Taiwan Jin Xuan Milk Oolong Tea (Flavored)

august 24/17 the peaches and cream taste is actually pretty good, but this isnt really what im going for with a milk oolong. what i like best is something a bit toastier, this is a bit too clean and light to be my go to, but i wont have any problems drinking the 100g i got.

Flavoured Milk Oolong often gets a bad reputation for not being as “authentic” as their generally higher grade Jin Xuan counterparts. I have a soft spot for them, however; my very first oolong was David’s Quangzhou Milk Oolong and it opened a whole new world of tea awesomeness for me.

Side note: over the years, David’s Tea has been ambiguous on whether their Milk Oolong has flavouring or not but the website’s current ingredients list is “Chinese oolong, natural flavouring” so I’m going to take that as a yes.

The natural profile of a Jin Xuan can be quite striking and varying, but there’s a lot to be said about the comforting flavouring of these guys. Milk infested floral veggies lay dominion over both tongue and nose and stick around for about a week.

The main con for me is that the best steep is often the first steep, which is pretty much not the case for every other oolong under the sun. The milk flavouring here holds up incredibly well to multiple steeps, but not as well as a natural oolong. It’s also not as dynamic, but that’s the trade-off for flavour consistency.

Anyways, I love that I can pick up 100g of Teavivre’s flavoured Alishan offering for $10.90 USD (atm, 14.87 CAD). The Quangzhou rendition that David’s Tea carries goes for about $26 CAD for the same quantity.

Steep Count: 4

(2016 Harvest)

Tried this yesterday as my first flavored Milk Oolong. The scent from the leaves was milky and sweet, but also had a bit of a buttery popcorn or caramel corn vibe to it. That taste came through pretty strongly for the first three steeps, after which it tapered off for a couple more. I have heard that these flavored Jin Xuan are often pretty low quality leaf, but this seemed to transition into just a pleasant and slightly creamy floral tea after the flavoring was mostly steeped out of it. Not bad, but personally I think I prefer unflavored Jin Xuan.

This is a cool tea to drink in certain situations:

1. Right after you eat a pair of idlies and dosa and finish off with a mysore coffee, heavily milked up to the point where the milk denatures into thick buttery foam and there’s only so much of that to go around on a fall day. And you want to drink more milk. Then you can drink this tea, which smells like steamed milk, but doesn’t taste like much of anything but the slight tasting notes of:

Neem honey, asian pear-apples, pickled umeboshi, extremely watered down scotch, diet coke, cucumbers

2. When you want host a tea party where one of the events is a blindfold taste test and you want to include multiple different teas that could throw off your guests, and with the combination of dropping a hint of steamed milk earlier in the evening, you would find it a small victory when someone tasting this tea blindfolded would claim, “This is not tea, it’s milk!”

On the second steep, it still smelled like milk, but there was no taste anymore.

I got a big bag of this in the mail! Yay!

What’s the drinking equivalent to NomNomNom? Haha.

I think I prefer the comparatively gentle flavor of natural milk oolong better, but the natural ones can be all over the board in flavor profiles, not totally a bad thing, but when you’re craving a particular flavor… At least with this I got what I was expecting and I can expect to get relatively the same taste every time I order.

By the way, these expand a LOT. They’re on the smaller side of leaf size, but there’s alot of them! and they really bloom!

found this one a bit bitter compared to my other milk Oolong, cant remember who it was from.

