Golden Moon Tea

My order of the stuff I liked best out of the GM sampler (Lapsang Souchong, Sinharaja, Coconut Pouchong and the Imperial Formosa Oolong) came in today, woo! My review of the flavors in this tea still stands. Nothing new to add about it here, save that after brewing I caught the VERY distinct aroma of gardenias. That’s a heavy, cloying smell that’s hard to mistake for anything else; perhaps I can attribute it to having been too impatient to cool the water as much as I did the last time I had this tea.

Today’s weather is MISERY. It’s sleet-snowing like precipitation is going out of style, and bitterly cold. It’s the sort of weather that makes a person want to hibernate.

So, of course I’m having a dietary explosion of epic proportions. I ordered some pastries (delivery! Sinful!) and when they came in, I brewed up a big fat cup of this to sip on while I ate a napoleon. Paired together alongside the prospect of a cozy day indoors in my pajamas playing the recently-released Mass Effect 2, and I am at this moment in time almost giddily, inappropriately happy.

(Actually, some of the excessive giddy silliness might have come from being made to sit through watching Johnny Weir ice-dance to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. That is the sort of thing that definitely changes the course of one’s day, lemme tell you.)

Heavenly.

Unfortunately, I can’t really write a full tasting note here, because I don’t have ANY CLUE what temperature I brewed this to. I was too impatient to cool my Zojirushi and too wary of overheating the leaves to chance it, so I added room-temperature water to water I had cooled slightly in a glass…goodness only knows what temperature it was. It sort of breaks my heart that I may have under-done it, but I’m hoping that just means I can get another really good steep out of it.

I’ve mentioned before that I really dislike overdone flavored teas. They frighten me. They tend toward artificiality. Strong flavors in tea make me wary.

Nevertheless, I spent a good minute and a half standing in my kitchen, huffing the smell that came out of the sampler bag and thinking…oh my god, it’s like someone vaporized macaroons. It really is. The buttery quality of the oolong and the coconut make me feel like I’m sipping on subtle macaroons, without the heaviness in the mouth that would come from all of that sugar (and without the heaviness in my a** that would come from the same thing, heh).

I’ve never had pouchong before, but I’ve already mentioned this week that I think I’m a huge fan of oolongs, generally — the bready, starchy, buttery, chewy and delicious sort — and this tea is managing to combine that allure with coconut. It’s oolong and coconut, but it’s also macaroons and buttered kettlecorn.

This one is going on my shopping list. I’ll grant you it’s probably not the sort of thing I could drink 24/7, but I could see myself drinking it often. It’s the kind of tea that makes me want to plan a menu and throw a dinner party.

My GM sampler came in the mail. I confess to having mixed feelings about this event. I’m excited, but I’m also simultaneously overwhelmed, intimidated, and concerned for my health. Overwhelmed because there are SO MANY TEAS to choose from, intimidated because the sample size is enough to permit me one infusion at full strength and if I screw it up I’m in big trouble, and concerned for my health because I am not sure I have the personal reserves of strength not to brew cup after cup after cup of tea, and I may very well wind up consuming so much caffeine so quickly that the top of my skull actually comes flying off, which is the sort of thing that really puts a damper on a girl’s day.

I don’t doubt I’m going to be rating a bunch of teas in the immediate future, so I’m going to try to be more concise than usual (ha, ha, ha). This one is sweet. Before I took a sip, before I even sniffed my cup of brewed tea, I took a sniff of the wet leaves and knew I was going to like this. They were sweet and honeyed and still maintained that hay-like quality I love in black tea, though the hay clippings in this cup would be fresh, not quite cured. The scent is there — in the leaves — but there isn’t much of it in the flavor. I find it every now and then, a little background note of uncommonly bright malt, and I suppose this is the reason that I expected this tea to be an assam rather than ceylon (though to be perfectly fair, I haven’t spent a lot of time sipping on different kinds of ceylon tea intentionally, so what do I know? I’ve always thought of it as being the ubiquitous, universal, and understandably unexciting baseline flavor of black tea). After I take a sip and let myself sit a moment, I get a sudden flash of unexpected sweetness. I’m getting it more now that the cup isn’t blazing hot, but I anticipate that I might lose it again once the cup stopped being hot at all.

Curious about this second steep. I’ll update in a bit.

Edit: The second steep just earned this tea a big bump in rating. The first one is good, don’t get me wrong; brisk and tasty. It’s not so strong that it needs milk, but it probably would manage well enough with a drop or two (too much would probably be overkill). The second one, though, has a liquid-sugar quality that I can see myself finding incredibly addictive. De-lish.

So good! To me, this is sort of an archetype. Very smooth with no bitterness. Not the most exciting, I really prefer more strongly flavored teas, but this is just good.

Sweetened just a bit, this tastes just like a juicy, ripe honeydew melon. I’m adding it to the shopping list. I think this would be really awesome iced for the summertime!

