White Persian Melon

I’d been dying to try some additional (other than Coconut Pouchong) Golden Moon teas for a while, and was super excited when Alphakitty not only had them in her cupboard, but was willing to pass some along! Yay! Problem solved (now let’s hope I don’t like them tooooooo too much, because they don’t ship to Canada IIRC, and that’s annoying!)

Strangely, I’m getting almost a fermenty/rotten melon scent from the tea, which started the instant I put the leaves into the water. Not quite what I was expecting. I thought perhaps there was some cross-contamination between the teas, but then I remembered how to box smelled deliciously like chocolate raspberry, so I highly doubt that was the case. (I just went back to the little baggie of tea and sniffed it, but alas, the baggie smells too much like choco-rasp to pick out the tea)!

The sip tastes much better. I’m getting more of an overripe cantaloupe sort of flavour, mixed with a hint of….. Play-Dough???? That’s an odd association. Only getting perhaps a hint of white tea at the end of the sip.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t order this tea for myself. It’s not bad, but there’s something a little off about it. I’m going to leave the rest of my sample to “air out” (I do it with all my swaps, improves them a lot!) and see if it is an intruding flavour, but I really don’t think so. Either way, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t prefer this over Butiki’s Cantaloupe and Cream, and there’s only room for one melon white tea in my cupboard!

Thanks for the sample, Alphakitty!

ETA: Second infusion, 160F/3min, is similar to the first. Still that overripe melon sort of flavour, with a really nice white tea flavour at the end. I really think I might have enjoyed it far more prior to Cantaloupe & Cream though. … sipping it more, the “overripeness” doesn’t really bother me all that much now.

Golden Moon Tea Sampler #11, selected at random

I do like melon and was looking forward to this tea very much. It is not disappointing. I brewed only about 3.5 ounces of water because I didn’t want to flavour to get watered down too much. Am I the only person who uses a couple of tablespoons of loose-leaf tea for a decent sized mug?

In any event, I think I got the tea/water ratio spot-on; the water was boiled and then cooled somewhat (although I don’t know to what precise degree) and I set the timer for 4 minutes (Golden Moon advises 2-4 minutes).

So….I’m most certainly going to put this on my list for a “treat tea”. It’s a bit delicate for a morning tea and probably a bit costly for an everyday tea, but this is the first of my Golden Moon samples where I know that I will have to purchase the tea. I’ll wait to see what else becomes a “must”. This melon’s divine!

I love melons, and Rishi’s Honeydew Melon is one of my favorite teas. I’ve heard that this is quite similar, so I’m expecting to like this one very much. I took this unsweetened.

The scent of this one is like baking bread. It’s yeasty and almost smells a little like beer. The melon in this is pretty subtle, not surprisingly. It blends perfectly with the white tea in the background. This is a very light tea that would probably be sublime when iced. It leaves practically no aftertaste. I feel that the addition of sweetener would make this too sweet.

I can’t decide if I’m tasting muskmelon or honeydew or both, but whatever it is, it is good! Another winner from Golden Moon!

EDIT: In case you were wondering, I think I like this better than Rishi’s version. Rishi’s is still excellent, but the melon is a hair artificial. This wins by a mere 3 points.

This is going to be a very trying day for me as I am having a lot of trouble getting my fingers to communicate correctly with my brain. Case in point [though you can’t see what just happened and will simply have to take my word for it]: I just had to delete and re-type the word “communicate” seven times. And three more just now.

If this is indicative of how the rest of the typing I’m going to be doing to get schoolwork done today, maybe I should just cut to the chase and start crying now.

Luckily, during some of life’s gloomier and more frustrating sequences, we have tea. And I picked a good one this morning.

I can see this becoming a staple.

Carolyn mentioned in her review that she caught a flash of midori when she drank this and that is exactly what I parse out. For me it’s more present in the smell than in the taste, but that’s perfectly fine by me. Anyone who’s ever had midori knows how sweet it is, [and for those of you who don’t know…er, it’s pretty sweet] and so to have it take over the taste in this tea would be cloying.

Don’t get me wrong, midori is actually my absolutely favorite liqueur. Midori sours are my go-to drink when I’m out because I’m a girly drinker and I don’t like to taste the alcohol in what I’m sipping on. But, that’s a different class of drinking. When I’m drinking tea I don’t want to think that I’m drinking alcoholic kool-aid.

Sometimes when I sniff this as the scent rises out of the cup, I think I’m smelling apple cider, which is also something I enjoy quite a bit. The scent of the leaves themselves has little hints of both the melon and the cider, but also something else I can’t place. As a single entity, it smells a little bit like candy.

