Golden Moon Tea

Sipdown no. 93 of 2018 (no. 449 total).

On reflection, I am not sure why I rated this as low as I did. I must have been going through a black tea phase where I was making very fine distinctions among teas I considered good/great.

This is a very tasty tea. I found myself looking forward to the last little bit. It has a rich, malty flavor, natural sweetness, and mocha notes as well as honey. I’m bumping the rating.

Golden Moon sample No. 20 of 31, random. The home stretch!

I’m tired. Need to get more sleep than I’ve been getting. I don’t know whether lack of sleep can affect how things taste?

I ask because I had a sort of unusual experience tasting this one. To start with, the dark, chocolate brown dry leaves seemed to me barely to have any smell at all. I got a little sweetness, maybe a teeny tiny chocolate note, but mostly… not much. Neutral, planty earthy smell and not at all strong.

Then I steeped it, and did a little bit of a double take on the aroma. I wondered whether it was just me, or did it smell an awful lot like the aroma of GM’s Nepalese Afternoon? The aroma was definitely sweet. Black tea sweet. As I concentrated on it a bit, I determined that I definitely got a predominantly honey note to the sweetness rather than brown sugar. But at first blush they seemed very similar. In color as well.

In taste, though, they differ. This one hits me with sweetness right away. The first sip was extremely sweet and honeyed, though that may have been primarily in contrast to the taste I had in my mouth from a cup of something else (Tazo Om) half an hour earlier. The second sip, less so, but still can taste the honey. It has a briskness to it, and is more astringent than I remember the Nepalese Afternoon being. Medium to light bodied, I’d say.

Does seem like it would go well with food. Does seem more an afternoon tea than a breakfast one, at least in terms of my personal preferences.

Hmm. Not sure where to place this one. I think on balance I like it not quite as much as the Nepalese Afternoon, and it would be down the pike a bit on my breakfast blend list.

It’s probably one of those that will get at least to the semi-finals as I narrow down the universe of all possible tea to a manageable stash to keep on hand. I will probably order some to try it against a narrower field and see whether it makes it to the quarter finals.

Instead of buying the whole Golden Moon Sampler for $20, I purchased only those teas that I was interested in and saved $11. This was one of those teas. I love vanilla and I love jasmine, so I’d be telling a lie if I said I wasn’t excited about this one.

The smell is intensely vanilla. It’s an intensely creamy vanilla smell, like vanilla bean ice cream or the vanilla extract I use when baking cakes to decorate. The jasmine is there, but only slightly. It is tantalizing my nostrils.

This is wonderful! For a black tea, it is surprisingly light. I should mention that I’m drinking this after it has cooled down significantly; I was making some iced tea for my mother and forgot that this was waiting for me on the table. I actually don’t taste a whole lot of tea in here – it’s mainly just that extremely creamy vanilla with some jasmine on the tail end. There isn’t a whole lot to say about this. It is a very simple tea. Simple, but high quality and soothing.

Sipdown no. 53 of 2018 (no. 409 total).

I’ve been taking this to work for the past couple of weeks as a break from taking green tea to work. It got chosen as it was currently the lowest rated non-herbal in my cupboard. This is pretty deceptive because most of the teas I’ve got in my cupboard don’t have notes yet, and in any case 73 is not a low rating on my scale.

My default, I’ve discovered, is somewhere in the 80s most of the time. I’m working to be a bit more critical than that as I think clumping so many things together sort of defeats the purpose of rating.

Part of the issue I have with this one isn’t really it’s fault. It’s that it’s a white tea, and frankly, white tea doesn’t do a lot for me. If I can get flavor out of it at all, I consider that a plus. I have a lot of white tea, but honestly, I think once I pare down my stash I might have one or two at the most at any given time going forward. That’s how much I don’t get them.

The ginger is what makes this at all interesting to me. It’s a nice ginger flavor. Not too strong, too heavy, or too spicy.

I’ve now been through three steeps of this and it has grown on me sufficiently to be able to answer the question I’d posed to myself. Yes, I could see myself choosing this over an unflavored white. Maybe not all the time, but it could happen. The ginger has a staying power that I think would be really useful for an off-tummy day, and it also seems like a really nice season-shift selection for the time between summer and fall for some reason.

