Formosa Fancy Superior Choice Oolong (No. 625)

How to make the uber pot of oolong:

Set up one of your bigger tea pots.

Choose an oolong where the second or third steep is often better than the first.

Steep a couple cups of water in a generous amount of leaf in a separate vessel in the usual fashion.

Strain into larger teapot.

Repeat for at least three steepings (with a bigger teapot you could do more).

Sip the resulting blend of the three steepings and wonder why you don’t do this every morning.

This works especially well with this oolong from TG because the balance of green notes to roasted notes changes with each steep and this way you get the best of each all in the same cup.

I hate to say it but this one left me disappointed. It is not well suited to gongfu brewing and I should have jumped right to 3 mins after that instead of (1, 2 then 3). Because what I am experiencing at 2 mins the morning after is very drying, prickly, a tad minty turning into perfumey (I hope this isnt what they meant by sandalwood) and definitely acidic at the back of my mouth like bile. I couldn’t finish the cup, which is really rare for me. Before that it was really just boring. :/

So if you have this tea go with the longer steeps. While I liked what the Taifu did to my mouth better, neither of them had that savory, leathery, butteriness that I fell in love with in Teavana’s Oriental Beauty (exclusive to gift set). I still have one more serving of that left. Likewise Fong Mong’s High Grade was pretty good but I need to try the Top Grade.

I can’t pretend to have as sophisticated take on this tea as Jim does, but I must say that it’s one of the best oolongs I’ve ever tasted, and I have been to TeaGschwendner’s oolong tea tasting. If you’ve been trying to capture that elusive ‘Chinese restaurant taste’, get this. It’s like a 10x better version of the tea you’ve been served with dim sum. Very mild, light flavor- very uniquely oolong.

Still my overall favorite. This is the tea where, on tasting the first cup, or even just catching the fragrance during steeping, or even just watching the leaves unfurl in a glass teapot, I most often get that “all the problems in the world just vanished” feeling.

I can’t figure out why the aroma is often described as “like fresh bread”, though I have to admit that I lack the words to describe it. Certainly flowery, but there’s this special summer-oolong taste that for me is without equal.

A nice thing about this tea is that it does not care about water quality (as long as it is boiled) or how long you steep it – it’s a true “self-drinker”.

I’ve not tried multiple steepings yet.

Warm your pot with some truly boiling water.
Put a generous helping of leaves in there.
Close your eyes and take a whiff.

While the taste is truly amazing, especially when you contemplate the way it changes over multiple infusions, it is that first moment of smelling the leaves in the warm pot that I love best about it.

More feminine than the taifu, this tea is softer, revealing dried apricots, woodshop, and wet river stones. Second infusion was decidedly more complex and the aromas were more prominant, even a hint of marzipan started to emerge. A beautiful bai hao.