Coconut Pouchong

Another tea from the GM sampler. I used my Adagio tasting set to brew up this tea, and was impressed I was able to pour the tea into the cup without spilling most of it :) I love how these leaves unfurl, they get so large!

The leaves smell like rice to me, maybe rice steeped in coconut milk, but rice is the first thought that comes to mind. Brewed the scent is even stronger. It reminds me of the rice the Thai shop near my last job made. The taste is sweeter, has more coconut taste to it. This would be a good accompaniment to a homecooked meal of curry. I like how unique this tea is, I really haven’t tasted anything like it. It’s much different than a milk oolong flavor. I plan to try multiple steeps.

This was a sample from Kittenna. Thank you so much for passing it along!

Okay, oolong – it’s been a while since I’ve played with the greener counterparts. Normally I’m a huge fan of darker (e.g. dan cong) varieties, but I love coconut so much I will pretty much try it in everything. I’ve never had pouchong but it seems to look like a Ti Kwan Yin so I’m guessing this will yield a vegetal, buttery flavor. Looking forward to it!

The dry leaf smell is just, WOW. It smells like toasted coconut, like macaroons. These are not new descriptors (they are in a lot of the other tasting notes) but I’m still surprised to smell them myself. And it makes me realize that of all the other coconut blends I’ve tried, none has had this exact toasted coconut smell. I didn’t know what I was missing. Seriously. This gets 90 of its possible 100 points just for the smell alone.

The whole sample was 3 tsp. so I put it in my Breville with 500 ml. water at the below parameters. I won’t be adding any sugar or milk to this because I just can’t seem to make myself do that to any green-ish teas. But the smell emanating from the Breville isn’t worrying me – I’m pretty sure no additives will be needed.

I was right – I still get the amazing toasted coconut smell once steeped. The taste is the same as it smells! Except with an added bonus of buttery oolong to round out the mouthfeel. This is simple and complex, sweet and savory at once.

Since I used the entire sample on this batch, I’m probably going to put it through its paces today and get some resteeps going. I am curious to see how the flavor changes and how many steepings I can eke out of the leaves. Even if it’s just one, though, it has been SO worth it.

This ones going on my shopping list for sure. And if anyone knows of any other teas with this kind of coconut flavoring, I am all ears!

ETA: The second steep (at 6 minutes) retains most of the coconut (yay!) and loses alot of the brightness from the oolong (maybe that was what people thought of as floral?). In general this cup is heavier and less buttery. I’m surprised at how strong the coconut still is really. I’m sure I could actually get at least one more steep out of it, even. Will have to give it a try!

This is great stuff! There’s a freshness and authenticity to the fragrance. When I first opened the packet, all I could smell was coconut. “Where’s the tea?,” I thought. And this was odd, because if you look at the dry tea, all you see is leaves—it’s not like it’s a pile of coconut flakes or anything. After a few breaths, I could smell the fragrance of the tea itself start to creep in. What was interesting about the fragrance was how it changed when I steeped the tea: suddenly, the coconut disappeared and all I could smell was tea. Like I did with the dry leaves, I gave it a few moments and slowly the coconut began to creep in and mix with the tea. I was kind of fascinated by these aromatic acrobatics.

I’ve never had coconut cream pie. I’ve also never had any of the teas that attempt to recreate that flavour. But when I took a sip of this blend, I immediately thought of some sort of creamy, coconut treat. The tea has…substance to it, as if I’d added milk to it. As I was with the fragrance, I was fascinated by the tea itself. It’s really something, isn’t it, that we can combine a tea blend with water and end up with a light amber liquid that tastes…creamy! I don’t mean to make this sound like a science experiment, I just can’t get over this creaminess-without-cream effect.

Okay, so texture and consistency aside, this blend tastes great. It’s flavourful and balanced. It’s light in spite of the smooth, creamy consistency. I found myself sipping this one slowly to make the brew last longer, a clear indication that I need to add this to my shopping list. What I’d like to do, in the future, is try some different preparation methods: first, I’d like to try it iced; second, I’d like to blend it with a chocolatey tea—I love Mounds candy bars; and third, I’d like to make it kind of like chai, with (soy) milk instead of water.

Tea amount: 1 sample packet (I didn’t measure it out, sorry.)
Water amount: 16oz./~475mL
Additives: ~1 level tbsp Demerara sugar

I am just a little bit surprised by my reaction to this tea. In my quest to drink every coconut Oolong I can get my hands on, I ordered some of this from iHeartTeas. I expected to be madly in love with it, and heartbroken that Golden Moon for some reason can’t arrange shipping to Canada (I’ve emailed them about it and they are very nice and helpful, but say it’s not a possibility at this point).

Anyway, I’m not in love! What! This isn’t to undermine this tea. It’s good. It’s really good! But, my mind is not blown. And I’ve been finding coconut Oolongs pretty mindblowing 3/3 up to this one. It has the same light Oolong crispness, the coconut sweetness. But I’ve had it twice now and it’s just not quite matching up. It’s going to be a pleasure to finish it, but I am (thankfully) not going to be in mourning when it’s finished. I’m enjoying it but it’s not the first tea I want to reach for like Tealish’s Coconut Bongo was while my 50 g lasted. I think the Spice and Tea Exchange and Tao Tea Leaf versions have been my favourite, but the price of the Tao one sets it back. Tealish’s is a close third, but its accessibility boosts its rating. This one comes in fourth, as a solid contender but lacking the star power of the others.

