Golden Lily

Sipdown 8-2021
I have a nice sipdown momentum going today! I actually may consider using a redemption to get this again (if it’s still available), but I’m not in any rush to restock.

(DavidsTea 68)

This is pretty delicious. I recently bought 50g of it though, and it wasn’t as good. Different harvests, I suppose. This is for a 10g bag purchased March 7 2020 – my last trip to a DT store. It’s a really nice, fresh, naturally creamy green oolong. I quite like it.

2.5 tsp for 400mL water @90C, steeped four minutes Western-style.

First, I have too much leaf here. Second, the water temp is too damn hot. I’ve got scalded and bitter tea here. Bleah.

Still, I can taste a ghost of the lovely sample I tried at a DavidsTea yesterday, which was between a quangzhou milk and a tieguanyin. The DT staff tell me it stands up to multiple steeps and gets more floral with each re-steep.

Okay, as it cools, it’s improving. Definitely gonna use water at 85C next time. Can’t wait to try it gongfu.

This is a pricy tea almost $16 for 50 grams, but I think it’s well worth trying if you’re a fan of milky and floral oolongs.

Another new tea! This one isn’t part of the Reset/Recharge Collection, and it actually came out a little over a week ago but between all of the moving craziness I just didn’t end up sitting down to write the tasting note…

I think this is such an amazing oolong though, and I’m REALLY proud to have it part of the straight tea collection! It’s actually probably my favourite tea to have come out from DT since 2020 started, and of the new straight teas coming out for the year my favourite hands down! I don’t personally love DT’s Tie Kuan Yin and until now that was the only straight oolong we had for such a long time but this tea is so beautiful with a really interesting background! Basically, it’s a Jin Shuan cultivar green oolong, but with the unique differentiator of being from Thailand!

I love Jin Shuan/Jin Xuan so much as a style of tea that I actually have an entire unglazed pot dedicated to it – and it’s really cool to me to now have something that I have such easy access to, from work, that I can contribute to that pot’s growth and development. I know some people might ask why DT chose to carry a Thailand origin oolong when that’s an atypical growing region, but there are A LOT of other companies who carry Jin Shuan and in order to be competitive DT has to have something that differentiates theirs from the rest of the pack. So why not Thailand? It’s a relatively new terroir but the flavour is superb and not unlike what you would expect from Taiwan. Plus, if you’re a straight tea drinker, aren’t you curious!? I know that I was!

It’s excellent basically every way that I’ve tried it – Western, Grandpa, and Gongfu! Very smooth and forgiving/hard to brew incorrectly with a rich, silky mouthfeel. The dry leaf is sweet and aromatic with snow pea, creamy vanilla, and soft floral elements. I’d describe the flavours as creamy, rich condensed milk meets buttery coconut milk, with a side of fresh Spring flowers and a little, tiny hint of sweet pea. If you push the leaf a little longer/harder it almost has a fruitiness to it as well like white peaches.

I love this so much, and have gone through a lot of it in the last few months waiting for it to launch. It’s so good, and the type of oolong that I think can really speak to both flavoured tea fans and people with more of an appreciation towards straight and traditional teas!

Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.