Golden Moon Tea
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The leaves are long and definitely silver tipped, very pretty presentation. The fragrance of the leaves is really very simple: oolong tea. I brewed this hot, with no sugar for only three minutes (the package said five, but I felt it might be too much). The flavor is very clean: oolong tea, with a hint of orange and chestnut and date, then a slight cedar aftertaste. I wish that the cedar and date flavors were a little stronger, but I might achieve that with a longer brew. I drank most of the tea hot, but forgot about the end of my cup and wound up enjoying it, very much so I might add, cold.
Very good, will try steeping for longer or maybe adding some sugar to try and boost the flavors a little.
Preparation
Up at 1am! This schedule thing is not correcting itself, but…
This is still a good morning. I’m jamming out to Passion Pit, I’ve got an idea for a book, and a pre-‘breakfast’ cup of this that seems to have turned into something slightly sweeter on the tip of the tongue than I expected, but not so sweet that it’s the coconut pouchong, which sounded like a bit too much…more a nutty sweet that seems just right for whetting the appetite and helping me feel better disposed toward the idea of cooking eggs and bacon after all.
PS: I don’t think my cats like the Passion Pit. They do not seem to like it when I dance in the kitchen. They especially do not like it when I pick them up to dance with me. Oh well. At least one of us is having a good morning!
Preparation
I’m brewing this a little bit hotter than I was last yesterday, but it isn’t suffering in the least. I’ve been experimenting with temperatures for this and for the coconut pouchong in the hopes that I can figure out what produces the best balance of steep flavor and longevity through multiple steeps. Not quite finished doing that, but I am drinking an awful lot of both of them lately.
Yesterday I think I must’ve had approximately a bucket of this while I was sitting and writing, which is interesting — of the teas I ordered when I placed my Full Size Order from Golden Moon, this was the one I was most ambivalent about. The aroma of the steeping brew is still cause for an arch of the eyebrow; it’s pungent, woody, musky and floral all at once. My original note still stands — every flavor they describe on the label is immediately discernible in the final brew. The leaves — which are gorgeous, by the way, varying in color from black to a rich chocolate brown with silvery tips — produce what strikes me as being a rather complex cup of tea. In fact, sipping on it, it seems completely bizarre to me that this tea is unflavored…the uniqueness of the taste and the very distinctive character that it has for me is the source of some small amazement. Teas like this remind me to be astonished that all ‘tea’ — as far as white, green, oolong, pu-erh, and black — is derived from the same exact species of plant.
Giving this a big rating bump retroactively. Yesterday’s binge proved it well-earned.
Preparation
This is the first time I can remember that the flavors described on a tea have represented almost perfectly the flavors that I get when I sip it. I know that the gap between what’s suggested and what I sense comes, probably most of the time, from my uneducated palate…and let’s face it, I love, love, love spicy food, and am pretty unwilling to give it up to create a palate that’s fine-tuned, the way food tasters do.
I haven’t had even a moment’s trouble with this one. Everything they describe is there. The hardest thing for me to locate was the orange blossom, but it IS there…and that much to my delight; having lived in Florida (and even spent some time in working groves, long story), that smell is among my favorites of all time. I had some guacamole earlier, and I suspect that the garlic and onion in the guac sort of battered my taste buds, and that the floral note would be easier to pick out than the nutty note (rather than vice versa) had I not been snacking a little while ago.
The more oolong I have, the more I love it. So many flavors. So full-bodied. This one is pretty tasty.
Preparation
I really liked this one as well! There was such a yummy, peach and date flavor to it, with nice floral notes. The tasting notes here are really great, and if I knew orange blossom a bit more, I’m sure I’d be able to pick it out!
Hopefully the more oolong I have, the more a fan of it I’ll become. Don’t make the other oolong in the sampler with boiling water! I learned that the hard way.
No notes yet.
Preparation
About the ingenuiTea teapot. I had this problem too until I took the filter and scratched up the sides with a knife (or scissors). It works! And I haven’t had the “filter floating away” problem since.
For me, this tea is fresh bread. The kind of bread that is dense, hints of yeasty, is almost sticky in the middle and has little bits of chopped nuts and seeds in it? Yeah, that kind of bread. It’s flavorful and smooth but with good texture though not quite chewy – it is an Irish Breakfast and it tastes like it, but it’s a classy, well-rounded, full-flavored Irish Breakfast.