I had some of this at breakfast this morning, and while I don’t think this will be an everyday tea for me, it’s really nice for a change! Very sweet intense honey flavor, which I think is from the pollen pieces. Anyone know if these are bee pollen? It sure makes this tea different from any other I have tried.

I opened the sample pack and smelled the leaves. This smells just like a cologne or perfume that I used to have. (To the point where I went through some of my perfume oils, sniffing and trying to find the scent, but with no luck.) It smells intensely of pear and honey, and after it brews up, the tea lives up to the scent. You must like honey to like this tea.

I’m guessing that the pollen pieces mentioned on the label are bee pollen? That would explain the intensely honey note.

This tasted like I was eating sugar cookies with my tea. I enjoyed the vanilla flavor and the black tea base was good as well. I would recommend trying this. I haven’t tried many vanilla teas before (just Twinning and Adagio) but I thought this was worlds above those two.

This is nice. Very light, bordering a bit on perfume-y but not crossing over and I’m not getting a ton of tea taste from it, but it is still nice. No nasty aftertaste or obnoxiousness, just a soft jasmine. Not too complex, not a big depth of flavor and more jasmine than tea, but sometimes the tea taste in a jasmine can turn me off so this avoids that problem.

Overall, it’s pretty inoffensive. Just a jasmine tea. I know I keep saying it’s nice, but it is. I can’t really go farther than that, though. Nothing bad is going on in it, but there’s nothing stupendous either. It’s just nice. I feel like I’m damning it with faint praise but I just can’t get all that excited about this tea. But I it doesn’t make me think icky thoughts either so that’s gotta count for something, right?

This tea is seriously insane on the membrane, y0. My taste buds and mind are having a difficult time keeping up.

First off, in the bag, this one smells So. Good. Neither the gunpowder nor the black tea really stand out in the aroma, but the vanilla and the mint… they create this dual symphony of sweet and fresh. My nose could detect the warmth of the vanilla, mixed with the menthol-cool of the mint. I couldn’t stop sniffing it. Seriously amazing.

The leaves are pretty damned gorgeous, too. Wiry blacks and stick-like-chocolate-colored vanilla blended against vibrant peppermint leaves and rolled blue-green gunpowder. If I was an interior designer on HGTV, I could see using a similar color palette for a room. Do not go out and do this. I potentially have no taste in design.

Golden Moon suggests doing this one up at boiling, but I thought potentially that’d be a bad idea. Gunpowder’s a pretty hardy green, but it’s still a green tea, and I didn’t want to scortch the leaves. At the same time, I didn’t want the black tea taste to suffer from sub-par temperature. I decided to hit a middle ground of 190, and watched the dance. There was a lot going on in the pot. The gunpowder was popping and unfurling, the peppermint was pretending it was in a snowglobe, and the black tea un-wired itself. Very neat.

The infusion on this one smells more vanilla than mint, with a cool feeling to the nostrils like you’ve inhaled the polar icecaps. I love the smell of mint.

Anyway, on the taste, my mouth nearly went SYSTEM INOPERATIVE and shut down. Overload. Seriously. I don’t even know where to start. GM is pretty smart, because I think they just took their Madagascar Vanilla and then mixed it with Moroccan Mint. And somehow created a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The first taste you get is a bit of peppermint herbal-ness, followed by a mix of malty-cocoa-black and the faintest wisp of a gunpowder-like smokiness. If any flavor component comes across the least, it’s the gunpowder. Which I wasn’t surprised about at all, considering the robustness of the other components. This gives way to a very sweet vanilla component, that quickly becomes overrun by peppermint freshness. It finishes with vanilla, and the menthol-effects of the mint. There’s a green-like gunpowder aftertaste too.

I don’t even know if that all makes sense, but that’s how it is. It’s like this grab bag of tea, but you don’t need to work hard to taste all of the flavors. It’s not subtle in the least. But it’s all very smooth with barely any astringency at all, and while the tea teeters on the edge of being muddled and confusing, it manages to stay on the right side of goodness.

I seriously like this one better than both the Moroccan Mint and the Madagascar Vanilla, since the combination seems to cancel out the shortcomings of the both of them. The vanilla is no longer heavy and artificial when the mint comes in, and the gunpowder is softened by the vanilla. Really interesting overall, and sorry if this review was rambling! Cause this tea rambled all over the place.

This isn’t the strongest tasting tea, but I would definitely accept a tin of this for a gift. I think I would even buy it!

I will need to try more oolongs before I can give a really good review of this. I’m not sure my palate is sophisticated enough to figure out what’s missing. Maybe there’s nothing missing, but after reading the other reviews of this tea, I suspect that I just haven’t tried enough oolongs.

