Trying high quality Dan Cong in a Bangkok Chinatown tea shop

 

I visited my favorite tea shop to pick up some tea before I travel back to Hawaii, that CNNP cake I reviewed not long ago (a 2007 8281 Mengku origin sheng pu'er), and to get a bit of tea to give to monks I know on the way out of town.

While there the owner let me try some exceptional Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong (Chaozhou, Guangdong origin oolong, of course).  It was presented as from a single tea plant, which is possible, but you kind of never really know.  The quality was really high; it was at least one of the best Dan Cong versions I've ever tried, and maybe the best.  There wasn't that much room for improvement, only style difference.  

The pricing was eye-watering:  500 baht or $15 for 7 grams, so it's pretty much $2 / gram tea.  Too much, for an ordinary experience.  But I suppose people might see it as a unique experience they wouldn't get around to repeating, that "once in a lifetime" kind of theme.  I don't even consider such things; my tastes and appreciation are fine with drinking ordinary teas.  And I'm adapted to Bangkok pricing ranges, where you can eat a meal for a lot less than $15, or eat and also travel around all day.

To start we discussed processing, relative degree of oxidation and roast.  Kittichai, the owner, said that it wasn't in the modern very lightly oxidized and roasted form, that it was more in a medium range (for both), so a step towards a more traditional, older form.  Really whatever works best for that tea material is best, along with personal preference determining that.  It worked out.  

The scent of the tea was incredibly sweet and floral, or maybe floral and fruity, but very fragrant either way.  It didn't really come to life until he put it in a warmed gaiwan, then it did, even dry.  He was using 4 grams in an 70 ml or so gaiwan (not that I can assess volume like that).  Probably the infusions were even smaller, with the top that you don't fill and the tea taking up space.

It was bright, fresh, fragrant, and intense right away.  The taste was as fruity as floral, even though that type (Mi Lan Xiang) is described as honey orchid, and it's usually more floral than fruity.  It tasted like fresh lychee, the other owner claimed, and that was a good match, even if the power of suggestion may have helped cinch that judgement.

From there it intensified over a few rounds, really turning it up around the 4th infusion.  Sweetness was off the scale, astringency fairly moderate, although there was some, and flavor intensity was crazy.  It was really clean, with great aftertaste expression, and positive mouthfeel.  Good enough to justify the  $2 / gram value?  Who knows.  It was roughly as good as Dan Cong probably gets, although I suppose someone who has been exploring the high end of that range for awhile could judge better.

It didn't transition that much until around 9 rounds in, and then a little astringency started to pick up, which one might interpret as tasting like bitterness, even though the two things aren't the same at all.  It wasn't really pronounced until about the 10th infusion, and we let off around then, or maybe at 11 or 12.

Flavor complexity was so intense that you were just being blasted by floral and fruit range, so it might've been hard to do the normal round by round description of shifts.  If the relative balance of all that was there kept changing I didn't keep track.  It was definitely clean, sweet, intense, balanced, and complex.

I didn't mention the color; it started out with a pinkish sort of color, then I think it transitioned to a more typical light golden amber oolong range.  I'm not sure what that's about, the extra touch of pink, or if it signifies anything.

Packaging was definitely a bit much; it came in tiny aluminum canisters, like weed might be sold in, if there is such a thing as elaborately high end versions of that.  Then that was in a custom case.  This isn't so unusual for Chinese teas, presented as exceptional; they can go a little overboard.  I suppose status would be part of the appeal, drinking what is expensive, refined, and rare, and the packaging helps support that.  

Things are just different in China too.  One might expect lots of things to be rougher edged or more basic, somehow, but there's a broad higher end range of lots of types of experience or aesthetic context that's more the opposite.  Not that I've ever really been living the high life in China; I've visited that country three times, but as a value-oriented tourist (twice), and on a work trip once.  That almost leads into telling a story or two, doesn't it?  I probably shouldn't, but let's.

I went to China on business a long time ago now, maybe just over 15 years, so what I relate might be dated.  I'll skip the parts about the work context; it was somewhat IT related, since that's the field I work in, and from there it doesn't matter.  I was introduced to better tea in a Gong Fu ceremonial brewing demonstration at the company we visited (probably the one company you might think of).  

