I have been lead astray trying several times trying to identify a tea by taste from a fuzzy memory. All the teas that rang the bell were excellent, but none looks right. The tea I am looking for has long twisted leaved that are mottled green and bronze. I can't say which color predominates.
My taste-memory has "accepted" bao zhongs, green ti kuan yins, and yellow teas as being "it". The liquor was a pale yellow after 3 min steeping in water brought to the boil. The tea had a tremendous aroma that really got up into my nasal cavities when slurped like wine, and a long vegetal aftertaste. I don't recall any flowery elements in either aroma or taste. My sense of taste and smell might have changer over the years but my memory of what the leaf looked like hasn't.
I would have guessed a Taiwanese baozhong, particularly based on the color. The honey smell can be quite "high" too. I've never had a Wuyi that light, or that I would call vegetal, but I'm sure they exist.
Sorry, I should have been a little clearer. According to my limited experience, there is quite a range of appearance for baozhongs, with some being almost green and some heavily roasted like Wuyi. Based on the other things the original poster said about the tea's characteristics (absence of floral or fruit tastes, and yellow color), I would be very careful about ruling baozhong out.
What is interesting in your description is the appearance of the leaves which include "bronze"...is there a Wuyi or Baozhong that has bronze leaves?
Can you explain the tremendous aroma (which, you mentioned is not floral) that really got up into your nasal cavities? Can you recall the character of the aroma? Fruitty? Heavy? Spicy? This might help MarshalN & Alex reduce their areas of speculation.
In what manner of processing will they brew this colour? The OP didn't describe specifically which range of yellow - is it a dark yolky yellow, bright yellow, yellow with a green tinge (that would be closer to Baozhong, unroasted), etc. Perhaps WEL would like to clarify further?
In the ever-lightening tastes of the Chinese consumer market for tea, every kind of oolong has been made lighter and lighter. I have some 06 Shuixian sitting on my desk right now that I tried a few days ago, which brews a golden yellow colour (orange if you put lots of leaves in) and is quite light in taste. No roasting was done, or at least none that is obvious. The leaves range from oxidized bronze to a darker green/black.
So.... it really depends on what the OP drank. I am going by the "twisted long leaves" shape that he described.
I have tasted many Wuyi processed to attract the tastebuds of the younger generation in China; most of these range from the sea level plantations to machine harvested leaves.
The dried leaves are dark in appearance, but once brewed, the green showed through. Bronzed leaves? None at all. The colour bronze indicates the result of one of several processes, and high heat roasting is one of them - which in this case from the appearance of the brew as described by the OP, didn't appear to be the case. the other possibility is that the leaves have undergone post production high heat treatment to breakdown more thoroughly the chlorophyll groups a & b and chlorophyllin into xanthophyll groups and carotene.
The "rock-green" bruising period for oolongs would largely increase enzyme activity and change the chlorophyll into chlorophyllin, and in the drying process, chlorophyllin changes into phrophorbide, the leaves at this stage is a colour between dark green and yellow, and the liquors yellow with a green tinge, or green with a yellow tinge, depending on the length of period for the bruising and the drying. Roasting the leaves will alter the chemicals in the leaves further and present us with a brew of darker colour leaning towards yolky yellow and brownish red.
But seriously, who cares for such jargon?
What is interesting is that the OP mentioned the lack of floral notes. Light fermented unroasted oolongs might process a yellow liquor, but lack of floral note? This is almost unlike light fermented unroasted oolong.
That's why I thought a lighter Wuyi can be a candidate -- it could be construed to lack a floral note. It's not flowery in the way a light TGY is flowery.
I think the dry leaves were sort of an oolongy brown. The bronze-green bicolor was only visible on the used leaf. When I described the flavor/smell to a someone at the time I remember saying it tasted like an evergreen forest in New Hampshire smelled during the summer. Poetic, but I can't describe it better than that.
This was back in the 1970's; I didn't know how to treat a good tea: I put a teaspoon full of the tea in a tea strainer, put the strainer in a 6 oz. cup, poured fresh boiling water in the cup,and set a timer for three minutes. I had never seen tea leaves go from these narrow twisty things to full green (mostly) leaves. I had also obtained another new tea at the time, one which I know now quite well: Dragon Well. It struck me that the aftertaste of this unknown tea was very much like the taste of Dragon Well, that "water you cooked spinach in" flavor.
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