Thailand Oriental Beauty Pearl Oolong Tea

The dry leaf smells like roast and apricot jam. The warmed leaf is sweet, fruity and floral with notes of honey, burnt brown sugar, apricot, powdered sugar and daffodil.

Following a long rinse, the tea is strange in the first steep, light in flavor but it leaves a very strong buttered lima bean aftertaste. The second steep better shows the Oriental Beauty character. I can taste a gently sweet honey, orange blossom, minerals (silica?), grass seed, osmanthus and a light nuttiness. This steep still displays the buttered lima bean aftertaste but in the subsequent steeps it turns into honey, orange zest and vanilla with light cream.

For being a tea 6 years old, this is a serviceable oolong. I don’t have much experience with Oriental Beauty but I found this version from Thailand, while much less oxidized than a regular OB and without the autumn leaf taste, to be more true to that style of oolong than to a GABA oolong, which is what Leafhopper thought it resembled. Maybe it’s somewhere in between!

Thanks for the share, Leafhopper :)

I don’t know why I ignored this tea for five years. I love Bai Hao, so I must have just forgotten about it. I steeped 5 g of my 10 g sample in a 120 ml teapot at 195F for 30, 20, 20, 30, 30, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120, and 240 seconds.

The dry aroma is of honey and stonefruit. The first steep has notes of honey, faint malt, grass, and flowers (orchids?). I get faint plums and berries in the second steep, though they’re more in the aroma than the taste. The third and fourth steeps have notes of cranberries, currants, sap, pleasant sourness, honey, flowers, nutmeg, baked bread, and grass. It kind of reminds me of a GABA oolong. The last few steeps have flavours of GABA tang, honey, dried fruit, and sap.

I really struggled to describe the taste of this tea and found it to be all over the place in terms of flavour. While it had many of the notes I associate with Bai Hao, it more closely resembled a GABA oolong to me. This could be because of its age, although I have other older teas of this type and they haven’t changed that much. I’m sending my remaining 5 g to Derk, who might be able to figure this tea out.