Snow Sprout

Tea type
White Tea
Ingredients
Not available
Flavors
Astringent, Fruity, Grain, Nutty, Roasted, Smoke, Vegetal
Sold in
Not available
Caffeine
Not available
Certification
Not available
Edit tea info Last updated by Dinosara
Average preparation
175 °F / 79 °C 2 min, 45 sec 3 oz / 88 ml

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32 Tasting Notes View all

  • “So cozy! I’ve only got 5 more teas left to try in the GM sampler, which makes me sad. Somewhere down the line, I’m definitely going to need to order more of their stuff, since it consistently falls...” Read full tasting note
    80
  • “This is a tea that I ended up getting an ounce of for free with my Golden Moon order because they mistakenly shipped me this tea instead of the tea I ordered. So I figured I would try it! It is a...” Read full tasting note
    78
  • “This elegant dry leaf brews up to a somewhat lackluster tea. I have tasted green teas that had tons more character and I’ve even had white teas that offered more. I think, however, that the...” Read full tasting note
    70
  • “I had a nap earlier, which means my brain is pretty worthless right now. Decided to have some of my GM samples in the ever popular endeavor of cleaning out my tea pantry so I can order some...” Read full tasting note
    83

From Golden Moon Tea

As the most gentle among white tea, Snow Sprout delivers tender young buds that give a light infusion of serene clarity. Delicate herbal notes are followed by a lingering sweetness.
Ingredients: First Flush Bai Hao Yinzhen Tea Buds
Where it’s Grown: Fujian, China

About Golden Moon Tea View company

Golden Moon is dedicated to offering outstanding, whole-leaf teas of the greatest quality and finesse. All Golden Moon Teas are hand-plucked and meticulously crafted to enhance leaf character, aroma, color, clarity, body, complexity, and above all, flavor.

32 Tasting Notes

80
187 tasting notes

So cozy!

I’ve only got 5 more teas left to try in the GM sampler, which makes me sad. Somewhere down the line, I’m definitely going to need to order more of their stuff, since it consistently falls above average for me.

Snow Sprout is pretty. Upon opening the packet, it sort of smells like a musty honey smell. With lots of sweetness. Maybe sugared flowered? Anyway, The leaves look like green Silver Needle! Very odd, indeed. They’re fuzzy, and slender, but… they’re not silver. They’re a pale green. Sea green, almost.

Anyway, I steeped up the entire packet of this, because it was around a tablespoon or so, and watched it steep. Funnily enough, once the water hits the leaves (or sprouts? What do I call these guys?), they look like twigs. Knobbly twigs. Very intriguing, indeed.

Anyway, this one steeps up to a very light cup. If someone handed me this, I’d automatically assume it’s white tea. It even smells like a white tea, in that it’s not very interesting on the nose. But does it taste like a white tea?

Yes, yes it does. WEIRD. There isn’t much of a body to it, and the tastes are kind of fuzzy, but here we go, trying to draw some tasting notes out of this puppy. It’s very subtle, like a white tea. For one, I’m getting almost nuttiness at points. I’ve narrowed it down to macadamia nuts! Yes, it’s that sort of nuttiness. There’s a sweetness at the end. It’s more of a green sweetness than a white sweetness. I can’t really explain that; I think it’s only if you’ve experienced the two you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Other than that, I’m not getting much else. It’s definitely a yummy cup of tea, but I don’t think it’s that memorable. For what it is, though, it tastes pretty good!

Preparation
170 °F / 76 °C 2 min, 30 sec
takgoti

That does sound like a white tea. Curious, indeed. I’m looking forward to trying this one. I think today is going to be a tea swap/GM sampler day.

wombatgirl

I want to get the GM sampler someday – but there’s no room in the cupboard!

takgoti

If it helps, it comes in a decorative box, so technically you can just leave the box on some non-cupboard-related surface!

teaplz

Yes! I laid out the sample box with my collection of other basket-y things. It’s a cute little box!

