Ying Shan Hong

My first experience with snow chrysanthemum and a very positive one.

This purple tea comes as a nice little black cake with orange and yellow snow chrysanthemum pieces all over – festive! The dry leave smells strongly of apricot, smoke, fallen leaves and spice. The flavor is fairly complex: I could pick up apricot, peach, prunes, spice, carrot, smokiness, dill, mineral… The aftertaste is very long, spicy and apricoty.

Ying Shan Hong reminds me very much of the fall season with bright orange colors, bold taste, splendid decay and wisps of smoke in the cool air. This tea effortlessly won me over and got me intrigued with the potential of snow chrysanthemum in other teas.

I can’t seem to enjoy this. I’ve been playing with steep times and temps but despite my efforts all I can smell and taste from this is dill pickles.

I’m going to be up much later tonight than I had planned. This tea is extremely good. I can’t get enough (5 pots and still counting)! Goodness, this is good!

The dry leaf smells like chocolate? However, the wet leaf has a slight mineral, nutty, sweet, and chocolate(?) aroma and flavors. This is so unique, and due to the inability to comprehend tea at the moment because I’m so hyped on this stuff, I’m boggled. However, I’ve decided that I’ll never go back to anything for a while except cakes, bricks, and pu-erh. This whole experience is life changing.

Anyway, give this a try. I’m enjoying it tremendously.

Thanks so much Christina for this sample!

I had started a thread regarding compressed black tea. I received a lot of recommendations and Christina thoughtfully offered me some of this tea to try.

The sample I received was a few “chunks” of this tea. The smell upon the hot water hitting the tea immediately reminded me of sweet cinnamon. I wondered for a second if there was some contamination from my tea implements. But the smell quickly faded to subtly sweet black tea scent. A bit of an earthiness smell but still every once in a while my brain tells me cinnamon.

I did the first infusion with just boiled water for 60 seconds. My first thoughts were this tastes kind of musty, or dusty. After a few sips, I think what I am tasting is the chrysanthemum. There is what I would guess to be a slight dried flower floral flavour. The black tea does not seem to be very strong. It is slightly sweet but not getting the cinnamon flavour that I get in the scent. There is a generic light spiciness to the tea. At the end of the sip there is some dryness in my mouth but I would not describe this as astringent. I read someone’s tea blog that described this tea as “autumn” and I would agree.

I am unsure about this tea as of yet. I would not describe it as bad or that I dislike it. I think I am just having a hard time harmonizing with the flavour. I am going to try a few more steeps.

For the second steep I added 30 seconds. I feel like in this steep there is more astringency, especially as the cup cools. The dried floral flavour profile has morphed into a dry hay flavour. I feel like there is quite a bit more earthiness into this steep.

More to come…..

I’ve never had a purple tea before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I figured it would taste similar to a black tea. The dry tea itself is mixed with dry chrysanthemum flowers and compressed into a dense little cake — the yellow petals of the dried flowers are peeking through the tea itself, giving the cake quite a festive look.

I’ve had one or two teas before that tasted like chysanthemums, so I thought I was prepared for this tea. Oh, how wrong I was! The chrysanthemum flavour in this tea is pungent, and medicinal. The tea flavour itself is fairly weak, taking a back seat so that the chrysanthemum can drive. Overall, the tea feels quite thin and dry in my mouth, with a sensation of camphor and cedar being most prominent. The brewed tea was a deep reddish brown, like brandy.

Full review at: http://booksandtea.ca/2015/10/random-flower-teas/

I like chrysanthemum tea but this is chrysanthemum along with black and pressed into a cake. There was a bit of the flavor of the black tea coming through but the chrysanthemum tea dominated. For me, I really can’t see the point of this tea. I get the benefits of chrysanthemum tea on it’s own being herbal. For this tea, I couldn’t drink it in the evening and there’s nothing there to really make me want it during the day. This just isn’t a tea I would ever want to buy but it was still a good cup.