Hello and thank you for your comments, i find quite interesting to read comments about the tea even if i have no idea what mineral taste or peppermint mean etc. I guess the moral of this topic is that language doens't help much in tea drinking and we all taste things in different ways and give different names. However, no matter how we call the tea doesnt really change so maybe what i call yanyun you call camphor or peppermint or minerality i cannot know. It is why don't think describing flavors notes in teas has much use, it is easier to drink tea to find out its flavor.Victoria wrote: ↑Mon May 21, 2018 3:08 pmThank you for your quality Rougui and cool packaging designs. With your Daoshuikeng Rougui, I felt an expansive cooling feeling /aftertaste in my mouth, maybe camphor or peppermint like. When you speak of Yan Yun with yancha can you describe this a bit more? I interpret this as rock minerality after effect, that I have found in certain quality Taiwan high mountain oolongs, like FuShoushan. I also tasted high notes of rock minerality in Origin Tea’s ‘2004 Wuyi Hui Yuan Nei GuiDong (FengFeKeng) Tie LuoHan’ & in 2088 Tea’s ‘2015 Wu Yuan Jian Ban Tian Yao handmade’. With rock minerality, I experience a certain effervescent minerality, as an after effect, coating the inner mouth.octopus wrote: ↑Mon May 21, 2018 4:54 amby the way, I realize the quality that makes zhengyan rougui special might be hard to recognize. it is a strong flavor called yanyun. with enough experience drinking yancha however this can be recognized and regardless if liked or disliked is what makes certain tea special. banyan teas can have yanyun too it just varies in intensity usually and is not as common. I don't recommend zhengyan tea for those unfamiliar with yun taste not because anyone would dislike it but because what is special about it might go unnoticed, one can easily be cheated and would generally enjoy it just as much as a very nice and well made banyan tea that costs 5 times less.
Now what do I mean by yanyun? when you drink a rougui what you will definitely have is a rougui cultivar flavor+flavors of processing and picking+eventual roasting+age of tea and storage flavors etc. After drinking many rougui teas these will all have somehow variances on these notes. There are some though, which will have a flavor that isn't from those variables but is something else, that i call yanyun is this flavor given by growing in certain terroir in wuyishan.
Now how do you make sure you recognize it? only way is to drink a lot of teas starting from many banyan rougui to be able to recognize first rougui cultivar in a blind tasting. After you drink a lot of zhengyan rouguis the more you drink the more you will see a pattern: all the zhengyan teas will have the same underlying flavor besides all those others, lets call this new flavor yanyun.
For an extra help, I recommend to keep the first infusion to drink cool as last, the very first brew is probably the best and the yun will be very clear, when it cools down it will be even more clear. Try to do this test: brew one or more normal banyan rougui (a regular rougui that is not advertised as having yun ofc just to be sure, i guess the more you have the better) alongside the zhengyan rougui you have and save the first cup of them. Leaves look the same but try to notice if there is a difference in fragrance but if you can't at the end of the session without even drinking these cold cups just smell the soups. You will hopefully notice a clear difference. drink them and see.
In short when you feel very confident you can recognize zhengyan tea in a blind tasting you know what is yanyun flavor. However takes quite some time of drinking yancha to start to see the differences of flavors so don't worry too much and try to enjoy the tea.