Golden Moon random sample No. 19 of 31. The bad news is it’s not the chai again; the good news is that if it was the chai I would have to wait for another time to drink it given the hour.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think this is the same white tea used in pretty much all of the Golden Moon whites. Looks and smells exactly the same to me, and my guess is still white peony. I can see little pieces of ginger root, but I can’t smell them in the dry leaves. I do smell that same salty/marshy/almost marine smell I’ve described in other Golden Moon white tea notes. The leaves have that mix of twisted/pointy and flat in this one, too.
The liquor is a light golden, and interestingly, I don’t get a lot of ginger aroma. I get more of a sweet, white tea scent. This is probably a good thing. I like ginger just fine, and I even like it in tea, though my tastes tend to run more toward the black tea/bakery flavoring profile. I’ve preferred my ginger in stronger teas with other spices rather than as a single spice in a green tea, for example. Mainly this is because the ginger tends to overpower anything but black tea that is strong enough to stand up to it.
But this reminds me of the GM White Licorice, where the licorice smell wasn’t very strong and the flavor seemed to hit the right note. So I’m hopeful, because I’m more likely to like a ginger flavored tea than a licorice one, and I liked the GM licorice one.
Now. This is interesting. I can definitely taste the ginger. This may be the first time I could taste something in a tea that I couldn’t really smell. Usually, it’s the opposite. But what’s really very nice about it is that it isn’t overpoweringly gingery. There’s a nice balance between the tea and the ginger flavor.
What I’m not sure about is whether I would pick this to drink over a non-flavored white tea, especially since I’m having a hard time figuring out when in my daily routine to drink white tea. I’ll think on it some more. If I don’t order this, that will be the reason — not the tea itself.
