Golden Moon Tea

I’m going to make up for the failure that happened yesterday with my golden moon sampler of sugar caramel oolong with this one. I haven’t actually made sencha for myself before, but I’m pretty sure the tea my host mother in japan made for me at night was sencha. I can tell by the familiar smell of this cup.

It’s a very bitter tea. I definitely didn’t put hot water in either, I just get the feeling that sencha is a very bitter tea, since every time I drank it with my host mother it was also almost unbearably bitter. This cup is pretty bitter in my opinion, to the point where its a little nauseating. I almost want to put some more water in it to dilute the taste a little bit. I can’t really compare it to much, but as my first experience with sencha outside of my host family, I’m not impressed at all.

Just as tasty in the iced version. Just don’t drink it too cold (ow, my teeth).

I pretty much knew I’d love this by its name alone.

I stuck my nose in my sample bag and could swear it was a peppermint patty. I even brought the bag to my mom (whose tea knowledge extends to… nothing) and it was the first thing she thought of, too. Which is curious, considering it’s vanilla…

I’m a sucker for anything mint. Didn’t catch the vanilla until the aftertaste, which was a pleasant surprise. Since it’s freezing cold [for May] I decide to steep another cup, and then another, and I never lost the vanilla minty flavor. This one is a win. I need to buy it.

I may have enough flavor left in the leaves to try an iced version. Stay tuned.

Golden Moon sample No. 25 of 31.

I was hoping this would blow me away with it’s “claming aroma” (typo on the sample bag label), and that I would have found another staple Earl Grey.

This isn’t terrible, but it’s not among the better Earl Greys I have tried. The leaves are nice looking with their light colored tips, and there is a strong bergamot scent that, while it isn’t oily, is definitely heavy. I couldn’t identify lavender in the scent of the dry leaves. And I wonder why I’m supposed to, since it isn’t listed among the ingredients.

After steeping, the bergamot fragrance becomes milder. I’m still not smelling lavender, mostly what I get underneath the bergamot is a malty, black tea scent. The liquor is fairly dark orange/brown.

There is a hint of bergamot in the taste, which is what I prefer. I don’t love very strong bergamot in the taste, as when it is too strong it can do a number on my stomach. But this was perhaps too subtle even for me. I still can’t find lavender anywhere. But the other taste I do find is something odd. It’s a sort of a flat taste that hints of bread, but not in a delicious way. I’m wondering if it is what the tea tasting books refer to as “bakey” or over fired? If it is, it would make sense as there is a baked feeling to it but not in a tasty way. Like the stuff that sticks to the bottom of the cake pan and is heavy on the baking powder.

In any case, not a success in my further attempts to populate my Earl Grey stable.

The dry leaves’ scent does seem like sandalwood! “Honeyed sandalwood”, like the description implies—delicious! My anticipation of the actual tasting increases!

First sip….

The taste is super mild and subdued. I’m not getting much taste, actually.

Sadness! :(

Maybe the heat of the water is obscuring the flavor. I’ll wait for it to cool down.

After slight cool down…the taste is a little nutty, a bit woods-y, a tiny hint of sweet.

Conclusion: A very soft and quiet tea. It seems to require a lot of focus to understand and much patience to unravel its nuances. Which means it’s either very mysterious….or very insipid. ;)

Golden Moon sample No. 24 of 31.

I need caffeine. I went out last night and am going out again tonight. I haven’t done that in… I can’t remember how long. Anyway, fortunately since I pre-drew my last few samples I know that I have a bunch of black teas coming up in the sampler. So I don’t have to expend any energy figuring out what to drink. I can save the energy for tonight.

This one has very attractive leaves. I love the variegated colors of tippy teas. This one has a lot of pretty white tips in it, among leaves that range from dark brown to greenish. The packet indicates that this contains FTGFOP-18 darjeeling. (What’s the 18 mean? I can find info on the number 1 after a designation but not a number other than 1. From what I read, 1 is supposed to me that it is among the finest of its type, so does 18 mean it’s far down the ranks?)

The dry leaves don’t have a strong smell. They’re a little dusky smelling. As is the aroma of the steeped tea. I’m looking for the characteristic “muscatel” fragrance, but honestly I don’t know what muscatel smells like. It does smell a lot like the other darjeelings I’ve had, so I’m guessing what I think of as “darjeeling” smell is actually muscatel. It’s a sharp, dry smell at the top and a dusky, fruity smell at the bottom. The color is a medium brown orange “tea” color.

