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tl;dr: A thin, but easy to drink tea. Wet→Dry wood with hints of grain as you steep longer. Opens up quickly and brews cleanly, no fermentation tastes. 3.5/5

5g, 75ml porcelain gaiwan.

Smell: Spicy (as in cinnamon), mostly wet wood, hints of something I can’t place. Plum?

98C, 10s: Good “seal” on gaiwan lid. Scent was same as after rinse. The liquor is an average, ripe brown-red color. Maybe, more yellow than usual. Flavor is thin, with medium huigan, but a pleasant, lasting aroma in the nose after drinking. Very easy to drink.

98C, flash: Leaves opened up quickly, but I used small chunks of cake. Color more rich and dark, flavor is same but aroma that follows sipping is more full.

98C, 10s: liquor is now rich brown, with more “fast” huigan and some notes of more dry wood.

98C, 20s: Some light grain notes I don’t recognize. Still full flavor.

98C, 30s: .. 98C, 30s: Now the taste has finally mellowed out.

98C, 1m30s: Liquor much brighter/redder. 98C, inf s: .. 98C, inf s: .. 98C, inf s: becoming bronze colored, 98C, inf s: flavor dissipating.. 98C, inf s: … could probably squeeze out a bit more, but the flavor is thinning enough that I’m done for sure.

Qi of the tea is mild, I would say cooling and calming…maybe mildly disorienting even.

The tea is mildly “absorbent”. As in, during brewing, it creates a strong enough vacuum inside the gaiwan to cause the lid to feel slightly “stuck” when you lift it up. Historically, I’ve found the absorbency of a ripe pu’er correlates with the strength of it’s qi and how much I like the tea reasonably well. On a scale from not absorbent (0) to “can pick up the gaiwan with the lid due to the strength of the vacuum created” (5), this tea is a 1.5/5.

If anyone knows the name for this phenomena, I’d love to hear it!

Final impressions are: for the price, a great tea to brew while sitting around during the day. Not gonna knock off your socks, but for $25 a cake I’d stock this around for poor weather. Taste was rather thin but clean, would probably pass the “mom test”.

tl;dr: Woody shou with pungent, sweet presence. Dominated by notes of dry wood and bark with a leathery finish in a clean, mid-mouth feel. Easy to overbrew at first at the cost of a very, very mild astringency, but also easy to make too thin if underbrewed.
4/5, easy to drink, but not “full” enough for my tastes.

5g leaf. 75ml gaiwan.
98C, 5s rinse.
Smell: Extremely sweet, like sweet potato.
98C, 5s steep.
Smell: Less sweet, more forest floor with some subtle tobacco notes.
Light mouth-feel, clean, thin.. No bitterness. Brown, brown-amber color. Taste of clean, dry wood. As the leaves cooled, the smell went back to full strength pungent/sweet from before as opposed to immediate post-steep clean/wet wood.
98C, 10s steep (wanted 5, burnt thumb)
Smell: Even less sweet than after first steeping.
Mid-mouth lingering, mild astringency, otherwise similar to before. Color is now dark as night, and was so as soon as the water hit the leaves. Some forest floor flavors, some mild cooked flavors. Definitely oversteeped.
Curious about the smell disappearing with the higher temp water.
80C, 15s steep
Smell: Sweetness didn’t stick around much more than first steeping, but returned more quickly.
Flat, thin flavor. Probably understeeped at that temperature. More decayed wood than previous “wet forest” flavor.
80C, 1min steep
color definitely didn’t appear as quickly when the water was added, so extending the steep even further than normal.
Scent was still the same as the 98C steepings, so I guess my experiment didn’t go as planned, and it took 1.5min+ to reach the the same color/viscosity as before.
Mmmm. Strong earthy flavor in a medium, mid-mouth feel, relatively viscous liquid complimented well by the mildest of sweetness and woody notes. Best steeping so far. Some after-taste of leathery-ness, not quite astringency I think.
98C, 45s
Smell of sweet potatoes is still accessible, but I have yet to taste it in the tea itself. More leathery notes in the smell the more steeping I do. No leather in the flavor, however. Hint of leather in aftertaste, but dominated by woody, bark notes.
…
After three more steepings it sizzled out into a generic, mild shou.
It could definitely have gone more than 10 steepings, but I had to get to work.