2016 Beneath an Emerald Sea

Thick and balanced with a nice, moss-note.
Images and more at https://puerh.blog/teanotes/2016-beneath-an-emerald-sea-clt

Sipdown!

This is probably the most clean sheng I’ve had so far in my journey. I shared this with a friend who is hit or miss with most puerh (he’s more of an avid black/green tea guy), but I kept chugging away as he moved on to something else.

What I like about this tea: It lasts a long while and keeps ‘progressing’ as it goes. Toward the beginning of the session, there is a slight bitterness, which dissipates after steep # 3 (I will note here that I usually brew at a lighter temp (195 F) with sheng puerh). This tea has a nice smooth, grassy, leathery, and floral note throughout; however, with each steep, one flavor trumps over the other. Strange, yes, but good. I’m really happy to have had the chance to 1. drink this; 2. finish the sample with a friend (for the most part).

Starts out earthy, grassy, and slightly bitter (not unpleasantly), grows sweeter with subsequent steepings and the vegetal and almost minty top notes really come out. Clean, crisp and delicious! One of my first forays into raw puerh and I love it!

This was a good solid sheng with strong bitterness for about four or five steeps after it opened up. Somewhere around steep eight it began to get sweeter. You might almost call it a sugar sweetness in the sense that it seemed to be a sweet note without a fruity element or other note. I would not call it literally sugar sweet. It was good. I will try it again in another six months and see if it is aging at all in my storage. I have no room in the pumidor so it will have to be dry stored. This storage seems to work out better for my shou than my sheng. I think sheng is more susceptible to low humidity than shou. This was a good tea.

I steeped this tea twelve times in a 150ml gaiwan with 9.1g 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 got a little weak in the twelfth steep but I do think I would have gotten two more steeps out of it. This one would not go twenty steeps.

Another solid sheng from CLT! It was one of the greener feeling sheng from the CLT lineup – not meaning it seemed really young, but just that it had some flavors I associate with greenness. . .I guess. The dry leaf smelled mostly floral, but after a rinse I also picked up a bit of a marine, seaweed aroma, along with straw. The rinse left a slight sugarcane aroma in the cha hai.

The first steep opened up with a bit of a seaweed note. I also tasted a pretty distinctly sweet grassy flavor, along with a light apricot aftertaste. The second steep saw the seaweed recede a little bit, a floral layer replace the grassiness, and a pretty thick creamy texture emerge. By the third steep, the creaminess was so intense, and the associated with a bit of a vanilla taste, that I was drinking custard – or so it seemed. Pretty friggin delicious.

Unfortunately, custardtea didn’t last long. The next three steeps were still quite sweet and thick, just not in the right proportions to get that real custardy vibe I got earlier. The taste was vegetal in the front, kind of brothy, with a slight lettuce bitterness, followed by the sweet vanilla floral creamy flavor.

The tea took another turn around steep 7, taking on more of an herbal quality in the front, but still with a sweet aftertaste. For the next few steeps, there was a slightly citrusy flavor in the finish, with the sweetness moving more into the front. Probably more lemongrass than lemon.

As it began to wane, the tea got more uniformly sweet. It went on with relatively pleasant sweetness and thickness through around 14 steeps.

I think my favorite steep of this one was the custard sweet one. The whole session was quite good – deep and creamy sweetness buried under a vegetal (emerald?) sea :P
It was also enjoyably complex, with a lot of different flavors and changes going on through a session.

This tea is a bit more compressed than the rest of the 2016 lineup. I can hint at a light aroma of sweet wood, some green bean, and light honey with floral characters wafting off the leaves. I warmed my gaiwan up and placed a bit inside. The scent expanded to asparagus, some smoke, and a slightly sour tone. I washed the leaves once and prepared for brewing. The first steep has some minor sour characteristics, faint smoke, and a heavy vegetal base. This is a very bright tea, for the later steeping brought about an incredible amount of lemon flavor. I can take in some basil and other herbaceous tones. The huigan is swiftly brief but potent. The brew continues in this manner and doesn’t develop much further. The sweet aftertaste lapses between sips. I liked this tea, and it reminds me of spring. It’s a decent easy sipper. I did not note any qi apparent in this session.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKN-PCpAwzL/?taken-by=haveteawilltravel

This is another exceptional tea from Crimson Lotus.

Emerald Sea was sweet, thick, and powerful. What really surprised me about this tea is that on the first steeping, Emerald Sea showed intense strength the would usually take other teas 5-6 steeps to come out. My only complaint is that in the later steeps, this tea seemed lose all of its power at once and didn’t really phase out. Other than that, I’d recommend this tea to anyone whose a fan of Crimson Lotus, or teas produced in the Jingmai religion.

no detailed notes today (#workdaysteeps), but this is my first session with this tea and i am enjoying it very much. lots going on flavour- and texture-wise in the early steeps especially. good longevity for that phenomenon, and getting some interesting head- and body-feels. very nice.

A very nice apricot smell.
The flavor’s got some lingering bitterness that’s very, very nice and some floral notes that sometimes feels fruity. After like 7 steeps the bitterness goes away and for the rest of the tea (and believe me, the tea goes on forever) it’s just a very pleasant flavor.

Yesterday I drank through this for quite awhile since I was hooked up with a beenghole:)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BIsbctkAfU2/

The rinse brought out very strong aroma which meant either it wasn’t going to be my type of tea or it was going to turn into something good. I went into this thinking it’d be a few months too young for me, however as you will find out, that was not the case.

First thing I noticed was the blend itself. There was a flower in my leaf, multiple colored leaves, and even different sizes/shapes; this made me realize I had no idea what to expect. I went ahead and put a picture on Slack because the flower was interesting to see.

First three brews were murky, looking very strong in taste. There is certainly a texture to the tea that is pleasant, yet it doesn’t have a great taste as of yet. Opening this tea up, as it was a beenghole piece, did take five or so brews but it changed after that. Texture wise it still had some viscosity to it when hitting the later steep, but it was the taste that got me.

Once this opened up, it tasted much like the 2014 wild purple wuliang that YS sells that I have really really enjoyed. This being so young and having some of that gentle wild like taste to it with hints of sweetness is quite nice. This is definitely a quality blended cake with a bit to settle still, but it’s already a pretty nice tasting material as it is. I expect with time the wild aspect will fade a little and smooth out creating a better taste to go with the thicker brews in the beginning.