This is a medium to light bodied, refreshing drink. It’s flavorful without being weighty, and it has a bright texture with being too drying in the finish. I’m a darjeeling n00b, so though I know I like them and I like this one, I don’t yet have enough of a repertoire to compare this meaningfully to others. I gave the only other straight darjeeling I’ve rated, the Tazo bag, a 74. This is better than that, but I wouldn’t put it out of the 70s, so instead of rating it overly high I’m going to bump the Tazo down some.

So I actually was intending to drink a different golden moon tea, but grabbed this one cause they had the same package color.

The smell of the tea is so sweet, and so full of the wonderful smell of caramel. Hmm, the tea itself isn’t tasting so sweet though. I gave my mother the second steep, and she thought it tasted pretty “blah”. I’m thinking that I put in water that was too hot though. There’s this really weird bitter taste that I usually never get with oolongs. Aside from the bitterness, I taste the sugar faintly but I think overall this tea was just a fail. I’m a little upset that I don’t have more of this sample to try and get it right, since it sounded like a really tasty tea.

Yeah, this tea is almost unbearable to drink. I’m really ready to pour it down the drain. This is why dealing with samples of one serving suck. If you mess up and make an undrinkable tea, you don’t get a second shot at it.

Just received my Golden Moon sampler, so my apologies for the upcoming spamming of your pages :)

It’s a rainy Saturday morning, mom is baking brownies, and I wanted something standard with my eggs. That, and considering my standard dislike of black tea, I figured I’d get the “breakfast” teas over with.

I can’t really detect anything special about it. It’s not as good as my [one] yunan (hey look, I can compare teas now!), but it’s better than other black teas I’ve attempted. The packaging claims a hint of honey, but I can’t tell. I won’t be running out to buy it, but hey. That’s what a sampler is for.

I’m on a lockdown until I have liberated at least five tins, I’ve decided. Or emptied one of the 52teas pouches as they are large enough to count equal to a tin, and also got through at least 10 of the smaller samples.

Starting now. So this is the first sample, nine to go. It was another one from the Doulton tea present. A prize-winner even. I have to say I’m a little sceptical. The 52teas coconut cream pie is really the only coconut tea that I really like. Often I find coconut becomes rather cloying and unpleasant. So yes, I have to admit that choosing this one now was a question of getting it over with… (Sorry, Doulton )

I smelled the leaves before brewing and they were definitely coconut-y, but there was also so,ething else. so,mething kind of more like hazelnut-y. That’s kind of interesting. After steeping it does smell of coconut, but mostly it smells like a green type oolong.

What a surprise to taste this! The coconut is definitely there, but it’s not the cloying super-sweetness that I have com,e to expect. It’s primarily the pouchong flavour here, and then the coconut is sort of lurking around the edges. I would never have guessed this but coconut and pouchong suit each other very nicely!

I’m shocked!

Sipdown no. 109 of 2018 (no. 465 total).

On its way out of my cupboard for now, I’ve decided to up the rating on this one fairly significantly.

As compared to other green teas, gunpowder is a sometime thing for me. The dark, smoky flavor is a bit too much for me on a daily basis, as lapsang souchong is for me on the black tea side. It isn’t to say I don’t like it, just that I can’t drink it daily.

And yet, I did drink this one daily for a while and it wasn’t too difficult. I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen to do so if I wasn’t engaged in a massive sipdown effort, though.

Which made me realize that I had unfairly graded this tea. I graded it on an absolute scale of all green teas, rather than a gunpowder among gunpowers. And that’s not how I’ve said I’m doing my ratings.

As a gunpowder, this is quite solid — at least as far as those I’ve tasted go. When I am sufficiently close to the end of my green teas to order more, I’ll be adding at least one gunpowder to the mix. But I’m not yet to the point where I’m ready to standardize on a single company’s offering.

Tasting note no. 666. Cue Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEllLECo4OM

(The spooky Omen music starts at about 1:48 but you can knock yourself out and listen to the whole thing if you have an hour LOL.)

I had nothing with devil, diablo, diable, satan, lucifer, or such in the name so I decided to go the opposite direction, literally up rather than down. Hence the Temple of Heaven.

After I sampled this in my 31 flavor Golden Moon sampler I gave it a rating of 73 and added it to my order. It’s weird, though. Now I don’t think I’d order something unless I gave it a 75 or higher, and I’d probably only order a few teas ranked in the 70s as there are so many I’ve given more than 80 to.

