2016 Yiwu Charity Cake

Sipdown/Group Buy Sample

This one found itself at the bottom of my stash somehow, so I figured I’d finish the last bit of the sample this morning.

Honestly, the one thing I enjoyed about this tea the most (for a younger leaf) is the fact that it wasn’t heavy in astringency/bitterness. Rather, it was pretty light, considering the age of the material. There were slight floral/straw/fruity notes throughout the session, but they didn’t stand out that much—I started to increase the time/temp to pick out some of the notes. Overall, it was an alright tea, but I prefer something with a bit more age and/or complexity.

I just finished my sample of this from the TU Group Buy I participated in a little while back. This was a pretty good tea – no complaints about it – but it wasn’t anything special. Good and tasty, but nothing to write home about really. The dry leaf had a nice floral aroma. After a rinse, it gave off a nice and crisp straw aroma with just a hint of a citric feel to it.

The tea had a pleasant and thick texture to go along with a consistent flavor profile. I got a sweet nutty flavor off of this, with slight floral and straw tendencies, especially in the early steeps. This tea was sweet, completely lacking in any unpleasant astringency or bitterness. A very easy tea to just guzzle down. It also displayed rather impressive longevity. I was able to drink almost two liters of the stuff before it finally gave out. Some would probably consider this tea a little boring – and I might count myself among them if I were to drink this every day for much of any period of time. So I guess it is easy enough to drink that it would make a good “daily drinker” for when you are focused on things other than the tea, but isn’t interesting enough to make me want to come back to it on a day-to-day basis.

While I was drinking this tea, somebody in our Slack teachat asked me a question which stimulated some good thinking on my part. He asked me to compare this tea with Bitterleaf Tea’s 2016 Year of the Monkey Yiwu, White2Tea’s 2016 Diving Duck, and a Yunnan Sourcing 2016 Yiwu. I have tried all of those besides a YS 2016 Yiwu. They are all in a the same price range. If I had to put the three of them which I tried in order of how much I enjoyed them, it would go as such: BLT Year of the Monkey > W2T Diving Duck > TU Charity. BLT’s is a clear winner for me, with DD and Charity pretty close to each other.

I’m interested in how other people who have tried these three teas would rank them. Comment away if you have! :)

This one smelled more green than sheng when it was dry, so I had high hopes for it. There is a bit of that green funk, but it’s accompanied by the formaldehyde and flowery soap that usually comes with sheng. My coworker, who actually enjoys it, describes it as Dial soap and flowers.

He’s benefiting immensely from my sheng experiments this morning.

I steeped this a little heavier than usual due to the almost nonexistent aroma off the dry leaf, 7g to 100ml at 198-200F. Very light flavors with cooler water, borderline boring was my first impression, actually, as it was a pretty one note, unchanging tea for the first 6 or 7 steeps or so. Not an unpleasant note, by any mean, in fact, it was quite mellow and calm and pleasant with an herbaceous, bassy sweet note to it and a soft, moderate thickness with a bit of roof drying astringency.

Later steeps the astringency dies down considerably and so I pushed it with hotter water (upped to 205 F and longer steep times that I would have called slightly overbrewed in most tea) and it returned a nice bit of sour-almost-not-quite citrus bordering floral notes alongside the sweetness, creating an interesting mouth feel dynamic with the astringency. The taste reminded me of sweet and sour stir fry sauce with a more vinegar than citric sourness at parts that helped contrast the sweetness. Nothing mind blowing, but a nice little last hurrah from this tea which had been quite boringly polite up til now. I haven’t tried this at boiling yet, but soon enough we’ll see what that brings out of this.

From the Puerh Plus TTB 2

This is actually a tale of two tastings. I really liked my first sample of this tea. It was light but elegant, with citrus and floral notes. As I drank it, the flavors grew on meand my enjoyment increased through many cups. Thinking I might like to buy a cake, I kept the remaining 3 grams of the tea to enable me to try it again, before making a purchase decision.

The second tasting started out similar to the first, with a light, elegant flavor with floral and citrus highlights. However, this time the tea seemed to get worse, rather than better, losing the fruit and becoming bland. At the 4th cup, it was a slightly bitter straw; not bad but not the lovely tea I expected. A shorter steep at cup 5 removed the bitterness, but left a pleasant but not very interesting tea. I suspect that different steep times, temperature, etc. could develop different characteristics, so you could have some fun with it.

I wound up recommending this tea, because I think it is good value as an everyday tea. However, I’ve made a vow to not buy any more everyday teas, so I’m going to pass on this one. My numerical score is the average of the 87 I gave this on the first session and the 81 I’m giving it for the second session.