Yep, quite glad I got a tin of this one. Even though it is making me crave fresh bread. Fortunately, I’ve got to run to the store today so I bet I can dig something up.
Preparation
I was really surprised to see so many gold leaves in this tea. Sure, they look a little dry but it’s still neatly unusual. I didn’t smell the leaves really but I sure can smell the tea – even from across the kitchen! It smells pretty fruity, actually, with a chaser of malty cardboard. I’m trying it straight first off to see how that goes, but I do appreciate a good stout blend that can handle sugar and milk.
This is very smooth. And pretty much like it smells. A deep, fruity taste (makes me think of dark berries – particularly cherries) followed by a solid bread-y, bake-y taste (also dark – more like wheat or rye bread than white). For the second half of my cup, I added a little milk and sugar. Some of the nuances are smoothed over – the bread-y is just bread-y now, not a dark bread-y – but it stands up to the addition nicely. Very smooth, no rough edges but a solid core of upright, stout tea-ness with faint fruity on the front and fresh-baked bread-y on the end.
It’s not quite a drag-me-into-the-morning-kicking-and-screaming type tea (Adagio’s Irish Breakfast is a bit more aggressive in that manner) but the nuances and depth of flavor make it a really classy cup, especially for an Irish Breakfast.
Preparation
Er, kept thinking. Haha, sometimes my fingers think they know better than I do what I want to type. >:|
@teaplz – It is a good cup! Probably the least in-your-face Irish I’ve had but I have a feeling that my hands might be shaking just a little after a huge morning-sized cup!
@sophistre – Haha – I totally understand! Glad we are not insane! (Or if we are the insanity is easily spread via the internet).
This tea reminds me of the Golden Spring from Adagio that I like so much, with a slightly darker, slightly less savory flavor profile, but definitely more fruit, and a lot of depth to the fruit flavors you can detect. It has a lovely aroma. In terms of taste the ‘ripe cherry’ quality they tout is not difficult to find at all. Neither is the prune, though there isn’t as much here of that flavor as I’ve noticed in other blacks, perhaps because the malt quotient here is slightly less. There’s something else here in the flavor that I’m trying to identify and having a difficult time placing a name too. It isn’t bread…oh, what is it? It drives me a little bit nuts when I can’t place a subtle flavor with its analogue! Something roasty.
I like it quite a bit. There’s enough savory sweetness to the cup that I could easily drink this all of the time. In fact, if I hadn’t ordered quite a bit of Golden Spring, I would probably be content to consider making this my default Easy Drinking Black for a while.
Preparation
Bready and roasty? I might have to try this one, even though Irish Breakfast teas are often too harsh for me.
I think I might modify ‘roasty’ to ‘bake-y’, after discovering that Auggy found the same note in her cup that I did. It’s definitely behind the fruit, but it kept popping up as I worked through it…subtle enough to make me wonder if I was going crazy, but there! Everybody has been saying it’s an exceptionally mild Irish Breakfast (I don’t have much experience with Irish Breakfast generally, so I’m taking them at their word), so you might find it a good option. :)
Very decent brew. Had the full sample pouch brewed hot with a pinch of German Rock Sugar for 5 minutes. The aroma is definitely tea, so I added milk because this is usually how I have breakfast blends. The flavor is good, a little malty with a touch of fruit flavoring.
Overall, good, I enjoyed it very much.
Preparation
This has a really good tea base, not bitter at all to me. The ginger is very faint but becomes more prominent as the tea cools. I woul ddefinitely welcome this as a regular addition to my cupboard.
I’d like a little more ginger, but knowing that the ginger is faint, I would probably drink it on days I didn’t want something really spicey.
I’m not sure how I feel about this one, which is in all probability unsurprising as I have a long, long history of disliking licorice. I suspect that this probably deserves a much better rating than I’m giving it, in fact, but I’m having trouble hopping over the mental hurdle of ‘oh no, licorice’.
