Golden Monkey

As a general rule, I think it’s safe to say that I greatly enjoy Golden Monkey teas. First of all, monkey so that’s kind of a duh. Second, it just tends to be a good, full-flavored but smooth and sweet Chinese tea. So yeah, I’m a fan all the way around. Sadly, the same can’t be said for Teavana. I’m not like a total anti-Teavana tea person – I’ve purchased from them before and I’m sure I will again because I think they have some of the cutest yunomi-style cups. But typically I find them too much a fan of blending random beep together and their teas are overpriced for their quality – for the same price elsewhere, much higher quality tea can be had. But enough general tea babbling and let’s get on to specific tea babbling.

The dry leaves are really quite cute (thin and wiry with little gold bits) and have a great fruity (almost berry-like) smell to them. Post-steeping, it has a great malty smell with strong honey notes. Or perhaps it is more of a great honey smell with strong malty notes? Also, there’s a good bake-y smell going on.

The taste was a bit unexpected. It’s not as heavy/thick/chewy as I was expecting but the flavor is very strong and very malty. It’s very clear tasting, like it would look sparkly and clear (which it actually does but that doesn’t always translate to taste). There’s a hint of sour to it which could probably be too much if brewed longer, but at this level it’s actually not bad – it adds a little balance to the sweetness. But it does seem to hang around after this sip which is a little less cool. All in all, it’s not the best GM I’ve had (that honor still belongs to Teas Etc’s GM) but it’s not bad either. Stout, perky, clean – the only real negative is the sour taste and that isn’t overwhelming.

Wait, I take that back. There is another negative – the price. Two ounces of this tea is just over $18. Three ounces of the (in my view, superior) Teas Etc version is just under $17. So even though I like this tea, I don’t think I’d ever actually buy it. Instead, I’d go to Teas Etc, save a bit over a buck and get an ounce more of a better Golden Monkey. (However, the rating I’m giving this tea is based purely on taste, not price.)

ETA: The second steep (3:00) is a bit… plainer than the first one. It doesn’t really have the sour bit anymore except a tad in the aftertaste (which is good) but it also doesn’t have the same bold and sweet malty taste that the first steep did (which is bad). But even though the overall taste was thinner and flatter, I still managed to finish off the cup quickly.

I used to have a terrible sweet tooth. I also used to have to eat something every hour or 2, or my blood sugar would get low & I’d be dizzy, ditzy, & worthless. That has all changed, due to a major overhaul in the way I eat & the way I view food, & a recognition of a significant list of foods that I thought were good for me, but were actually ruining my health. It’s been about a year & a half since I made that transition, & I’ve lost alot of weight & I feel great!

But once in awhile I want something a little sweet. Today is that day. I’m having a ‘hail mary’ meyer lemon tart. It’s sweetened with agave & coconut sugar, & although sweets are not my friend, & they usually make me feel like crap, it’s a small treat & I ate well today. It’s dreamy & creamy, & not very big. It requires a robust unsweetened cup of tea. What I really wanted was a strong assam, but I have none. In retrospect, the Kenyan would have been especially nice with this, I think. But this will do: Malty, grainy, even a little sweet. Yup, this will do…

sipdown! no count down here though until the end of the day since i’ll be gaining teas and hopefully losing some before the day is out.

this was another sample from terriharplady (getting sooo close to finally getting through all your teas terri!) and while this one is a tasty cup of black goodness, it leaves my mouth feeling really dry at the end of the sip, which i’m not overly a fan of today. this would likely be a tasty cup of tea with milk and sugar to help combat the dryness in my mouth. still though, a decent cup of goodness this morning…

Edit: 1800 tasting notes..that much closer to 2k before my first year steepsterversary is up haha

I missed you, Steepster.

And really, I’m not back yet. I’m still down south, where I’ve been since the 22nd (and somehow it’s still absolutely freezing outside…why do I feel cheated?). I was totally incommunicado for the holidays, which were lovely, mellow, and full of accidentally oversteeped cups of tea brewed at random temperatures…and then I was tea free for the last week, because I had my wisdom teeth out, and hot liquids were a no-no (to say nothing of the fact that caffeine and vicodin make poor bedpartners).

Today I actually got to brew myself a half-cup of chai. It was as though the pill-filled universe I’ve been existing in flickered for a moment on a faulty circuit, and normalcy was briefly restored. I may escape the matrix yet! With a flight home Monday to look forward to, things are looking up (though I may very well be shredded into a thousand tiny pieces by two very angry, lonely cats when I walk through that front door. The possibility exists that I may not survive how glad they will be to see me).

