Verdant Tea (Special)

Thanks for the sample Dennis!

This is a bit of an odd bird to me. A lot more vegetal than other young shengs I’ve experienced. Light spiciness/herbaciousnes in early steeps. Extremely mild bitterness, and a tiny bit of sweetness but not much. Really interesting and different!

Glad I got to try it :)

First tasting note? Ah, so much pressure!
I wasn’t expecting to like this tea as much as I did. It smelled like hippie perfume. Nothing says yummy like drinking a bottle of essential oils!
No, but seriously. That scent combined with the slightly sweet and smoky black tea like a charm. It wasn’t soapy or incense-y. I say give it a try if you can!

In depth-ish review here:
http://sororiteasisters.com/2015/04/18/nurture-4-black-tea-verdant-tea/

Random chance sample from Dinosara. I’m a fan of mint, so I thought I would give it a shot.
The dry leaves are very fluffy, so I chose two (actual) teaspoons for my 8 oz up at home. The smell of the brewed tea contains definite mint an rose notes, but also something…. like a light meat flavor? The leaves smell very faintly like tuna! Not fishy tuna, either, more oily, meaty tuna! So bizarre… Luckily that flavor doesn’t translate into the brew. There is a faint minty tingle at the end of the sip, but I think it just contributes to the slight sweetness of the sarsaparilla and rose flavors. The rose really saves this tea, it makes it a nice, complicated cup; otherwise I think it would be too muddy.
I think the cardamom is giving me that meaty undertone. In overall profile, this tea is more sweet than savory, though. It almost reminds me of a good, floral soda (that I think has a touch of sarsaparilla flavor in it) from Kentucky called Ale81. Definitely intriguing.
I added a touch of sugar to see what it would do, and WOW did it bump up the sarsaparilla/floral soda analogy! Thankfully, the sugar forced the meatiness out of the flavor profile, as well. Now I’m really enjoying this cup with some sugar!
Unfortunately, if I gulp it too quickly all I get is the muddiness of the mint… This is definitely a sipping tea.

Backlog (from this past week). Ohhhhhh dear. This was not pleasant at all. From the moment I opened the bag, something smelled really off and really terrible. Basically, it smelled like the inside of one of my travel mugs when something has gone bad in it. YUCK. Up close, and once steeped, it smelled like that smell mixed with… smoked meat?! Flavourwise it actually wasn’t too terrible (herbaceous, pu’erh, blah blah), but I just couldn’t get over the smell, which starting making me nauseous while at my desk. Won’t be drinking more of this one, sadly.

I haven’t had the opportunity to try a jin jun mei before, so I grabbed a bit of this one with my Verdant order. It looks like a dian hong, and truthfully, it tastes like a dian hong. Sweet, yammy, smooth, maybe a bit of caramel, but not really distinct. Not really sure why there’s such a hype and steeper price for this kind of tea.

I’ve had this one for a long time lol
Anyways it’s still pretty tasty :)
I love dandelion alot which is probably why I enjoy this one, nice yummy cinnamon notes too, I can’t taste the yabao inthis blend but hey it’s a year old and still pretty damn good.

I received this from the Verdant Blend Club for April, and this is also available on their website. There is a lot going on in this tea due to the many ingredients, but the sweetness from the Laoshan Black and licorice root are ever-present, with the herb flavors (from the rosemary, thyme, and oregano) coming through more toward the middle-end. The typical chocolaty notes from the Laoshan black tend to meld very well with everything, and there are some very subtle fruity notes here from the orange peel, grapefruit peel, and bergamont… but only a hint. Some sips are sweeter than others, especially as this tea cools. I’m really enjoying the licorice sweetness which tends to hit me in the back of the mouth/throat, while the other flavors are more ‘forward’ on the toungue/mouth.

I found this to be fairly complex and unique and I recommend you try it if you are a fan of licorice sweetness, herb flavors, or if you just can’t get enough of Verdant’s Laoshan Black variations.

Here’s the blends club blend that resides in my cupboard (#19). I hadn’t tried this one until recently when I cold brewed some.

I would say it is a decently tasty blend. I wish there was more tea and less “stuff” in it (‘cause holy crap there is a lot of stuff in this blend). So many flower petals. It tastes like jasmine with a hint of fruitness. I will probably cold brew the rest of it since it’s not super exciting.

Ok, now I can review this one, which I am drinking this morning. This tea isn’t actually in my cupboard, but it should be. So it’s not going to get a countdown number because it would screw everything up. But it should be about here; there’s another blends club blend here, which I will be having later this afternoon. I almost put this one in my list of blends club blends to sell (note: I have a bunch to sell that I listed over in the forums), but then I realized there isn’t actually any wacky ingredients in this that I dislike, so I decided to keep it and at least try it.

This is one of those teas that is impossible to measure out properly. Everything is long and spindly and doesn’t fit in the teaspoon. So an approximate 3 tsp (2 perfect teaspoons) went into my cup. I like this one. It reminds me a bit of the Cocoa Goji Zhu Rong, which was a blend a while ago, but this time with jasmine. It works. It’s a bit chocolatey, a bit of bright goji berry, and then an nice strong hit of jasmine with some creaminess from the yunnan white. Very tasty. And of course not a blend that they will ever bring back.

Back logging from memory

Started out mildly citric fruity spectrum which bled into lemongrass due to lemon flavor being more pronounced followed by a slightly herby tail which reminded me of dried lemongrass. Unlike other fresh sheng I have had by verdant I would say this is an attempt at storage puer where as in the past it seemed they were friendly/light “drink now” profile whether intentional or not. There was a bitterness which I like but unfortunately it was not followed by a sweetness (as per bulangs I enjoy) which would have sealed the deal for me to order a larger chunk but we shall see in a year or so. It slightly reminded of w2t bulang mini cake I really adore but this tea was more complex but it was lacking the body and sweetness that complete the experience personally.