Ricky

Down to one, down to one! Can you guess what it is? It’ll probably be your last tea to try as well.

Step 1 – Trick yourself into thinking you have room in the cupboard (if it helps, just move all the tea into another cupboard and come back the next day! Gasp! Where did all my tea go? Oh well, time to order more)

Step 2 – Click the purchase button.

Step 3 – Confirm the order. (Yes, you will be hesitant here, but it’s like a bandaid, quick and painless. If it helps just oh accidentally knock onto the mouse and click Confirm =])

Step 4 – Regret about the purchase. (Sorry, no returns!)

teaplz

Ricky, Coconut Pouchong? :D

Ricky

Hahaha, bingo!

sophistre

You guys had better drink it soon! It’s the one tea I bought a big bag of rather than just a little tin, so if you hate it I’m going to be soooo disappointed!

sophistre

Well…disappointed on your behalf. I have a pot of this sitting next to me for when I finish my matcha, so not disappointed for me, obviously. ;)

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78
2201 tasting notes

This is a tea that I ended up getting an ounce of for free with my Golden Moon order because they mistakenly shipped me this tea instead of the tea I ordered. So I figured I would try it!

It is a confusing tea. Golden Moon initially called it a green tea, then changed their website info to a white tea. Other Snow Sprouts are typically classified as green teas, but they are the downy buds that look just like white tea. Not to mention taste like white tea. So yeah, confusing.

Hayish, nutty, a bit bready. Yup, tastes like a white tea. It’s not too exciting (to me) but I’ll try to keep it in rotation so I drink it up before it starts to lose flavor.

Preparation
195 °F / 90 °C 2 min, 0 sec

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70
259 tasting notes

This elegant dry leaf brews up to a somewhat lackluster tea. I have tasted green teas that had tons more character and I’ve even had white teas that offered more.

I think, however, that the problem is ME and not Golden Moon. I’m one of Swift’s over-sized Brobdingagians in my taste and my temperaments. I like the huge big bow-wow and Snow Spout is like one of those delicate tiny humming-birds: blink and you don’t see it. I think that lovers of green tea might like this a lot and it’s worth trying for lovers of white tea.

I’m thinking of Stevie Smith’s charming couplet:
“That Englishwoman is so refined,
She has no bosom and no behind.”

This tea has got no bosom, no behind, but it is most certainly refined.

Preparation
2 min, 0 sec
RachanaC (Rachel)-iHeartTeas

I love how you described this one. Paints a picture :-)

teabird

I’m glad to hear – especially from someone who likes big showy teas – that there is a range of character in green and white tea. I suspected as much, but it’s still heartening! Needless to say, I’m still looking for a white tea to wow me.

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83
911 tasting notes

I had a nap earlier, which means my brain is pretty worthless right now. Decided to have some of my GM samples in the ever popular endeavor of cleaning out my tea pantry so I can order some tea.

This smells pretty. Sweet. Nectar-y maybe? Not floral, but sweet and not really fruity but maybe not… thick enough to be nectar. Faint honey? Something. Eh. It smells good.

Brewing, it smells a little musty, dry and sweet. Not bad. Not concerning. Seems nice. It’s very light in my cup and I can’t really get much smell from it. But sipping it is quite nice. Sweet with a little of the musty taste that I smelled when in the pot. As it cools, the sweet musty taste turns mostly just sweet with maybe a hint of hay or something… . No briny taste, no real vegetal taste. Just delicate sweetness and flavor. This makes me think of a sweeter version of Rishi’s Snow Buds. But softer and less like a green (which is ironic because this is considered a green and Snow Buds is considered a white but there you go).

Anyway, good stuff. Like it a lot. Sweet, delicate, gentle but flavorful. I’m a fan.