Golden Moon random sample No. 19 of 31. The bad news is it’s not the chai again; the good news is that if it was the chai I would have to wait for another time to drink it given the hour.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think this is the same white tea used in pretty much all of the Golden Moon whites. Looks and smells exactly the same to me, and my guess is still white peony. I can see little pieces of ginger root, but I can’t smell them in the dry leaves. I do smell that same salty/marshy/almost marine smell I’ve described in other Golden Moon white tea notes. The leaves have that mix of twisted/pointy and flat in this one, too.

The liquor is a light golden, and interestingly, I don’t get a lot of ginger aroma. I get more of a sweet, white tea scent. This is probably a good thing. I like ginger just fine, and I even like it in tea, though my tastes tend to run more toward the black tea/bakery flavoring profile. I’ve preferred my ginger in stronger teas with other spices rather than as a single spice in a green tea, for example. Mainly this is because the ginger tends to overpower anything but black tea that is strong enough to stand up to it.

But this reminds me of the GM White Licorice, where the licorice smell wasn’t very strong and the flavor seemed to hit the right note. So I’m hopeful, because I’m more likely to like a ginger flavored tea than a licorice one, and I liked the GM licorice one.

Now. This is interesting. I can definitely taste the ginger. This may be the first time I could taste something in a tea that I couldn’t really smell. Usually, it’s the opposite. But what’s really very nice about it is that it isn’t overpoweringly gingery. There’s a nice balance between the tea and the ginger flavor.

What I’m not sure about is whether I would pick this to drink over a non-flavored white tea, especially since I’m having a hard time figuring out when in my daily routine to drink white tea. I’ll think on it some more. If I don’t order this, that will be the reason — not the tea itself.

I have no opinion at all on rose teas. I’ve never had anything that has tasted of roses, so I don’t know what to expect from the mug that is steaming on the table next to my laptop.

However. I do know that the scent of roses is prone to make me run away, be sick, or cry. Let me explain. We used to have this bottle of rose spray in the bathroom. It was there to cover up the smell in case things got a little crazy in there. So if you opened the bathroom door and the first thing you smelled was roses, you knew to run away, because the scent of something much, much worse wasn’t far behind.

I was also unlucky enough to catch the swine flu towards the end of my senior year of high school (pretty much exactly a year ago). I spent a lot of time being sick in that bathroom, so the whole room smelled like roses for a while. I came to associate that rose smell with having to be sick again.

Lastly, when I graduated high school (again, about a year ago) my parents presented me with a bouquet of roses. We moved immediately after the ceremony, making me leave behind the bedroom I had grown up in, the sanity I was used to living in, and worst of all, the friends I had grown up with. It was a teary day, needless to say. So the scent of roses makes me think of graduation, which was the last time I saw any of my friends.

So. Now that I’m all nice and emotionally exhausted, we can get to the tea. If you’re only interested in reading about the tea, begin here: The tea tastes like a black tea, nothing fancy or special. All the rose really does is hang on to the end of the sip and highlight the astringency of the black base. You can taste rose, but it isn’t very identifiable without the package sitting right next to it. If I didn’t know I was drinking rose tea, I would have thought I was drinking a particularly astringent black tea.

After an outdoor concert, I am completely sunburnt. But right now I am freezing because we just discovered how to fix our thermostat and now I’m sunburnt and living in an icebox of 66 degrees. Time for some golden moon tea!

The color is very brown, and warm looking but there’s not a very distinct smell to it, though I think with all these fluctuating temperatures my sense of smell is not so good at the moment.

Well, it’s not that sweet and considering the name, I was definitely expecting a sweet tea. The flavoring tastes a bit weird. I’m not really tasting any honey … or pear. In fact, it’s almost really bitter and sour tasting. No matter how much I try to taste some flavor theres just none that really stand out to me. I’m thinking that the water wasn’t exactly boiling when I put it in but still, it shouldn’t make this much of a difference!

Ah! there it is. I think it was just a matter of it cooling off a little bit. I definitely got a taste of honey with some pear, but it still doesn’t taste sweet. I feel like I need to put some sugar in this tea or something! Not a bad tea, but every now and then I get this really weird metallic bitter ish taste that makes my teeth feel awful. It’s part yum, part yuck, and part indifferent.

Tried to see if I could get another cup out of this today. That’d be a negatory, it tastes like someone told someone else that they had heard from their brother’s wife’s cousin’s dog what this tea tastes like.

