Aged Tie Guan Yin

Nutty on the first taste with a hint of cinnamon and cocoa. It tastes quite thick and the cocoa flavour comes through more as I drink it. The toasted oats flavour also comes through and makes me crave crannachan. To be honest, I had been wondering what the flavour was and only really made the connection upon reading the tasting notes. Anyway, I have enjoyed this and the aftertaste is still there, lingering nicely on my tongue even five minutes after. This is not my favourite tea, but I could happily drink it when the mood takes me. It is complex and really requires time to savour and enjoy the full depth of it.

Oh yeah! I am really enjoying my Canton Tea Company club membership. I’m only two infusions in on this one. I love a good a heavily-roasted TGY, and I am really impressed with this ones complexity.

Maybe I’ll add more to this note later.

Smoky up front (and aroma). Really nice flavor that finishes with chocolate.

Tea number two from the EU TTB Round 4!

Now this is Autumnal! Although a little more mellow than I had hoped (the tasting notes on the packaging does say that it’s mellow) it’s a beautiful TGY with cocoa and oatmeal biscuity notes. So relaxing for this kind of day. The aroma of the tea brewing is woodsy and a little smoky, so I was surprised that that didn’t come through in the tea. I love roasted oolongs, but haven’t yet tried as many as I would have liked to. I don’t think I’ve had a single one I didn’t like! The oolong balls are still furled up pretty tight after a 3 minute steep, so I think I’ll be trying a second steep of this one. The experiment continues!

Another aged tea in my line up today. I’m doing bursts of house cleaning whilst cooking a large pot of chilli to aid my craving of chilli cheese fries. So I want aged teas and chilli cheese fries….an odd but pleasurable day.

These Oolong balls are medium/large in size and are very dark brown in colour. A quick sniff-spection reveals a sweet wood, leather and dry earthen concoction that leaves my mouth salivating in anticipation.

Ok this is interesting, it tastes milky but not overtly sweet or creamy which I usually find with fresh Tie Guan Yin. Milky but also buttery though mild and not fresh, which sounds horrible as non fresh milk is sour and disgusting and this is not like that but I can’t think of another way to describe it. Perhaps to say like uht milk, not fresh but still ok.

Enough about milk. It has a little sweetness to it and is more floral than I was expecting. Also has a toasted quality which comes through more in the later steeps, though it remains lighter than you expect an aged Oolong to be.

A nice Oolong but unfortunately it doesn’t stand out as much as I was hoping, it just tastes like I bought a pack of Tie Guan Yin and left it in the cupboard for a few years before finally digging it out and trying it.