Please help me explore green and oolong tea

I would suggest trying heavily roasted oolongs, like wuyi oolongs (big red robe), also green tea like long jing dragonwell, houjicha, maybe a genmaicha.

Teavivre has nice sample packs with several kinds of tea to try.

I can’t help you on the green tea front because after 4 years of serious tea drinking I have established that I just don’t like them. The way I got into oolongs though was through roasted oolongs which remind me of my beloved blacks. I definitely recommend getting samples from Teavivre of different oolongs to try a couple different flavours and see what you like. I constantly stock their Big Red Robe. Davids has a couple unflavoured green oolongs that would give you an idea of their taste if you wanted to pick up 10 grams of each. They’re not my thing, but they’re okay.

As for puerh, only bad ones will be fishy. I am not a connoisseur but puerh became the next logical step for me, to expand my tastes. My favourite teas are chinese blacks with no additions, and I find many puerhs to be similar to those, only with more oomph. I have yet to have a puerh taste watery! :) Although, to be fair, I think tea tastes watery WITH additions and bolder without. To each their own!

My mom doesn’t like tea to taste like grass or vegetables, and she really enjoyed Teavivre’s Nonpareil Te Gong Huang Shan Mao Feng Green Tea (and, to a lesser extent, their regular Huang Shan Mao Feng). Seconding the recommendation for Long Jing/Dragonwell, also.

Hi,

It’s all in the quality of the tea, and its preparation. I am so sensitive to bitter that I can’t even stand a hint of coffee in a beverage, but I drink oolongs and pu-erhs all day every day. And, in our house, adding anything to the tea is sacrilege. You can’t make a bad tea into a good tea, but you can easily ruin both. Most folks who talk about needing to add milk and sugar are steeping way too hot, for too long, or using too much tea. (Usually just too hot and too long.)

So, without dialing this back, you’re going to be really disappointed with most green teas and many oolongs. (I’m just making some assumptions, so this advice may not really apply.)

To your questions:
Grassy taste – This aversion doesn’t necessarily eliminate green teas entirely, but it maybe makes it a class of teas that isn’t going to work well. Good green teas are often characterized by a pleasant “vegetable” taste. (Not a great descriptor, but you’ll know it when you taste it.) This often comes with grassy over/undertones. But, many high-quality, well-prepared green teas will also come across with some pleasant sweetness that may balance out the grassiness to your palate. It’s best to try many varieties to sort of train your palate to the possibilities before deciding what you like or dislike about any one variety.

Just know that if the tea is bitter, you’ve oversteeped it. If you can’t get rid of the bitterness through shorter or cooling steeping, then the tea is no good. I would call this a truism of green teas.

Fruit/floral – Definitely get some good-quality jasmine. It is not only very pleasant on its own, it blends well with a wide variety of other teas. In addition to its flexibility, it has the virtue of being something that is very accessible to most people’s palates, making it suitable for company – even among folks who claim to hate tea.

Oolongs – There is an oolong to suit every preference. Kee mun tends to come across chocolatey, my wife drinks a ginseng oolong daily called “Blue People” which is distinctly sweet. We also drink a white champagne oolong which, as its name suggests, tastes a bit like champagne. High mountain tea is a good transition between what you may be familiar with (black teas), and the broader spectrum of oolongs and green teas.

Milk oolong (like many other teas in this class) tends to come across pleasantly buttery for many people.

Cheers.