The tea is light, but has the softness in its flavor that honeydew melon, or perhaps cantaloupe contribute. I find it subtle and calming. There are likely to be aspects of it that I’m not picking up presently, but I’m too busy typing and retyping characters to be too bothered at the present. I expect I’ll be spending some quality time with it in the future.

This tasting note has been brought to you by Carolyn, the letter K, and Mavis Beacon.

This is very yummy! True melon! Straight, fresh cut, from a salad bar! Almost WIne-Like and sugary – naturally! YAY!

I couldn’t figure out what kind of tea I wanted today! Well, if truth be told, I would have wanted Sugar Carmel Oolong again if I had any more! But since I do not – I thought I’d give another Golden Moon sample a try.

1st steep – 3 min. Delicate and delicious!!! It seems I’ve found a white tea that I love! When they say it’s flavored with “sweet melon nectar” they are not kidding! I feel like I am drinking a rare nectar of the gods. This tea makes me feel as if I should be laying on a chaise lounge being fanned, and offered peeled grapes and such, not sitting at my desk in snowy Philadelphia!!!! The flavor is not cloying or overly sweet – it’s absolute perfection to my taste buds.

2nd steep: 4 min – Less melon, more white tea flavor. Still a great cup of tea. I’ll keep to 2 steeps though.

Golden Moon Getting a Tin Scorecard: White Persian Melon, Kashmiri Chai, Sugar Caramel Oolong

:)

This is a delightful white tea – the melon is so sweet without being too sweet, and it is a delicate melon taste to match the gentle flavor of the white tea. My first couple of sips, I noticed a wine-ish kind of note right at the start.

Golden Moon Sample No. 3 of 31. Another random pick.

There was an amusing, crazy, humongous open leaf among the dry leaves, that looked something like a bay leaf. Never seen that before in the teas I’ve tried. Other than that they looked greenish grey with flecks of white. Not sure what kind they are, maybe white peony? They smell sweet and, I guess, melony, but it’s really too pungent to be just melon. The smell reminds me of something I can’t place. Maybe jelly beans? Candy corn? Cotton candy? A tiny bit like caramel? This worried me a little at first. I was afraid this would be gag-me-with-a-spoon sweet. But it turns out I didn’t have to worry.

When steeped, the melon scent becomes evident, and the candy smell recedes greatly. Sometimes the aroma smells a bit like honeydew, sometimes like cantaloupe, sometimes like a mix. It’s a juicy and mildy fermented smell, with a high white wine-like note. The liquor is a clear, pale golden-yellow.

Wow. I’m tasting this as I type and it does taste just like a melon! It’s like drinking a slightly watered-down version of the juice left on the empty plate where the honeydew was at a breakfast buffet, but there’s more to it than that. It’s mildly sweet, but with that same slightly fermented note to it, which must be the underlying tea. Winey. Almost yeasty. It’s very nice indeed. It is the best flavored white tea I have tried so far, not that I’ve tried that many.

I’m giving it a provisional rating that puts it above the other flavored whites I’ve had but isn’t out the roof as I don’t yet have enough of a comparison base in flavored whites to feel comfortable saying this is the best of the best. It may change as my experience changes, but for now I’m calling it a smashing success as a white melon tea.

The scent is wonderful—very dewy and fresh! Almost like honeydew. The taste is only faintly melon-esque. I taste mostly the white tea overlaid with a suggestion of melon. The white tea itself seems outstanding—just slightly vegetal, no bitterness or astringency. I think I detect some creaminess?

This is a very refreshing tea, overall. But it’s so ephemeral it’s almost “not there”. Like a dream of a tea.
_{(…did I drink this…or not?…)}

the only reason this didnt get a 100 is because i wanted more watermelon flavor but its amazing! The dry leaves didnt smell too good and reminded me of adagios white pear so i was a bit confused. as soon as i poured water over the leaves it was all melon! <3 the scent of the tea is honeydew and watermelon rind where the taste is cantaloupe with the tea flavor. i LOVE melons all kinds so this is like a nice winter treat! i will more than likely buy a bigger container of this but i have 1 cup left in my sample so we will see (and i plan to resteep the leaves i used for this cup) every time i sip i find more things i like about this!! :D

200th Tasting Note!!

Thanks to Alphakitty for the swap, I can break out of my DAVIDsTEA rut! Don’t get me wrong, I do own other teas besides ones by DT, it’s just that all the other places are a little trickier to get to and DAVIDsTEA is a mere 15-minute bus ride away.