Oh well! I got two massive cups out of it yesterday, both of which I oversteeped, so that’s not that surprising.

Golden Moon Sampler Tea #30
Almost at the end of my Golden Moon sampler! Basically took the entire month to go through it. Which is a pretty good pace, I think.

My mom called right after I set this to steep so it was probably steeping for waaaaay too long, but I don’t think, wonder of wonders, that it did any harm! I have so far been pretty unimpressed with the Golden Moon Oolongs although that may be more of a problem with me than with the teas, but this, THIS is what I think of when I think Oolong. Although very light in color, it has a bold, nutty flavor and a light hint of smokiness and an overall impression of toasted rice. Delicious!

I don’t get much in the way of dates. On the other hand, I don’t eat a hell of a lot of dates, so that is not too surprising. There IS a fruitiness about it though, especially in the aftertaste. There’s a slight acridity which I think comes from the oversteeping, but all in all this is DAMN tasty.

I’m gonna be making a trip to the land of iced oolong in June, so I’m not sure that I want to order more of this since Japan has historically left me feeling a bit oolonged out, but if I WERE going to get Oolong, this would be it.

Edit: Oh wow, I didn’t notice but apparently I hit 100 tasting notes 2 notes ago! Am I spending too much time on tea? (No.)

Golden Moon random sample No. 18 of 31. With the way my luck is going I will draw Kashmiri Chai dead last. ;-)

Dry leaves have a creamy vanilla scent, similar to the creaminess of the Vanilla Mint. An ice creamy sort of vanilla. It’s not as rich, deep or powerful a fragrance out of the box as I recall the Mariage Freres Black Orchid, which is a pretty high standard to live up to. I can see little pieces of vanilla bean among the dark brown leaves.

The aroma is quite nice. I do smell a somewhat alcoholic note, which I suppose could be rum and a sweet underlying black tea smell along with the vanilla which continues to be an ice creamy/cream soda-y vanilla fragrance. I notice there’s a reference to tropical flowers and I am reminded that some tropical flowers do have a vanilla-like fragrance. I think some orchids do. In any case, if this was meant to refer to other tropical floral scents I’m getting a goose egg, though there is vanilla in spades.

Flavor wise, this is a decent vanilla black, but not spectacular. Far better than the Numi decaf, not as good as the Mariage Freres Black Orchid, possibly not even as good as the Jade Teapot Starry Night, even considering the missing stars and all.

It would not be my go-to vanilla, but I’d be happy to accept it were things I like better not available.

I thought that this tea was acceptable but I would not buy it. I have had senchas that are more vegetal (which I like) and more buttery (which I also like). This one did not have a lot of distinguishing characteristics. “Meh” is not a very high accolade, but I want to put it a few rating points below “a’ight” and some point above “hate”. I don’t see any reason why I would invest money in this tea when I’ve tried other, better senchas or flavored greens.

Although I was careful about time and water temperature, I got a bitter taste. It shouldn’t be that difficult to brew even the most delicate tea unless the pay-back is sensational.

I made some cold brewed iced tea with this and the last of my River Shannon (sniff!). I forgot to make simple syrup, so I put a nice squeeze of agave nectar in for a little sweetness.

Delicious!!! I am not crazy about hot Darjeeling teas, but I adore them iced. This one made a very complex fruity and floral brew. Distinctive. I’ve not had a Darjeeling quite like this one. I would actually get a tin of this just for iced tea.

This one is rich and creamy vanilla and mint in just the right amounts. It tastes great hot and iced. I have had this one about 3 times and it truly is a quality tea. Yum!

A delicious tea! You can really taste the vanilla bean and I will say it adds a decadent creaminess to the tea. It almost creates a silkiness to the mint in the tea. Absolute joy. So far both Golden Moon Teas I have tasted have been fabulous. It looks like I will need to purchase more yummy teas.

Golden Moon Sampler Tea #29
And then we all pulled out the white tea at the same time!
So I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know Chrysanthemums were edible. Drinkable. Whatever. And I also totally thought that this was just a straight white tea. Oh well!

So since I didn’t realize that the stuff was edible, I can’t really say that the knowledge that it was in the tea made me happy or disappointed. Intrigued is the furthest I’m willing to go. It WAS kinda neat to see the flower among the tea leaves, but that’s about it.

