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I decided to go with this tea as my first tea of the day. A beautiful day, I might add. I must have had it before but I don’t remember anything about it. I really have to sip this one down, it’s one of the older teas that I own (5 months old?).

However, as soon as I opened the tin, I realized why I am so reluctant to have this one… Because it smells godawful. There’s this extremely artifical smell that the leaves and, subsequently, the steep have. I tried not to smell it. It was like… a bunch of lime zest that you just found under an old carpet.

The flavor was slightly better but there was still so much of fakeness to it. On the whole it tasted like some kind of earl grey cream gone very wrong. Because you get this lime that tastes like a really nasty bergamot and then there’s some creamy notes – which was the only thing that positively surprised me about this tea.

Fusion Teas have some really awesome offerings (Caribbean Nectar Rooibos, Raspberry Champagne White) but this, IMHO, is not one of them.

Backlog.

Beautiful straw-grey, long and swirly leaves brew into copper-brown liquor of a VERY tantalizing aroma. It sure is fragrant, they got that right!

And the taste… It tastes like the sweetest Chinese black tea you can imagine, but it is even more graceful and delicate. Which doesn’t make it less full-bodied. Every sip is smooth. And SO sweet. The flavors I detect are fruit tree blossoms, perhaps very sweet melon, maybe even a perfectly ripe avocado.

It has this other flavor to it that is hard to describe but that embodies “tea flavor” in general. It’s like tea flavoring in drinks or sweets, except it is perfectly natural. Imagine that a tea plant can actually grow edible apple-like fruit. They would taste like this tea.

This could be one of the best teas I have had so far. It is also my first yellow tea. I wonder if they are all this wonderful?

I re-steeped it three times and all the steeps were delicious, although on the third steep it seemed to have lost its ethereal blossom sweetness and started to get a little bolder instead (still not astrigent at all).

It seems like Zen Tea have it on sale right now and I am so tempted to get a massive amount of it… But it will have to wait.

While I like this tea a little bit more than Lupicia’s Lychee, it is not anything particularly striking my fancy. It has all these nice fruit in there but somehow it is kind of… boring. Like an aunt’s birthday party kind of boring. You know, there’s all these good homemade pastries and cakes but then… damn, does it drag and the clock must have frozen!

Mabe it’s because its decaf? It’s good to have a decaf tea that pretends to be a black blend though, once in a while every tea drinker needs something like that.

I think I’ll move on to some oolongs soon today. It’s time!

This tea… is gorgeous!

It tastes just like red-berry concentrated syrups that my grandmother used to make. You would add water to it to get a nice, refreshing juice. The last time I had it was probably nearly 20 years ago.

There exist some blends that try to imitate this kind of syrup, at least in Poland I’ve known some, they are usually herbal and bagged teas. Needless to say, they all would taste quite artificial. This one does not.

It retains this berry syrup flavor but also charms you with its delicately astringent base. And it feels like drinking this refreshing juice when I was a little girl. So amazing. I would not, not in a million years, expect this tea to take me back to an almost forgotten flavor of my childhood. Thank you, Mariage Frères!

And thank you, Anna, for a sample of this! I am glad that I like this one so much because it seems to be one of the more US-available of the French teas :)

I guess this tea is slightly better than I initially thought. It made a nice Saturday morning beverage, especially since the sun is shining nicely.

The lychee flavoring composes well with a nice day (A DAY OFF, too – very needed) and the black base seemed more definite this time around.

Thank you so much, Jennkay, for a sample of this!

And the sample is pretty much done because I had it with my husband two nights ago and right now I am having the rest of it just by myself.

I love my green oolongs so much! And I think this is the best Tie Guan Yin I have had yet. I love the asparagusy quality of a TGY – this one has also plenty of green vegetable notes to it, but it is creamier, fuller, more buttery… and on the whole more complex. I love when teas have this lingering flavorful aftertaste that stays with you between the sips. This tea definitely has it, too.

It’s just chock full of qualities I love in oolongs.

And the color of the steep is so beautiful, the warm yellow of today’s sunlight. Because, guys, it was fairly warm today in PA. AMAZING.

OOOOH YEAH! I got it, I got it, I got it! THIS IS IT!

Here’s what I did: I used 1 tsp of sifted matcha, whisked it in a bowl with 1/2 cup of 185 F water. On the side I heated up 1 and 1/2 c of almond milk to approx 170 F and then added it to the matcha mixture. I ended up with 16 oz. of delicious, creamy matcha latte GOODNESS.

I found a way to enjoy matcha and on my second try, too. Not bad. I detect French Vanilla so much more this way as well (even though it is the weakest flavoring grade).

SOOOO GOOD!

(See my previous note to find out about my confusion when I had it with just water).

EDIT: Unfortunately 16 oz. turned out to be way too much and I couldn’t finish it. The specific bitterness of matcha is really, really tasty at first, but then it gets just yucky when you have too big of a serving. At least it turned out to be so in my case. Oh matcha, matcha, we seem to have an interesting relationship.

Thank you, Anna, for the sample of this!

It brew into clear and ruby concoction that vaguely smells of vanilla as well as some non-describable fruit.

The base is supposed to be Ceylon and Chinese black tea(s) and I can mostly detect ceylon, although definitely toned down by the Chinese part. I really like the base this way.

When it comes to flavoring, I hardly detect any. I sure can taste vanilla, but it is very shy and hiding in the corner. I have to look for it. Hazelnut? Hmmm… perhaps. It could be even shyer than vanilla, probably to the point of paranoid kind of shy. But it’s there.

The flavors seem to come out of their corners a bit more once the brew cools down. And I greet them with an open palate.

Errr…

There’s something else I detect, too. Some fruitiness. Perhaps it is just maltiness. It’s like some sort of carmelized citrus with most of its citrusy notes seeped out and only sweetnes left. If that makes any sense?

This tea is very delicious, but it is definitely not for the impatient ones because the flavors are very subtle. In fact, if someone just served it to me and said it’s just a non-flavored morning blend, I would totally believ it. And I would still find it delicious.

There is also a possibility that I did not detect the flavors because I was just out for a smoke. I am a very occasional smoker, so it is unfortunate I decided to taste such a tea after just smoking a cigarrette. Oh well – that’s a lesson.

These pearls are so fat! I love them.

Steeped 3 of them, instead of 2, per 8 oz. of boiling water. That totally did the trick. It tasted better now than I remember. Brown sugar notes seemed more disctinct and the body fuller – a great start of the day.

The liquor looked a little “dusty” but it was probably my fault since I hadn’t rinsed the leaves – I hate doing it because I feel like I waste water :( So I usually don’t.

I must say, this tea didn’t move me one bit.

I love honey and I love pears. But when their flavors are combined into tea, it doesn’t seem like a mix that sits with my taste buds too well. Or maybe it’s just this one.

The flavoring is not extremely strong, as is the case with other Golden Moon teas, but it verged dangerously on the artificial, and I didn’t like that very much. I was mostly getting pear with a promise of honey (a promise that was never kept) and the base was much too weak – but perhaps it is my fault, I could’ve underleafed it slightly.

I still have a serving-worth left, I’ll try to perhaps steep it longer and we’ll see how that goes.

I still love Golden Moon teas, though!