This tea is wild alright – visually It looks like someone raked their tea lawn and put the leaves in a bag. The leaves themselves are actually purple too. How cool is that?
The sparse nature of the wild “lawn clipping” style leaves and deceptively faint aroma of the dry leaf brews a shockingly full bodied cup of tea with a range of taste somewhere between dry, herbaceous chinese green and smokey ripe pu’er. Its quite remarkable, this tea borrows from both sides of the spectrum while standing distinctly on its own. This was my first ever Mao Cha style tea… up to this point I have never tasted anything quite like it.
The energy of Wild Monk is penetrating, as is the flavor if left to brew for too long. I would suggest shorter steepings around a minute. The first few brews tend to be dominated by hay and a well balanced meditative smokiness while the later brews bring a bit of citrus and sweet shellfish to the mix.
Main notes to my palate are:
Hay
Smoke
Malty/Citrus
Shellfish (mild)
Sweet (mild)
While not a daily drinker for me, it is an enjoyable cup of tea and its nice to know I have it when i’m in the mood for something off the path of conventional flavors. Overall i’m rating this tea highly because it is so unique, wonderfully complex and for lack of a a more tactful word, powerful.