Preparation
175 °F / 79 °C 3 min, 0 sec
Micah

Sounds delicious! I was really confused by their website with this one. It was listed as a green tea but they kept referring to it as silver needle in the description.

Do you think it tastes more like a green or a white tea?

Auggy

To me, it tastes more like it is a white tea when cool (but I can see more typical green tea tastes when it is hotter but Snow Buds still seems more green to me than this one). But I’ve not had many white teas so I could be way off base.

Auggy

(By the way, love Shipwrecks! I read it ages ago but had forgotten about it. I might have to bring it out for a reread now that your profile has reminded me of it!)

Micah

Yes! Shipwrecks is such a great book. I’ve read it probably three times and it doesn’t get old. I’d have to say that my favorite part is the last few sentences and how they capture the emotion of the entire novel. It’s so powerful.

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91
558 tasting notes

These leaves steeped the lightest colored brew I’ve ever drank, at least for a green tea. I love the lightness of this tea. The flavor is light and sweet and the lightest hint of sweetness to it. I hope to try others of this type down the road. Quite the enjoyable cup.

Preparation
165 °F / 73 °C 2 min, 30 sec

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65
371 tasting notes

Oh GM sampler, I have not forsaken thee! I just get distracted by other shiny teas. And puppies. Fwuffie puppies!

This simple tea called my name tonight. Yup. Simple and serene. Not quite yawn, but close. The packet smelled like…wait for it…wait for it…white teeeeea!

Maybe Shakespeare is spoiling me with awesome flavors and it was unfair to have this tea amongst such epic tastes. But I definitely still like subtle teas. Subtletea? (Yeah, I’m thinking that’s been done many-a-time, but I can’t resist teh cheez).

The taste is nice and white tea-ish. But there is the ever-so-slight hint of sweetness. It’s like a tiny powdered sugar fairy sneezed on the leaves. Pleasant aftertaste. Nothing remarkable and I don’t plan to buy more. NE

Preparation
175 °F / 79 °C 2 min, 0 sec
mpierce87

I love fwuffie puppies!

Stephanie

“It’s like a tiny powdered sugar fairy sneezed on the leaves.” — I love that!! :)

malomorgen

lol sugar fairy sneezed. thanks for making me giggle so early in the morning :D

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81
2036 tasting notes

Sipdown no. 7 of March 2019 (no. 42 of 2019 total, no. 530 grand total).

Looking back at my original note on this, it’s clear to me I was trying very hard to taste things in this tea that would make me like it and also make me feel as though I understood white tea. And maybe I did taste all of those things and all these years later, the tea has lost flavor which explains why I didn’t taste those things in the tea I just sipped down as a take it to work tea for the past week or so.

If I was rating this now based on my most recent experience, I’d rate it somewhere in the 60s because I really taste very little in this that makes it distinguishable from hot water.

But I hesitate because I can’t say for sure that when I wrote that first note, the tea I tasted was fresh and that made a difference.

Anyway, it’s gone now.

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70
1112 tasting notes

My stomach was not quite ready for the holiday food that I had yesterday. I feel awful today. Today’s tea is all about recovering a sense of balance. Golden Moon calls this the most gentle of green teas, and gentle sounds reeeeeealy nice.

Maybe two minutes was too short of a steep, because I am getting barely anything – hot water with the faintest…I don’t even know how to describe it. Hay? Not really grass, definitely not floral… Even though it’s not firecrackers or revelations, it’s very nice for a queasy tum.

Steep 2, 3 minutes: string beans!!! Again, very light. Strangely enjoyable in a “tonic” sort of way.

Steep 3: lighter string beans. Still comforting, but I think this is it for these leaves.

I enjoyed the second steep the most. It really did help settle my stomach and I liked drinking string beans a lot more than I liked drinking asparagus :) I won’t be buying a tin of this, but I’d be into trying snow sprout from some other tea companies. It’s a really nice tea for when you need to tilt the scale a little more to the wholesome side of things.

