Mountain Wūlóng

Smooth, dark, re-steeps well.

My girlfriend, and the way things are going- future wife, gave this to me for Christmas. I made it for us a few times while she visited last week. She doesn’t know much of anything about loose leaf teas, but found, likely, the tea I’d enjoy the most from World Market. Maybe it’s one of those Connections that Karl Jung was talkin’ about.

I drank some tonight, and thought about her.

Light and crisp; overall floral and subtly sweet grassy aroma and taste.

Flavor Notes:
•Lightly Floral
•Light bamboo hints
•Grassy in the middle
•Slightly sweet honey finish
•Very clean bamboo finish with a slight sweetness that lingers (for several minutes) in your mouth after you’ve finished your cup.

Aroma:
•Nutty
•Grass
•Floral
•Subtle hint of honey.

This Oolong tea is pleasantly light in flavor, it’s smooth and refreshing. None of the flavor notes stand-out too much.

All of the flavors I mentioned are subtle and gently overlap each other from the second you take your first sip until your last, creating a nice ‘middle of the road’ Oolong tea.

The floral notes are more up front in the first steeping, and by the third steeping the grassier, bamboo flavors are more apparent.

The best part about this tea is the clean (almost sweet) lingering flavor that stays on your palate long after you’ve swallowed your last sip.

Other notes:
Light amber color liquor. Nutty and slightly vegetal aroma on first steeping that gently fades to a more floral one.

Thin, dark and wiry leaves brew this tea to an almond golden colored liquor. The first taste on the palate is vegetal but soon fades away and is replaced by sweet, fruity/floral aspects. There isn’t much of an after taste, per se, but is more like breathing fresh springtime meadow air for the next 15 minutes.

Good, but not great. About what one would expect from a world market tea.

I find World Market teas to be reasonably priced with usually adequate flavors. So, I grabbed the Mountain Wūlóng tea while we were browsing through the store on Saturday.

When I opened the silver bag, the clumps of dark leaves smelled very grassy. It wasn’t a freshly mowed aroma. It was closer to the odor that cut grass expels after it ferments in the compost pile for a day or two. The smell was recognizable but not necessarily unpleasant.

I steeped the thick black leaves for four minutes at 185 degrees as recommended on the package. The brewed color was a deep gold. The aroma was like slightly sweet grass (i.e., the yard variety).

The first few sips of this brew produced a strong grassy taste. However, the more I drank, the more subtle the flavor became. By the time my cup was half full (or was it half empty?), the grassy flavor was embedded in a semi-sweet honey taste which I preferred over my initial impression. I didn’t discover any astringency. The aftertaste was smooth with a slightly sweet attribute.

This was a cordial tea and not a bad way to kick off my Monday morning. It didn’t have the caffeine kick that I normally require to jump start my brain. However, this selection did seem to keep me in a calmer state of mind than I am accustomed to when I begin the work week. That’s plausibly not a bad thing!