Wu She Gao Feng "Wu Shi Cai" Jade Oolong Tea - Spring 2017

Medium bodied with beautiful fruity smell (passion fruit). It really makes you feel like you are in a fruit orchard and evokes the feeling of sunny days.

There are strong grassy and mineral notes in the first few brews. Generally I found it to be very mineral. The sweetness is mostly present in the smell, not so much in the flavour. The taste is a little bit more more on the savoury side, but fairly complex. It does have some subtle egg yolk sweetness though.

There is a noticeable cooling effect and the tea gives a buzz that builds up slowly but peaks fairly strong.

This is my first time trying this oolong. Scott recommended it to me as fruity, so I’m hoping for the best. I steeped 6 grams of tea in a 120 ml porcelain teapot.

25 and 20 sec steeps at around 195F: I really had to work to detect the flavours here. Vegetal, heavy bodied, no astringency, that “jade” type of taste. There’s some sweetness if I squint, but nothing I’d say is fruity.

40 secs with boiling water: I upped the temperature to try to pull more out of the tea. There’s a tiny bit more astringency, but it does have a stronger vegetal flavour and a nice aftertaste that could be guava or some other tropical fruit. The sip itself doesn’t taste fruity though.

50, 60, 90 secs with boiling water: I let the leaves cool after the fourth steep and they smelled like marjoram or some other herb. Wish I had names for all these flavours/aromas! The taste and aftertaste remain pretty consistent. One thing I like about the oolongs I’ve tried from Taiwan Sourcing is their consistently long aftertaste.

So is this tea fruity? Kind of, though I don’t think that’s its primary attribute. I’ll need to experiment with the rest of my sample.