They were pretty good about not making it seem like tall, beautiful women were the norm in that country, even though they were that as hosts, and extending that not to make lots of claims about the tea brewing, hyping ancient traditional forms as being something they're generally not.  People might make wishes when they pour tea over tea pets; a fairly basic idea like that comes up.  Maybe that frog relates to money (it is holding a coin), and another to success with family, so it would be a good place / context for asking for a next child.  

Chinese people love to make wishes, as Thais do.  My wife loves to visit Hong Kong temples and go through all of that, or there are lots of Chinese temples in Thailand too.  We just happened to be walking into a local Chinese temple in Korat, Thailand, when we had just picked up Myra, our cat (then a kitten), back in 2021, so I took her in there and asked the multitude of Chinese gods to keep an eye on her.  So far so good.

 

some people might recognize this old Shenzhen mall space

Hong Kong; a temple, of course

Apparently drinking alcohol plays a role in business connections.  That's probably the last time I've been good and drunk.  The next time we met with another Chinese company I kept it bit more reeled in; it matches an expectation to go there, but it's really a bit much for me, as a non-drinker (now even more so, but mostly that back then too).

Enough stories.  Later I bought some tea in a shop, waiting for others to buy other things, and that started my next level of tea exploration.  But it was all normal enough.

Back to this tea, it was amazing.  Others would probably appreciate it a lot more than I did.  Earlier on in my exploration of teas I was really into broadening my horizons, and trying out exceptional range, and now I'm fine with just drinking good tea, and by that I mean anything with character and aspects one can appreciate.  That's most teas; they just offer different experiences.  Maybe the low end grocery store versions aren't like that, and other ranges that are comparable, but so, so much of tea range is interesting and pleasant, or at least just pleasant.

But it was nice having a unique experience.  I ran through a tasting set of pretty decent Dan Cong from ITea World a year or so ago (more now?), and it was nice trying the other types.  Mi Lan Xiang and Ya Shi / duck shit get most of the attention in "the West."  And they're often quite pleasant, so I suppose that they should, but others are also interesting.  I tried a number of them from Cindy, of Wuyi Origin, and that's a good source for exploring pretty far up the quality scale, at pricing that's quite fair for what they sell, even approaching $1 / gram.

Cindy!

Being more into sheng pu'er I don't even buy that much oolong now, of any kind.  Eventually I'll probably cycle back through a long exploration and experience phase again, but who knows how long that will take.  Good black tea is more my fallback, most often Dian Hong.  By good I don't mean searching out the high end, best of the best, I mean basic and pleasant.  And if good comparable forms are from Thailand and Vietnam I'll drink that instead, so I suppose calling that Dian Hong style tea is more accurate (DH adjacent?).

This shop sells pretty decent, upper medium quality tin packaged Dan Cong, at a much lower price point range.  That's more what I'd drink, but I only buy it there to give away to monks, to save my tea budget for the next sheng cake, or maybe black tea.

that tea I just bought, and already reviewed earlier, 2007, so perfect for getting to now

Self awareness related to using tools from Buddhism

 

This is from a Quora answer I wrote, about what most or many people don't know, but don't realize that they don't know.  I'm saying that limited self awareness is one answer.  

I add a little on how tools from Buddhism, meditation and mindfulness, can partly resolve this, but a how-to for more in depth guidance would be a short book, so this doesn't get far.  I did write a short book on that, about a year ago, and even it didn't get that far.  

This is that answer:

What are a few things that people think they know but actually don't?

Most scope of knowledge and aspects of human experience, taken a certain way, but I wanted to take this in a specific direction.  I’m claiming that people think they know themselves but really don’t.

I’m into a few subjects, Buddhism being one of those.  Not only do most people who think they’ve got an intermediate grasp on what Buddhism is kind of miss most of the point, most people also don’t get how their own life experience, perspective, worldview, and even immediate process of perception work.  

Let’s stick to the second part; it’s a lot to unpack of how Buddhism is often modeled, versus how I see it working out in practice.  I could write 1000 words just trying to justify being a subject expert, and different people would interpret that justification differently.  Someone with essentially the exact same credentials and background could be either be a great reference or else relatively biased towards unhelpful and impractical directions; it’s funny how the subject works out.