I digress though, so on to this tea… which to my gluten-deprived (AKA intolerant) taste-buds highly resembles a brewed loaf of bread. Hmmmm, odd indeed. I do get a little of the melon at the end of the sip, but mostly all I can smell and taste at this moment is liquified baking bread. To solve this I simply plug my nose while drinking and it transforms into the delicate, melon-laced white tea I was expecting… to which my husband says, “You look ridiculous.” To which I say, there are certain baked goods that do well in tea form—cake, pie, cinnamon buns—and bread is not one of them.

The leaves are long and pale green, a white tea and smell faintly of melon. Not really like the green melon I thought it was, it smells more like cantaloupe. Anyway, steeped this tea up, hot, no additives, was aiming for 3 minutes, but forgot about it-so it actually infused about six minutes, no big deal.

The aroma coming off of this tea is very sweet, almost sickeningly sweet, like a nectar or extremely fragrant flowers, actually reminds me a very sweet wine. The tea itself, tastes like melon and is very sweet, but not overpowering, which is weird, because based on the smell I would have thought it to be sweeter. I am glad it is not as sweet as it smells, that would have been too sweet.

The tea wasn’t bad, it was pretty good but too sweet for me to enjoy on a regular basis. This of course could have been from the over-infusion, so I might have to get another sample and find out.

The dry leaf smells like honeydew rind. Distinctly melon but not very juicy or as sweet as the meat of the fruit. Brewed, the tea smells more like very ripe cantaloupe.

Taste wise, it’s very melon-y on the front and transitions to a sweet nectar taste at the end. It’s very sweet. I mean very. Melon and nectar. There’s not a lot of depth to the flavor as both tastes are pretty high and sweet. Honestly, I think it may be a little too much for me. At the same time though, as this cools, it’s less super-melon and more… buttered melon. Melted butter instead of creamy solid butter.

I can get behind the buttered melon thing, but the initial hot taste of melon and nectar is just too sweet for me. Maybe if paired with a darker tasting white tea, this would be more my thing as the melon flavor is very nice. But ultimately, too overpoweringly sweet for me.

I received two small sample sizes of this from Golden Moon with my iced tea set. I am a bit puzzled by it. The dry leaves smell great but when this tea brews up it definitely smells like alcohol as a few other people have mentioned. It does smell like a melon scented beer. I am not sure if I like the aroma.

The taste of it however is very nice, perfectly smooth and sweet . I am not sure what else to say, it was interesting but not something I would purchase for myself.

Last of my Golden Moon samples. I haven’t quite taken to white tea so far… it’s not that I dislike it, but I have yet to have one that’s blown me away or had me coming back for more. I suppose Harney’s Winter White Earl Grey is a possible exception. Anyway, I do love melons, so I had to try this one anyway.

The leaf is fairly long and twisty with some long stems, and a fair amound of fuzzy leaves too, and I’m not sure that I ended up with enough tea in my infusion basket. It smells amazing, like the freshest, ripest, sweetest juicy canteloupe, with perhaps some light honeyish notes underneath. Brewed, it smells melony but subdued, and the tea has come forward a bit.

I’m afraid I didn’t put enough leaf in the cup, because the flavor is very light. Still, the melon is definitely present: sweet, juicy, like having a slice of fresh canteloupe. The tea adds a flavor almost like when you eat down to the rind and you get that green, fresh flavor. I’m really enjoying this one even a little weak; it’s delicious and pretty unique, at least to my tea cupboard right now.

Edited: Ok, I took my already steeped leaves and dumped the rest of my sample pack in with them. I know Golden Moon sample packs are only supposed to be one serving, but they usually include a little more leaf than I would typically use in my 12oz cup, so I’ve been measuring out what I usually use and then I’ll see what’s left after that. Since the white tea is so light I put the rest of it in and steeped as before. The liquor is much darker this time, but the tea is, surprisingly, not as good! The melon flavor is just not as evident and it lacks the natural sweetness of before. Too much leaf this time? I dunno, but this isn’t doing much for my experiences with white teas!

This is nice! The leaves are perfectly scented, pretty without being overpowering in their sweet melon-ness. Once it’s brewed up the cup is a bit darker than I expected with four minutes of steeping, but the taste turned out just right for me. It’s definitely melon-flavored, but it doesn’t taste fake, and I still get the tea aspects in there too. There’s also a natural sweetness that complements the fruitiness well. It’s a wonderful marriage of aromas and savors, and I expect this would be great iced on a hot day.

