Classic Bai Lin Gong Fu Black tea of Fuding * Golden Monkey * Spring 2018

For my final review of the day, I’m going to dip a little further into the backlog than I did with my last two reviews and look back to my last sipdown of October. The Classic Bai Lin Gong Fu Black tea of Fuding is always one of Yunnan Sourcing’s regular offerings that I look forward to every year, primarily due to it almost always providing a great drinking experience. This spring 2018 offering proved to be no exception. It was a fantastic Fujian black tea.

I prepared this tea gongfu style. For my review session, I set the water temperature at 194 F and neither raised nor lowered it over the course of the session. After quickly rinsing the loose tea leaves, I started off with a 5 second infusion. This infusion was chased by 18 additional infusions. Steep times for these infusions were as follows: 7 seconds, 9 seconds, 12 seconds, 16 seconds, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, 1 minute, 1 minute 15 seconds, 1 minute 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes.

Prior to the rinse, the dry tea leaves produced aromas of malt, cinnamon, baked bread, cedar, chocolate, and raisin. After the rinse, I detected new aromas of roasted almond and roasted peanut. The first proper infusion introduced aromas of honey and sweet potato. In the mouth, the tea liquor presented me with notes of malt, chocolate, cedar, cream, baked bread, and sweet potato that were balanced by subtler impressions of roasted almond, roasted peanut, raisin, honey, cinnamon, and brown sugar. The bulk of the subsequent infusions introduced aromas of orange zest, brown sugar, earth, plum, butter, grass, and roasted walnut. Stronger and more immediately detectable notes of roasted almond, roasted peanut, and brown sugar appeared in the mouth alongside earth, orange zest, mineral, vanilla, butter, and roasted walnut impressions. I also detected hints of plum, pear, smoke, red apple, green bell pepper, and grass. As the tea faded, the liquor settled and emphasized notes of minerals, cream, malt, earth, and roasted almond that were chased by lingering brown sugar, honey, grass, vanilla, roasted peanut, chocolate, and raisin hints.

This was a very smooth, sophisticated Fujian black tea that remained very approachable despite its complexity and depth. It also displayed tremendous longevity in a fairly extended drinking session. Since Yunnan Sourcing has batted 1.000 with offerings of this type, and this one did not buck that trend, I fully expect that the two most recent productions of this tea were also more or less just as good as this one. If you happen to be looking for a great and versatile Chinese black tea that is both easy and fun to drink, look no further.

So I didn’t see this tea on here for This Year and I didn’t feel like adding it myself blah blah so last year’s tea right here is well fine enough for me lol.

This one is always delicious its malty and spicy with sweet notes and a nice baked goods type thing going, like a flaky pastry. Damn good Tea always.

Well, I have generally determined that Golden Blacks are one of my favorite types of tea. So, time to step my game up a notch!
Western Style. 3 min with 212F Water. Wet leaf smells like honey and muted cocoa with some maybe baked bread is it? Hard to say, I’m still learning this stuff.
Taste is… OH WOW. This is so much better than my Adagio Golden Monkey. I can see the similarities for sure, but all of the yumminess in this cup is turned up to 11. I’m getting strong cocoa and honey notes, and yes I’m calling it- it tastes like fresh baked bread. There’s something else there, I want to say ever so slight sweet potato, but really only the best parts of sweet potato because I really hate sweet potato and I’m definitely loving on this. Aftersip mouth taste is sweet and pleasing. Almost like a honeyed dinner roll. This is probably the best tea I’ve ever tasted in my life. Actually, “probably” may be misleading. I’m pretty much certain this is the best tea I’ve ever had. If there is better tasting tea out there, I don’t recall. I need this all the time. Bottom line: If you are a fan of the golden blacks, you owe it to yourself to try this. Go for it. This tea is wonderful.

I had this tea again and again it was Western style. I am starting to warm up to it, actually. Yes, it is till very demanding to its management (i.e., easy to oversteep), it is still not particularly intense and thus requires a very neutral or sweet water to shine… but I came to enjoy its understated sweetness and generally muted but oh so pleasing flavor palette. This seems to be a very good tea for a very particular kind of mood: relaxed, quiet, mellow, self-contented.

Recently I started finding many teas while not being suitably for the role of the everyday drinkers to be perfect companions for very specific moods. Unfortunately, most of these moods only rarely descend upon me and, consequently, I am becoming increasingly saddled with many highly mood-specific teas and cannot find anything I really want when I am in my “general mood” despite dozens and dozens of tea in my cupboard.

Which makes me want to immediately place another order in this never ending quest for the elusive tea that I would want to drink day in and day out like a happy koala bear.