Sky High Oolong

It’s always tricky to review a tea that I didn’t brew myself, but here are some of my notes. The package says that this tea has notes of Magnolia, Sugarcane and Spring Water.

1st infusion: (205˚F, ?)
Tea smells buttery, this is a very light infusion. Leaves smell intoxicatingly sweet and floral.

2nd infusion: (200˚F, 1:00)
Tastes buttery, savoury almost salty. I half-suspect that the mug I’m drinking it out of came into a brush with some salt (but it’s the same mug as I drank the first infusion out of, so… very curious). In any case, this is a good tea.

3rd infusion: (200˚F, 1:50)
Too astringent probably steeped too long.

Thank you, Liquid Proust again! It tasted like a paler version of Mandala’s Tie Guan Yin. I definitely got Orchid, some cream, and some sweetness with a butter aftertaste. I am glad I did the western because I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise taste it. I liked it, and it reminded me of my new coming preference for greener style oolongs. Only complaint is that it was watered down. Glad I sampled it.

This tea has a nice low key floral smell, but the taste just doesn’t do much for the drinker (being me).
I brewed this using water at 187f and didn’t seem to get much out of it overall which was unfortunate because I see pretty leaf in my teapot expanding but not doing much in regards to releasing great taste into the water. The taste is nice, but I wouldn’t call it great or strong enough to make anyone pick anything specific out about it.

Finally sitting down for a gongfu session with my Kickstarter rewards. We had another power outage today (second one in the last month, and third this year for this area apparently. Grump.) so I was really craving a cup of tea by the time the power came back on.

The dry leaf is tightly rolled green nuggets that smell sweet, floral very creamy.

Steeped 2g in my 50ml gaiwan with 96C water. The package directions recommend 3g for 150ml, but 1g just seemed like such a tiny amount of tea for this. I think 2g was a good choice.

Steeped leaf has a surprising smell of brown sugar and kale, but the tea soup is pale yellow and both tastes and smells like the dry leaf.

First steep for 1 min is floral, fruity and creamy, with a slight tang on the finish. It has a medium body.

Second steep for a minute again has a slightly tart note on top of the orchid and creaminess, though is otherwise very similar to the first steep.

Reading the tasting notes in the description, I definitely see how this tea evokes fresh air. It’s got this sort of quality that’s both light and substantial – hard to describe, but quite lovely.

This was pretty consistent through four steeps. For my fifth I reheated my water (I’d just been pouring from my kettle as it cools) and ended up with a nice caramel note and a not so nice melted plastic note. I was hoping a sixth steep would be good but now there’s a weird cardboard taste coming through.

I’m not sure what happened here. The first four steeps were lovely and definitely worth drinking, but I think I’m done now.

A while back I supported a Kickstarter campaign for Dachi Tea. I kind of forgot about it to be honest. I’m not an Oolong lover. But I figure I want to support new tea ventures, because TEA, right? Well, today i received a package of four 10 gram samples from Dachi, sent all the way from Taipei City in Taiwan to Fargo in North Dakota. I received this one, Iron Goddess, Frozen Summit, and Honeysuckle, and this one won.

My description might be awkward and amateur-ish, because 1) I have no sense of smell and thus don’t taste much and 2) I am still pretty new at drinking high quality teas. So, please bear with me as I try to tell you what this tea is like:

The dry tea is greenish, black, and golden brown leaves rolled into irregularly shaped pellets. I think these are called pearls? I put 6 pellets into a T-Sac and steeped in almost boiling water for 2 minutes. The resulting tea is very pale and delicate in color. The tea tastes (and again, please remember I can’t taste much because of no sense of smell) smooth. There is no sourness or bitterness in this tea. It is not cloying or sweet. It seems to have light body to me and a pleasant mouthfeel. I really can’t bear bitterness, sourness or astringency, so this tea passes my personal test for a good tea. I am really interested in hearing what a smelling person thinks of this tea.