Zhen Qu

mmmmmm So I really like this tea! It won’t replace Laoshan black as one of my favorite straight blaccks but it’s pretty damn good! I asked Stacy for a sample of this to try out and see how it compares. I really enjoy the chocolate notes in this tea and the malty tones in it. I love the sweet honey notes in it. I really wish i had more of this now that my small sample is gone. Thanks for this Stacy!

The world didn’t end! Yeah!

This isn’t the tea I wanted. I wanted something dark & rich, velvety & heavy with malt. But I’m at Tony’s, & his selection isn’t so great, & I realized I had tossed this into my purse, so there it is. My first cup was with 1 tsp of tea, & it was ok, but not really all that exciting. That was this morning.

I’ve been kind of cranky this afternoon, & Little Terri wanted pancakes. Basically, she wanted to be indulged a little, & feel like she was getting away with something. So pancakes it was, & they were tasty, with just a little maple syrup & coconut butter. We also had a bacon & broccoli fritata.

I also just had another cup of Zhen Qu, using 2 tsp of tea. Much better! There is a really nice chocolate-ness to it, a little malt, & it’s very satisfying.

I feel better now.

Bleh. So one of the lids of my travel mugs does not smell good, and unfortunately, this tea was affected by it. I swapped lids with a different mug (that had been emptied) to try and curb the problem, but the damage was already done… what should have been a nice, malty black tea tastes like something crawled into it and died (ok, I’m exaggerating, it’s not that bad, there’s just a bit of an off-flavour… just enough to make me want to dump this out. I need to pick up denture tablets ASAP!)

I probably won’t have very many sipdowns this week. I have gone through most of my easy sipdowns and am left with moderate amounts of lots of teas (and lots of a few teas). I will make myself crazy (and maybe bored) if I try to focus on only drinking the teas with the least amounts in them, so I am going to cycle through all the moderate-amount teas in the next couple of weeks. That way I will have a better idea of the amounts I have left as well.

I started with this one! It really is quite a tasty Chinese black tea. It reminds me more of the black pearl teas from Yunnan, with it’s nuts and chocolate notes, than the golden Yunnans with their honey and sweet potato. A solid, delicious black tea, and a pleasure to drink.

Oh my… this tea is so good! I’ve had this type before, I believe it was a sample sent to me by ScottTeaMan. Scott- where are you? Haven’t seen you in ages.

Anyway, this is a great tea to sip on PLAIN, without additions. It does not need anything to make it better. It’s very gentle and has notes of cocoa, caramel and a hint of floral like a darjeeling. Not a trace of bitterness in sight, just a really lovely sipping tea. yummy!

Sorry I have not had the chance to write a lot of longer tasting notes recently!

I am surprised to be the first reviewer of this tea (and pleased at the same time since I have great respect for Stacy and Butiki Tea!)

I first noticed this Black Tea at the end of the list of on the Butiki Website and the notes describing floral,chocolate and pecan flavors were intriguing. I’d also learned that Stacy likes to steep her tea for a long time…really long. I sometimes do the same (although she wins) and I thought that if this tea tastes that good with a longer steep, I wanted to have some for my own cupboard.

The leaves were small, curly and a 50/50 mix of gold and black leaves from Yunnan, China.

The steep time was 5 minutes

The comments for this tea were correct when they said the tea is mildly malty. I wouldn’t have guessed that. Usually chocolaty tea’s have a hefty amount of malt as a supporting base but not here, and there was a definite cocoa taste.
Honey flavor was easy to pick up but the nutty and floral taste came in after the tea had cooled and lingered in my mouth.

This was a smooth and mild black tea but one that wasn’t flat. The flavors were rich and thick enough for adding milk and sweetening which I did for my morning cup.

This day marks a year since I traveled with my granddaughter Schey to Alaska, Canada and Washington State. Today was our last “Cruise” day before a week in Washington. We were heading to beautiful Victoria, B.C. (Wow did Victoria look beautiful at night!Lit up like Christmas in September!) and believe it or not, our two week trip was sunny!
What a wonderful time!
Every day there was a ‘tea’ on board ship. We went to a big Indonesian Tea one afternoon, and in Victoria we went to the Empress and bought more Tea. I bought some Canadian Maple Tea in another shop.
Now remember, I had never heard of Steepster. I had never tasted ‘loose leaf tea’. I was almost blind because I needed operations on both my eyes. EVERYTHING was different in my life a year ago!