Preparation
175 °F / 79 °C 2 min, 0 sec

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61
244 tasting notes

Doulton ‘s review1 of this tea pretty much sums up my feelings. I had to really work to enjoy this. I opened the packet and inhaled. The fragrance is light, fresh, green, very subtle. Not green like freshly cut grass, but green like young. When steeped, the fragrance is a bit stronger, but not much. The flavour is like the fragrance. I felt kind of bad drinking it, really, as if by leaving it in my cupboard, it’d continue to mature: so, little tea, what would you like to be when you grow up? I’m thinking my palate’s just not sophisticated enough for this one.

1 http://steepster.com/Doulton/posts/39590

Preparation
175 °F / 79 °C 3 min, 0 sec
Angrboda

Footnotes! How did you do that?

Nik

Footnotes: add the footnote number in [ ] brackets. Then, at the bottom, use “fn#” for the footnote. So [ 1 ] (without the spaces) will link to fn1. More info on the Textile reference page at http://redcloth.org/hobix.com/textile/.

Angrboda

Neat! I will remember this. Thank you.

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54
382 tasting notes

Golden Moon Sampler Tea #31
Well, this is it, the last one. I’d been kind of avoiding finally drinking the last sample because that would be the end, and it made me sad. But I guess that now I have my 52teas order to look forward to (and my Matcha!) so I will not be pining for new things to distract me from the teas I have for too long. Of course, this also means that I can get down to the business of getting the teas that I was particularly impressed with, but, alas, Ewa’s Pocketbook dictates that this must wait. In fact, my Golden Moon order must compete in line with: samples from Harney & Sons, the teas I decided on from my Upton samples, AND replenishment of some Adagio teas I am running low on. So who KNOWS when I’ll get around to them.

But let’s talk about this tea. The leaves were very light and smelled almost sweet, which was intriguing, but unfortunately I think I used too much water, because the taste is very faint and doesn’t have the sort of “full” quality that teas with a naturally light taste have when brewed properly. The liquid is very light, a pale brownish yellow almost verging on tan. Not quite the same color as white tea though. It’s somehow…greyer, if that makes sense.

The taste, light as it is, is a delicate sweetness and a very light generalized vegetal taste. The longer it steeps the more hay-like it gets, but I’m not really noticing any of the herbal notes that the description talks about. It’s certainly pleasant enough, but I like my teas a little bolder. Okay, a lot bolder.

And that’s that. The end of the sampler! It was a lot of fun trying all of these different teas, and, to be perfectly honest, I DO still have some left over samples that happened to have slightly more leaves in them. I do wish the packets were slightly larger, so I could try each of these teas two separate times, or so if I accidentally oversteeped/overwatered/overanythinged a tea on the first go around I would have the chance to correct the mistake, but beggars can’t be choosers and the sampler is still a great value and great fun.

I take my leave of my Official Golden Moon Sampler Tasting with this reminder:
And in the end, the tea you take, is equal to the tea you make.
HAHAHAHA THAT’S STUCK IN YOUR HEADS NOW! MY EVIL PLAN IS COMPLETE

Preparation
170 °F / 76 °C 3 min, 0 sec
__Morgana__

Congrats on the end of an era. Buy more samplers!

Rabs

Okay, but what evil plan is this out of how many? Cuz that would be a lame evil plan if that’s the only one you have. I know deep down that you can do eviler-ier. ;)

I think that I’ve sort of walked away (temporarily) from my GM sampler cuz I have so many other teas suddenly, and I was getting down to the ones I’m not so interested in trying. This is where I kick myself for not doing the random grab :(

Rabs

Oh yeah, for something constructive: I’d suggest that when you eventually get around to placing a GM order then you can add samples (99 cents – woohoo!) from the ones that you thought weren’t given a fair chance. :)

Ewa

well that is on the “mildly annoying” end of my evil plan scale. the scale stretches all the way to diabolical, I swear!

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