I really wanted to like this. I really did. After reading several reviews of it I thought it would be nice. I like honey, I like pears, I like black tea. Honey pear black tea? That’s a no brainer, right?

Wrong.

The dry leaf smelled weird. Extremely vegetal with a sweetness that just seemed not to belong. A tragic foreshadowing….

The smell of the liquor was nauseating. I don’t know what it was. It smelled bitter, flatly sweet, like it had splenda or sweet and low in it. And it had that bad vegetal smell to it. Like boiled weeds.

I sipped it twice before dumping it in the sink. Tasted like sweetened bitter greens. The Flavor was muddy and disjointed with a slight whisper of pear dropped in there somewhere.

I wish this tea would have been good. I really do. I don’t know what happened but it was just awful…

I’ve had the rest of this sample just sitting around and dangit! I need to get rid of some of my drips and drabs again (still). So off we go!

Second verse, pretty much same as the first. I kind of love Adagio’s Gunpowder but haven’t really found another one I’d consider buying in large(ish) quantity. This one is definitely smokier than Adagios. It’s making me think of wet cigarette ash. It’s a bit unpleasant at the beginning but I’m getting used to it. But yeah, not for me. I’m actually dropping the rating a bit because I’ve had a squidge more experience with Gunpowders now. Go me.
3.5g/8oz

I like the tiny little pellets of leaves that make up this tea. It’s cute.

This certainly smells smokey but it smells cigarette smokey to me, not the more attractive and sweet cigar smokey. I think teaplz once described a smokey tea as smelling like wet ash and I think that is the prefect description of this tea’s smell. Not all that appetizing for me.

Thankfully it doesn’t taste like wet ash. The smokey taste is actually pretty mild. There’s also not the salty taste I associate with so many Chinese greens. It doesn’t have the same sweetness but otherwise makes me think of a much more delicate and green version of lapsang souchong. Actually, maybe a little too delicate. I think I might want a little more depth in the flavor. I get a nice taste when I first sip, but it pretty much disappears when I swallow and then a sort of post-fire feel of smokiness coats my mouth. I want a little more oomph in the taste as I swallow – an increase in flavor instead of a decrease. On the other hand though, I feel that if there were more oomph in the flavor, I might end up with a too-strong taste of brine or wet ash. So maybe more delicate is good in this.

As it cools I start to get a little more flavor but it is a little flatter than the taste when hot and there is a little astringency that is starting up at the very back of my mouth. But it’s still pretty good. Better than I was expecting. I think this might be a good beginner’s gunpowder. And I would include myself in that ‘beginner’ category. But it’s got the gunpowder characteristics but not so overpowering that they are offensive. Not something I’m going to have to buy but I’ve got one more cup left of leaves and it won’t be hard for me to finish it off.

A nice, basic tea. I can’t taste any bitterness and it smells and tastes really good. I could see myself drinking this on a regular basis, but it’s not as good as some of the other black teas from Golden Moon Tea.

I don’t quite know what to think of this. The dry leaf has a very strong pear flavor, together with something rather astringent, like vinegar. During brewing, the honey and pear scents are overwhelming, and smell delicious. The tea has a strong pear/honey scent and much milder flavor, but the tea is . . missing, somehow. Possibly I need to use more leaf, but I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that from the scent. I’m wondering if mixing it with another plain black tea might provide a more satisfying cup, or if slightly sweetening it would reinforce the flavor.

Life is starting to become busy again but I’m not sure I’m ready for it! Winter session Shakespeare class for one more week and then the regular semester starts. And I finally have a job. At a coffee shop that sells Rishi tea! I’m kind of excited about that. Maybe I can get a discount or something.

In any case, I’m fully stocked up on tea for at least the next couple of weeks. Orders came in from Red Blossom Tea Co, Den’s Tea, and the famed Golden Moon sampler (so I can finally ship my swap box to you, takgoti! Sorry for the wait, it’ll be shipped tomorrow!). There’s almost too much to take it all in and I’m enjoying it very much.

Last night I pored over The Merchant of Venice and drank somewhere in the neighborhood of half a gallon of tea while doing so. I haven’t done the homework & tea thing since high school! It was great.

Anyway, I’m slowly making my way through the Golden Moon sampler and it was either Vanilla Jasmine or Tippy Earl Grey tonight and my housemate chose Vanilla Jasmine so here we are. The dry leaf has a very warm vanilla scent to it. Not too sweet but just nice and rich vanilla. While brewing the scent was lovely. Light jasmine robed in vanilla, not competing but complimenting nicely.

The flavor is full and robust. It’s dominated by vanilla but with nice floral jasmine notes throughout. The vanilla flavor is wonderful. Rich and creamy and the overall flavor of the tea is perfectly balanced. My housemate loved it too.

Nutty taste, indeed, but it’s delicate yet fairly bold…if that makes sense!!! :)

YUM.