[Later edit]:  let's add the high level summary of my Buddhism background, a sort of resume, more tied to it being interesting background than a convincing foundation of expertise.  I was into Buddhism as a personal interest for awhile, a decade or so, attempting some degree of practice along with learning.  I went back to university studies to help extend that learning and convert it into a form I could communicate, getting one degree in philosophy and religion (a BA), and then a Master's in comparative philosophy (having originally studied Industrial Engineering).  I was ordained as a Thai Buddhist (Theravada) monk once, for just over two months, and have lived in a Thai Buddhist society most of the time for the last 18 years. 

There is a layer of subconscious input in lots of psychological models, so it’s normal to sweep lots of an internal model of experience into a black box kind of category.  This works, but you can break down what is going into that, what processing is doing, and what the output means a lot more than most people ever attempt to.  Of course you can’t access the mechanisms of your own thoughts and reactions, as if reading code that your internal “operating system” equivalent is running.  But you can switch an awful lot of what is normally subconscious to the range of partial and limited conscious awareness.

How?  What are the odds I’m going to make any sense of this claim?  Not great, based on what’s here so far, but let’s keep going.

We are built up of societal inputs, conditioned to be who and what we are.  That conditioning starts when we are a baby, or really as long as nine months before that, and by the time we’ve learned quite a bit of language, at age 3 or 4, a lot of other conditioning has already happened.  By 5 a lot of that gets “fixed” into a personality.  That will keep changing over time, but perhaps not more than it has already formed, in one sense, or range of senses.  

We’ve already learned what a social self is, at this early age, we’ve grasped how we relate to lots of forms of desires (for food, related to interaction, and it just keeps going).  Ideas about negative experiences become clear, related to pain (physical mishap, or violence), social interactions that cause stress, about how lacks of different kinds of stimulus play out (hunger, being left alone), about decision making gone wrong, and so on.  Lots of this maps to what we ordinarily see as cultural components, but lots is more basic than that.  Culture tends to be about clothing choices, or social roles, interaction norms, aesthetic issues, then on to ethics, but our conditioning to be a human runs a little deeper.  

We can go back and unpack some of all that, and see how we relate to it uniquely as an individual.  We can become familiar with our own assumptions, biases, goals, and most importantly self-image.

In one sense it’s not difficult to, but in another it’s absolutely impossible (conventionally).  We simply examine our own experiences, in two different ways, drawing on a different form of reference input about patterns we might find.  

Note that I’m going to tie all of this to Buddhism, just not so explicitly, and not in a really conventional form, unless one already knows that framework of ideas.  I’m talking about using meditation to examine patterns of thought and experience, as our mind presents them to us as mental noise.  The reactions and desires that are “running” in our mind, to the extent this even exists as a singular, unified thing, show up as a sort of noise when we try to just sit and quietly experience our thoughts.  

Don’t take my word for it; go and just sit quietly, with absolutely no stimulus, for about 20 minutes.  The first half will be so noisy you might as well be watching television.  Then your mind might settle a bit, and more distinct thought patterns might stand out as more important, or at least less inclined to just dissipate.  But it takes a long time to experience anything like more clarity.  The point never really is “going blank,” it’s about relating to the noise in different ways.

We can also use a different but somewhat equivalent process to identify how our ongoing mental state, and immediate desires, and model of self, all play into our immediate reactions to external inputs.  That just keeps happening, right, but we are present for it?  Not present in the sense of fully aware of our current internal mental state, and why we react as we do.  Our current emotional state is sort of relatively clear to us, sort of not.  Where impulses and intuitions come from is generally not clear; we aren’t completely “in on” that subconscious layer.  We function well enough without that, but without the benefit of much of a degree of self-awareness.  In a limited sense we all do really know ourselves, but if you ask yourself why you did something or made a choice exactly at that time, and in that way, you’d have to unpack things a bit to get to that.  

People would assume the opposite; of course they know why they do what they do.  Routine demands it; they have burdens to work, eat, sleep, conduct social functions, and so on, and each individual choice or action, or thought, relates to working through all of that.  That’s right, in a sense, but we can drill down to mapping broad inputs to specific outputs, if we try to.

