TASTING $26,000 TEA. Is it worth the price tag? + GIVEAWAY!

hey tea heads this is don from mayleaf in this video tasting some insanely expensive teas i'm approaching this session with a mix of excitement and trepidation because the teas i have in front of me are by far some of the most expensive teas that i have ever tried they represent probably in the top 0.0001 percent of most expensive teas in the world they are truly up there in the rarefied atmosphere of ridiculous mark under ridiculous ridiculous pricing so i'm excited to taste them obviously because i expect them to be super high quality teas but at the same time i am approaching this session with a little bit of trepidation because i have a very strong suspicion let's call it a certainty that the tease in front of me will never live up to the price tag i'll talk about the price tag in a little bit let's put it this way if these teas even come close to the price tag then they would have to be the best teas that i have ever tasted i've been involved in tea for 20 years we've been curating teas for 15 years we source the absolute pinnacle t's the best teas that we can find absolutely every season and so i am prepared to spend a lot of money on teas because i love them and i think the experience is well worthwhile but in the case of these kinds of teas i think that this is a worrying trend that has been happening for many many years that is creating potentially a bubble in the market where the price of the teachers is so far removed from the experience in the cup so the price of tea we've done a video about this before but it's worth just sort of stressing that the price of tea is dependent on many factors it's dependent on the quality of the tech work the location the very specific location is dependent on the age of the tea trees the processing the amount of hand processing that's gone on in the making of the tea the season that it was picked the age of the tea itself potentially there are many many different factors you know that will affect the price point of a tea plus there is simply supply and demand how rarity is and the trends in t so you know what people are more interested in at any particular time so all of these factors come into play to define the price point obviously the seller him or herself gets to choose the price point depending upon their overheads and their expense and the packaging and all those factors come into play just like any other business however the price tag must match the experience in the cup so you need to be able to take away all of the other factors you know the the cachet the status the name of the tea all of those things and just focus on the experience in the cup and ask yourself a question was that experience worth the price now i think for the majority of teas out there tea is remarkably priced it's very very affordable considering the joy that it gives you when you get into true tea but in the case of these two teas here i think that we have gone too far so let's talk about these teas i have in front of me ginger may the most expensive black tea in the world i'm gonna taste this tea on instagram after this one because i've done so many videos about ginger may on youtube you can go check those out i'll stick links in the description below if you want to see me tasting this tea then i'll be tasting this afterwards it's going to be a special day for me here and we'll be tasting that and putting that on instagram but today on youtube i want to be focusing on this tea here this is a new land kang rogue so rogue way is yensha rock oolong if you don't know what a rokulon is i'll put a link in the description below very very expensive premium oolong teas from fujian province from wuyi area and this is from mulan kang which is a very specific area very well known for their rogue way teas and the price point on this is retail 96 000 r b per gin so 96 000 rmb per half kilo that equates to around 26 or so thousand dollars per kilo so you're looking at about 2 600 for 100 grams you're looking at about 260 for 10 grams so you're looking at about 26 us dollars per single gram of this tea i'm not quite sure how much is in here in fact let's open it up and find out this is a 2019 tea so we get sent all sorts of teas obviously in the selecting of our teas we find teas from all over the place and we get sent these kinds of super rare teas as well and you know so i thought i would taste it in front of you and let's see what it's like um and i've got another pot of this and another part of this so we're going to be doing a giveaway so stay tuned and one of you will get a lucky chance to win some of this tea so let's see how much we've got in here we've got that's three grams so you've got about uh oops oops that's a lot of very expensive tea that i'm pouring all over the place that's an eight gram portion right so in this scoop is eight grams let's round it down to 25 us dollars per gram so here is two hundred dollars worth of tea in front of you here and that's conservative right so new land kung rogue why is it so expensive new langkang is a very particular area where rogue way is famed and this is top obviously there's lots of there's a fair amount of newland rogue way around because it's got such a a very famous name in fact how much of the nuland kung rogue that you see on the market actually comes from yulan kang is another one of those very pertinent points whenever we're talking about tea but there's a fair amount of it around and this is the absolute top top area so niulankang roadway i've got eight grams here shall i do the whole thing you know what if you're gonna do it do it isn't it so this is a 200 session here that we're doing i've got my blue guy one i'm gonna heat this up now the question can this ever be even close to being worth that kind of price as i said if it is then this is gonna be