What our customers say

Brief (few seconds) steeps in 90 Celsius water.
Liquor is of a clear pale yellow in tone.
Taste is smooth with a fruity sweet aftertaste. Surprisingly has a minty finish. No tartness nor bitterness.
Mouthfeel is slightly dry, encouraging salivation.
Wet leaves are dark greenish brown in colour and large in size, giving off a fruity burnt sugar aroma.
This tea withstands many steeps.

Beautiful tea

I don’t have a lot of experience with different kinds of tea, but this one is so different that I want to write about it here. It has a fullest, roundest body and silkiest texture I have ever experienced with tea. I have not expected tea to be like that before and I totally love it!

Now I understand a bit about tea maturity

I have heard about it but this is the first tea that has made me experience the interesting thing about tea maturity. I bought the first pack in 2012 because I had read about Leo’s name in a tea merchant’s catalogue here in Switzerland. It was great taste and good value, but when I opened a second pack that I bought last month, the aroma of the leaves instantly tell me it had already become something else. The sweetness was less obvious but much deeper with a prominent ‘woodsy’ tone. The infusion much deeper and mellow and the taste longer. There is something dancing on the taste buds that I don’t think I can write even in German. Maybe it is music in tea taste.

I am just so disappointed that it is sold out now. I hope the new stock will mature to the same wonders!

TR
Zurich

獨特的岩韻、幽幽的花香，加上豐厚紅茶的口感，飲後心情愉快。拿去茶友聚會，個個人都讚好。現在桐木關梅占是我最喜歡的紅茶。

Yummy. I’ve tried both this and the Mi Lan Supreme, and while my inner tea snob prefers the Supreme, this less expensive version is still a very good example of Mi Lan Xiang and has an amazing price to quality ratio.

The inherent honey and nectar-like characteristics are the focal point of the journey that unfolds over the course of a long and thoroughly enjoyable gong-fu session. Thick yet smooth, with a powerful mouthfeel and a graceful evolution of flavors and sensations across the full session, this one captures the essence of what makes Mi Lan Xiang among the most popular and most famous of all Fenghuang cultivars.

It’s juicy, fruity, and peachy-sweet with an oily quality that sinks deeper and deeper into the palate with every sip. The undertones of honey get stronger as the cup cools, but it never loses the clarity and smoothness in the body even when the soup is left to cool down to room temperature. It maintains a consistently elegant flavor profile no matter how you brew it or how you drink it.

I love the dynamic nature of this Mi Lan, it responds very well to being brewed up in the gong-fu style, but I actually prefer to brew this Western-style because you can see the full breadth and depth of flavors this tea has to offer in every sip. I could comfortably keep both this and the Mi Lan Supreme in my stash – the Supreme would be for gong-fu infusions, and this one would be for Western-style infusions.

This tea is an enigma. It’s a Pandora’s Box of flavors and sensations that shows a different side of itself every time you brew it up. Like a chameleon, it is very colorful and dynamic, and constantly shifting around as the soup cools, or as the leaves are being warmed back up as more water is poured into the brewing vessel.

It’s also a very sophisticated and elegant experience. The complex nature of Ya Shi Xiang as a cultivar is perfectly captured in Tea Hong’s Orchid Literati – it would be difficult to find a deeper, rounder, and more wholesome expression than this, despite Ya Shi being a popular cultivar.

It’s not just the additional layers of flavor that make Orchid Literati stand out as one of the very best Ya Shi you could ever hope to find, it’s the additional dimensions. Much like watching an old movie on a flat-screen, in black-and-white, then watching that same film re-mastered in 3-D with ultra-high definition colors, so too does this Orchid Literati re-master and upgrade my experience with a cultivar that I know and love.

Besides the sheer breadth and depth of the flavor profile, one thing that really stands out to me about Orchid Literati is how clearly the terroir comes across – I can taste the soil and feel the minerals which fed these trees, and that alone is deeply quenching for my dancong-drinking soul.

It’s not difficult to find a “good enough” example of Ya Shi because it’s an easily-approachable cultivar and there are a lot of really good examples out there… but quality of this caliber is exceptionally rare, and for the price point this sits at, it’s a no-brainer to pick up a bag (or two) and experience the magic for yourself.