Golden Spring

[Drax]

I realize this is a new tea from Adagio, but I was surprising to not find much discussion on it.

I really enjoyed my first experience with this tea. It reminded me a lot of drinking sweet tea. This tea also generated a large number of those crystals (trichromes?) in my glass.

But one thing in particular -- before brewing, the leaves were about 60-70% blond and the rest dark/black leaves. After brewing, the leaves looked pretty homogeneous in color (basically a chocolate brown) -- and maybe if I looked really hard I could see a couple darker leaves. Did the blond leaves get stained by the darker ones or something...? Just something that struck me as odd...

[geeber1]

I like it too, which surprised me because I haven't liked very many Chinese blacks. I don't have any idea about the color changes though.

[Victoria]

There hasn't been too much mention of this one, I liked it too, but 3rd.
Maybe because of the four being released at the same time,
the yunnan noir seemed to garner all the attention. The yunnan noir
was my favorite of the four. Then keemun rhapsody. I rated the
The fujian baroque 4th, it was not for me.

No idea on the color changes either.

[Chip]

I had this when it first came out and received another sample of all the new offerings for Christmas. My first impression was, "Golden Spring, light and airy for a black. I want to use more leaf next time, maybe semi gong fu. This is the most curious of the blacks for me in that it is Bi Lou Chun black if I hear right."

I think I will have it now ...

[Drax]

I'll have to do a tasting where I try all of those newer teas together or something. I've had them all at this point, but very different days from each other.

I'll be curious to hear what you think, Chip. Especially the freaky leaf color change!

[Chip]

The color change is pretty common I think with gold or silver tippy leaves, especially containing pubescent buds. Perhaps the pubescence comes off, or as it becomes wet, it changes color to the leaf base color of the darker leaf.

Anyway, the tea seems to share characteristics between a Keemin and a Yunnan. I noticed some faint cocoa aroma of some Keemun, yet also faint peppery of Yunnan. It is pretty nice, but not my fave of the new offerings, since Yunnan is one of my least fave blacks to begin with.

[JasonC]

As far as the color goes, I didn't notice it, but now that you mentioned it, yeah after brewing the color is rather uniform.

...[snip]...
Anyway, the tea seems to share characteristics between a Keemin and a Yunnan. I noticed some faint cocoa aroma of some Keemun, yet also faint peppery of Yunnan ...[snip]...

I agree with you Chip, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. I happen to be drinking this tea right now. For me it almost has a sort of green tea-ish flavor, and then the keemun(or some other black teaesque flavor) kind of hits me. I am not a huge fan of green teas, though if I am in the mood for one, theres nothing better. I find this tea to be very interesting. I find that I prefer the Keemun. I also have kind of taking a liking to the pu erh dante. I really didn't like it at first, but it has sort of grown on me. Getting back to the golden spring. I would say it sort of has a "golden" quality to it, if I had to put the taste into words ( which is hard to do ), it has a sort of "spring" feel to it, but it is indeed a black tea, so I can sort of "see" the gold-ish tone that might be made from combining the two colors(flavors). I tastes sort of "fresh" to me, again almost greenish in nature, but not quite.

I do enjoy the tea, but it is not my favorite. I am going to place a larger order soon for some more samples. I think I would quite like to try some of the flavored blacks, and I will also be purchasing a larger tin of the Keemun Rhapsody; I find of my samples thus far that tin has been getting lighter the fastest.

In short ( TLDR ): It's good, not the best, but worth a try, pick up a sample and check it out.

Thanks,
--Jason