Just a few weeks after reviewing Chicago Tea Garden’s Golden Bi Lo, I turn to Teas Etc’s Bi Lo Chun Reserve, a delightful green tea with a remarkable nose.
Bi Lo Chun is a specialty of tea makers in Jiangsu Province, China. This particular sample from Teas Etc (a free sample, by the way) features lovely white downy leaves, indicating that the leaves were harvested at a young age.
This review, the final one in my series of ti kuan yin reviews, comes at an opportune time: Chicago Tea Garden, the suppliers of this final ti kuan yin, officially launched yesterday. Congratulations to Tony and his partner Erin — all the best of luck to you both!
Now, the tea.
A line from Little Yellow Teapot’s review of Chicago Tea Garden’s Golden Bi Luo has stuck with me this week:
The sign of a great tea is when the leaves look great before and after steeping.
It is remarkable just how markedly different two teas of the same style can be. Yesterday’s ti kuan yin, a Taiwanese one, had a sharp nutty character and a wonderful dry aroma. Today, we’re drinking a ti kuan yin produced in Fujian Province, China, and there’s not a hint of nuttiness. But it still smells lovely, as its name suggests: Clear and Fragrant Style Ti Kuan Yin from Tea Trekker.
The first in my series of ti kuan yin teas is the only one from Taiwan.
Highly aromatic teas seem to be the hallmark of Taiwanese tea producers. This ti kuan yin might not be as aromatic as some of the other Taiwanese oolongs I’ve tried, but it still bears a lovely nose of sweet, almond-like nuttiness. One of the best things you can do with a tea like this is to warm the gaiwan or whatever teapot you’re using first, place the tea leaves in there, and then just suck in the aroma. You’ll be amazed at how much you can smell.
My fellow tea blogger, Tony Gebely of World of Tea is starting Chicago Tea Garden, an online tea store that’s just days away from launching. He sent me samples of two of his teas a few weeks ago, one of which is this Golden Bi Luo, a rare black tea from Yunnan Province, China.
Golden Bi Luo is made in the style of Bi Luo Chun, a green tea that is the specialty of tea makers in Jiangsu Province. Like Bi Luo Chun, Golden Bi Luo is rolled into little balls, but it has a lovely golden tint. This tea scores very highly on the attractiveness scale. It’s beautiful to behold.
Just a few weeks after I received the Travel Buddy tea mug for Sinterklaas, the folks at Copco sent me the latest addition to their Total Tea range: a stainless steel tea thermal mug.
There are a few things I really like about the Copco thermal tumbler, but there is one definite standout feature: the twist-to-stop steeping feature, a device that allows you to control how long your tea steeps for. It’s simple, intuitive and shows that Copco understand tea drinkers’ needs.
Do you like my mug? It was a Father’s Day present — my first ever — from Benedict.
Of course, Father’s Day was way back in September, so why the recursion into the past? Truth be told, my camera has a flat battery, so I don’t have any photos of today’s tea. Instead, you’ll have to make do with some choice pictures of the almighty mug I drank it from.
When I first started drinking wine, one of the things that I most enjoyed was the feeling afterwards, once the wine had coursed through the throat and into the stomach. That warmth. It was amazing to me to feel how the body responded to the drink.
I had a similar experience this morning with tea. The tea is an aged pu-erh tea from Bana Tea Company, a Menghai factory raw (sheng) pu-erh that has been aging since 1996.
Today’s tea is a kabusecha — a Japanese green tea that is 45% shade-grown for three weeks prior to harvest. That puts it halfway between sencha, which isn’t given any shade at all, and gyokuro, which is 100% shade-grown for the three weeks before harvest.
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