Hua Xiang Qing Xiang Tieguanyin

This tea is a light oolong with strong floral aroma. The tea is floral and buttery with a pronounced creamy aftertaste. If you take your oolong tea with cream and flower, this tea is perfect for you. It is slightly too buttery for me, but only slightly. Otherwise it is an excellent tea.

(Autumn 2016 version)

Steep 1: 450 mL hot (not boiling water), half the 5g sample package used, brewed Grampa style

This has a nice roast on it, strong orchid fragrance, cream in the after taste

Steep 2: More orchid, slightly vegetal. For a tie guan yin, this is less oxidised and less roasted than most I have had, and I really like it. The floral notes are present in the scent of the liquor and while you drink it. I think a touch of brown sugar or other sweet flavour would have really pushed this to one of my favourite oolongs. It isn’t a bad cup by any means, but I do tend towards sweeter oolongs.

Okay, here is the third and final review of the day. This was another of the oolong samples from Verdant Tea that I had been meaning to finish for some time. I finally got around to it a little earlier in the week. I tend to be a big fan of jade Anxi Tieguanyin, as I am much less inclined to display traditionalist leanings with Anxi oolongs for whatever reason. This one I found to be pretty good. I could not count it among the best Tieguanyins offered by Verdant Tea, but it was certainly worth trying.

I prepared this tea gongfu style. After a quick rinse, I steeped 5 grams of loose tea leaves in 4 ounces of 208 F water for 6 seconds. This infusion was chased by 14 additional infusions. Steep times for these infusions were as follows: 9 seconds, 12 seconds, 16 seconds, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, 1 minute, 1 minute 15 seconds, 1 minute 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, and 5 minutes.

Prior to the rinse, I detected aromas of orchid, lilac, violet, custard, and sweetgrass. After the rinse, I noted emerging aromas of cream, butter, and saffron. The first proper infusion then yielded hints of pastry and rose on the nose. In the mouth, the liquor offered delicate, subtle notes of butter, cream, custard, and pastry balanced by hints of sweetgrass, lilac, and orchid. Subsequent infusions brought out stronger sweetgrass, orchid, and lilac notes while the saffron and rose started to make themselves known in the mouth. New impressions of garden peas, minerals, green apple, and watercress also appeared. The later infusions offered lingering traces of minerals, sweetgrass, and butter as well as occasional touches of lilac, violet, and rose.

A very mild, smooth Tieguanyin, I enjoyed this tea’s accessibility and approachability. That being said, I also found it to be a bit boring. As oolongs go, it did not display a ton of depth and did not change much over the course of the session. At the end of the session, it was pretty much just a less aromatic, less flavorful version of the tea it was at the start. I could see it perhaps making a decent introduction to jade Tieguanyin, but for someone who has had a large number of such teas (like myself), this tea was only somewhat satisfying overall.

Priority No. 3 of my great sipdown purge had to be one of my oolong pouches from Verdant. I don’t know why Verdant teas always winds up neglected in the back of my cupboard, but there it is.

I’m not going to write a proper note on this tonight. I steeped it in a cup that was previously holding the Sticky Rice Jin Xuan, and I fear some of the flavouring may have creeped over; either that or this Tieguanyin is incredibly sweet and creamy (but probably not subtlety highlighted with rice notes). The sweetness actually oozes in the finish and aftertaste, which is distinctively not from Sticky Rice.

(2016 harvest)