Alishan Oolong Tea

Good and real Taiwan tea leaves

Decent oolong. I bought this as a stopgap for my regular online supplier and it's a pretty nice green oolong.

Sure this is the real deal. Smells milky and tastes milky. Would defo time buy again!

Oolong is a very wide category of tea that sits between green and black teas, and through skilled, labor-intensive processing, a tea-maker can coax anything from buttery florals to deep chocolate to roasted nuts to tropical fruit out of a single batch of leaves. It's done by carefully controlling both the oxidation and roast intensity of the leaf. Oolong is thus a premium, artisan produced tea, and one that It is unmatched in its breadth of flavour profiles and complexity of taste. Much like wine, expect to pay good money for a good oolong. The Alishan Jin Xuan that I tried is a green oolong, meaning that it has a low level of oxidation, and light roasting. The flavour profile of a green oolong is fresh and fragrant, and that would be a good description of this particular example. The tea comes beautifully presented, vacuum packed for freshness inside a double sealed bag. Unlike common black teas, some of which arrive as dust almost, this tea is whole leaf, tightly wrapped into small balls. A little is all you need - 2 grammes at most, and they expand greatly when steeped in boiling water. I like to use a traditional gaiwan when I make oolong, and I steep the leaves one cup at a time, for about two minutes before pouring off the liquor. Made like this, oolong will give you five or more cups of tea from the same leaves, and every cup will be slightly different as the flavour profile develops. This tea begins as a strong bright brew before developing more subtle buttery notes, becoming floral, with hints of jasmine and grass towards the end. So, those 75 portions of 2g can easily translate into five times that number of bowls of tea, and suddenly what you initially thought was expensive, really isn't at all, especially when you treat it in the way it deserves, and as a gourmet item. Seen in that light, this tea is very good value. CONCLUSION When prepared properly this is a complex and delicious tea, best drunk mindfully and treated as a journey of discovery. It's well worth trying, and I rate it with five stars.

I have no real issues with this tea, even as someone who mostly prefers black tea with an occasional dip into green/matcha when I take a notion for it. This tea arrived double sealed, with both pouches made from foil, the interior pouch was tightly vacuum sealed, and the outer pouch is intended as a resealable container if you don’t have anything better. The recommended brewing method on the product listing is a more western style several minute brews with a single infusion, but there is nothing wrong with trying out different methods. The rabbit hole just for brewing styles and methods for oolongs alone is surprisingly deep, and they can have quite an impact on the results with teas from specific places or that are processed in different ways. For a rolled tea like this the main difference is that you add a step and make the first infusion in a tea session a bit longer to give the leaves time to expand. I’m pretty new to oolong tea specifically, and I don't really have a vast collection of teaware, so I tend to make do with a small glass teapot for most of my brews when I get hooked on a new tea type. With that said though, if you really want to do it the proper way a nice enough gaiwan is only a tenner or so, and they aren’t particularly hard to find or use. I just used the gongfu brewing method with my small teapot with great success and as mentioned all that needs to be tweaked for this particular tea is a longer first steep/infusion at a hotter temperature to let the leaves expand properly. As usual with tea, everything is subjective and nothing is really stopping you from putting a couple of heaped teaspoons worth of leaves into a teapot and giving it a good amount of water and a long steep time. As long as you give the leaves enough room to expand, this tea is surprisingly versatile. Because of that expansion I would say that using this ball rolled tea in small single-serving mesh filters isn’t giving it a fair shot and at minimum you’ll need a 120-150ml teapot to let it expand enough with 3-9 gram servings. Like gaiwans, small glass or ceramic teapots are very affordable, and they do make the process much tastier, easier and just generally more enjoyable and not just for oolong teas. It is a little wasteful to do a single long infusion for a tea like this where you’d easily get 5-15 enjoyable smaller infusions, but I get that not everyone has the time or patience for that. But when you’re paying £17.99 for 150 grams of good quality tea it just makes sense to get the full value from it. No complaints with this product, it’s a good quality tea that arrived well packaged and is reasonably priced compared to similar teas. Happy to recommend.