Despite my inability to drink any tea, I did get to buy some tea the day before my extractions. There’s a Teavana nearby. I loaded upon Samurai mate and splurged on a little bit of their Golden Monkey, as I sort of like Adagio’s, and I’m a huge fan of the Golden Spring. Why not, right? Fujian tea and I seem to get along pretty well.

Take this with not just one but several grains of salt: my mouth is not completely normal right now, for one thing, and for another I have no ability to gauge temperature here, but…

I’m just not that excited about this tea. Malty, yes. Bitter? Yeah. Not just bitter but a bit sour on the aftertaste. I’m sure I can lessen this by backing the temperature off, so this rating is just tentative. It certainly seems to have the thick, brothy mouthfeel that I liked so much in my Golden Spring, but the flavor seems so forward. There are elements of that prune/raisin sweetness in there, but they’re outdone by the bitter malty flavor. I guess I’ll have to try it again another time. Glad I only bought a small amount, though.

Hopefully it at least fuels me through reading the insane amount of updates from you guys that I now have to parse through! I’m excited to see what everybody was trying over the holidays, and I cannot wait to get home…home, where my Samovar and Teafrog orders from pre-Christmas are patiently waiting for me to pick them up from the front desk…

Black teas are my jam. This, though, was my first purchase from Teavana. Not only that, but it was my first time ever seeing a tea store. Living down south in a town far away from civilization, I always had to order teas online. After moving to college, I threw some praises up to the Lord above for having tea places so close to me.
But, like I said, it was my first time in a tea store. I was just too excited. This was the first tea they showed me, and I didn’t even think about it. I just bought it. I regret that now, because I could have gotten something much better. This is tasty, but not so much by itself. I have found myself mixing it with other black teas I have just so I can get rid of what I have left.

It’s alright, but I probably won’t buy it again. Not from Teavana at least.

My first impression – not as good as Harney and Sons Golden Monkey but twice the price. Sticking with Harney and Sons. It does have some of the character of Harney’s GM, but I don’t think it is quite as caramel-y or honeyed. The aroma is very nice. I will try resteeping soon. They recommend 2 to 3 minutes steeping time, while I give Harney’s 4 to 5 minutes and get no bitterness. I have read that this one gets bitter if you leave it longer. We’ll see how the experiments pan out. Sweet hubby bought this for me on his lunch hour while at a class in another city! Mmmmmmwah!

Chance placed me in a Teavana store this afternoon-for only the second time ever and the first time in 3 years.

They had 6 teas available for sampling, but zero black teas. Then they had the nerve to tell me that they didn’t carry Assam because basically, it was crap and they only carried the best. Considering all that cheap Rooibos they sell, that was a rather ridiculous statement. However, I was not in a confrontational mood and let it slide.

This was listed at one of their top-rated teas on Steepster. Well, we know that they don’t sell in amounts smaller than 2oz, just because. So, I paid $5 to try this as a “to go” tea (in store), my first Golden Monkey. Now I see that there are TWO entries and it seems it’s not so well-liked after all.

I did briefly see the leaves before they brewed them, but I failed to take notes. Who knows what parameters they used. It was small and crowded so I couldn’t get that info. Not ideal tasting conditions. It tasted pretty good. Kinda chocolately and maybe notes of butter or caramel. I would have bought one ounce to try some more, but I wasn’t paying $18.50 for 2 ounces of something I wasn’t really sure about.

They didn’t once take me over to the cast iron teapots or suggestive sell too much and they understood that “no, thanks” meant “no, thanks.” However, they tried to overpour my 2 ounces of Strawberry Paraiso-2.85 ounces is not “about” two ounces. They had 5 employees sharing one scale and one register, add in the customers and it was a mess, so you really had to keep an eye on them trying to overpour.

If they ever get around to selling samples or at least selling one ounce of tea, I would give this another try. However, the end result of this is I will probably try a few golden monkey teas from other companies who sell their tea that way.

Overall, I’d say this was an okay shopping experience-I did get some rock sugar because I wanted some and it was there. AND they had no minimum on how much to buy! I’d go to this store again if I was around to get a to go cup of a couple of their teas, but they don’t have a lot that really excites me.

Got this as a Christmas gift from my future brother-in-law. Apparently he walked into Teavana and told the clerk that I liked black tea, and this is what he recommended.

Honestly? I’m disappointed. I’ve been meaning to try a Golden Monkey for awhile now, enticed by the promise of a cocoa flavor and some maltiness. I tasted almost no cocoa in this, and the maltiness was bitter and overwhelming. I’ll still drink this with cream, but I’m sad that it didn’t live up to its promise. As another reviewer said, Black Dragon Pearls are everything this tea should be.