I was more worried before I opened the packet than I was afterward, actually. The smell wasn’t so strong that it punched me in the face, but it was still strong enough to leave me wondering why I was going to pour hot water on top of it at all. I sort of dumped the entire packet into my glass infuser cup, and watching it brew I realized that there are a ton of twigs in this blend. It’s not a very pretty blend at all, and there are more than a few fannings drifting around the bottom of my cup right now. Assuming that’s the non-tea stuff, though.
I was pretty gratified to find that the tea, once brewed, stayed soft and unassuming on the licorice front. The taste of the white tea — which brews to a pretty silvery-gold — reminds me of the silver needle I have from Adagio. Every sip has a little bit of licorice, but it’s…very mellow, and reminds me more of the background note of licorice you can sometimes get from bagged ‘medicinal’ teas, like the Yogi teas, for instance…it’s drinkable even for someone who viscerally rejects the strong scent of licorice. It does create a sort of weird feeling on my tongue and soft palate, though; not numbness, per se, and not a coolness like mint, but something that makes me think of both of those things on a much smaller scale.
I confess that I’m sort of baffled as to where to rate this. The rating should probably be considered very soft.
Sadly, there’s not any better place for this, so I’m just going to write about it here.
This cup is so win: http://www.teavana.com/Tea-Products/Tea-Cups-Mugs/Glass-Tea-Cups/Yves-Glass-Tea-Infuser-Mug.axd
There are only two points of potential annoyance: the first is that stuff sometimes gets stuck in the little glass vents. I find that a toothbrush and about a second-and-a-half of effort are enough to take care of that…I never spend any time standing around struggling to get them cleared out. The second is that occasionally you have to pause your pour to allow the water to vent through when the tea is small enough to clump against said vents, but again…10 extra seconds doesn’t really bother me. Your mileage may vary. I use this thing constantly. I definitely use it more often than my iron teapot; almost every cup of tea I make is a new flavor, so I feel like there’s less fussing, and it means I get to see the tea brew…and they get nearly the whole cup to unfurl in. The lid that comes with it flips over to make a pretty good infuser-saucer between steeps. Plus, it’s all glass, so it doesn’t retain any smells or flavors and I don’t have to worry about chemicals leeching out of plastic bits into my hot water. Not a bad deal for 15 bucks. I like it so much that I ordered two more.
True, it ain’t no sorapot (where the heck is my sorapot, btw? It still hasn’t come in!), but for 16 oz. of tea brewed for a steep-voyeurist and a minimum of effort it’s a good choice.
Preparation
Finum stuff is pretty good. The gold mesh is great. The only thing I don’t dig about it is the plastic, with all of this muttering about hot water leeching BPA out of plastics and into the liquids (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080130092108.htm). This is one of those issues that’s pretty inconclusive overall, but nevertheless I’ve gotten to where I’m trying to get around heating plastic near my consumables (no more microwaving tupperware for sure!).
Crappy weather, check.
Weekend inside, check.
Too much sugar consumed already in the form of homemade hot chocolate, check.
Time for some campfire tea (I think I saw someone else call it ‘lumberjack tea’ at some point — Robert, maybe? — and it made me snicker).
I definitely prefer the sweetness in this to the extremely acrid Samovar version, though I think the Samovar lapstang souchong is better with milk or creamer. Either way…this is the closest I can get to the scent of pine logs full of sweet sap burning in a woodstove in my 18th floor apartment.
(And you know…it actually goes pretty well with spending time revisiting Orzammar…okay, maybe that’s an overdose of nerd even for me.)
Well…technically I’m on the Cambridge side of the river, but only just. I love my new place. I lived in a second-story apartment in Fenway for a while, and definitely spent my fair share of time in the ‘old building’ trenches…my whole electrical system blew after I moved into that one! >.< Plus the mice…and the Sox fans…and the paper-thin walls…
So, yeah. Sometimes I miss having a yard or a porch or something, but…overall? No complaints. I’ve got eight years on you according to your profile notes, though, so you’ve got time to poke around and find that perfect place. ;)
So…RELIEVED.
I was so afraid that brewing this was going to make my house smell like cigarette ashes. I don’t smoke. I can’t stand the smell of it. More than that, I’m actually allergic to nicotine, so it weirds me out on a totally different level than I think just finding the smell unpleasant would weird me out. Thank HEAVENS that isn’t what this brewing produced. To me, this is campfire. Campfire and the pungent, tart scent and flavor of pine sap. I don’t have any trouble whatsoever locating the pine in this, which is…really quite the unusual sensory experience. It’s a completely independent flavor from the smoke. I can even taste the tea after I swallow each sip.