It's very important to not use too much tea, or leave it to steep for too long - if you do then it tastes like a seaweed broth. Even with that taste I could still see why millions of people might like it as it's so smooth. After I brewed the first lot and found that the dehydrated leaves were attempting to escape the filter due to them having increased in volume so much, much more than any other tea I have previously made, it was obvious I had messed something up, so I decided it probably wasn't fair to review based on that experience. So I drank that pot, and made another 2 pots from the same leaves (so 6 cups in total) and it 'improved' - still not to my taste, but I could see why other people might like it. Today I made another batch. I measured the tea, rather than just using the one and a half heaped teaspoons that I use for all other teas in that pot. 3g per 200ml of water so for a 500ml pot I used 7g. I also closely timed it's first steep, about 1 minute and 15 seconds. I used water that had been left for a couple of minutes after the kettle boiled, no idea what temperature that is but it's got to be a few degrees short of boiling. The result is an almost imperceptible colouring to the water When brewed correctly it's nice, it still has the smoothness of the first batch, it's almost totally clear of any sediment, and it has a very subtle taste, probably of Oolong tea (I've never had it before so I have no idea what it's supposed to taste like, other than that it probably shouldn't taste of boiled seaweed lol) Very early days, like most teas it's, at least for me, an acquired taste, but I don't actively dislike it. Possibly I may buy more, I've still got a lot of it to get through before that decision needs to be made.

The time of this review 150 g of this oolong tea from Vietnam is around £18 The instructions for a hot cup of tea - use about 3 g of this tea ( around a teaspoon) in 200 ml of hot water, Brew for one minute, drink. I tried with an in-cup sieve but there was no different to using the two cup method with a tea strainer. I have tried a few different teas. My normal tea is blended but some green tea I like, whilst other green teas I definitely don’t. Now the taste of this tea wasn’t for me, the aroma put me off, I have tried a few cups over two days, the taste was fine but I wasn’t persuaded to have any more, I am the only tea drinker in this house and that will be a personal thing for me I am not sure that the advert saying 75 cups is accurate 150g of tea in the pack and 3G per cup is only 50 cups of tea, or 36p per cup The tea is obviously dried when it arrives but it will swell when in the hot water as you can see from the attached photograph . If you are thinking of buying some Vietnamese alishan oolong tea, I hope the review is a bit helpful

I'm a big tea drinker but I've never tried Oolong tea before. Apparently it lies somewhere between green tea and English breakfast tea. So it can be quite light in colour (nearer to green tea) or a bit darker and closer to breakfast tea. This version is fairly light in colour. It took me 3 attempts to successfully make a cup of this. I used a steel ball tea infuser. The type with the spring loaded jaws for an individual cup. The first time I fully loaded the tea infuser but the tea leaves expanded so much that they pushed the jaws open filling the cup with pieces of leaves. The second time I half filled it and had the same problem. The tea leaves expand a crazy amount. You only really need a very small amount of leaves and the third time it worked a charm. I usually like floral light teas but I'm not sure about this one. It could be I'm still making it a bit strong (I usually like strong tea). A bit more experimentation, and research, is needed I think. Overall it's a good product. It arrived nicely packed and the leaves are very fresh. If you like Oolong tea I'm sure you'll be happy with this one. For me I need a bit more time with it to find the perfect amount and brewing time.

Einer der besten Oolong-Tees auf dieser Plattform, meiner Meinung nach. Dank dieses Tees habe ich, indem ich ihn regelmäßig getrunken und wie zuvor Sport gemacht habe, problemlos fünf Kilogramm abgenommen. Er wirkt gut entwässernd, ist zugleich belebend und gesund. Angenehm milder Geschmack, keine Bitterkeit. Ich kaufe ihn bereits zum zweiten Mal und bin sehr zufrieden mit dem Produkt.

No está mal