After drinking the tea, I still don’t really have an opinion. If the mums are providing some sort of extra dimension to the white tea taste than I either don’t have the required white tea baseline to be able to differentiate or just did not get enough of them in my sample to judge. This tastes basically like white tea, very light, kind of reminiscent of hay. There’s a slight bite and a sweetness in the aftertaste that may or may not be the mums, it’s a little reminiscent of chamomile maybe. As the water cools the chamomile note starts getting stronger. Interesting.

I can’t say that I’m that enamored of straight white tea, and as far as chamomile goes, for one thing there is my regrettable association and subsequent nausea, but aside from that I prefer it in foxtrot or chacha. So I’m pretty meh on this tea.

Golden Moon Tea Sampler #17 or thereabouts selected at random

I think that this is a fundamentally excellent tea. I did indeed get the orange/date aroma. It drinks up as a bit woodsy and fruity.

It’s something to consider for a full purchase but right now I’m a bit ambivalent. I only used a 1/4 cup of water—two ounces—because I had such a small sample. I’ll report back if a second infusion provides any great insight.

SECOND infusion: Not much joy here. As Randy Jackson says, “It’s a’ight”.

Golden Moon sample No. 17 of 31. Still no Kashmiri Chai. Sigh. And I’ve not been looking forward to this one as I have recently discovered I don’t care for the way dried chrysanthemums smell to the point where it sets my stomach on edge. I have also discovered that I am able to drink the plain chrysanthemum and enjoy it reasonably well (though I wouldn’t buy it after the sample is gone), as long as I don’t allow myself to smell the dry leaves, or to inhale the aroma of the tea too deeply while I’m drinking. The steeped aroma is just a shadow of the dry, so it’s not quite so problematic for me.

In any case, after reading Rabs’ note on this I realized for the first time this actually did have chrysanthemum in it so I was a little worried about trying it. Fortunately, I do not have the stomach-driven aversion to the scent of the dry leaves here, perhaps because there are only two flowers in the sample. Or perhaps because the salty/marshy note to the white tea that I noticed with the snow buds is present here as well and it overpowers any smell the chrysanthemums might contribute. Or it could even be that this is a different kind of chrysanthemum. It is white, where the others were purple.

In any case, no problem on the smell front. The dry leaves are interesting in that they have some flat, open leaves in them. Almost as many are flat and open as are twisty-pointed. I am not well versed enough to know what kind of tea this is but if I was guessing I’d guess white peony as it is fairly dark in color and seems to contain mostly leaves.

The sample wasn’t big enough to make a full cup, so I’m making about 2/3 of a cup. It makes a pale yellow liquor with a sweet, delicate, lightly floral aroma. No problem here either — either the flowers smell different or there aren’t enough to contribute to the aroma in a significant way.

Tastes like… chicken! Not really. I just have always wanted to say that in a tasting note and just finished having some broiled chicken breast for lunch and was wondering how that would affect the taste if at all.

In reality, it doesn’t taste anything like chicken. It does taste a fair amount like the tea base for the Numi white bagged teas that I was writing about around this time last week, only not as heavy and fresher. It’s sweet and slightly green/floral, with an interesting almost black tea note to it.

At least in my experience, White Tea is an apt descriptor here as I don’t really get any chrysanthemum flavor, unless it’s an intangible contributor to the overall sweetness of the tea. But from my perspective, not getting the chrysanthemum is a really good thing.

I’d probably just as soon try it straight, though. I do worry that in a full tin, the chrysanthemums would be harder to avoid and perhaps have a different effect than I experienced here. That’s enough to make me not want to take a chance on buying more of this.

Sipdown no. 49 of 2018 (no. 405 total).

I’ve been drinking this at work for the past few weeks, hoping that I would be able to bump the rating up. I’m a huge fan of jasmine green tea, and I generally expect to adore pretty much any that I have.

Alas, I think the rating on this one is just where it ought to be. It’s a good tea, but it didn’t blow me away.

I remember when I first got my Golden Moon sample basket and how much fun I had trying all the teas. They do have some excellent ones, this one just doesn’t quite make it to excellent.

Golden Moon sample No. 16 of 31. Selected randomly. I was sort of hoping for the Kashmiri Chai, but this was what came out.