But that’s easily solved on this one by bumping the rating a few points. I don’t have a lot to compare it to in the gunpowder sphere, but as a green tea, it’s a nice change from the lighter, more vegetal green teas I’ve been having lately. The smokiness, though light by Lapsang and even Keemun standards, is quite enjoyable on a rainy February evening.

I may regret drinking this at 9 p.m., but I was up against the 666 number and I didn’t see this as a first thing in the morning tea. Heh.

Night night all.

Golden Moon sample No. 23 of 31. Since I’m getting toward the end, and had an insatiable wave of curiosity come over me, I randomly drew the order of all of my last samples. This is the first. Here’s the order of the rest: Darjeeling, Tippy Earl Grey, Honey Pear, Rose, Kashmiri Chai (yay!), Imperial Formosa Oolong, Sencha and (drum roll please) Sinharaja.

The little gunpowder nodules look a lot like they did in the Moroccan Mint. I’m guessing they are the base for that tea. When I sniffed them without the influence of mint, I got a really interesting smell. At first, like Rabs I thought it was some form of rodent chow, or maybe lagomorph chow. That sort of grassy smell of those big blocks of compressed organic mystery material that pet rats chew on, or of the smaller pellets for rabbits. Second time, coming at it from having cleared my smeller by not being near anything with a strong smell for a few minutes I realized what it truly is. Millet seed. It’s the smell of the seeds I used to give to my pet finches. Or maybe it was the canary or parakeet. Can’t be sure now as that was a long time ago, but I definitely recognize the smell.

After steeping, I had an aromatic surprise. Up until now I haven’t been able to detect any smokiness at all in gunpowder. Mostly what I get instead is a sort of “dusky” or heavy green smell. With this, I did get a smoky aroma. Not smoky in the Russian or Lapsang sense, where you can really smell charred evergreen trees. More of a light whiff with a seed essence, as though you’d walked into a room where a sesame seed bagel had toasted too long after enough time had elapsed that the smell had almost fully dissippated. Along with that, there is the dusky green I remembered, which has a sweet aspect to it. The color is a deep, clear yellow.

The flavor isn’t as sweet and vegetal as other greens. It, too, has a dusky character with a sort of a nutty (or rather seedy) taste to it. I can find a tad of bitterness, but not enough to make it unpalatable.

I have very limited experience with gunpowder and may have to downgrade this eventually, but my experience hasn’t been nearly as unpleasant as reflected in the notes of a lot of other tasters. Or perhaps I’m just in a charitable mood. Really, though I didn’t dislike this at all, in fact, I liked it — my only hesitations are that I think it’s not something I’d choose to drink a lot, and that I don’t have a frame of reference to know how this compares to others of the same type of tea. So I’m giving it a default very good rating until I have grounds for comparison.

This is a very fragrant, flavorful Earl Grey. I actually got the hints of lavender and jasmine they mention on the package, and I think I liked this better without milk than with. A bit of honey is nice, but it’s not harsh enough to need sweetener. All in all, pretty similar to the Buckingham Palace Garden blends, but with more of a kick. I expect to get a second steep out of this, but haven’t made it yet.

ETA: Oh wait, there’s actually lavender in the blend. In that case, it’s not so overpowering as to be unpleasant, but just faintly there. This is a plus, IMO, as I’m not a big lavender fan.

Sipdown no. 9 of 2020 (no. 604 total).

This was an accidental sipdown. I am sipping down from lowest rated to highest rated, generally. But I was in a hurry and I have a lot of pu-erh that at this rate I’ll never get around to drinking, so I used this to make a cold brew.

It’s a mild pu-erh which is why I rated it on the high side, and for that reason it made a very nice cold brew — just a tad earthy, but not so much that no. 2, who is the primary consumer of the cold brew these days, thought it worthy of mention. He just demolished the pitcher’s worth.

For more detail, see previous note. In my original note I mentioned I didn’t get much earthiness, which may be why no. 2 didn’t notice it either. My tastebuds are, I hope, a bit more refined than they were when I wrote the original note 10 years ago….

Golden Moon sample No. 22 of 31. Fate determined Friday would be pu-erh day!

The package says it contains aged Chinese tea from the last century. Which sounds really special and exotic until you consider the last century only ended about 10 years ago. ;-P Still, 10 years is probably older than most tea I’ve tried except for the Celestial Seasonings mystery tea bags I found in the back of the pantry from years and years ago. So this should be interesting.

