunan Province, China.
The dry leaves are little twisted loose golden thread balls with highlights of black. They smell like malt and honey.
I tried the liquor at 3 minutes at this brew temp and it wasn’t strong enough so I kept it in for 4:30. This created a dark brown/golden liquor with scents of caramel sugar, dates, brown sugar cake.
The brewed leaves are chocolate brown perfectly unrolled needles/bud looking leaves. Fantastic!!
The flavor is smooth malt, dates, honey. Very delicious. There are subtle subtle vegetable notes as Camellia Sinensis suggests in their tasting notes. They say corn, tomato, and artichoke hearts. I can taste a tiny tiny bit of acid tomato and starch corn. This is a really balanced and complex tea. Wonderful.
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7/20/14
Tried a bit of this Gong Fu style today,,,,this tea gives LOTS of steepings!!! Used 190F water with short steeps,,,,6-4-6-8-8-10-10 created a deep, rich, auburn light mahogany liquor with notes of crème brûlée sugar top that has been really torched so it’s not super sweet, dates, a touch of smoke. Very delicious and rich.
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7/29/14
Tried this one Western style this morning and put it up against a cup of Yunnan Sourcing’s Black Gold Bi Luo Chun from Spring of 2014. They are different size snails and the one from YS has larger snails.
This tea is bright and citrus focused when brewed this way but it is well balanced with the subtle malt and sweet notes. The YS snails had more of a focus on smoke and malt.
I found that the two size snails have completely different flavors which of course they would. It is cool to see how the different size in leaves and rolling can bring out such different flavors!