Stone Leaf Tea

For my first venture into the tea blogosphere, I figured I should start with the best. Or at least one of the best, and if price is any indicator, Da Yu Lin is certainly one of the best. Yes, it is one of the more expensive oolongs out there, but it is really a top notch tea and well worth it for those special occasions when you need something extra fine.

Central Taiwan Mountains

Da Yu Lin is a town about halfway across the Central Cross Island Highway where highway 14 meets meets highway 8. This puts it directly in the heart of Taiwan’s high mountains – prime territory for delicious oolong tea. The town consists of a rest stop snack bar (complete with an aboriginal tourist gift shop), a small road side restaurant, and an intersection (of the previously mentioned highways). The first time I visited Da Yu Lin was while I was hitch-hiking across the Cross Island Highway in 2005. I remember stopping at the road side restaurant, borrowing their tea pot, and making some Tung Ting (an oolong tea from Nantuo county). At the time I was unaware of Da Yu Lin tea and thought that the restaurant owner would be blown away by what I thought was one of the best teas in Taiwan. He was not and it took me over two years to finally realize why.

Da Yu Lin is one of the highest grown oolongs in Taiwan. In the high mountain tradition, it is usually un-roasted so that it retains its fresh fruity and floral characteristics.

For this tea drinking session, I decided to brew the tea gong fu style (lots of leaf in a small vessel) in a glass gai wan (mostly for the pictures) with a glass pitcher, and my favorite white, conical, Taiwanese, swimming fish cup.

The dry leaf is a rolled medium size, uneven ball. The appearance is a deep blue-green color, with lighter, vibrant jade-green highlights and some shiny yellow-green stems still connected to the leaf.

I put one full tea scoop (about 1 tbsp) into the small glass pitcher and rinsed the leaves with water just off the boil. The aroma of the rinsed leaves immediately brought me back to the thick, wet, semi-tropical mountain jungles of central Taiwan. It had the sweetness of coconut cream and floral vanilla with a grounding element of steamed bitter greens.

For the first brew, I again used water just off the boil and let the leaves steep for about 20-30 seconds. After straining into the glass pitcher, the liquor was a clean, vibrant, translucent yellow-green with an almost day-glow quality, and the smell of the liquor was of mildly sweet honeysuckle blossoms. I poured a cup and took a sip. Now, for a rolled oolong, this tea is very light. The flavors do not jump out at you. In order to enjoy it, you must sit back and let the subtleties reveal themselves to you. Most notably, this tea tasted very clean and crisp. It is a flowing tea with little thickness or mouth coating feeling. At the same time, however, it did leave a distinct floral aftertaste, especially in the nose. One of my favorite parts about drinking this tea was exhaling after taking a sip. Its was as if I was breathing out honeysuckles and lilies. There was also a distinct crisp, fresh, sweet flavor in the mouth. The flavor on the tongue was of fresh, ripe mango, and coming in at the end, I felt a slight tart note of pineapple on the sides of my tongue and in my cheeks. The leaves had opened some and filled the gai wan. They were now a deep green with some lighter green in the stems. The aroma of coconut and vanilla in the gai wan was now replaced by a more vegetable smell of buttery spinach with an accompanying floral scent of lily.

For the second brew, I used freshly boiled water and let the leaves steep for about 30-35 seconds. Immediately upon straining the tea, I could tell that the leaves had opened significantly and that the tea would have more body and a sharper taste compared to the first infusion. The color of the liquor was now more green than yellow, but still clean and translucent. The balance of fruit and flowers in this brew leaned more towards the flowery. The tea was still very smooth, but not as sweet as before. The tropical fruitiness had become more cold-hearty. There were now hints of peach and apple instead of the coconut and pineapple. The flowers, however, were still very pronounced in the aroma and in the cup. There was indeed more body in this infusion and the flavors resounded more roundly in my mouth.

I prepared the third infusion in a similar manner to the second. The flavor and aroma of fresh wildflowers was still powerful. The fruitiness was also still pronounced, but it had changed again. The coconut was back! But, it was slightly different. Instead of the creamy, sweet coconut, it had the nuttier, earthier flavor of coconut shavings. Also still present in the back were the peach and apple hints. Another new aspect was the appearance of vegetable flavors only previously noted in the aroma of the wet leaves.

The forth and fifth brew were still mouthwateringly delicious. They maintained a delightful balance of fruit and flowers. Often oolong teas will lose one or both of these over the course of a few brews. This Da Yu Lin, however, retained these delicate flavors over the course of the afternoon.

My inspection of the fully opened leaves also pointed to the high quality of this tea. The open leaves were an even, vibrant green with deep green veins where the leaf had been folded in rolling. I could see that the tea had very even and light oxidation. There was no red or brown around the edges which shows that the oxidation had been stopped early making this tea so light and floral. The evenness of color and the perfect marbling of the dark green veins is an indication of the care taken in processing this tea and possibly part of the reason the floral and fruity flavor lasted after so many infusions.

Overall, this tea was clean, crisp, delicate, aromatic, and invigorating, like jumping into a cold spring high in the damp mountain jungles of Taiwan surrounded by fruit trees and flowers. No wonder that shop owner in Da Yu Lin was less than impressed by my low mountain tea. Living 2,400 meters (7,874 feet) up in Taiwan’s central mountains, surrounded by some of the best and highest elevation tea farms in the world, must lead to high expectations.

Click here to buy this tea from our online tea store!