I don’t know if any of you purchased this one for the new spring 2016 harvest when verdant was doing their preorders, but this one took a bit longer than they expected for verdant to get it, so they replaced it in my order with a black buds jjm, and then refunded my purchase of this and on top of that, they sent me this along with an extra 5g sample once they’d received it, and on top of that, they gave me $5 of tea cash! I wasn’t even really upset that the order was taking a bit longer. I really appreciate Verdant tea right now. I kinda think they lost money from that purchase of mine because I’d had $10 of teacash and .. Well anyways. They’re good people. (they also sent me 2×15g packages of this tea instead of the 25g I originally ordered.)
okay so the dry leaf is a lot of fresh cherries and earthy cocoa, a bit of wood. It looks black and twisty but they’re smaller than average twisted leaves
The wet leaf is like a laoshan black but more milk chocolatey and less of that sort of medicinality..
It has this intense creaminess, lots of chocolate, it tastes like hot chocolate on the way down, but then the aroma is a lovely, fruity, cooked apple and peach, god this is my kinda tea, the same milkiness as the zheng shan xiao zhong from li xiangxi, only with an aroma that I’m much more fond of personally, it is missing a lot of complexity, there’s maybe 2 or 3 notes that you can really find, milk, cocoa, cooked apples, I don’t know what else. Maybe a bit of a breadiness?
Okay this is an increadible hot-chocolate tasting lovely desserty tea, but it’s not keeping me interested too much, it’s not shifting between steeps, and the flavours are a bit muddied, and hard to distinguish, I get some barley later into the session, and a rocky astringency that’s quite nice and pretty consistent.
This is something I would keep around all of the time cause like.. damn but it’s kinda like a muddy version of my Ming Jian. It’s a decently affordable daily desserty tea.
