Da Hong Pao, known as Big Red Robe in English has the reputation as one of the top oolongs for connoessiurs. Its one of the teas that I seem to have a strange relationship with, because I believe remember my first time drinking it so fondly, but none of the teas since then have lived up to the memory (until now). Seriously, I’ve never been able to sell a Da Hong Pao this good before. I feel like I have 1 KG of liquid gold available, and for such a decent price too.

This tea is a banger, frfr. I gave it the name radioclub because of a movie called Paprika. The tea carries the imagination of the movie, and the sophistication of the radioclub bar within. It’s exactly the kind of drink I’d get if I was visiting this fictional bar.

I used the whole package with 330mL of boiling water and steeped for 2 minutes, my results are below.

First of all, the dry leaf smells between grapefruit or blood-orange gummy candy and a good fruity whisky like Linkwood 15 or Oban. It’s satisfying, rich in texture, and lives up to the hype of the aroma in the mouth. Round 2 introduces a yaki-tori sort of flavor. Like Charcoal grilled chicken and tokyo negi/green onion, it also began to develop a mineral fragrance that was hard to place at the time but became more obvious in round 3. Round 3 was like mineral oil — in my fine dining days we used to have to polish rocks with mineral oil to be used as plates for the customers. Rocks with mineral oil have a distinctive smell, just like this tea. Round 3 had a bit of everything, it was like sipping a whiskey cocktail with grapefruit bitters while eating yakitori off a hot oiled rock.

Seriously great.

This is another tea that comes pre-packaged in individual units though, which might be a good thing for customer cost.  It does prevent me from having fun with a label. The sketch I’ll upload as the product image is from my notebook I keep at the shop. I doodled it while I was drinking the tea. I can’t recommend this tea enough.