a tea which is going to redefine all my expectations of rock oolong and i very much doubt that that's going to be the case but you live in hope right okay so let's take a look at those leaves they are beautiful right the smell coming off here is immaculate it's amazing let's smell okay so burnt caramel a little bit of red currant the charcoal has had a chance to die down so this is 2019 i'm speaking to you from july 2020 it's very important that you do not purchase wee rock oolongs that uh you know are sort of under six months old because they'll have so much of that charcoal note there is a definite bright um happily note happening it's a lovely smelling tea if you had blind tasted me with this sample i would definitely be excited to try it and that's why we tend to do blind tastings whenever we taste samples you know we we we don't want the price to influence our choices because as i said for me the price needs to be reflective of experience the experience is what counts everything else can be put to the side everything else is storytelling okay here we go i mean it's lovely um it has a uh almost it has an almost like uh stewed meat kind of note to it and it sounds horrible but like a very aromatic um wild venison stew sort of earthiness and savoriness and then you've got cherries um apple a particular perfume like longan i mean it will have been roasted over longan woods charcoal but there's a very distinct fruity bright longan flesh and cherry flesh stone fruit aromatic coming through the charcoal is lovely it's a body which is is giving it depth and intensity but is not overtaking those very very clear aromatics that come from tehwak and of course it has a rocky note to it as well shall i taste the rinse this is dollars worth of tea so i should taste the rinse nice longan longan not quite as sweet as lychee a little bit more sour longan fruit is what i would say is the fruit there let me uh make sure that the temperature is up here i need to do everything right here and as i said after this session i'm going to taste this ginge in may but as you can probably tell from my expression you know it's a great tea judging by the smell it's a it's a very very good tea but you know when you compare this to say under undercover dhp undercover dhp is a jungyeon da hong pao blend that we have sourced from a very very um immaculate producer with a long family history in having their jungyan fields in we and making yenchas and that comes to around 90 cents a gram right so the difference between 90 cents a gram retail and 26 dollars a gram it's it's madness it's nearly 30 times the price um and i personally would very much say that i prefer the aroma of undercover dhp to this one so let's see how it tastes and we will give it a fair judgment it always um sort of fills me with a bit of excitement amusement and a little bit of an eye roll when i get sent samples like this and i um i'm told by my sourcing um uh assistant that this is way above our price points and i'm like well how much is it and they say okay this one is x then uh i'm always like a little bit like okay fine let me give it a taste let's see it's worth giving a taste most of the time we taste blind to price but when it is so insane like this you uh it sort of is flagged to me right here we go color of the liquor beautiful amber orange cheers everybody new lancome rogue way top of the pile of new lancome rogue way here we go right texture is immediate lots of rockiness lots of um physicality pulling and and movement um slight sort of um prickly sensation on the tongue would i say that it's particularly pleasant i mean i like it because it it has action from the get-go it has action the moment you put it in your mouth it has a lot of character but the sensation itself is not a sensation necessary of luxury and i would say that if you gave this to somebody who doesn't really drink a lot of yen chars they would probably go it's a little bit prickly on my tongue very very very clear rocky nature slight bitterness on the back on the back pallet of my mouth texture is not particularly thick i would say it's medium medium-bodied um now let's focus on the taste i'm getting a bitterness on the sides of my tongue which i'm not particularly enjoying and that's sort of um masking some of them the more pleasant aromatics in the tea and i can sort of see i can i can taste that there's a lot of depth which will hopefully express itself more in the next few rounds because it's rarely the best infusion the first infusion of yancha nothing particularly amazing though i am getting some stone fruit we're more moving into apricots um there's some guava in there um there's a little bit of red currant you know how red currant can have that sour character to it well this has that and it's also got as i said that bitterness which normally comes from say biting on a pip you know or a seed in a fruit is sort of it it's it's it's fast it's fast on fast off so it comes you get this bitterness and it goes so it's nothing particularly disturbing or lingering but it certainly isn't something that i would say is a positive note in the tea i am at first glance surprised by how underwhelmed i am by this tea i was at least expecting it to be an amazing session if not worth the price but definitely if i had tasted this blind i would not pick this out as a lineup for something for may leaf tea what is that there's a sort of um very particular unripe fruit sour and bitter notes coming through and that unripe fruit is in a way gives it a certain character but it's not it it tastes unripe okay we're gonna do second infusion here and we're going to see if there's a marked change nice sweetness is now developing in my mouth yeah nice lingering cherry sweetness is developing in my mouth that's something that i am definitely enjoying antique woodiness that is sort of standard