I savored this month’s White2Tea monthly tea subscription club – all the teas sounded great to me!
For the White2Tea club, every month you get teas that are curated by White2tea. These teas are samples from their current line up, previews to new teas to their shop, as well as some private stash and discoveries. The subscription is month to month, cancel any time. So far, all the teas I’ve received has been pretty good – I recently dropped a bunch of cash for a group order, buying more teas that I received in previous months. Good stuff!
For the month of January, the White2tea club teas are: 2008 Haichao Chenxiang Ripe Puer (125 gram mini cake), Dark Feather Dancong (10 gram sample) and Big Red Tree (10 gram sample). I took almost the entire month to sample all these teas. I steeped all these teas with boiling water and gongfu style short infusions.
2008 Haichao Chenxiang Ripe Puer
I drank this ripe puer twice. I had a really bad ripe puer the day before the first sampling of 2008 Haichao Chenxiang, so I was super happy to get some good puer in me!
I found 2008 Haichao Chenxiang Ripe Puer very easy to drink ripe! The tea has a clear dark color.
2008 Haichao Chenxiang Ripe Puer starts off pretty rich like a comforting morning coffee with notes of malt and chocolate. The tea ends smooth and sweet. I’d show this tea to someone new to puer – the flavor is not too complex but good quality. I didn’t get that many infusions, about 8 for both runs, but all were pretty good.
Dark Feather Dancong
I love the name of this dancong!
Dark Feather oolong is smooth and lots of creamy lips. The flavor is roasty deep like walnuts and pecans with a peachy and leafy aftertaste. My favorite part of this tea is the lingering creamy peach breath.
At about the 5th infusion, Dark Feather Dancong gets quite dry, 5/10 on the Astringency Meter, with dry cheeks but mega aftertaste.
Big Red Tree
Big Red Tree is interesting – it is from old arbor puer trees. The tea is fermented but then made into black tea. The dry leaf of Big Red Tree is pretty as it has long gold highlighted twists of tea with a touch of grape scent.
First cup has an orange color – wow so pretty!
In totally random the hot steeped leaves smell like raspberries! Big Red Tree’s flavor is thick with a creamy malt edge to it. The tea reminds me of a golden tipped yunnan black however there a berry notes to it that make the tea more unique in flavor. I would like to say the berry flavor is raspberry, but it’s pretty close.
This tea has lots of resteeping potential, I got around 14 resteeps! Later infusions the color of Big Red Tree got more deep orange. I was getting a buzz on the tongue might of been tea drunk. In an interesting twist, the final infusions where surprisingly buttery!
In the end, my favorite of this month’s White2Tea club teas was Big Red Tree – very cool, unique tea! Boo, I’ll need to get more Big Tree Red and I just made an order! I am unsure how much of a deal I got this month as the 2008 Haichao Chenxiang Ripe Puer isn’t on sale due to limited stock, Dark Feather Dancong, at the time, isn’t listed. Big Red Tree full size is $35. I look forward to next month!
