Wojciech Bońkowski
Master of Wine

2008 Tie Guan Yin ‘Red Dot’

Posted on 17 January 2009

Tea overdose

I can’t give a very analytic description of this tea. I got a 20g pack from Alex Fraser of London’s Eastteas, one of my favourite tea merchants. (If I understood well, Alex has two qualities of Tie Guan Yin at the moment; the superior one is marked with a small red dot at the upper right-hand corner of the packs).

I then used half of the pack when exiled with a heavy flu at my parents’ house, being the only quality tea I had available. Then I put the remaining leaves into a canister which I forgot to label. Seeing how little there was left I put the whole lot in a gaiwan. That was quite an amount of leaf! The tea came out very concentrated but as the leaves expanded it was impossible to put the lid on.

Roughly 10g of dry leaf – too much for a gaiwan!

I decided to transfer the leaves into a ~300ml ceramic pot. All I can say is that this is not a ‘wow’ tea, and perhaps doesn’t deliver for its high price (IMHO, few expensive teas do), but it surely has a lot of presence and power. Nose is very clean, showing high grade material, although perhaps not as floral and narcotic as some other TGYs. A sign of quality, this is not easily overbrewed even with a lot of leaf (with some fragmented). There is a hint of structure but never bitterness. Throughout a good 12 infusions I bathed in this tea’s milky texture and leafy presence. No wonder it cured my flu in a day.

Category: tea Tags: , ,