2010 Essence of Tea "Rougui" Yancha

You may, Gentle Reader, have gathered that I don't drink a great amount of yancha, or any wulong for that matter.  This is not because of any dislike for that genre, but merely reflects the fact that I entirely adore pu'ercha, and take every opportunity in my increasingly rare tea-sessions to catch up with cakes that I have been anticipating.

Therefore, the generous gift of some Rougui [cinnamon] yancha [Wuyi rock-tea] from Nada is a gratefully-received opportunity to redress the balance, to some small degree.

Nada notes on the product page at Essence of Tea that this tea was obtained from 60-to-80-year-old trees in the "zhengshan" [proper mountain] region for this tea.  I understand that Mrs. Nada has been making diversions through Fujian, after the couple's annual trips to Yunnan, hence this addition to their pu'ercha inventory.

I'm not very good at telling yancha apart - from an outsider's perspective, as is mine, yancha all looks about the same.  I'm not sufficiently familiar with its nuances to be able to discern, for example, Rougui from some of the other classes of yancha.  Therefore, the "long, brown leaf" appearance, pictured below, is unsurprising, and unenlightening, to one of my ignorance.  That said, they seem to be unbroken and well-handled.

The clean orange soup that results has an intense aroma of sweet pudding.  Perhaps that is fitting for a class of wulong named after a pudding spice!  

The character in the mouth is a great surprise: it is substantially cooling, like a good pu'ercha.

The roast does not dominate, which I take to be a good sign in roasted wulong; rather, it is a complement to the surprisingly green, raw-wulong flavour of the leaves.  I like it very much.

I use plenty of leaves, to bring out the flavour, and it gives me a rare opportunity to use my roasted-wulong teapot, which my mother once dubbed "Little Boy's Doodah" (pictured above).

Thanks again to Nada for a fine session with a fine yancha.