yensha material really nothing to write home about certainly would not make according to that first tasting at the shortlist on uh may leaf on a melee selection tasting deep dark amber color okay elephant gets a couple of dollars worth of drips and here we go infusion number two cheers everybody thickened up slightly definitely thicker still not i would still would not call it thick i would say it's medium thick bitterness is attenuated reduced still there a little bit just sort of poking its head above the wall so it's still noticeable but is definitely reduced i'm getting a dryness in the mouth look there's lots of rocky texture here there's a lot of physicality there's a lot of dynamic shift happening i'm getting dryness on the front of my tongue i'm getting bitterness on the back uh top pallet i'm getting some sourness and some juiciness develop so it's a very physical tea as you'd expect from a high quality tewar rogue yancha the flavor of it is definitely falling short of the mark really i mean you know there's i'm not inspired with a a lot of different tasting notes that's hitting me i'm getting woods i'm getting berries like red currants and but you know as i said like under ripe like you were picking them and you put one in your mouth and you're like oh no that still needs some time to mature but it's got that tininess that sort of um yeah that that fruity acidic tanginess that uh is perhaps something that people would like i don't particularly like an overly sour tea especially this kind of sourness so you've got like sourness that comes from a tiguanyan sourness from the processing which is sort of a sour apple candy note where it it it somehow works with the freshness of the tea but when the sourness is coming from this sort of deep inner leaf material which is just causing a sort of soured unripe fruit taste it it's a bit disturbing and bizarrely enough this infusion even though the texture is a bit better is quite weak quite surprisingly weak i'm gonna hit this was hit with 100 degree water and you saw how long i brewed it for and you can see here i'm not skimping on leaves here right again worth noting about 200 us dollars this session retail right and you may say well that's just madness this is cuckoo land no one's paying for this kind of prices for tea you would be wrong and this is the point that i'm trying to make here a little bit um is that there's one thing a t not being worth the price we've all experienced that before but when people are paying this crazy money because they've got crazy amounts of money and they want the status of the tea well i mean you know it just beggars belief you know why are they doing that because clearly as i think is pretty clear here the experience of this tea is just i mean it's it's it's not even in the same universe right the experience of this tea compares to the price point let alone the same ballpark it's just totally just a total disconnect between price and experience and i've noticed this with these really high ticket tees that essentially people are buying them because they can afford the status symbol of having a new land kung rogue now okay worth me noting i've tasted other new land kang roadways that are cheaper than this and a lot better than this i'm not saying that you know new land kang roadways should be avoided at all costs no of course not you know there are going to be some great new langkang roadways out there but as i said this is top of the pile there supposedly and it's giving me a very underwhelming experience for a ridiculous price tag and there are people paying this price and so the worry is that when you have such a disconnect between the value of the experience and the value of the actual cost that's when bubbles start to to get created where the the prices just become so inflated because people are prepared to spend the money especially in china there are chinese people who are very rich that just all that they're looking at is i want to get the best rogue way out there where is that from that's new lancome okay what's the most expensive new lan kang rogue way out there i need to get that put that in my collection so that i've got that for my own sort of sense of self value or so that i can show off to friends or i can give it as a gift but ultimately it has to be about experience now of course experience is personal some people might enjoy this team more than i do there's going to be fluctuations in what people consider to be a high quality experience but as i said we're not even in the same universe here right so even if you think this experience is a lot better than mine it's still in my opinion not going to be worth the price third infusion a lot lighter the liquor let's see now this has moved a little bit more into a mangosteen finish so sweet mangosteen and cherry finish it's got similar notes to a chilan which is a very very very affordable yensha our summer haze for example summer haze i again would you put you give me the choice of drinking summer haze versus this price points are worlds apart and i would every time pick summer haze wow fallen off the cliff excuse the pun because it's a cliff ooh long fallen off the cliff this tea has a lost it on the third infusion just dropped volume is down i'm gonna try and give it an extra bit of an infusion time because this tastes to me like the eighth infusion now yenshas are not known to last you know an extreme amount of infusions they're not like you know cooked pooers but still you would expect the third infusion of any high quality yensha to be very rich still in its sort of peak phase of the session just very very slatey tasting a sort of a lot of sort of calcium it's dry again that bitterness is still there top of the palette that is not going away giving me heating sensation okay that's a little bit darker let's give this a taste but i am