I will have to rebrew in the near future due to this being the first sheng by verdant that has held my interest and have potentional to be flavorful with flash steeping or sub boiling water.

Backlog:

Had this one the other week, but can’t remember tons about it. I kept forgetting to log it though. This one was pretty disappointing for me though.
It was a bit bready, but also super woody. It was way too strong for my tastes, but glad I got to try it.
Thanks, Terri for the sample!

This tea was surprisingly good to me, considering I don’t think I’ve had these ingredients in combination before or possibly at all. I put a little sugar in it and sweetened, it’s quite tasty. It wet my whistle while I was doing data entry and manual labour in the library stacks. It all needs to be done by the end of May, boxed up and documented, and it’s somewhere around 1000 binders of data. And I just had to look up the spelling on wet because I wasn’t sure that was the correct word. It is. WET my whistle and WHET my appetite.

Um….this one tastes better than it smells, I think. But I’m honestly not big on frankincense smell, so that has a lot to do with it.

The cup tastes like a high quality chamomile, with lots of strong honey and apple notes, and a delicate floral quality. Behind that though, there’s a more robust herbaceous quality, which is ever so slightly earthy.

This is it! The last unlogged tea in my cupboard, and the last sample to try from beelicious. Thanks again for the huge bag of goodies!

Compared to the unblended Wuyi Big Red Robe, this one isn’t as strong or roasty. The oolong here reminds me even more of a honey-citrus-heavy Dancong, which is also enjoyable. There’s a hint of cocoa, a savory quality, and something like woodsmoke. Not sure how whiskey-like it is, but it is interesting and a completely different, and lighter, experience than the base tea.

This tea is an explosion of flowers in your mouth… but that’s pretty much all. The ingredients list had me very excited to taste a tea that promised to be a complex collaboration of interesting flavors , but unfortunately all I can taste is floral flowers. Soooo much floweriness. Florals completely coat my mouth. Did I mention the flowers are very floral??

I first brewed this at 3g/6oz/190F for 1min, then at 4g/7oz/205F for 30sec and 1min. The 205F, 30sec brew was somewhat weak, and all of the 1min brews were a mouthful of flowers. I wish I had enough of this tea to experiment with steep times, temps, and water/leaf ratios etc, perhaps a gongfu sesh. I’d love to taste all of the ingredients in this tea, but for now I can only recommend it to people who are in love with jasmine and florals.

This was a very yummy blend. I’m sad that I finished my sample.

The first time I brewed this I forgot it was a green blend and treated it like a black! Wasn’t actually that bad, but I figured I’d wait to rate it until I had actually steeped it properly. I decided on western style (too lazy for gaiwan) but relatively heavy leaf (4g) and short steeps (1min), which I think ought to be good for several infusions. First one is very nice – lots of vanilla and toasted rice in the aroma, smooth and buttery green tea base.

Darby was nice enough to send me a sample of this one! Glad I got to try it finally! Tastes a lot like the other chai from Verdant that I tried. Except instead of the creaminess that I liked in the other, it kinda tastes like dirt. 0_0
I’ve never had a chai that tastes like dirt. Didn’t over-steep it at all. So no idea what’s with that. xD
Still glad to have tried. Thanks, Darby!

Thanks for a sample of this a while back, BrewTEAlly Sweet! The Yabao flavor profile just isn’t for me… though it’s less easier to ruin than a raw pu-erh. I’ve had the Yabao on it’s own a couple times before. I love the idea of adding spices, and it does make the flavor better for me. Not too spicy so it doesn’t overshadow the Yabao. The flavor is light: honey, sweet. Does it taste like a snickerdoodle cookie? If any tea did, this one would. I would imagine adding some sort of sweetener would help that aspect. I was hoping for more sarsaparilla flavor. The second steep had just as much flavor. I’m happy to have tried this one! It’s annoying I couldn’t find this one on Verdant’s site. I thought they have them all archived. I wish they had a search option.
Steep #1 // few min after boiling // 2-3 min steep
Steep #2 // just boiled // 4-5 min

I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS TEA!

Steeping parameters: 100mL gaiwan, ~3.5g leaf, water temperature increased with steep number from 178-190 F. Would recommend to anyone and this will be my only 100 rating. Well, maybe not only but only for now…

Spicy smell, spicy taste. Kinda looks spicy too. Actually when I saw that there was oolong in it I got excited because Verdant has good oolong. The flavor is very much like the scent. Though I’m not really sure of the use of Tulsi. It’s like hibiscus, its overpowering. The smoothness and flavor of the oolong are pretty much none existent.

This is a very unique flavor that kind of grows on me. When I first read the label, I read citrus. When I first opened the package, the smell was strong, and really it smells quite a bit like cola (think coca-cola) . When brewed, the cola aroma morphs into something more flowery/perfumy. The taste when brewed is definitely flowery (honeyed rose) with citrus elements (though it isn’t really a strongly citrus tea by any means) so it didn’t occur to me that I had misread the label. But, when I read through the description provided by Verdant, I noticed my mistake. So, I looked up cistus and found that it is a type of flower. Very interesting and I’m glad to have tried something so different. I’m definitely enjoying this tea.

This was tasty and a bit spicy. I enjoyed it, and would have finished it, but one of my best college friends was in town and in need of tea restocking. It is my job to make sure she never goes without, so home with her this went.