Lots more channels through self-image than we might initially expect.  Or maybe we would expect that.  But the forms it takes, and individual inputs and finer reactions, thoughts, and actions, wouldn’t normally be apparent at all.  It’s all a little counter-intuitive.  In the end we have built up fairly developed images of social selves, with some dimensions that are more evident than others, and we act on goals related to maintaining or extending those.  In lots of cases the drivers we act on aren’t social in the sense of an external demand, limitation, goal, or pressure, but instead relate to a dimension of internal self-image and self-definition, which acts within and internal cause and effect loop.

So it’s hard to push all this to the next level, adding examples of that, making it clearer, but the claim here is that we can learn about the make-up of our internal reality by listening to the noise residue from it (using meditation), and we can examine the same kinds of things by breaking down our immediate reactions and process of forming external reality (using mindfulness training to extend momentary reality of internal mental inputs).

Let’s go with one example, and then let this drop, since it’s not supposed to be longform writing, but already is.  My son, who is 17, and his mother argue over what time he should go to sleep.  In this modern context, or I suppose when I grew up too, at that age he would normally be expected to make those decisions himself.  But among his friends all of them make terrible choices about this very thing; they sleep late, at 2 or 3, either getting by on 4 hours sleep a night or else that plus a nap.  It would be better to sleep 8 hours a night, or at the most extreme 7 plus an hour as a nap.  

He claims that he functions better on less sleep, which is difficult to evaluate, but it’s probably not accurate.  There is a genetic variation that makes that the case, for some few, but in general people still developing a complete brain structure need that rest to support a more positive outcome.  Probably all of this should have been resolved by better parenting and more assignment of responsibility when he was 13 or 14.  You try being a parent and making that work perfectly.

Here I’m claiming that it’s not just the extra activity of gaming or scrolling media that he is interested in, since he gets in plenty of that, but the relative freedom to make the same choices as his friends.  That’s understandable; that part kind of works.  But if he could take a longer view he might value having a better developed brain and mind more.  If he could see how it all maps out he should be able to notice that it’s all partly a form of protest, and that her well-grounded concern is valid.  His internal view of self, related to valuing freedom and self determination, is actually causing him a problem, because that sufficient sleep would benefit him.

Of course I’ve had this explicit discussion with him, so the theory behind this set of ideas is clear.  It just doesn’t map out to internal self-awareness yet; he can’t see all of the parts at work within his own internal processing.  On one level he really does think that he would function better on 6 hours of sleep.  That’s even though on another level he knows that boost in adrenaline from running short on sleep is temporary, and not completely sustainable, at least as an optimum.  

Looked at one way this all boils down to ego; his view of self and how he maps out reality is inflexible, and tied to inputs and outputs he isn’t completely clear on.  He is making decisions based on reasons he is getting wrong (the reasons and evaluation form, not just the final evaluation process result).  Looked at another way it’s a problem related to short term and long term decision making.  Two more hours of watching videos is a short term gain; two more hours of sleep is a long term better choice.  Kids need to learn this kind of evaluation process on their own, ideally at 14 or 15, instead of 17 or 18.  I suppose most really put it all together between sophomore and junior year in college, if ever.

It seems strange saying that if he sat in meditation 20 minutes a day he could figure all of this out for himself.  I guess that’s the general claim here.  He could also map out how he sees his future better, how he deals with childhood ending, and other thorny issues, like themes related to romantic relationships.  Pretty much no one is trained to evaluate reality in this way at early stages of life development; it’s rare enough for adults with real problems to take up such tools in adulthood.  And there are other paths to a similar goal.  During my freshman year of college I tried out all sorts of crazy sleep cycles and almost all of them not working well identified how normal sleep really is relatively optimum.  Who knew?

Someone would need to try to make use of these tools to confirm that they work.  In general that’s not normal, to do that.  There would have to be some unusual driver pushing them to put in lots of atypical effort and exploration.  That leads to another set of tangents I’ll not pursue here; why did I do that?  I’m kind of an odd person, and my life experiences were atypical.

