What our customers say

A Real Treat

I would call this a mid-roast tea with a high floral aroma with sweet mineral flavours. My mouth is full of flavour, feeling, and the huigan is big! This is a big tea. Dry leaves are long. Layers of flavor and depth. A real powerhouse!

Complex and intriguing… this is definitely the type of tea you want to drink a few times before you feel like you’ve had it even once. The flavor profile is sophisticated, especially considering how easy and straightforward it is to brew up.

This Zhu Ye has a crisp and clean mouthfeel, like mineral-rich mountain spring water, with a pleasant lingering sweetness that gradually builds up and slowly fades away. It has just the right amount of bitterness to keep the flavor profile on the slightly-dry side, but without sacrificing the delicacies of its otherwise sweet layers of flavor.

There’s a vibrant and apparent note of nettle; to me it’s the focal point of this tea, and it really ties the whole flavor profile together. I get overtones of pine needles with hints of green peppercorn & juniper berries, a mossy and slightly starchy body that has notes reminiscent of fresh peas and corn kernels, and undertones of truffles with cornflowers. This tea has a pungent earthiness, yet also a distinct silkiness, that makes for a really intriguing contrast of flavors and sensations.

Notes of nettle weave their way seamlessly in and out of the whole flavor profile, adding a subtle herbaceous spiciness that is quite powerful yet so gentle at the same time.

The aroma coming off the bottom of an empty cup, as it cools, reminds me of clover honey. It’s got a clear and focused sweetness, with subtle hints of nettle creeping back up and becoming stronger as the cup cools down completely to room temperature.

The color of the soup is bright and clear, with tiny hairs suspended in the cup. In later steeps, the broth turns a bit hazy but the mouthfeel remains light and resists turning excessively bitter, even after a long final steep.

The leaf quality is superb, it’s worth watching these leaves open up as they brew, and definitely worth looking closely after they’ve taken a nice long bath. It’s clear they were plucked well and processed uniformly.

This is a powerful tea, with all of the correct nuances in the right places.

Delightful Taste
My wife and I tried to discern the taste profile of Dianhong Classic 2019 as described by Leo Kwan and reviewer Karen Ager, but our taste buds were not refined enough to match their descriptions to the taste we experienced. Suffice to say that we found this tea delightful and calming, and we enjoyed it very much! We brewed gong fu style and the high quality of tea was maintained through many rounds of brewing, varying the rounds with increasing steeping time and temperature!

This is a good example of baked Tieguanyin, it’s got good firing techniques coupled with good leaf material, and it’s pretty flexible in terms of how it can be brewed up. It always creates a deeply enjoyable cup of tea in the handful of times I’ve brewed it so far. This tea is going to be awesome in the fall and winter time – but even during the cooler days of the hot summer, which I’m in right now, it’s proven to be quite refreshing.

I enjoy the way the soft floral and stronger fruity notes come to the forefront of the palate with each progressive sip, gently being supported by the clear notes of charcoal without ever becoming smothered by them. The baking accents the flavor profile and adds an interesting depth by bringing out a kind of fruity sweetness that is usually obliterated when the firing is taken too far… which is quite often, unfortunately.

Anybody can burn a batch of tea leaves, either at too high a temperature or for too long, or perhaps even a combination of both – and call it a “high roast”, but this takes no skill to achieve. What does take skill to achieve, is a proper firing that elevates the inherent qualities of the tea leaf being processed. There are molecular changes to the constituents of the leaf that are induced by good firing techniques, and these are what create depth in sweetness and distinct accents in the floral and fruity layers of the flavor profiles, which is what I find in this Tieguanyin Classic.

It’s nice to see an example of proper firing techniques in something priced superbly well for daily drinking. If you’re looking for a roasted Tieguanyin as your daily-drinker, this is a great choice.

The leaf quality is fantastic, as these little nuggets unfurl slowly across both gong-fu and Western-style infusions, and across a wide temperature range, they are uniform and have some stoutness to them even after taking a long bath in water fresh off a rolling boil. They hold their composure well and resist turning bitter. Even as the cup cools, the tea remains crisp and clear in its flavor profile.

The very best unsmoked Lapsang Souching I have ever drank! Can not compare to others out there as it is not in the same league to do so.
My newly discovered “comfort tea”.

The Whiz Kid

I was told that it is not an easy tea to prepare nor to appreciate, so I was a little anxious when opening it.
I choose to brew it with a low leave to water ratio and it immediately appeared that the real complexity of the tea is that it can offer a wide range of tastes.
In these conditions, this tea develops very sweet and gentle taste of plum and date, brilliantly balanced by the woodsy aromas from the baking process.
I am eager to prepare it again with other parameters, I am already amazed by its the wide range of possibilities.
To summarize, to me this tea is not the wild child I expected but a more a whiz kid who can show you tons of wonderful tastes if you can guide him.
Thanks to all Tea Hong staff for this great discovery!
( A paragraph is edited out for a discussion about another customer’s comment. Detail discussions are more suitable when carried out in forums, such as the one in TeaGuardian.com — note by Tea Hong )