This is my first non-Samovar loose pu-erh, and I now know that all pu-erh leaves are not tiny and cute. These are fairly big, and chunky. They look like fragments of brown tree bark. They have a mellow, chocolate earth smell.

The tea’s aroma is really yummy, though it doesn’t have the smell I associated with pu- erhs. There’s not even a small amount of leather in this one. It smells sweet and (to me anyway) chocolatey. Like the middle-to-high chocolate notes in fresh baked brownies (just not the dark fudgy ones). The color is medium to dark brown, not as dark as the Palace Pu-erh, not as light as most black teas.

Wow, very tasty. Interestingly, it’s not like the other pu-erhs I’ve had. I really don’t get a lot of earthiness. It’s more like a very dense and flavorful black tea, smooth, sweet, some malt, and a character that verges on chewy and biscuity. Its not so much a taste as it is a connection, but I feel a strong cocoa association, maybe a little of the mocha-java as well.

I’m liking this one quite a bit. Some day when my experience has increased sufficiently I’ll have to get more scientific about my pu erh ratings. For now, I’m giving this a mark commensurate with my enjoyment from this tasting.

Random Selection from Golden Moon Tea Sampler—perhaps #18? I have lost count.

I had read the reviews of this previously and when I opened the package I was initially enchanted by the aroma. At last a Golden Moon Tea sample with some real character—which I have not seen since their wonderful Melon tea. Then I thought of a comment that Rabs had made about how this dry tea smells like Pledge furniture polish—-the thought popped into my head—I had read her review but it seemed like a long time ago.

So there i was with the proverbial mixed emotions: wanting to try a tea that kept oscillating in aroma between a good strong bergamot and Pledge. A sequence of ancient Pledge commercials paraded before my eyes and then led to a vision of that Ty-D-Bowl guy—-a miniature of the actor who played Murray on the Mary Tyler Moore Show—navigating the waters of a toilet on a small raft singing an eerily awful prototype of a raggastan number.

So I had digressed mentally but my nose had ferreted more deeply into the aroma and I was set to enjoy the tea—visions of New Lemon Pledge and Ty-D-Bowl notwithstanding. (The thing about popular culture is that it wraps itself around society including those virtuous people who don’t watch television but yet have somehow learned by magical Osmosis that Cyndi Lauper and Sharon Osbourne are on the Celebrity Apprentice kow-towing to Donald Trump—-and yet there was not one single mention of Britain’s parliamentary elections of yesterday in my local newspaper).

Another digression. The brew was a fairly decent Earl Grey but not one that made me want to sit up and salute. It’s a good Earl Grey but I continue to search for the definitive Earl Grey that I will want to always keep in my cupboard. There are a couple of candidates thus far, but this one just does not quite make it—sort of like the political parties in England—there is no clear winner yet and I will keep on trying Earl Grey teas but I don’t think I will end up with this as my standard of Earl Grey Excellence.

Not at all a bad effort, just not a stunner.

I chose this one today because the moment I’ve been waiting for for three years has come!!! My lavender plant that I raised from seed IS READY TO FLOWER!!!! Yaaay!!!!!!

I wanted to drink this one without milk (I’m at work, plus I thought lavender and milk would be…not so good. I think this is where I screwed up the rose tea and made Rose Milk Lotion – shudder! Anyway!) so I brewed it slightly under boiling and for only 3 minutes.

It’s really nice! The black tea base has no bitterness brewed like this, and the lavender with the bergamot is not overpowering – just a good old fashioned fruit and floral. This is one of those teas that I would probably only want to have every now and again, when I’m in my nostalgic moods. Since this is the first I’ve tasted, I’d like to taste around a little… if you’ve tasted one from another company that you thought was stellar, I’d love to hear your recommendation!

I did a second steep at 5 minutes and it’s very similar to the first. Mmmm! I also think this would be spectacular iced.

Sipdown no. 66 of 2018 (no. 422 total).

Took this to work over the past two weeks. It remains a good solid jasmine green tea. I’d drink it again, though I’ve found some juicier jasmines since I first gave this one a try.

Golden Moon sample No. 21 of 31, chosen at random.

