Review: Tung Ting, Spring 2015 from Red Blossom Tea

Today I'll be reviewing another tea from Red Blossom. I purchased The Discovery Collection which comes with four sample teas, all of which I'll review. I'll be drinking the Tung Ting Formosa Oolong today. This will be my last tea out of the four tea sampler set.

From the Red Blossom website:
"Our Tung Ting was gathered at a little over 700 meters above sea level, in an area outside Lugu, Nantou County. We source exclusively spring harvested leaves for their fragrance and mouth feel. The tea is then lightly oxidized to accentuate its fresh orchid and gardenia notes."

I used the recommend 5 grams of leaves for my gaiwan. The leaves don't have much of a smell. After a rinse they had a sweet vegatal smell .

I did the first brew at 200 degrees F for three minutes. The leaves had a vegatal smell to them and the liquor was a faint light green without aroma. The taste is subtle and sweet that transforms into a green vegital and very slight astringent taste. It had a taste hard for me to describe and I felt myself trying to get every drop from the steep to understand it. The 5 grams of leaf filled the gaiwan to the top.

The second brew was at 200 for three minutes and thirty seconds. The sweetness in the aroma is almost all gone and I can only make out a leafy smell now. The leaves unfolded beautifully. They were mostly full with 2 or three leaves and displayed light and dark greens with a few hints of orange around some of the edges. The liquor was a light yellow with a slight smell I couldn't place. The taste of the front was was vegatal that got slightly bitter in a good way. The taste is subtle and takes me two or three cups to describe it to myself. I feel a slight bit of energy.

The third brew was done at 200 for four minutes. I first notice a lot of debris in the bottom of my cup and pitcher. The liquor was a lot lighter and really had no aroma that I could pick up. It the taste had the same flavors of the first two steeps although slight diminished. It was smooth and straight forward. I wanted to do a fourth brew and would have steeped for about 5 minutes to see if I could keep the tea producing but decided against it as I was headed to work and wanted to test it while I was there as well.

It did just as well brewing in my IngenuiTEA at work. I drank the infusions all day totaling about 3 steeps. I probably used about 7 grams of leaf and you can see that they expanded nicely to fill the entire device! This is a great all day drinker that is sweet and can have a nice bitter and vegital taste if push it on the heat/time/water to leaf ratio. It all depends on your taste for such things. I love a sweet to astringent or astringent to sweet transition and this tea can provide some of that based on the brewing variables.

This is the final tea of the sampler and if I had to rank the teas for my preference it would be:
1. Three Cultivar Red
2. Tung Ting Oolong
3. Premium White Tea
4. Pre-Rain Dragonwell

. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for reading!