actually shocked i did fully expect that i was going to end this video by saying that this is definitely not worth the price but the level of distance between the value of this experience and the value of the actual price point is it's just beyond words nope that's gone that's dropped off the cliff i would need to probably you know infuse this i will do it one more infusion for like a couple of minutes just to try to get something out of this but wow wow so this is a perfect example of the sort of meddling that is going on in tea pricing where you have a product which is so dependent on this very specific single origin area that has a reputation for making the best rogue ways and simply on that reputation the sellers are selling and they are selling this tea to very rich people who can afford this kind of tea without really considering the fact that there are there is a wealth of far superior yensha experiences than this out there at a absolute fraction a snip of the price point like 30 times if not more 40 times less expensive than this and a higher quality experience okay well i'm going to give it one last taste but this worries me you see when i when i speak to suppliers and they're saying oh but you know this is a new land kung roadway and you know the price point in you know the other sellers are selling out is this price point and they're selling it you should sell it too you know my i'm thinking you know this all this does is encourage you know the criticism of the tea the specialist tea market it encourages people to say wow that's ridiculous this is you know you're so far away from reality when you're pricing these teas and as i said in my opinion i think that tea in general specialty is remarkably well priced you're looking at you know for the most expensive teaser sort of a session costing you say four five six dollars for like top top top end like the top you know three percent of teas out there costing you sort of four or five dollars a session so the price of you know i don't know uh a quarter of a bottle of wine you know at a restaurant you know or even even less than that and you're getting oh an amazing experience that can last for you know over an hour if not longer so i think that the price point of tea is remarkable it's very very affordable but when teas like this are on the market i think it gives specialty tea a bad name and i don't like it at all and i would encourage all of you out there that are tempted to purchase these very very high ticket tees to tread with caution i'm not saying don't do it but just tread with caution and always remember that the experience is everything strips away all of the storytelling does the experience live up to the price point cheers this is still a third infusion look at that throwing away that is bitter it's bitter it's now just gone bitter again i've brewed that i don't know but it's definitely over a minute and it's looking very very light fourth infusion like bitter water uh really really really bad just bad i'm i'm i'm it's sort of it makes me angry right that people are selling tea of this quality of this low quality scratchy on my throat bitter fourth infusion it's the third infusion that fell off a cliff first infusion was sort of vaguely fruity but mostly sour and pithy bitterness second infusion was still bitter still sour not much going on but that was the best and then it just fell off a cliff really really bad the best was the aroma which has now turned into a sort of very vaguely pleasant vaguely pleasant cherry and rock aroma but you know two hundred dollars twenty dollars ten dollars no i wouldn't even pay ten dollars for a session of this and this costs two hundred dollars for a session well very disappointed with this tea and worth uh tasting in front of you just so that you get to understand that these high-ticket teas you know don't be afraid about saying it's not worth it when you taste it okay because if it's not it's not right i'm going to move on and hopefully have a better experience with this jinjin may and i'll be tasting that on instagram but first of all well i don't even know if i want to give this away as a giveaway but i will i've got another one of these so another 200 session out there if anybody wants to try this experience i will um i will give it away to someone just write in the comments section below what can you write write for me your most underwhelming t session so the t session that you recall that just was the most underwhelming let's just share sort of amusing stories of very underwhelming tea experiences obviously may leaf is all about celebrating pinnacle tea but it's worth having a laugh and we've all had them those underwhelming tea experiences this is definitely one of them just write that in the comments section below and i will pick a winner out and i will send you this and i'll send you one of our yen charts so that you can do an a b comparison and you can see what i mean about the difference all right let's do that so write down in the comment section below and i'll pick one lucky winner to get this new lancome rogue way that's worth two hundred dollars that's it heads check out our other videos taste rts wherever you are in the world by browsing mayleaf.com and come visit us if you're ever in london other than that i'm don from may leaf thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from those tea bags and overpriced tea and keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 20,398

Keywords: tea, mei leaf, don mei, loose leaf tea, white tea, green tea, yellow tea, oolong tea, matcha tea, black tea, puerh tea, puer tea, pu erh tea, websites for tea, tea tasting, tea shopping, high quality tea, chinese tea, taiwanese tea, japanese tea, tea ware, teaware, tea gifts, gong fu tea, gong fu brewing

Id: UXWhsNE7VNw

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020