This is another one of those teas that brings to mind instantaneous memories for me, all of them connected to cabins and wood stoves, most of these enjoyed alongside a feeling of utter boneless exhaustion at the tail end of long day of snowboarding. It makes me think offhandedly of the trips I took to Mesa Verde when I was living in Colorado; some of the old Anasazi cliff-dwelling areas still have fire pits that seem as though they’re going to be stained forever with this sort of scent, where the red rocks have been blackened for all time.
I didn’t expect to like this, but I hoped that I would. I definitely do. I don’t know how much of it I would find myself wanting, but I could easily see myself adding this to my order. It’s so…cozy. So curl-up-on-a-futon-in-front-of-a-fire cozy.
Now that I’m getting halfway through the mug and it’s cooling slightly, it’s becoming surprisingly sweet on the finish! I really didn’t expect that. I thought I was going to have to add milk and sugar to this at the very least, and I haven’t added either, because I’ve been too interested in the flavors to risk covering them up. That’s a good sign.
Yeah. Yummy. Quite believably not for everyone, but I think most tea-ites recognize that lapsang souchong is a love it or hate it affair. I can’t even say that I like it broadly yet; for all I know I might just like this one…but I do like this one. Hallelujah.
Preparation
Everybody’s palate is a little different. It’s definitely not a subtle cup. Maybe you’d dig on the Russian caravan tea? That’s like…lapsang, keemun, and…one other tea, isn’t it? …Now I’m not sure. I wish like heck that Andrews & Dunham accepted AmEx. x.x I’m really interested in trying their Caravan from series 3.
No notes yet.
Preparation
Jillian- L-theanine is my drug of choice. I’m REALLY picky about my chais (no licorice, no fennel, no anis, chili/cayenne a must, and perfect spice/tea ratio)… so when I find the ONE… that has chocolate in it at that, I want everyone to be as giddy as I am! Seriously, the 1st time I tried it, I did get a buzz lol.
The leaves smell good, and my husband commented on how good my tea smelled when he came into the kitchen. I tasted it straight first and it was not at all bitter, but was a sort of assertive tasting tea. With a touch of soy cream and sweetener, it was delicious. Very nice with a blueberry scone from the grocery store bakery.
Chai remains one of the most delicious parts of my morning routine. I had wanted to save the chai that came in my sampler order for a moment when I wouldn’t just be relying on it to function properly, but I’m still wrestling with my sleep schedule, and a premature waking-up at 3am this morning necessitated breaking from that plan for the sake of something soothing and bracing at the same time.
Cardamom is the star in this blend. Opening the packet to take a sniff it was the first spice that coasted out to meet my nose, and a glance inside explained why: there were two fat cardamom pods sitting right on the top. Paired with milk and made into a latte, it immediately put me in mind of various Indian desserts. Cloves are the second note, with cinnamon trailing a distant third. The tea, needless to say, is little more than a backdrop for so many forceful flavors…which is alright, in a latte. I’m not certain I would enjoy this as a straight tea, but then I’m not certain about that when it comes to virtually any chai.
It’s good. Basic. Probably very forgiving of being blended with other things. Cozy. It’s doing what I needed it to do this morning.
Preparation
I chose this as my last tea of a stressful work day, and I’m really glad I did. I’m not normally a big fan of jasmine tea and would not have ever thought to pair it with vanilla, but the smell of the leaves intrigued me enough to try it. It is a bit like drinking warm cream soda (albeit less sweet), and the aroma is superbly relaxing. It brews up very smooth and while I do taste more vanilla than jasmine, the vanilla tastes very natural and pleasant. I could see drinking this as a late afternoon tea very often.
Preparation
To me, the very idea of a rose tea is slightly strange, and yet I really don’t have any good reasons for why that should be so. I don’t eat rose petals, therefore I shouldn’t be drinking them in liquid form, perhaps? Even that reason doesn’t hold up, ultimately; some of my favorite black teas are my favorites because they remind me of hay in a hot barn. It isn’t as though I’ve ever sat down to have a big heaping helping of alfalfa.
