Zhushan Natural Oolong

I chose this as the first tea to try from a tea swap with Mastress Alita (thanks!) based on her disdain for the perfume aroma (which is totally understandable).

Man, this tea has so much going for it but it really needs just a slight touch of creaminess to add to the experience and temper the forward florals. It’s very 3-dimensional. Like I can pick out distinct stacks of flavor and sensation in my mouth. I bet a lot of snobs might think this tea is unrefined and clunky. I concluded if I could find more of this tea, I’d like to use it as an instructional experience for people who are wanting to move past the beginners Taiwanese oolong and are comfortable with adventuring.

The dry leaves are super tiny nuggets that smell kind of like cheap white floral perfume, woody and floral sweet cinnamon, green wood, wet wood and woody peach. The majority of the nuggets opened quickly and fully after the second steep, revealing some of the most beautiful leaves I’ve ever seen. Most of them are pretty small with shades of copper, olive green, bronze, and brown. Looked damn fine in my purple clay gaiwan. This oolong is not picked as 2-4 leaf and a bud. It’s all pretty robust and small leaf with only 1 or 2 buds attached to the few stems present. Looks machine harvested.

The first steep started out thick leading into a pleasantly drying but not thin mouthfeel in the following steeps. I don’t know how else to describe it. At first, the aroma of the wet leaves really put me off because it smelled so strongly of cheap floral perfume. The liquor was thankfully not as strong in smell but stood in its own right throughout the whole session. By the time I got to the third steep, the perfume scent of the wet leaves separated into very distinct tastes in my mouth. The woody, floral cinnamon and woody peach of the dry leaf lined my whole mouth. Some mineral produced a tingling side-tongue and my saliva glands felt active but not producing. A light, bitter medicinal elderberry and black cherry went down my tongue. Florals stacked on top of my tongue and hit the roof of my mouth. It started with a base of bittersweet violet blanketing my tongue. Going up there was a penetrating orchid and at the top it was some kind of earthy base-y white floral with a very high note. Above that was a cooling sensation that opened my sinuses and allowed the white floral to float higher.

The cooling sensation eventually sat at the back of the tongue, along with that medicinal black cherry and elderberry. A very faint butteriness turned up mid-session at the top back of the mouth. The florals eventually mellowed. The bitterness was never overwhelming and despite oversteeping here and there, the liquor never became offensive. Toward the end, a light sweetness presented and salivation finally became noticeable. I ate a few cilantro leaves and that really amplified some wonderful flavors between tea and herb. The session faded away smoothly with 10 steeps.

I can’t wait to try the remaining 5 grams in a long-steep/higher-water-volume western style brew. I get a feeling that might produce something quite interesting and much more medicinal. For me, this isn’t an everyday tea. I was going to say I can’t figure out where it would fit in my life beyond an instructional tea but it’s certainly perking me up on this dreadful, um, cramping day. Warming and lightly relaxing.

Thanks again, Mastress Alita. It’s always nice for a tea to find a good home.

May Flowers! So, this ended up being another overleafed gong fu attempt… I wonder when I’ll figure out the secret? Seems that any time I look up what I should be doing based on the amount of water it holds and the type of tea I’ll be brewing, I need to take about a gram off of what the estimates say or my results are too bitter to drink. Because both times now that is what I’ve done, and my second attempt has been fine…

I used 4g of leaf in my 150 ml beginner’s gaiwan (though to be fair, I only fill it about halfway since I’m making a single cup, and even then I end up emptying a bit of each infusion into a “drainage” cup), at 190 F using a first steep of 20 seconds with subsequent steeps starting at 10 seconds and increasing in 5 second intervals. My session was a quick 7 infusions before my tea felt weak enough that I decided to wrap things up.

This tea has a very vegetal dry smell, but steeped has a very strong, perfumy aroma. In fact, the aroma was almost as perfume-floral potent as Jasmine Pearls… phew. And that isn’t exactly my tea, because of the extremely heady aroma. So the first few infusions were a bit strong for me, with a very thick floral orchid taste and scent. This is probably the most orchid oolong I have ever had! There was a very subtle hint of a nutty taste and a bit of cinnamon left on my tongue in the aftertaste. Around the fourth and fifth infusions the tea mellowed out a bit, and those were probably the most pleasant infusions, as the floral had tamed itself a bit more to my liking, and the aroma wasn’t so overwhelming. By the sixth and seventh steeps, the flavor was still pleasant, but noticably starting to loose steam.

Unlike many oolongs I’ve tried, I didn’t really notice the flavor changing from infusion to infusion, so in the future this is probably an oolong I’ll prepare western style instead; I think that may also produce a slightly less overwhelmingly “perfumey” experience out of the gate as well, which is the one thing about this tea I didn’t like. Perfumey teas tend to aggrevate my head the way strongly scented hand lotions or perfumes do, as far as migraines go, so I tend to avoid them. The mid-infusions didn’t have that problem, so I think a western brew will do this tea well, so I do plan to explore it again.

The tea was just a bit one-note… granted, it was a note I enjoy, flavor-wise, but the strong aroma, lack of flavor versatility, and short staying power don’t make this a favorite oolong overall. It is certainly a good choice for a strong floral hit that isn’t jasmine, though!