I actually tasted this tea yesterday, but I still don’t really function very well on 11th September, so I wasn’t up to writing a tasting note.

There are only a few samples left from my Golden Moon sampler set. I’m very much a “save the best for last” kind of person, and the idea of white tea infused with melon was so enticing that I immediately put it aside so it could be one of the last ones I tasted.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I cut open the packet, inhaled, and crinkled my nose in displeasure. The dry leaves smell like stale bread. I persisted, and after a few breaths I could discern a vaguely melon-y aroma. But when I reset my sense of smell and went back to the tea a couple of moments later, there it was again: stale bread. Unpleasant.

As off-putting as the tea’s aroma was, I couldn’t just pour it out without tasting it. And who knows, sometimes the taste is a surprise, y’know? Sadly, the tea tasted like a wilting flower. Other tasters have mentioned alcohol, overly ripe melon, a sort of fermented smell, but the one thing I took away from both the smell and taste of this tea is, “spoilt.” The smell of stale bread and the taste of a wilting flower’s sickly sweet smell. Blech.

As with the aroma, continuing to sip for a while improved the experience ever so slightly, but putting the mug down for a while and coming back to it after a few moments pushed the reset button so that I had to endure the whole stale bread, wilting flower thing all over again. That’s just too much work to try and enjoy a nice, hot cup of tea.

This one was confusing to me. Let me start by saying I am not a big fruit tea fan and I am especially not a fan of melon. However, just because I don’t like something as a food doesn’t mean I won’t like it as a tea so I gave it a shot. This is part of my sampler set I received. So upon opening the package the smell is intense and it smells a bit like alcohol. Weird but I went ahead and brewed and it still had a very strong aroma or melon and a tiny lingering smell of alcohol. I had my first taste after letting the tea cool a bit and noticed the alcohol smell wasn’t there and it didn’t taste like it either. However, it was ok in flavor but still better than expected considering my prior disposition. Next, I decided to let the tea cool a bit more and to see if there was a difference and there truly was a difference. It becomes natually sweeter and more like real melon; which for someone who likes melon would love. So great for the tea but just ok for me. I will say this tea probably would be great iced on a hot day with or without sweetener.

Golden Moon Sampler Tea #21:
Guys, I think there’s something wrong with my tastebuds. I’m getting…chocolate from this?

Let me start at the beginning, as usual, I drew this out randomly. I was pretty pleased because while out grocery shopping I had picked up a thermometer for frying that I am going to attempt to use to measure the temperature of my water. Yes, I am cheap. I’m a graduate student, this should not be surprising.

When I opened up the sample packet, I got melon right away. I marveled at the giant-ass leaves for a while but then got down to business. When I poured in the water, that’s when it began. The smell became pretty vegetal, but I was also catching whiffs of, yes, chocolate.

I did a two minute steep for my first cup and then brought it up to 3.5 minutes for subsequent cups. The first cup was…wow! Despite the smell this doesn’t taste vegetal at all! It’s light and sweet, and totally melony. Honeydew, I’d say. But I could be wrong, I don’t eat melon THAT often.

But there was still a problem. I was still getting chocolate! At the same time as melon. W. T. F.

Second cup, the longer steeping time has allowed the tea itself to come forward a bit more, and I am no longer getting the weird chocolate flashes. There is an undertone of, I guess fermentation that I think other people have likened to liquor, but it makes me think of overripe fruit more. I think the combination of the sweetness of the tea and the hint of fermentation was somehow combining to give me the idea of chocolate, don’t as me why. Maybe I haven’t had chocolate for too long and have forgotten how it’s really supposed to taste. Clearly a trip to the candy store is required.

But enough about me being weird. Let’s talk about the tea! I quite like it, but I’m not sure I like it enough to buy more of it. I am pretty much meh on melon, so I don’t know if this tea will have legs once the novelty wears off. I suspect it will not. Still, I give it a definite “maybe.” ;)

Oh the disappointment. I sooo wanted to enjoy this tea especially after reading the reviews. Buy nay, our love was not to be – perhaps my expectations were too high? This was the tea where I finally had to admit to myself that I must get my “winging the temp” issue resolved and soon. I just don’t want to think about how many teas I’ve potentially butchered. (eeek!)

This is another tea where I swear I tasted soy milk (plain soy this time – or what I like to call “bean juice”). Then the melon taste to me was like a not-quite-ripe cantaloupe. I’m so sad that this earns a M in my book.