Anyway, the scent is delightfully, definitely ‘rose’. That does not change over the course of the brewing. It still struck me as strange. Like…sipping on potpourri or those little sachets of dried roses that mothers and grandmothers seem to like tucking away in various drawers of clothing, irrevoccably tying the scent of dried rose petals to the little private and forgotten places within spaces belonging to the older women in my life. (And this is not wholly true; I think my mother has preferred lavender and cedar over time, but I smell the aroma of roses emanating from this cup and my memory still jingles to the tune of sachets and drawers).
I suppose I had forgotten about Turkish delight. One sip and I remember; that beautiful pink jelly that I seem to only ever eat dressed in chocolate, wrapped in shiny pink wrappers and made by Fry’s (though I can’t for the life of me remember ever eating anything else made by that company). The quality of the rose flavor is approximate, occasionally providing a flash of something sweet on the parting of the sip. I have a very minor astringency in the back of my throat, but it’s pretty mild.
Definitely not a tea that I see myself craving, but I wouldn’t send it back to the kitchen, either. If rose tickles your fancy or you happen to be a rabid fan of Turkish delight, I suppose this might be right up your alley.
Preparation
…my mum used lavender.
I wrote a review of Harrod’s rose tea. Maybe you want to check that out and compare it with what your impressions were…I felt quite strange in the beginning too…but, oh boy…once you drink it…!!!
@wombatgirl: I’m guessing this is perfect for you, then. Cooking with rose tea isn’t something I’d considered.
@Robert: That sounds absolutely gorgeous! If wombatgirl’s comment hadn’t made me curious about using this stuff for cooking, this certainly would’ve done the trick.
@Shanti: Strangely, I think the first place that I ever recall hearing about Turkish delight was…in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. It’s what the queen feeds the one brother to bribe him over to the dark side, and now I suppose I can see why it worked.
@Keemun: I really enjoy Turkish delight, so I suspect the strangeness is really a mental bias more than anything. I did finish my cup! I read your review and laughed a little…I tried to avoid using the phrase ‘grandma tea’ in mine, but that’s definitely part of the block, I think…liquid-grandmother-memory, so strange! I’d be curious to try Harrod’s, it sounds more subtle and maybe more to my tastes? Then again, I’d probably be curious to try this one iced, too.
…with a pastry topped off with a blip of icing and a sugar-dusted rose petal!
Mmm. Mint. Creamy mint. I am seriously going to keep the package around just so I can sniff at it. The mint feels so good in my nose. Mint is good. Not sure on the water temp (go brewing at work!) but I’m guessing around 195-ish. I let it cool for a minute or two before putting the leaves in. While I waited, I sniffed the package.
I also studied the dry leaves while I waited and kind of wish I hadn’t. The Gunpowder looks like mouse droppings. I feel like there has been a mouse wandering through my leaves. It’s bringing up bad memories of mouse droppings on my desk and a no-kill trap being chewed open and the forced use of a less-than-no-kill trap. Let’s just brew this up and forget all about mice.
Sadly, all brewed up this tea doesn’t smell as friendly to my sinuses as the leaf did. It’s sort of musty with a tinge of mint. As it cools a bit I get more mint and less musty. Maybe a hint of vanilla.
Sipping it tastes like a milder version of the 50/50 blend I do of Adagio’s spearmint herbal and cream-flavored black teas. I was going to say blander but it’s not. I think it’s got a bit more depth to the flavor. It’s actually nice but not what I was expecting based on the strong smell in the package. I get the vanilla most as I inhale while taking a sip and then there is a bit of mint-with-solidity-which-I’m-assuming-is-tea taste and then the whoosh of mint after I swallow.
This is nice and accomplishes what it sets out to do (be a creamy mint tea) but ultimately, I just don’t find it all that impressive.
Preparation
I’m with you on the unfortunate appearance of gunpowder … you should SEE the faces at work when I spill a few leaves on the counter when filling a tea bag and pick them up and drop them in my cup ….
@gmathis—That’s funny!!
I still remember the one time we had a mouse. I was in university housing, and they put down poison so the droppings were a sort of teal green. Someone left out an empty bag of potatoe chips, the rodent crawled in, the bag tipped, and he couldn’t get out!! Worked much better than the glue traps which were totally ignored.
