Snow Orchid, bouquet Phoenix dancong oolong

If you’re a fan of Anxi or Taiwanese oolongs, you should definitely check Snow Orchid out. It might replace your current-favorite oolong.

The leaf quality is superb, the aroma of the dry leaf is intoxicating, and the experience in the cup is unlike anything else out there. I’ve had quite a few different examples of freeze-dried Fenghuang oolong and this is the best one by far. Employing Ya Shi as a cultivar was a great choice, it naturally has a buttery silkiness to it that is amplified by the processing techniques here, and it has created something unrivaled even in the larger, and more generalized, world of oolongs. You just won’t find any other oolong quite as rich and decadent as this one.

It’s super thick and creamy, it oozes rich and gooey notes of fruits and flower with explosions of milk & whipped honey that are somehow front-and-center, yet also manage to support all of the other notes without drowning them out. I get some fruits reminiscent of citrus and pears, with hints of mangoes, melons, and eventually berries as the session progresses. There are some apparent, mineral-rich undertones that are gentle and stitch the whole experience together, reminding me that despite how velvety and smooth this tea is, at the end of the day it’s a high-end Fenghuang oolong, and so it will carry that characteristic bright minerality with it that all good dancong should have.

I’m surprised by the persistence of this tea. It has remarkable stamina when brewed up gong-fu style and will hold its composure very well across the full session, never falling apart. The color of the soup retains its clarity and does not become hazy. This is definitely a marathon runner, and it will go the extra mile where other freeze-dried dancong will fall apart and become bitter.

The leaf quality is superb. These are thick and wholesome leaves, processed uniformly and gently to retain the full spectrum of oils and aromatics that are produced within the leaves.

A quick word on processing: if the “zao qing” is done improperly, the freeze-drying technique will create brittle cell walls, which physically fall apart in the presence of near-boiling water. The cell walls disintegrate, the leaf starts to break down, and the resultant extraction becomes cloudy with tiny, almost microscopic bits and pieces of what used to be the constituents of the cell walls. Therefore, the real trick with freeze-dried Fenghuang oolong is to figure out how to pair the manual/mechanical processing techniques (“rattling”) with the freeze-drying in order to create something that releases tons and tons of flavor, but does not physically fall apart during extraction.

Tea Hong’s Snow Orchid achieves just that. I see why it took over a decade to fine-tune the process… it’s not easy to make something like this, and the mastery of the technique shows in every single second of the session.