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A nice black tea with complex aromas, sweet and spicy taste, and a very soft mouthfeel. Speicifically, I can smell bourbon vanilla, wood, and dried fruits like cherries. The taste is also woody with flavours of honey and black currants.

The tea has a thick, colloidal mouthfeel and a fairly muted sweet, mineral taste, which primarily reminds me of vegetable broth. It is also a bit bitter and cooling.

[Spring 2023 harvest]

Really good black tea with a thick liquor and a complex taste.

The dry leaf aroma is cosy with strong notes of tomato vine, nuts, and malt. Wet leaves, on the other hand, smell more like chestnuts, cocoa, and acorn. The tea has a smooth, creamy mouthfeel and a woody and nutty taste. There are flavours of almond shells, roasted peanuts, and muscovado sugar. In the sweet and spicy aftertaste, there are further hints of peach and cinnamon.

There is a clear flowery Mengku character here, but the tea also has a slight off-putting bone broth taste. I couldn’t quite warm up to it in my first session. The sweet and cooling aroma is, however, attractive.

[Spring 2023 harvest]

As good as I remember it, this tea consistently impresses me over the years.

It has a thick, creamy texture, and a somewhat herbaceous and brothy taste for a dianhong. Nevertheless, there is also a lot of sweetness and mild astringency. The taste reminds me of bread and forest floor. Likewise, the aroma carries a lot of depth with interesting fruity, medicinal and buttery notes.

This tea has only a light bitterness, but a lot of sugar beet sweetness. It has a smooth and silky mouthfeel and its aftertaste is a bit sour and very floral.

Specific aromas remind me of conifer forest, butter, mint, and carrot cake. In terms of flavours, there are many vegetal ones, such as broccoli, spring onion, celery stalk, and bell peppers.

A funny blend, certainly the first time I drink pu-erh with a Dan Cong oolong. There is an integrated character, but also one can pick out the individual teas. In the end, the experience of this tea is a bit more like and aged sheng actually. However, instead of a cohesive whole, one can feel the two poles pulling – the pungent oolong and the smooth shou.

The aroma has some sweet floral notes, a bit like apricot and rice. The tea is strong with a smooth creamy and cooling mouthfeel and an astringent finish. It has bitter, sweet, earthy, medicinal and herbaceous flavours. Specific flavours remind me of mint, gin, nuts, and barley.

For my first session with this tea, I used a lot of broken leaf pieces I found when unpacking it. As such, I had to be very careful not to overbrew it. I did get a very strong brew, but never really unpleasant.

One of the clear highlights was the exceptionally thick mouthfeel that sets this tea apart from a lot of similar ones. I also liked the very bitter and sweet taste a lot. It is a vegetal with notes of butter, burnt food, leek, alcohol, and apricots.

A decent buttery tea that’s on the savoury side with very little bitterness and astringency.

Dry leaves smell of sawdust and earth, wet ones more like popcorn, fern fiddleheads and milk. Early steeps are a bit sweet and fruity, later ones become a bit more savoury. There are notes of popcorn, green pepper, butter, and banana to be found.

I often find that Yi Wu pu-erh is overpriced and not quite my kind of taste profile. This one, however, is highly enjoyable with a strong yet pleasant energy to back up the experience.

The dry leaf aroma is sweet and fruity, which morphs to a flowery and cooling one with notes of ghee, compost, and ash throughout the session.

The liquor is thick and full-bodied with a a lot of depth and intensity in taste – floral, bitter, and sweet above all, but also mineral, spicy, medicinal, and herbaceous. The flavours remind me of gin, honey, sage, spearmint, and butter.