Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Oolong
Where to Buy: Canton Tea Co.
Product Description:
Dan Cong is the champagne of oolongs: ripe with intense fruit and sweetness. This high grade example comes from a plantation on the lower slopes of Wu Dong Mountain, Chao Zhou. The leaves are thoroughly fermented and baked to produce a rich liquor with unique flowery and honeyed notes that can be enjoyed through multiple infusions.
Our Buyer’s notes:
“This tea is more heavily baked than the Song Zhong Dan Cong to allow the tea to produce its unique honey and lychee flavours.”
Taster’s Review:
Ooooooh-Long! This tea definitely puts the Oooooh into Oolong. It is truly wonderful.
The aroma of the brewed liquor is delightful. It has this amazing sort of “outdoorsy” kind of scent, like the fragrance you might experience if you were walking through the woods on a quiet spring morning. It is smells of earth and damp wood, as well as newly blossoming flowers and hints of fruit, and even a clean, crisp air-like scent. This is a tea that you need to inhale deeply – taking in this extraordinary aroma – before taking a sip, to truly experience it in its entirety.
And then, of course, there is the flavor. And … put simply, this has a flavor that keeps you sipping. That is to say, my cup is now empty and I need to infuse the leaves again in order to compose the right words to describe this tea. It is so good that I finished the cup before I could start writing about it.
Now as I sip my second cup (the result of my third and fourth infusions combined), I can tell you a little more about this tea. The flavor is intense. It has a honey-esque tone to it … not just the sweetness of honey, but also the unique floral taste of honey. It is sweet with the subtlest tone of sharpness in the background, such an enchanting, piquant kind of taste.
And as the description from Canton Tea Co. suggests, there is a lychee kind of flavor to this too. It is so very similar to the unique flavor of lychee, in fact, that I had to double check on this tea to make sure it wasn’t a lychee flavored or scented tea. But no: these interesting flavors are achieved naturally through the baking process of the tea leaves, and not through a flavoring process.
I was able to infuse this tea a total of six times with no loss of flavor, making this not only a delicious tea, but also a good value for your money too. This is the kind of Oolong I would recommend to a tea enthusiast who finds some Oolong teas to be too delicate for their taste. The flavor of this is so intense, they’re sure to change their mind about Oolong!