This morning when I drink this Butiki Tea and discribe how it looks…I can SEE it! It’s beautiful. And I am writing a review on
Steepster with all my new friends! (Unbelievable!)
I am reviewing tea and enjoying it with a knowledge that makes me laugh…I mean…how can this be? It’s been less than a year since I’ve been on Steepster!

For me to say, “I think this is a grand Black Tea” with some knowledge about it is humbling. I’m fortunate that everyone on Steepster has taught me so much (including Stacy) and shared in swaps fine tea’s so that I know that this is indeed a fine tea.

Awesome!

I’ve had this one three or four times since my initial review and have tried adding more leaf, more steep time and both extra leaf and time. No matter what I do I just can’t get the punch of flavour from it that others seem to. It is a perfectly acceptable black tea but nothing about it stands out. I have found many of the Butiki blends to be lighter in flavour than others I’ve had in the past but usually the base tea is quite impressive on it’s own. This one just doesn’t wow me though. I prefer the Taiwanese Assam with it’s chocolate kick. Man, I wish that wasn’t all gone already!

This is so amazing! It’s like a 2nd flush Darjeeling meets a Yunnan black. Out of all the black teas I’ve been drinking in the morning, this needed absolutely nothing added to it.

I taste nuttiness, honey, chocolate, and just a nice touch of floral notes to it. Maybe a bit of caramel too! The caramel especially comes out now that the remaining tea has cooled a lot.

It’s a very mild tea, I found myself sipping it very easily, without even thinking about the taste, other than about how good it tastes!

I’d definitely get more of this in the future, I really wanted to take advantage of Butiki’s sale yesterday but I couldn’t justify it, and I tried to get my mom to buy even $15 of it and she just tells me she doesn’t like tea (and 10 minutes later she liked the chocolate tea I had last night when I gave her the mug to try it). Oh well. I’ll have money one day.

The dry tea is really cute. Small downy curly leaves that are repeat with golden buds. The leaf smells slightly floral and nutty.

I brewed one TSP per 225 ml for around 4.5 min at around 95°C.

The resulting brew is a maple orange colour with a yellow ring around the edge of the cup.

At first sip the tea tasted a little thin, but as I let it cool a little, while I write this it developed more depth.

The scent is slightly chocolately, with sweet potato under the incensy influence of a touch of smoke, a hint of nut almost like sweet walnut, and a hint of something sweet ( more butter toffee than honey).
The flavour has a bitter chocolate, clover, sweet potato mixed with longan, with a hint of nut developing on the tongue at the end that deepens in the aftertaste. There is a hint of dried fruit which had the deeper notes of dried dates. The tea has a crisp top note almost like a Darjeeling that leaves a tingling underneath the tongue, and a slightly bitter base note that gives this tea a stronger presence than its texture or first taste suggested.

A fun tea, with a nice dose of caffeine. It makes a nice afternoon tea.

This tea is another one from my epic swap with TastyBrew, thanks!

This is fantastic!

The dry leaves are gorgeous – lots of golden curls amongst the dark chocolate curled leaves. The aroma of the brewed tea is chocolate-y and sweet, with notes of malt and caramel. Nutty too. My taste buds are eagerly awaiting a sip as I wait a few moments to allow it to cool a bit.

Ohhh… so good! Rich and malty with a strong honey-esque tone. Chocolate-y, yes … and deliciously caramel-y too. The caramel and honey mingle together to form a honey-caramel overtone that possesses hints of the caramelized sugar that have not quite burnt… but have developed a really rich, brown color.

It’s remarkably smooth, and the flavor also possesses something I did not anticipate from the aroma – a floral note. Like a hint of flower somewhere in the distance. I did not really smell the floral tone, but I can taste it.

A really REALLY good black tea. It has some vigor to it too.