I suspect all of this is not so convincing.  I do appreciate feedback about it though.  The more functional parts are probably a bit too vague to critique in standard forms, but input based on intuition or related or unrelated experiences would be interesting.

Bangkok Chinatown shop Tie Guan Yin and Jin Jun Mei

I'm reviewing two more tea samples from my favorite Chinatown tea shop, Jip Eu.  I was there to buy some other teas and they gave me them (many thanks).  

It turned out they're low-medium oxidation level / high roast level Tie Guan Yin (Chinese Fujian rolled oolong) and Jin Jun Mei, buds based black tea from the Wuyishan area, as opposed to the TGY being from Anxi.  I don't know the full producer details and back-story, so those are the primary origin areas, not a solid claim about the origin of these, but they're probably from those places.  That shop owner has family in those two parts of Fujian, so of course they would be from there.

These are kind of standard tea types.  That oxidation and roast combination for the oolong isn't the most standard form, but it comes up.  Jin Jun Mei is a well known black tea type, just a higher tier sort of theme tea, the opposite of a daily drinker.

This is their Facebook page, one potential contact for them (with their location here).  They have a Shopee outlet page (online sales platform), but it probably doesn't work to cite a link because the web page link details won't apply, but it's here):

I've bought some of that before.  I think the hexagonal tin three over from the bottom right is what I just bought, which I think was Da Yu We Dan Cong oolong, to give to a few monks.  Here's a somewhat recent Da Yu We Dan Cong review, if that background is of interest.

One might expect there to be a good bit of generality related to how pre-packaged tin based teas turn out, related to quality level.  It doesn't work that way.  It's just a packaging and distribution form; the teas can vary a lot, and do.  

In Western outlets we're accustomed to teas being presented in a certain way, then packaged and sold in certain ways (in multi-layer zip sealed bags, with printed labeling), but that kind of form doesn't really improve or detract from tea quality.  We're also accustomed to typical story telling.  Those stories definitely don't make the tea any better, and often if you know tea background well parts tend to be self-contradictory.  Some descriptions work as red flags:  tea master, 1000 year old tea tree, forest origin, etc.  A tea could still be really good even if many of the details a vendor passes on are wrong, if the plant type doesn't match, plant age story, the "master" part makes no sense, they describe oxidation level wrong, and so on.  It's better to go by how the teas are, but you need to try them to know that.

It's nice when Chinatown shops let you try tea after tea, so you know exactly what you are buying, but they don't at Jip Eu.  All of those teas in that image are sold as pre-packaged tins, and they wouldn't have very many of those open to taste from.  They're more of a local wholesale outlet for different grades of Wuyi Yancha, Fujian oolongs like Da Hong Pao, Rou Gui, and Shui Xian.  And then there are lots of versions of teas there no one would know about if they only visited a few times, and after visiting regularly for more than a half a dozen years I still usually try something I've never heard of there.

Shops set up like tourist attractions, where you can taste a lot of things, like Sen Xing Fa, tend to sell teas at higher mark-ups, so you get charged fairly directly for that tasting process.  Sometimes that's in your favor, since you only buy teas you like, but if you pay 25% more for teas that aren't quite as good then that's not favorable.  

It takes a long, long time to be able to judge trueness to type and quality level quickly and accurately.  I drank some of a sheng pu'er with them at that shop that day, an 8281 CNNP yellow label 2007 sheng pu'er, from Mengku, and reviewed a sample at home a week or so later, and my impression was not the same.  How could that be, since I've been drinking mostly sheng for 8 years or so?

Lots of factors enter in.  I was on a fast that day; what you've eaten or haven't eaten changes your sense of taste.  If you are in a hurry that makes your impression less clear.  In a shop they may brew tea slightly differently than you do, which changes things.  Using different water makes a difference.  

Some teas that come straight out of a warehouse storage area will be much better after they rest a few weeks, and air out a little.  Now that I think of it vendors always frame that as the teas needing rest from the trip when shipped, as if temperature and humidity variations affect them during travel, but especially for sheng pu'er it could be that being packed in with tons of other teas is good in one sense and temporarily negative in another; a musty edge picked up from that can fade fast.  The jet-lag theme for teas is usually about intensity being limited at first, for a couple of weeks, or longer.