I have some, but not a lot, of experience with jasmine tea. Most of my experience is with teas that don’t claim to be exemplars of the genre. So I was really pleased with how the dry leaves smelled when I opened up the sample packet. The jasmine provides a rich and very fresh floral scent. There is a lot of jasmine growing in my neighborhood and on cool spring evenings, it smells wonderful. This strikes me as very similar in fragrance. The tea smells quite nice too. Quietly herbaceous and a little earthy. It is darker than I’d thought it would be, not very green in color — more toward the browner side.

The tea is a dusky, light yellow, and it smells lovely. It’s pretty much only jasmine I’m smelling. Warmed and diffused by the water, the aroma smells even fresher than it did before.

Though I know it isn’t the best descriptor, the adjective that comes to mind upon tasting this is “pretty.” The tea is not distracting, nor is it absent. I am going to try steeping at 2 minutes and see if it becomes more present. It has a sweet, floral flavor, with a very slight vegetal note.

It seems to me a solid jasmine tea in my limited experience, but I had hoped for more green tea flavor to show through.

I looked back at how I rated the Numi jasmine which I think is the only other non-flavored jasmine I’ve rated, and which isn’t as nice at this. I gave it a 71, which is pretty high on my scale. Rather than bump this one up significantly higher, I’m choosing to bump the Numi down a bit. The Golden Moon is tastier and tastes higher quality to me, but as I’m fairly new to jasmine green tea, I am not yet sure it is the best example of its kind. So I’m making it the de facto standard “very good” for now, to be revisited as my experience grows.

Chrysanthemum! ::shakes fist in the air::

I actually didn’t read the sample packet on this one until I’d poured the leaves into the pot and noticed a single white flower. I was somewhat confused since I thought that something called “White Tea” would contain just white tea. Then I read the packet. I’m not a big chrysanthemum fan.

I won’t go into details because I’m having a horrible time figuring out how on earth to describe it. I just feel like a perfectly good white tea was spoiled by one singular flower. It just sort of added an unpleasant taste for me. I think that what it reminds me of is when I was a child I loved dandelions so much that I tried eating one. I’m not gonna try that again to compare, but I just remember that bitter plant taste and being so disappointed.

I must admit that I did do two steeps. I don’t hate it, but it’s something I’d never purchase. M

Sampler Pulled out at random—perhaps #15

I loved the aroma of the dry leaves: it was sweet as if the tea leaved had been infused with honey (although there was not physical evidence of that). It’s a very nice tea; it’s a better than nice tea. But it did not establish a very strong identity with me. I would certainly drink it—it’s a good black tea. But I did not make a note to purchase it. I would, however, recommend that people give this a serious test or consider ordering a sample if you are placing an order with Golden Moon.

Sipdown no. 7 of 2020 (no. 602 total).

We drank the last of this as a cold brew and it made a good one. It has a rather intense tea essence. Like Nestea but obviously better. But that makes it a really excellent iced tea.

Golden Moon sample No. 15 of 31. About halfway through my random grab bag and loving every minute of it! Today I have a sick kid home from school with me, and had a hectic working morning, so for my lunch break I wanted something distracting and, hopefully, soothing and stimulating at the same time. Fortunately, yesterday after the caramel oolong, I hooked this tea on my random line.

The leaves on this one are really pretty. Some are very dark and brown; some are lighter and green; and some are silvery white. It’s identified as an organic black, though, so these colorful variations are all the more interesting and even a little puzzling. They smell to me like wood, and somewhere between the wood of a living tree and that of an unfinished board. It’s a dark, sweet scent, with a roasty/toasty tang.

V. pretty red/gold/brown clear liquor. The aroma is of vanilla and brown sugar with a woody undertone.

Wow. It tastes not a lot like it smells, but I like it. The note that the taste and smell have in common is wood. I find the taste hard to describe in comparison to other blacks. It’s almost easier to describe what it isn’t than what it is.

It’s not sweet except through the finish where I can taste some maltiness. I don’t get vanilla taste at all, nor do I get a strong floral taste. It’s like a super concentrated version of a high grade “tea-flavored” black tea. It’s super concentrated, without being overly strong or bitter. Oddly, despite its strong flavor, it doesn’t seem full-bodied so much as medium-bodied. But I am noticing that I am finding the Golden Moon blacks I’ve tasted medium-bodied in comparison to blacks from other companies. I also don’t think I’d call it smooth so much as “brisk.” Though it isn’t overly drying either.

I like it well enough to drink it as a staple black, I think, at least until I hone my tastes in black tea a bit more.