/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Okay, this tea is something else. It's the 2017 XiaGuan "Gao Shan Yun Wu Lao Shu Hong" from KTM.

https://kingteamall.com/products/2017-xiaguan-gao-shan-yun-wu-lao-shu-hong-high-mountain-cloud-old-tree-black-tea-cake-200g-hong-cha-dian-hong

First, let's make it clear that this tea is like 8 cents/gram. It's about as cheap as you can find. The dry leaf smells, in actuality, like milk chocolate. Not hints of chocolate or the suggestion of chocolate - if you stick your nose right into the cake and inhale deeply, it's like putting your face into a box of chocolates. Speaking of boxes of chocolate, there's also a little bit of cherry coming through for me in the dry leaf, which was reminding me a lot of the variety of chocolates you'd get in a box where there's that pink cherry filling.

Moving on to the warm leaves, those scents only intensify, and when you finally wet them, cinnamon very overtly enters the mix. The first few steeps are basically perfect mirrors of the scents so far, again harkening back to that cherry filled chocolate. Here's where it gets interesting, though. After four or five steeps, that really round and luxurious chocolate taste starts to fade and is replaced by a different, though similarly categorized one - really high quality burley pipe tobacco. It was extremely odd to taste that coming through when it's such a specific smell that I've smelled so many times in a completely different context. I don't think I've ever had a tea taste like I just put my nose into a tin of Burley Flake.

Anyway, I'd recommend this as a very deep, round, sweet, and actually pretty complex tea that won't even approach breaking the bank. If anyone orders from KTM anytime soon I think you would do well to throw on a cake.

>>15662090
This is my favorite black tea in recent memory, It had a complex flavor with just a tiny hint of smoke.
Xiagaun actually makes a decent amount of black tea and its all supposed to be pretty good.
https://kingteamall.com/collections/black-tea/products/2017-xiaguan-gao-shan-yun-wu-lao-shu-hong-high-mountain-cloud-old-tree-black-tea-cake-200g-hong-cha-dian-hong