My latest purchase from House of Tea was all about bolstering the daily drinker side of my stash – I ordered a good sized cargo of their very nice Bai Mu Dan – and this tea was included in the package in the form of a free, 5 gram sample.

My last encounter with this type of tea was back in early June of 2018, after I spotted some for sale at Sing Tehus in Copenhagen.

This version, as you might expect, also hails from the volcanic island of Jeju, comes from the second flush of 2020, and is certified as ecologically produced.

The dry leaves weren’t giving much away, but after a few seconds in the warmed up pot they started doing their very best Long Jing impersonation.

The first infusion had the same kind of creamy nuttiness that I expect to see in a Long Jing, but backed it up with broccoli stalks, as well as a tart-but-sweet green appley aftertaste. Those small, fine leaves came with a fair old bit of dust around them, and although my strainer caught the majority of it, rendering it as a fine, green sludge, a little still made its way into the cup, noticeable as a slight clouding of the liquor.

The second, half-second long steeping saw only a very slight drop off in the quality of the brew, but as is so often the case the third round fell into the “nice, drinkable, but we’re done here” category.

It has to be said that I was pleasantly surprised by this tea.

Normally I’m not a fan of green teas that demand water at temperatures lower than 80°C, and I’ve never really got on with the “in-and-out” steeping method when I’ve encountered it in the past, usually with Japanese green teas (Gyokuro, I’m looking at you…), but in this instance the two combined seemed to hit a a sweet spot, and well, just worked.

Good stuff.