Added a few points on to the rating…

Very light in color and scent but not in taste!
I can smell the Chesnut-like and woodsy-hints!
It tastes nutty and almost sweet and semi-juicy.
It has a bit of a weird aftertaste but nothing I couldn’t get used to.
Interesting tea to say the least.

I’m not thrilled by this one. I really , really like Earl Grey, but I’m not liking the lavender in this blend. I would drink this if it was served to me, but I wouldn’t seek it out. The bergomot gets kind of lost. It’s as if you planted a citrus tree and a field of lavender grew up around it. IMO, the lavender just doesn’t belong there.

Other people liked it a lot. I just don’t “get it.”

Here we go with my first dark oolong!

First Infusion

Well, I was badly burned by my last oolong and my temperature problems. I have a little bit more of the Orchid Temple that I scortched, but I wanted to try something different. So I pulled out Imperial Formosa, the darker oolong of the two in the Golden Moon sampler.

I opened the little packet, and inhaled. Hrm. Interesting! The smells are not unlike black tea, but it’s lighter. I’m getting somewhat roasted notes, but there’s a sweetness underlying it.

I was more careful with temperature this time around, so I shot for 190 but ended up somewhere closer to 185. Can I talk for a second about how pretty oolongs are? Of course I can. This is my review. The leaves are a gorgeous chestnut brown, twisted and accented with silvery bits. Very, very pretty.

So I tossed a very heaping tsp into my pot, and steeped this one up. Oolongs are so pretty in the pot. This one slowly, slowly unfurled, and the water began to change color at a snail’s pace. Many of the leaves were sort of like in suspended animation; neither floating to the top of the pot, nor lingering at the bottom. Just hovering on invisible jet packs. Very pretty and cute.

When it came time for the pour, I was actually getting quite excited. The wet leaves here smell fruity-roasty now, and the light amber infusion… okay, it’s mouth-watering. There’s only the faintest hint of smoke, but beyond that, I’m getting buttery fruits. Something akin to apricots and peaches, with some date notes.

So I took the first sip and… oolong success! This one is complex and yummy and there’s something for each part of my mouth. The brunt of the flavor is fruity goodness. The stonefruit flavor really comes on strong and sweet, with a high nectar-like note. Surprisingly, there’s somewhat of a mouthfeel here, that evokes those little fruit cups filled with peaches that I used to eat when I was a kid. Sort of like drinking the liquid left behind (which was always the best part, to me).

The roasty notes are very light, and if I suck the infusion in at high speeds ala wine tasting, I get a hint of a cedar-like feeling from the roastiness. I can’t find the orange blossom in here, but I think I understand the chestnut tasting note listed by Golden Moon. It’s sort of the lingering sweetness left on my tongue, that’s savory-sweet similar to the feeling left by chestnuts. It’s not really the taste of chestnuts, but the tastes associated with chestnuts. If that makes any sense at all.

The only complaint I have is that there really is a lot of astringency here. It’s associated with sweet flavors, which is awesome, but after several sips in a row, my tongue sort of feels stuck to the roof of my mouth.

I’m really loving this one. If it can hold up to multiple steeps, we might just have a winner on our hands. I’ll probably rate this one high anyway, just because the first steep is really very delicious!

My mom tasted this, and she went, “Ooh, this is delicious! Fruity!” So there is approval on multiple levels here!

Yay for good oolong experiences!

Second Steep (5:00, 185)

The second steep came out a teeny bit darker than the first and the infusion didn’t smell as wonderful. Not that is smells bad, it just doesn’t really have as strong and delicious of a fragrance. There are some roasty notes mixed with the faintest wiff of fruit, but it’s not anything to get excited about.

The taste this time is definitely weaker than before, and definitely skewed towards a general sweet taste instead of a taste coming from any sort of fruit-related yummyness. The roasty taste is somewhat mesquite and interesting, but it’s not very strong. I’m not sure how much longer these leaves are going to last on me. I think I’ll try one more infusion and see how it goes.

Third Infusion (5:00, 185)

I’m finally tasting that cigar-like sweetness that Auggy mentioned in her review, and it’s sort of a deterrent from continuing. The flavors are also getting really weak and muted, and the sugary taste is too much in the forefront to be enjoyable. At least there’s no astringency! But there’s also nothing interesting, either. The body is thinner overall. I’m going to stop here.

So lackluster subsequent steeps, but the first was absolutely delicious. I’m not sure how to rate this, since oolongs are supposed to sustain over multiple steeps, but I really liked that first infusion.

Another tea from my sample pack. I’m not experienced enough to be able to analyze this tea and describe the subtle nuances of taste that it provides.

If I was going to high tea at the finest of tea houses, this is the black tea I would expect. Very English tasting to me. Now I have to pick between it and the Irish Breakfast. Well, when I have room for more tea, that is! Maybe the best thing would be to keep ordering the sample pack?