Alishan High Mountain Jin Xuan Oolong Fall & Summer 2023 Tasting | Eco-Cha Teas

In this video we will be tasting and talking about summer and fall 2023 batches of Alishan High Mountain Ginseng Oolong from Taiwan. We're here tasting summer and fall 2023 batches of Alishan High Mountain Ginseng Oolong from Taiwan. I brewed nine grams of tea leaves in these 150 milliliter tea judging cups for 90 seconds three times, first, second, and third time. I have the summer batch on my left here. You really get, I'm emphatically inhaling here because once you drop those leaves out and you quickly whiff the cup with the remaining aroma, it gives an even better sense of when the leaves are in the cup because the leaves are filling the cup with leaves and not air. Fall, it makes sense that the fall has a fresher aroma because it was just picked and processed like literally days ago. I'm getting a little bit more of a, well, just a freshly baked aroma. This has more of a herbal, vegetal aroma on the summer batch. I can see already that the stem material is larger on the summer batch just like it was in our Oolong batches of tea. Makes perfect sense. The leaves are really growing as fast as they can in June and into July. These were picked early July. Very fully grown leaves, classic summer crop of leaf material. The fall is very similar to the Oolong that we just tasted recently. Smaller, significant stem material, but definitely smaller leaf material, a little bit less mature. It did rain consistently throughout August, so the leaves grew less without having lots and lots of sunshine like they probably did earlier in the year. Nice, even coloration both in the brewed leaves and in the dried leaf. Uniform size and color. Very similar color in the summer leaf, just a little more stem material basically. Slightly more mature leaf material in the previous crop. Visually, the brewed tea is very close in my perception. I can see a little bit of different, the fall harvest being slightly darker on the first brew, but on the second and third, if we switch them out, I don't think I would be able to tell. It's really similar. Nice golden hue, definitely brewed lighter on the first brew and a little and darker and darker as we go. So we're going to go one and one. Start with summer, first brew, still nice and fresh, light, almost like a tangy flavor there. This is very similar to the tasting we just did of the oolong batches that we sourced. The summer is lighter and yeah, I think that could be called floral. More floral than vegetable, definitely aromatic, perfumy, and fall is more substantial and creamier. A little more ginseng, that classic milky buttery flavor coming through on the fall on the first brew. Let's see how we go on the second. Much stronger on the second brew. Pretty intense. It's got like a tiny bit of bitiness. It's not quite as stringent. My tongue isn't drying out, but there's something hitting the back of my palate. I guess it could be a fresh herbal kind of a strong flavor. It's hard for me to nail right now. Flowers, not really. I'd say it'd be more like a fresh herbal, you know, pick the leaves and taste them out of the garden kind of herbal hit there. Definitely smoother. Really nice soft mouth feel on the fall brew. Buttery, a little bit of pastry. I think the oxidation is more significant in the fall brew. Younger leaf material, a little bit more denser kind of concentrated composition, which really makes good sense given that the leaves were much more mature in the summer. A little more fiber structure to them. They're less mature in the fall. They still have a lot of juice in them, giving them their stronger flavor profile. I got lost here. I'm going to start on the third again. Summer. Yeah, that's a very interesting kind of strong note in the summer tea there. I think one thing that happens in a small detail, and it's a guess really on my part in the processing, the difference between these two factories is this factory tends to, in the tumble heating phase, they dry their leaf material a little bit more and it gets a slightly, a very subtle toasted grains note in there because a lot of the moisture is taken out of the leaves upon the kill grain or the cease oxidation phase. And then the leaves are allowed to reconstitute and are tightly rolled and dried. It seals the composition more. It fixes it more, basically, literally, by exposing them to high heat and removing the moisture more on that first hit of the tumble heating. So there we have it. Fall 2023, Alishan High Mountain Jinshuan Oolong in comparison with our previous batch of summer. Alishan Jinshuan Oolong, literally from across the valley. They're very in close proximity to each other, these two farms. One is in Ruifeng and the other is in Ruili. Ruifeng is a little bit higher, produces more Oolong. Ruili is a little more famous for Jinshuan because it's just a little bit lower. Jinshuan seems to produce the best quality tea at around 800 to 1,000 meters. And the Ruifeng farms are just about 1,000, maybe 1,100 in some cases. A nice, balanced, full-bodied brew, similar to our Oolong selection for fall 2023. Alishan Oolong has a similar character with a little more Jinshuan, of course, the buttery, milky flavor. I need to get one more hit of that before I stop talking. Yeah, the mouthfeel and then this kind of like tang, a zingy thing at the end. Oh, now I'm getting it. I felt that most in the summer first. It's like creme fraiche or something just a tiny bit of sour on top of that very smooth, buttery texture and flavor note in the Jinshuan. Get some now. The summer and fall batches are a little bit cheaper than the spring and winter. The price difference in Jinshuan is significantly less than that of the Oolong crops, but it's still the best price of the year that you're going to get for the quality. Get some.