If you try a half dozen teas at one time that can muddle your impression, especially if you keep mixing stronger and lighter types and versions.  If you can side-by-side taste a tea along with a benchmark version you know, at your home, taking time to settle down and focus in, you'll get a much clearer impression.  

Most of those tins are between $10 and $30, usually for 200 gram amounts, but in some cases for 100, which is on the low end of a normal range, 5 to 30 cents a gram.  Better quality oolong I've bought there was $30 (1000 baht) for 100 grams, at 30 cents a gram, which again is about right, for high demand, high quality Wuyi Yancha.  I've had good luck with Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong there in the past, I just wanted those monks to be able to try something else, so I didn't buy them that.

I'm pretty sure that I own a part of a cake of the 8001 CNNP tea shown in that photo, a 2006 version.  I'd go with the 8281 over that, because that 8001 is on the intense / heavy / burly side, unless someone loves that kind of character.  Or this 8653 Xiaguan cake (from 2006).  That's going to sound strange, to people who know these teas, because that 8653 has a strong barnyard sort of theme, with lots of saddle leather and old barn scent, but to me it works.  Much better than it did in 2022, 4 years ago, when I first reviewed it; that style range of tea can really use the full 20 years or more to age-transition (ferment).

On with this review then.

Review:

TGY:  this isn't really opened yet; the next round will work better for a description.  It's clearly quite roasted, which is a good sign if that balances well with a medium-high level of oxidation (not like black tea; I mean for oolong range), and a bad sign if it's used to cover up flaws, or to re-condition a stale tea version.  We'll see.

JJM:  this is pretty good.  There are a few different styles of Jin Jun Mei, or the range covers some scope, however one wants to frame that.  One style is bright, heavy on honey.  Another is warmer toned, a little closer to a conventional black tea, maybe including more dried fruit range, and slight earthiness or spice.  This is the second.  It does include some honey, and a touch of beeswax, along with a characteristic light dry edge that seems to pair with that beeswax.  Then the rest of the tone is warmer and deeper.  It's closer to rich spice, but hard to place.  There are bark spices out there that aren't cinnamon; maybe that.

Sweetness is good, it balances well, and feel is relatively full, even though this is just getting started.  It's good tea.  I'll need to keep brewing this quickly, at less than 10 seconds, even though this is probably 5 grams in a 100 ml gaiwan, a little less than I usually use.  The other will need to infuse for much longer to get it to open, more than 20 seconds, then probably backed off to 15 or so once it's brewing normally.

TGY #2:  this is much more complex, even though it's still not fully opened.  It's going to be nice.  It includes a bit of cinnamon, so it's not so far off the other in flavor range.  Rich floral tones are a little stronger, quite warm related to the roast effect pulling the whole flavor range to warm mineral.  I'd guess oxidation level wasn't all that high, since bright floral is still present too.  It's probably mineral tone that's warmer, and the two mix, making it seem like warm floral tone, when it's really not.  Sometimes teas like this can seem really out of balance, when there's a lot going on that doesn't completely match, but this is good, just not great.  

A friend shared a decent but moderately plain roasted oolong from Taiwan, that he bought in the airport there on the way back, and this is similar in style but slightly better.  It's not completely balanced, because inky mineral, some warm spice, and some lighter floral range are all mixing, and they don't sync together perfectly.  But it's pretty decent tea.  Maybe on the higher end Taiwanese scale not that good, but that's already filtering versions down a lot for a comparison range.  As teas go you would find in a Chinatown shop, anywhere, this is good.  It would've been nice if just a little more oxidation input had made it balance better.

JJM:  this is on another level, compared to the other.  A bit of sourness, that is picking up, offsets that high quality, very pleasant assessment, but it's still in a different range, just better.  Warm tones add a lot of complexity.  The honey and beeswax, now a lot more subdued, lend it complexity, as spice tones do.  The sourness is a bit much this round, related to it coming across completely positively, but people would have different tolerances for that, or preference range that makes it seem a neutral input, or else awful instead.  Apparently I'm in between; it's worse for including that, but it's not something that ruins the experience.  It would be nice if that evolves back out.

