Cedar

Tried this a couple more times and still not even a hint of cedar/hinoki/cypress. I’m not even getting it in the aroma any longer, which is a bummer.

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So this one is a blend of sheng, crassicolumna sheng, and cypress oil. I love evergreen-y notes in tea, so this sounded lovely to me. The dry scent, though, is almost a bit chemical? It reminds me a bit of burning rubber…

By contrast, the flavor is very mellow. It tastes like a mix of an earthy Chinese green tea and maybe an aged white tea. It’s smooth, but has a noticeable mineral note to it along with a touch of earthy smoke. And then there’s a stonefruit flavor that reminds me of apricot fruit leather, albeit perhaps a bit less concentrated and certainly less sweet. Overall, I’m actually reminded of a gunpowder green tea.

I don’t get any cypress notes at all, and I have no idea what the crassicolumna would possibly taste like. Mostly it’s just a mellow and very mineral sheng. Meh.

This seemed so promising to me.

It’s basically just a sheng mixed with cypress oil, which is just a brilliant combination. On the dry leaf, the rich woody aroma of the cypress is also really apparent – I’ve been sneaking little whiffs of the sample bag every time I’ve gone to make a tea from Chroma.

I made it as a Western cup of tea yesterday and I honestly thought I had overdone it with the amount of leaf I’d measured out – but steeped up the flavour of this was so, so weak. It did have a really nice almost effervescent mouthfeel with this light, plucky astringency. However, as pleasant as the mouthfeel might have been, none of that really means anything to me without taste to back it up. I’m not writing it off entirely yet, but it’s just shockingly mild without any real presence of the cypress oil.