I chose this tea to be my reward for staying on track with this Couch to 5k program, whee. I wanted something sweet. I may have to go and paw through the other samples for more sweet teas after this. As for this one?
Fruity!
Seriously, where am I getting that from? Of all of the things that I expected when I lifted my steeped cup of light, yellow-amber, canary-colored tea up to my nose, fruit was seriously not on the list. And yet, that’s sort of what it smells like, to me — like someone caramelized some sugar and added it to some kind of fruit. My cup is still pretty hot. Maybe that’s going to lessen as I sit here and sip on it. I’m not even sure how to describe what kind of fruit I’m smelling. The more I sit and sniff, the more I think it’s reminding me of the bananas-in-bananas-foster smell…which I guess makes sense, given all of the ingredients in a bananas foster and the sauce…all of that hot sugar. In fact, now that I’ve said that, ‘bananas foster’ is definitely sticking around.
It’s not a very punchy flavor in the cup. Not nearly the strength of the coconut pouchong. I don’t know if I’m pleased or disappointed by that. I’m also not sure that I know enough about oolongs yet to properly evaluate the one they used here; all I know is that it isn’t the kind of oolong that makes me salivate from the rich, nutty, buttery smell. This is merely an echo of that flavor profile, a ghostly reference to those stronger qualities, lacking the brothy fullness in the mouth.
There is a temperature somewhere between ‘just shy of boiling’ and ‘tepid’ when the cup is hot but no longer needs as much caution in the sipping, and I’m starting to believe that this magical temperature window is where amazing things happen to the flavor of certain teas. Since hitting that mark, the tea seems to better represent the scent it throws off. It’s still not nearly as intense, but it’s stronger. Somehow I feel as though a little bit of sweetener in here to bring the sweetness you can smell up to the level of the sweetness your tongue gets might help to round out and smooth the flavor. It doesn’t need the sugar, but it might make the sweet-tooth itch the cup aims to scratch a little bit easier to satisfy.
Not a bad tea. Pretty drinkable. Not sure I can see myself craving it, though, so I probably won’t buy any, but it was interesting to try.
Preparation
No. The only GM tea I’ve tried is Moroccan Mint. I have yet to have the room or cupboard space for the entire sampler.
Reading the reviews about this had me pretty excited to try it, despite my trepidation — the last pear-flavored tea I tried was Teavana’s white pear tea, and it sort of chased me off.
I think the strong smell coming out of the brewed cup was a little bit frightening. It was cloying and heavy and dark, more like honey-stewed fruit than fresh pear. The taste is better than that, thankfully; it reminds me of the flavor of those straw-like plastic tubes of honey you can buy at certain candy stores, combined with an obvious pear flavor. That shouldn’t really be too daunting, but somehow it is. I’ll finish the cup, but I can’t picture myself craving this, out of all of the teas that I could select.
I do like pears and I certainly love honey, but maybe the pair of them together and hot are just not my bag of tea, so to speak. Maybe it’s just ‘hot pear’ that gets overwhelming. This one might redeem itself for me over ice, where the perfumey honey-sweetness is more expected. In fact, I’m guessing that’s almost true for a certainty, as the more the cup cools the sweeter the flavor gets, balancing out the stewed-fruit taste to replace it with a more alluring sugary aftertaste. I’m curious enough that I might try it that way. Maybe I should try Teavana’s white pear that way, too, since I haven’t even touched the stuff since that first ill-fated cup.
Preparation
It’s alright. It’s very basic. It is rather broken, and a lot of small slivers wanted to escape my glass infuser and get into my cup. The actual tea is greenish-yellow and fairly light. I’m not having as much trouble getting flavor out of this as some other people did, but what I’m getting is basic green tea. It smells better than it delivers — the same problem I had with Adagio’s, honestly. It smells like green veggies cooked in butter, and it tastes like the kind of green tea I could get literally anywhere, without quality control.
In short, it’s not undrinkable but it’s not exciting.
Edit: The more it cooled, the more astringent it became. I don’t know whether to blame this on the pieces that escaped into the cup and were languishing on the bottom or the tea itself, but either way…not so appetizing.