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[Spring 2021 harvest]

CS’s Zhu Ye Qing is a beautiful tea that’s both crisp and surprisingly warming for a green tea. It is well-balanced with sufficient complexity, pungent aftertaste and a relaxing cha qi.

The aroma is very fresh and vegetal (cucumber, broccoli, leeks) with just a hint of cream. Taste is a mix of nut oils (walnut), sweet grass with a nice bitterness (chicory) to it. There is no astringency basically. Other flavours on display include rice, sunflowers, green beans, and rapini. Liquor has a medium body and a buttery texture, which is really quite nice.

[Spring 2021 harvest]

Marvelous looking, delicate leaves with lots of hair here. It’s an exceptionally elegant tea with a silky full body and a resolute chest warming cha qi.

Initially, I get a nutty, floral and meaty scent which becomes vegetal later – a bit like chard.

The taste profile has vegetal backbone reminiscent of thistles and fiddleheads, as well as some floral and tart carambola notes. Subsequently, protracted sweetness comes to the fore, while mild vanilla and black pepper notes linger in the background.

It’s not a cheap tea, but a fresh green tea of this quality is hard not to appreciate for me.

As with many Taiwan Sourcing oolongs, this one doesn’t have enough going for it for me to be able to recommend it. With their tea, I find myself feeling that the storytelling is more interesting than the “experience in the cup” more often than not.

Dry leaves present a sweet creamy aroma with hints of brown sugar, cinnamon, root vegetables. During the session, it’s rather a mix of gooseberry, black locust flowers, and a grassy meadow. I also detected scents of celery and fermented fruits to some extent.

The taste has an unusual amount of woody bitterness which I find is not very well integrated. It also reminds me of hazelnut skins a little. Otherwise I get a decent plum sweetness and a vegetal finish which is a bit like fenugreek leaves. A residual lemon flavour shows up in the aftertaste too. The disintegrated nature of the liquor is underscored by its thick, cooling and a little rough mouthfeel.

Bai Ni Shui is a tea with multiple personalities. Initially, I get a fruity apricot aroma, but after the rinse various hints of mushrooms, forest floor, sea buckthorn juice, pickles, green bell pepper, and citrus skin emerge.

The taste is fruity and musty at first with notes butter and sea buckthorn juice again. The mouthfeel is colloidal and cooling. One of the residual flavours is that of apples.

Around third steep the tea gets more grainy. I can taste rye, sweet grass, and slightly unripe green grapes. Afterwards, it gets more sweet and mineral as the flavours gradually peter out.

Cha qi is not overly strong, but I like its heady and spine tingling nature.

This is a very comforting tea with an interesting mouthfeel. The texture is sticky, buttery, quite thick and at times bubbly. Compared to most other hei cha on the market, it seems to also produce longer sessions.

In a preheated gaiwan, I get a peaty mineral scent. Once the leaves open up, there is a distinctive and unexpected banana aroma, complemented notes of wood, raisins, rice paper and parsley.

First infusion is sweet and woody, while the second tastes also of barley and licorice root. Third steep brings light plum tartness and subsequently the tea becomes quite mineral and herbaceous. Towards the end, however, the experience is dominated by sweetness that at times resembles winter honey.

In conlusion, the tea is easily one of the best fu zhuan I’ve tried. It is on the more expensive side of the spectrum, but the full body, moderately complex profile and good longevity justify its price for sure.

Taiwan Sourcing has some very nice red oolongs. This one is fairly subtle, but I like it a lot. The aroma is on the sweet and fruity side, while the taste is more woody and nectar-like. It remains quite sweet throughout though. There is also some warming star anise spiciness, chicory-like sour bitterness, and sweet potato earthy sweetness. The mouthfeel is a little astringent and bubbly with medium body and soft presence. Interestingly, the aftertaste stays warming for a while – it’s a good tea for colder rainy spring days.

[Spring 2020 harvest]

I find this tea to be quite boring honestly. Besides a simple profile dominated by dill flavour, the body is very light to the point it reminds me of tisanes.

Dry leaf aroma is somewhat unique with notes of cucumber, dill, and sawdust. It is similar during the session, with a bit more sweet and fruity – pollen-like scent. Taste-wise, the tea is crisp and sweet.

I got a sample in the form of dragon balls. They have the right amount of compression and open up easily after about 10-15 sec rinse. 

The tea has a strong Lincang character (crisp, high florals, citrus notes) but also some faint Jinggu-like grainy notes. It’s definitely a more wild and forest-like tasting tea than your average tea from the well-kept gardens of Mengku. The liquor is medium bodied, but it has a lovely mouth-watering and very soft texture.

Dry leaves smell of dried mushrooms, after the rinse I find the aromas similar to those of Yunnanese green teas. They are vegetal, grassy and citrusy and overall quite beautiful.

With dragon balls, the rinse is rarely great, but here I like its crisp and sweet vegetal character with notes of bok choy and pollen. First proper infusion is floral and tart with a touch of bitterness. There are flavours of hot hay, barley, and lemon zest.

Subsequent steeps bring out more of quinine-like bitterness that I really enjoy. Other notes include those of red apple, courgette, and mushrooms. The aftertaste is surprisingly astringent at times and displays a lot of floral sweetness.

Song pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNfLqCZkFWc

Thanks for including this sample in the package Martin! I really enjoyed it and am glad to have tried a black tea from William.

Somehow, it lands somewhere between an aged white and a more typical sun-dried black, which is most probably due to the short oxidation in large measure. It is a woody and sweet tea with hints of sawdust and smoke in the aroma. In the mouth, some additional notes of peach, malt, licorice and autumn leaf pile come forward. I also found the effect on the mind to be quite defocusing – a fairly common aspect of Jingmai teas actually.

[Spring 2021 harvest]

I was excited to try a sample of this tea, expecting something different, at least. When dry, it smells of nuts, meat and chard. On the other hand, wet leaves have a very distinctive cabbage aroma.

First infusion is quite savoury and nutty with a mild bitter bite and honey sweetness. The flavours have a a good depth and the mouthfeel is very velvety with no astringency. The protracted aftertaste starts off juicy, buttery and warming, eventually a bit of vegetal sweetness appears from the bitterness though.

Subsequent steeps are pungent, vegetal and floral (still like honey, but without the honey sweetness) with a hint of spiciness and some astringency appearing too.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had any tea that you could say is truly a “yellow tea”. It’s certain is that this one is unlike any other tea I’ve had. It’s a bit hard to describe in what way though. Most of the specific aspects can be found in other teas, but the manner in which they come together is certainly unique. Also, the strong cabbage aroma is quite memorable.