So this came with the flavored sample set that I mostly wanted to try the jasmine teas contained within. This is the oolong with the added flavoring, rather than the unflavored Jin Xuan oolong. Upon opening the pouch, there is mostly certainly a candy sweet fragrance! With the unflavored Jin Xuan, I can’t really taste much of the qualities that make it a milk oolong. That sweet flavor makes itself known mostly in the first steep, slowly fading after that. The leaves are very dark green. The leaves unravel very fast, already filling the infuser with the first steep. I used an entire sample pouch (two teaspoons) but it seems like the flavor was stronger than necessary with each steep (even with one minute steeps). So I’d also recommend trying this tea with one teaspoon or one and a half teaspoons and/or with lower temperatures. I didn’t ruin the flavor too much, but I know it could have been better with proper parameters. Otherwise, the flavor is milky and candy sweet with hints of butter and some type of fruit – possibly pineapple. This oolong is alright, but I know that Teavivre has better options.
Steep #1 // 2 teaspoons // few minutes after boiling // rinse // 1 minute steep
Steep #2 // just boiled // 1 min
Steep #3 // 3 minutes after boiling // 1 min
Harvest: 2014
Ah! I won one of the $8 gift cards. Very excited about that! Good luck to everyone else!

I thought I had tried this one but the package is unopened. Big thank you to Angel from Teavivre for sending me this free sample! I’ve tried their unflavored milk oolong before and adored it. So I have high hopes for this one.

The dry leaf aroma is mouthwateringly yummy. It smells fresh, green, and delicious. The brewed tea aroma is not as potent, but the leaves are also still mostly furled after a quick one minute infusion. The initial sip is nearly flavorless and then BAM! The flavor hits in the aftertaste! The after aftertaste is a tad yucky though. It’s thick and slightly bitter. Maybe subsequent cups will be better.

The second infusion was for two minutes. The bitterness is gone from the aftertaste now. However, this oolong is fairly one dimensional. It has that “milk” flavor but not a whole lot else. I’m not getting creaminess or floral notes. It does have a slight mineral note; it reminds me of copper. And that’s about it.

Third infusion for 3.5 minutes is pretty good. I think I had enjoyed the unflavored version of this tea more. Of course, part of that could be contributed to this tea’s age. Although I hadn’t opened the foil package yet, this tea has been sitting in my cupboard for over three years. I’m sure that hasn’t helped things. In any event, I’m exhausted. I think I drank about seven different types of tea today. I’m ready to end my tea journey for the evening and go to bed. Sooo tired.

Thank you, thank you to Angel/Teavivre for the generous samples! I received this months ago but classic me has been hoarding them.

This is the second time having it and, to be honest, both times it hasn’t been as milky as I had expected. Plus, the base is a little too vegetal for my liking. I’ve also been picking up on a chlorine-like undertone that has been driving me bonkers because it seems like a little more than just chlorine. There’s something more to that specific note.

After all this time, I finally figured out what it is. I don’t know about you, but the mold in cheese like Gorgonzola, and the rind on Brie and Oka all have this chlorine-like flavour that hits my palate the wrong way. This is totally that. So I guess you can say that this kind of tastes like those creamy kinds of cheeses, mold/rind and all. Since I love the taste of Brie/Oka, you’re damn skippy I just take off the rind so I can enjoy the deliciously creamy centre, but I can’t do that with this tea!

Come to think of it, I’ve had milk oolongs taste more like cheese than milk in the past, anyway. For instance, I vividly recall DAVIDsTEA’s Quangzhou Milk Oolong to taste like Havarti. Go figure!

Here’s Hoping TTB R5 #8

El Nino has finally decided to pay California a visit! And this means we’re expecting nothing but rainy days all this week which is a great change from the drought this state has seemed to have been in since the day we arrived here three years ago!!

Rainy days means lots of teas and since I’m still trying to power through the TTB I decided that a milk oolong would be a perfect treat on a grey and wet day…. This isn’t bad. I get a lot more of the vegetal notes that I do any milkiness or creaminess. Its a decent oolong, I just don’t know if it feels like a milk oolong to me.. maybe because its artificially flavored instead of being natural… whats most interesting (to me at least) is they flavor the tea to enhance the milk scented yet to me this tea smells more like cinnamon or a david’s tea I can’t put my finger on than milk… now that I think about it, most the most likely answer is this may have suffered some in box cross contamination