Wuyi rock oolong · full roast · Wuyishan, Fujian
The leaf named after the spice you smell before you taste anything: cassia bark, roasted sugar, and a wet-stone grip that stays after you swallow.
Cassia bark → roasted sugar & dark caramel → wet stone, then a cool sweet return
Top, middle and finish are a way of organising time, not a standard term or a promise. Re-tasted against each lot; weight and brewing are below.
Aroma and palate, in the order they reach you.
Typical of the style · re-tasted against each lot
Rou Gui is named for the aroma family the bush produces, so the spice is in the leaf before anything is done to it. A heavy roast then drives sugars and amino acids into Maillard products — the reaction that browns bread — which is why the nose reads toasted rather than green. General to roasted oolong; not an analysis of this lot.
That grip is what Wuyi drinkers call rock rhyme — yan yun. It comes from the site: slow growth on thin rocky soil, and it survives processing as a cooling, drying sensation rather than as a flavour. It is the part of the cup that a valley-adjacent garden cannot copy.
Returning sweetness is hui gan — literally the sweetness that comes back after swallowing. Roasted oolong holds it longer than green tea because the roast has already driven off the volatile top notes that would otherwise sit in front of it.
Cassia. Baked sugar. Hot stone. Not poetic guesses about an unfamiliar leaf — the smells a hot roast produces, and the reason it produces them.
Sugars and amino acids react under heat, the same Maillard browning that colours bread crust and toasted nuts. The heavier the roast, the further that reaction runs.
Rou Gui translates as cassia. The bush yields the aroma family it is named for, which is why the spice survives a heavy roast when a floral note would not.
Wuyi's mineral finish, yan yun, arrives as a dry coolness after swallowing rather than as a flavour. Two gardens a valley apart can produce the same cultivar and a different finish.
What you can see
Before any flavour word, the leaf gives you evidence you can check without trusting the copy on this page. Three things to look at.
Long, twisted strips, dark brown with a red-brown edge where the leaf was bruised during oxidation. Not pellets, not dust. The colour is the roast, not the age.
Clear amber-orange. Brightness matters more than depth: a muddy cup usually means over-steeped leaf rather than a stronger tea.
The standard printed on it is GB/T 18745-2006, the Wuyi rock tea standard. A rock tea sold without a cultivar name is a blend, whoever grew it.
Same leaf, two time scales. The difference you taste is extraction, not a different tea.
Parameters stated for this product · adjust to taste, then keep them
Boiling water, fifteen seconds on the first pour, then add five to ten seconds each round. Six or seven infusions is normal for this leaf, and the middle steeps are usually the sweetest.
The spice is loudest in the first two steeps. The mineral grip arrives around the third and is still there at the end.
By the fourth steep the leaf is fully open, so the extra seconds are doing the work the first steep did on its own. Keep the water boiling and keep the pours short.
If it turns sharp, the steep ran long rather than the leaf being finished. Drop back five seconds and try again.
A number is an identity, not a stock code. Where a field is unknown, it is left out rather than guessed.
One leaf, six fates. Nothing here is blended across regions.