Second steeping!
Still delicious!
I just want to make a giant pot of this, set it on my desk and keep refilling my cup all afternoon. I would obviously have to think of a way to keep the pot warm (samovar) that would not involve fire (…electric samovar?) and did not cost over a hundred dollars (…I got nuffin)

So this is it.

The last tea to try in the Golden Moon sampler.

Back when I started rating teas on Steepster, and when I started my loose leaf journey, one of the first things I noticed was the Golden Moon sampler. I began to sound the alarm around Steepster, probably annoying the hell out of a bunch of people in the process, but I really was pushing this thing on people. Because you know what? The sampler is a tea education in a box. It’s the perfect way to convert your friends to tea. It can show you everything that tea has to offer. Because Golden Moon is a damn fine company.

And Golden Moon is also a company that does flavored teas really, really well.

So I’m saving their award-winning baby for last, the pinnacle of their tea artisanship.

And you know what? This tea is amazing. This tea is just… man.

Okay, let’s start with the basics though, before I start babbling on about the taste. First off, when you open the packet, all you can smell is rich, delicious coconut. Toasted coconut. The inside of a Mars bar. It’s extremely distinct. You cannot mistake this for anything else other than coconut. I’m serious.

Yay for my first loose leaf pouchong! The leaves look more akin to a green than an oolong, and since pouchong falls somewhere in the gap between green and oolong, it’s understandable. They’re very full and dark and lush. So I steeped it up, and the resulting infusion was a pale lemon chiffon color. Very pretty.

Did I mention how much I love the color that oolongs steep up to? Okay, I’ll mention it now. Oolongs have such an appealing color palette.

Anyway, the infusion pretty much smells just as delicious as the dry leaves. Except now add butter. I’m serious. You can smell the buttery pouchong shining through.

Is there a first thing as love at first sip? Because I think this might be it.

Oh my. The pouchong is the first flavor that hits your tongue, smooth and ridiculously sweet and full of buttered goodness. And then the coconut comes, authentic and delicious and real. It doesn’t overpower the taste of the pouchong, but rests happily next to it, all cuddled up inside of it, until the two tastes merge so well that it creates a newer, better, wonderful taste.

I love it when flavored tea does that. When neither the tea nor the flavoring overwhelms the other, and there’s this wonderful balance that makes you just sigh with happiness when you drink it.

That sigh is this tea.

Much love for Golden Moon, and yay for all of the people that have taken this remarkable tasting journey with me! Let’s convert some more people to the Tea Box to End All Tea Boxes, and have fun drinking tea! Because if tea tastes as good as this, I’m a full-on crazy convert to this wonderful beverage.

I liked it but I didn’t love it. The coconut taste was good, but prefer my beloved Organic Black with Coconut. I think the sort of floral green paired with the coconut didn’t do it for me. If I already didn’t have a coconut tea I was crazy for, maybe I’d like this better.

GM Sampler | Tea 5 of 31

Coconut Pouchong | http://bit.ly/9WQQq0
[Eventually to Become]The Full Spread | http://bit.ly/bDtnNn

This was the tea that finished off my GM day back in January, and this was the best one of the bunch. If you had told me that I would hate the pear tea and love the coconut tea in this sampler, I would have laughed at you for five minutes. Maybe more. Because coconut and I don’t see eye to eye all of the time and, as we have established, I love pear.

The tea in the packet smelled, unsurprisingly, like coconut. Macaroons, the formerly named Samoa cookies from the Girl Scouts, suntan oil…all these things popped into my head. Wet, the leaves smelled vegetal with a hint of coconut. It reminded me of beansprouts, which I thought was weird, but they ARE tea leaves, so whatever.

Sipping the tea, it had a hint of that vegetal flavor, but it was much lighter. Mainly, what I was getting out of it was a buttery quality. Oh, it was good. Buttery with whiffs of coconut flavor and a cookie-like finish. It reminded me, undeniably, of coconut macaroons. Really freaking good coconut macaroons.

There were some other things going on in the tea, but all I could think of was coconut macaroons. That is what has stuck, and that is why I will be ordering this tea.

I never would have called that one.

COCONUT MACAROONS!

No matter how many teas I try, I always come back to this one. I think it my be my all-time favorite, or if not it’s definitely in the top three. When I make two cups of tea at once I tend to make two that are extremely different just so I can tell them apart, but this one goes surprisingly well with the Houjicha I just drank. As always, refreshing and delicious.

This is so delicious. First, let me just say that I am not a fan of coconut. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, the smell of coconut tends to to make me queasy, due to a bad experience as a teenager with coconut rum. Anyway, I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this tea—on the one hand, it’s award winning. On the other, I hate coconut. Well, this tea definitely has changed my mind about coconut, because it’s absolutely scrumptious (ha, I love that word).

The dry leaves are dark green and long and thin, and smell like coconut milk, cream, and maybe the lightest toasty scent. I can’t smell any tea at all. After steeping, the scent of the infusion is the same as the dry leaf, with a hint of pouchong. Surprisingly, the flavor is actually a very nice, even balance of pouchong and coconut, and they meld together seamlessly. The flavor doesn’t just sit on top of the pouchong, but seems to be intertwined with it. The ratio of flavoring to tea was nicely done, so it doesn’t feel like I’m drinking just coconut flavoring with a hint of tea, or tea with a hint of coconut. And oh, the flavor is delicious. There’s a custard note to the infusion as well, and at times it feels like I’m sipping coconut milk, not tea.

I only have a sample of this, so I’m going to have to get my hands on some more. I can see myself drinking this a lot!