I had a hard day. I just sold my childhood home, which I’d been holding on to since my mom died in the mid-90s, mostly for sentimental reasons. I thought I was ready for this step. Sure beats being a landlord from multiple states away (so my thinking went). Or having it sit empty and having to deal with upkeep from multiple states away (so my thinking went). And it’s in an area that, very fortunately, held its value during the recession and even appreciated some, so no downside there. And the transaction was relatively painless because the lady who was renting it bought it, and so I didn’t have to put it on the market.

But when I had to sit down with the notary and sign the deed, I started to feel really sad. So many memories tied up in that house. We moved into it when I was 5. I’m trying to make myself look at the bright side. At least the buyer wants to live in it and update it, not tear it down and build a McMansion on the little lot. So if I ever find myself in the neighborhood with my kids, I’ll still be able to show them the house mommy grew up in.

But. Stress. And work stress this week too, no time to work out for 2 days. I’m hoping to take a few days off as soon as I get a project done, maybe get a massage. Yeah, that’s what I’ll look forward to, she said.

Anyway, I thought I had a conference call at 7 p.m. tonight but it got postponed, so I actually have a shot of doing a workout. But I really don’t feel like it, so I am hoping a gentle caffeine lift may help motivate me.

I haven’t had jasmine pearls before though I’ve seen pictures of them. The pictures don’t really do them justice. They’re quite charming looking in real life. They look like tiny, variegated aquarium snails. Or miniscule turbans. Or rolled up bits of rattan. They have a strong, sweet, jasmine smell.

The liquor is pale yellow with a hint of green and has a rich jasmine smell. It’s got a lot to it without being artificial or overwhelming. I’d happily wear it as perfume; it smells lovely and fresh. It would make a nice spring/summer eau de toilette.

The taste is very, very sweet and slightly vegetal, with the predominant note, not surprisingly, that of jasmine. The tea has a light body, but I’m not sure I could rightly expect jasmine to be chewy.

By the end of my first steep, the pearls had only partially uncurled. Some of them were starting to look a bit ringletty. The flavor on the second steep, while still light bodied, had more depth. It felt a bit silkier, like it was leaning toward green oolong land. The pearls were pretty much uncurled at this point, except for a few that had a tightly wound bit still at the end of the leaf and looked a little like… sperm! I gave them another run through, believing that there might be more flavor hiding in the curls. There was, though the second steep was tastier. The third was heading toward washed out.

I can’t remember the non-pearl GM jasmine well enough to compare these two. Perhaps it’s my mood and my great need for comfort today, but I have a more positive visceral response to this one than to the other.

Can someone who is more experienced with green teas in general and jasmine green tea in particular educate me on why one would have both jasmine pearls and regular leaf jasmine in one’s cupboard other than for variety in how they look and whatever difference there may be in how any given one tastes vs. another? Is there something else I should be considering? If I had to choose between the two at the moment I’d pick this, but perhaps there’s more to it I should be thinking about?

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

Plucked at random from Golden Moon Sampler Basket
Tasting Note circa #18 or 19

I tried to make this a success. I really did. I try to meet a tea and its demands 100%. I don’t think I can spin gold out of cat food but I do think I will try my hardest to bring out the best in the tea. I had a small sample and therefore only used about 3 ounces of water. The dry tea smelled faintly like one of those very mild soaps that they sell for use with babies. I could not pick up on the ginger at all.

Brewed, the golden tea looked ok but still did not present itself with a discernable aroma. Maybe if I conjure up vegetation in my mind it’s slightly vegetal but that might have been one of my Jedi Mind tricks (the limits of my Jedi Mind tricks are remarkable: pretend that the spinach has a romaine overtone—that sort of thing).

Ultimately, I think that I still prefer big, bold flavors and I like my ginger to be all full of huff and stuff. This is probably my least favorite of the Golden Moon Teas I’ve tested thus far.

The leafs smell like Japanese green tea. I don’t like Japanese green tea. As the tea cools a touch I can smell the buttery quality coming over the green.
Taste… It’s not that strong for sure. I get the usual oolong taste, there is a element of the green sitting over it. So far not bad but nothing special… As the tea cools though, the green comes out stronger.

Second steep is the same as the first for me.
Oolong always grows on me, it starts at the first cup as annoying me this the similarity to green but the other elements always win me over.

I had to put sugar in the tea, it was smoky to the point of a bit of sour. With two level spoons of sugar it is very good. The sweet and the smoke complement each other.

Rating this iced and sweetened. The sweet and smoky go well together. It lacks the BBQ taste of this hot (which i don’t like) but it has the sweet and follow through smoky of a smoked brisket with BBQ sauce.