Drink This Potion Before Midnight

Hello hello!

Brief rundown —Taiwan Sourcing is a website that’s owned by the same man that owns Yunnan Sourcing. Taiwan Sourcing is dedicated to sourcing the best oolongs that Taiwan has to offer, along with carefully selected tea ware. Unlike Yunnan Sourcing, who sells a lot of Chinese Oolongs, Taiwan Sourcing is strictly Taiwanese teas. With that, one of their most prized and renowned oolongs is ‘The Potion’ Jade Oolong, which comes from Qing Xin. For their 2016 harvest of this tea, it broke their record for their most expensive green oolong. So naturally, that made me want to try it. Furthermore, here’s why ‘The Potion’ is an oolong that more than just a tea; it’s a potion itself…

Steeps 1 - 4

For this session, I used 3g of tea in a 60ml vessel. After heating water to a temperature of 185ºf, the session went underway. Upon the first steep, which started at a thirty second steeping time, the creamy and sweet floral tasting note of gardenia brushed against the base of the tongue. The taste and aroma of this tea kept blossoming with the continuing steeps, and at the third steep began to leave the aftertaste of butter and dairy cream. Towards the end of the fourth infusion, the sweet notes of raw sugar cane kept making its way through the floral gardenia notes, and came together to create profile that was as delicious as it was meditative.

Steeps 5 - 8

The texture of ‘The Potion’ progressively got thicker and thicker. The sweet floral notes slowly faded into notes of sugar snap peas. Along with that, the sweetness that was detected earlier kept getting stronger and stronger, and left a radiating aftertaste of pure sugar. To help compliment those notes, the tea’s soup felt like a syrup as the gloopy notes of buttered popcorn became too prominent in the mouth to ignore. Everything up to this point was very enjoyable, and this session kept getting better and better.

Steeps 9 - 14

‘The Potion’ halted its climb and began to level out. The base of butter slowly calmed down, and gave way for the green vegetal notes to move forward. However, when these notes began to die down, a strong yet pleasant undertone of menthol began to make its way to center stage. The cooling aftertaste of menthol was immediately left in the roof of the mouth as the tea continued to settle down. Eventually, ‘The Potion’ resembled a few medicinal properties at this point, but I was too tea drunk to detect anything further. After the fourteenth steep, I was able to put this tea down and call it a night.

Conclusion

‘The Potion’ is definitely a potion, and this tea’s body was thick enough to give it its title. This oolong has a relatively high price point, but due to the complexity of the tea, the price seems very well worth it. The Potion is not an oolong I’d recommend to someone whose looking to calm down, because this tea has so much energy that you’ll be tea drunk long after the session is over. In conclusion, I think that ‘The Potion’ Jade Oolong is one of Taiwan Sourcing's best offerings, especially if you're looking for a green oolong. Next time you venture off of Yunnan Sourcing’s site to visit their sister site, hopefully you’ll get the chance to place an order for this oolong and see why it’s called a potion, for yourself…

"Blissfully Tea Drunk"