TGY #3:  this might just be where this is settling.  The balance of all of those inputs last round have shifted, but they're all still the same, beyond that.  A cinnamon note is nice; it kind of links the rest.  Warm mineral tones serve as a base, and decent sweetness.  It seems like the floral tone range probably is warming a bit.  Feel has some fullness, which is pleasant, but that's limited; an even higher quality range would probably feel thicker and fuller.  Same for aftertaste expression; it improves the tea including it, but it could be a little stronger.  All in all this is pretty good tea though, with a balanced, pleasant character.  Not perfectly balanced; in between a relative ideal and a tea that's a little off for lacking balance, again good but not great.

If someone loved this high roast, medium-low oxidation style, adjusting TGY character, they would probably assess this more positively.  I'd love a little more oxidation and a little less roast input more, and probably some variation of the Taiwanese Qing Xin cultivar instead.  It's pretty good for what it is though.  A pronounced ink sort of mineral note someone might love, or else dislike.  I don't see it as more positive than neutral, maybe even as a slight negative.

JJM #3:  this is balancing much better; that sourness is fading fast.  Tones have warmed; it includes lots of rich spice and now comes across more as warm mineral.  Brighter honey more or less dropped out.  This probably won't last long, before it's brewing much thinner infusions.  A lot of flavor has extracted out already.  The other took the first two infusions just to open up, and it's only brewing most of the material now, which was true of this much finer black leaf form within seconds.

TGY #4:  for people who haven't explored these ranges of tea a different theme would enter in that I'm not experiencing:  novelty.  I've not tried that many versions of teas in these styles and types, but maybe a half dozen quite roasted, medium-light oxidized TGY, and at least a half dozen JJM versions (not a half dozen in this narrower style range within that type; it's not like that).  It's really nice trying new tea range, but I have to be experiencing something unusually unique to include that.  

Then your favorites it's fine to repeat, over and over.  I could drink decent but ordinary Dian Hong (Yunnan black tea) half of the time, forever, and I tend to like sheng pu'er a little more than that, I just wouldn't tolerate repetition as well for any one version of that.  I suppose that I could drink just one of those relatively basic Vietnamese sheng versions I've been trying two days a week, all year.  These two teas I'm reviewing are nice but not my personal favorite types.

This round improves just marginally; it all hangs together in slightly better balance.  It probably will hold up that way for a few more rounds.  It has to be decent quality to do that (which is early to call, since this is still only a couple of rounds into being fully wetted).  

JJM #4:  this is as good as it's been as well; I suppose it could make a couple of more very positive infusions, and stretch on beyond that.  Warm tones stand out, but there's a lot going on.  The same flavor list applies, but that would be open to different interpretations.  A toffee note seems to be picking up, replacing the earlier honey, settling in where spice and limited mineral covered before.  The spice leans a little towards cacao now; that would make for a more reasonable interpretation, at this stage.  Warm mineral supports and balances that, so that it doesn't just taste like a candy bar.  You wouldn't associate it with sourness in this balance, but I suppose a very light part of it still is that.  

This is a pretty good place to leave off note taking.  These will change a little more over the next two rounds, and they're in a solid part of the infusion sequence now, very positive.  But 8 cups usually feels like a good bit at one time, and the intensity of that Jin Jun Mei has me really feeling these.  It's trivia that most people know, but buds only teas contain the highest amount of caffeine, and processing (the oxidation) barely offsets that any, so this black tea version may well contain 1 1/2 times as much as the older leaf oolong I'm comparing it to.  

At a guess sheng pu'er probably kicks in related to feel related to other compounds also contributing to the experience.  Or maybe it's just magic, "cha qi," the spirit of the earth carried by deep roots from tea trees.  Probably that takes on the form of specific compounds, but that's not as cool a story.

I'd recommend these to others to try.  Jin Jun Mei is an interesting and novel black tea type.  Unsmoked Lapsang Souchong can also be really nice.  I really like rolled oolongs made to balance more oxidation and less roast input, as I've mentioned, but that more traditional style is more rare now.  It might come up more in Taiwanese versions, than for Anxi origin Tie Guan Yin.  Inky mineral and light floral can be ok, evolving into richer spice tones, as this did, but the balance works better for the other style I'm describing, as I see it.