May to me is strawberries and spring teas. I’ve been chugging shou pu’er like it’s going out of style and I really need to switch to greens, whites and young sheng pu’er to get me into Spring and Summer mode. It looks like the Simple Loose Leaf box this month has some nice oolongs and greens!
Simple Loose Leaf box info – Simple Loose Leaf is a monthly Co-op tea box that sends 4 to 6 loose leaf tea samples (1/4oz size) – you get a wide assortment of different teas such as straight teas, blends and herbals. With being in the Tea Co-op, you get a membership ID. If you enjoy and want more tea that you’ve sampled, you can purchase it from the Simple Loose Leaf Tea Shop for 50% off.
For your first box, you can enter OolongOwl for a 50% off your first Simple Loose Leaf’s Tea co-op box!
The teas this month for Simple Loose Leaf – Chinese Jade green, Irish Breakfast black, Shui Xian oolong and Yerba Mate.
For May 2015 Simple Loose Leaf is experimenting with size, so each tea is 10 grams instead of 7 grams, but we got 4 teas instead of the usual 5. I quite like this change, especially for unflavored teas as I get two gong fu steeping rounds. The teas that interested me in particular this month is the Chinese Jade and Shui Xian (I cannot say no to a roasted oolong), so that is what I’ll be sampling here this month.
Tasting of May 2015 Simple Loose Leaf teas
Chinese Jade has a lovely dry leaf and is vibrant in color with curls of silver. I decided to steep this in a gaiwan, gong fu style, with 175f water and 10 second infusions.
Chinese Jade sips in with the flavor of sweet buttery peas with a smokey nut like finish. The aftertaste is lightly fruity floral like peaches. With each infusion the green gets more intense vegetal with a walnut shell bitter and smokey taste, making for a strong cup.
I got 5 good infusions, with the later steeps getting pretty dry with a 5/10 Astringent dry finish. I steeped a 6th infusion but it got too vegetal bitter and dry to drink.
I had a giggle in finding one single branch leaf that is reddish brown where all the others leaves are green.
Shui Xian Oolong is my kinda tea. The scent of the leaf is roasty toasty nutty with an appearance of long twirls of dark leaf. Gimmie! I also steeped this tea in a gaiwan but with 200f and 15 second infusions.
The first six infusions taste of sweet mineral, toasty pastry notes, and fruity apricot finish. Shui Xian kind of reminds me of an apricot danish. The apricot finish and aftertaste is quite light.
The later infusions, up to 9, lighten considerable with less fruity notes and more of a savory butter and mineral notes, kind of like an unsalted saltine cracker.
My favorite has to be the oolong for this month’s Simple Loose Leaf box!