This was a gift from someone who knew I liked tea, but didn’t know what to get me. I was shocked to find out that this is one of the most expensive mall teas. It’s good, but it’s certainly not great. I think it smells a bit like the tobacco my stepfather used to chew when I was a kid.

For the price I was a little disappointed, but the flavor is exceptional if you are a huge fan of robust black teas. The golden leaves and the aroma is my favorite aspect of the tea itself!

Very smooth with dry notes and a bit of a bite at the end that reminded me of a Keemun.

This is hands-down my favorite black tea. It is so incredibly smooth and doesn’t taste like any other black tea I’ve tried. Oddly enough, it reminds me completely of a Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab scent called Iago, which contains black musk, wet leather, and vetiver. If you could combine those into a tea, this would be it. (I hope that sounds as appealing to other people as it does to me).

I would like to try a version of this that doesn’t come from Teavana, however, as it was incredibly over-priced. I’m sure I can find something even more high quality for the same price or less somewhere else.

The number of golden buds is a testament to the high picking standard of this leaf. Other than this, I do not have much praise for this tea. The aroma of the brew is pleasant, the appearance of the wet leaves are rather broken (could this be from poor processing, transporting, distribution on a large/small scale, or a combination of these?). For a tea that fetches a price such as this, the leaves should be relatively whole, and there should not be many broken leaves. This is not near the case for Golden Monkey.

The flavor of the first brew tasted simply like lipton, with a bit more roundness. Subsequent brews left me unsatisfied with a thin flavor.

There are two separate pages for this tea. Hmmm. I still love it. So smooth and delicious. Light enough for my tastes!

I just returned from Teavana with this little number. Steeps to a deep copper color and even straight up is the B-O-M-B my fellow tea players.

My sales person said I could make a “Naughty Monkey” if I added some milk and sugar. I can imagine that being killer, but I am drinking for health benefits AND taste, so I don’t want to go that route. Ill-behaved primates aside, this is one good tea.

This is the first loose leaf tea I’ve purchased. I find it rather tasty, though it tapers of rather quickly in subsequent steepings. At any rate, I don’t plan to get it again because Teavana was way too aggressive when I was trying to buy it, but it was a decent first selection over all, I think.

Well I guess this is kind of a sad story. When I first wanted to get loose leaf tea, of course i went to Teavana. I walked out of there with 8 oz ( I think the guy told me it would last me 1 month…. I guess if I was drinking 5 or 10 cups a day…) of this tea. Not that it’s a bad tea, it actually made me realize that I love a good straight black, but it’s still sitting there months and months later. On teavivre, I could of got more acclaimed tea and for cheaper, I think theirs is about half the price of Teavana.
Other than that, like I said its a good tea, just dont buy it from this company.

I was distressed on a recent trip home to discover that Teavana has discontinued my beloved Celestial Temple Peaks. When asked what they had that was similar, they produced this Golden Monkey, which is twice as expensive and not quite as good. But the dry leaf smelled about the same as the Celestial Temple Peaks, so I bought some.

The leaf for this has less buds in it than I would like. The tea itself has the honey taste that I like in my black tea, but also has a malty note of which I’m not particularly fond. It also has a tendency to get a bit astringent.

Over all, I prefer it to Verdant’s Zhu Rong Yunnan Black, which was big on the malty taste profile, but not as well as Temple Peaks. I anticipate that I will now have to be on a quest for a new black tea.

(Sorry not to elaborate on the taste profile more. I’ve drunk this maybe half a dozen times now, so I figured it was time for a note, but I believe I’m coming down with something so it doesn’t taste quite right today.)

I have Golden Monkey mixed with a bit of Citrus Lavender Sage, and although delicious, I’m not willing to spend so much money on Teavana tea again.

I sprang for this during Teavana’s recent post-holiday clearance event, and while I ultimately found this a perfectly suitable and enjoyable tea, I wouldn’t purchase it at it’s regular (and rather ridiculous) price point. (My first Teavana store shopping experience was also rather uninspiring, but I suppose I’m digressing, and disappointment is probably what I deserve for daring to venture outside of the house.)

The post-steeping color was a gorgeous coppery brown, and the smell malty and slightly fruity. The teamaker’s notes about the lack of astringency are certainly true. In fact, the smoothness caught me off guard. Granted, I usually drink very strong Assams tanned with whole milk, but this tea is smooth and pretty when plain. The second steeping was more floral and even smoother, but still not the best I’ve had.