Spring Laoshan Green

My preorder came! Yummy! I cracked it open right away.
I brewed this in my gaiwan, 1/3 full of leaves, pour in, pour out.
First steep: Sugar snap peas in cream! Lovely!
Second steep: Nuttier, with a sweeter scent and aftertaste. Beautiful emerald green liquid. Still creamy.
Third steep: More nutty, even. Very slight astringency.
Fourth steep: More astringent, but beanier.
Fifth steep: Amplified version of the fourth steep.
Sixth steep: Fading, but that makes it sweeter again, and less astringent.

Overall I’m quite happy with this purchase. It is a good, fresh, obvious green tea. Boyfriend even liked it!

-Not my bag

These leaves are the tiny curled style similar to bi luo chun. They produced a light green with a tint of yellow liquor or straight yellow depending on steep time/temp. The tastes I got (realizing this is almost a year old and some flavors might have dissipated), was beany I would say cross between lima beans and white great northern beans. A slight sweetness in the first steeping but that was about it. It lasted about average amount of steeping for a green not super longevity but I’ve had one or two teas fade quicker

I personally wouldn’t drink it again not into the beany profile and with so much great tea in my cabinet and only drinking a few a day I cant see myself purchasing or drinking any of the samples I have. Not a terrible tea but not good enough for me personally

If you

I actually have the 2014 spring, there seems to be multiple entries for this tea on Steepster and I don’t want to add another one just to change the year. I’m guessing this tea is probably fairly consistent per harvest, and you can get spring, summer or autumn pickings of Laoshan green.

Probably should have started drinking this earlier but I lost my enthusiasm somewhat when shipment of this tea was delayed by two months, and getting this spring harvest required a pre-order. I can’t fault Verdant for delays in their tea shipment from China, but I do fault not updating customers until we complained individually. Enough of us complained individually that Verdant started doing weekly updates. By the time I got the tea I was just glad it was all over and I didn’t need to keep track of it any longer.

I opened this today after receiving a gift of a Zojirushi water boiler from a tea friend who had it and was using another system to boil water. What a great gift! I feel like I have a Kwik Trip next to the bed now. I’m still experimenting with the settings, and it will take time for the system to lose the off taste that most electric kettle systems have when fairly new. I’m thinking of adding one of my pieces of charcoal bamboo which would be sooo awesome if it works out to improve my water even more!

Anyway, the Laoshan green has a beautiful slightly rolled leaf. I used a heaping tbsp of tea in my 140 ml gaiwan. I’m not getting any of the oat cereal flavor the description mentions. To me it smells and tastes rather like sencha or gyokuro, like a raw spinach. I’m brewing a little hot at 208 F but I’ve learned to do that with spinachy teas or else they are just gaggingly sweet. I like it a bit bitter, more of a tea taste as opposed to wet salad.

My rating here reflects the quality of the leaf. I think these types of greens are a matter of acquired taste and not for people new to tea. What is to be appreciated are the early spring nutrients, fresh green flavor etc. The leaf quality is exquisite, since it is first flush it resembles other first flush pickings with delicate, small and fragrant leaves. My personal taste leans toward strongly fermented tea or highly oxidized blacks lately. This is after nearly 15 years of drinking a pot of green tea every day for health reasons. Wish I had this tea back then, but I’m glad now that I can get this tea and fermented teas even more to my taste.

Mastress Alita’s sipdown challenge – May Tea #5:- A cupboard staple

It always surprises me a bit when I think of Laoshan black tea being related to Laoshan green tea.  I know there are some fans of the Laoshan black out there, but the black version has always been so much flatter in complexity for me than the Laoshan green.  Which for me is a Cupboard Staple.  I wouldn’t even think to put Laoshan black in my list of favorite teas… I just forget about it completely.  But I’m so glad I know about Laoshan green!  I have a few older pouches remaining… and I love how Laoshan green in particular has different seasonal harvests.
2022 sipdowns:  62

Lewis and Clarke TTB

We had some friends in town, and they wanted to go to the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter today. So, that meant I had about 10 seconds to choose a tea to cold brew and drink grandpa style while at the parks. I was trying to take a break from greens, as I’m growing tired of them, but this was on top, ad seemed like a good candidate for what I needed.

This is sort of roasty, nutty, and on the dark end of the vegetal spectrum with notes of green beans and lima beans. There’s also a bit of water chestnut. Not bad, but if I had more time to pick, I would have chosen something on the lighter end of the vegetal spect I because I prefer them cold and the darker ones hot.

A solid green tea with a very nutty vegetal taste to it. I’m not the biggest fan of vegetal teas, but it is certainly not bad. The tea seems high quality and it stands up to repeated infusions.

Continuing my early-morning-get-shit-done-with-straight-green-tea routine, I settled on this one today. And it was a sipdown, to my surprise – I didn’t realize I had so little of this one left.

Very nice and vegetal, and almost no astringency. Even a little bit bread-like, which I think I noticed with their Laoshan Autumn Harvest as well.

I liked it much more this time than the first time I had it, but since I doubt I’ll restock (Verdant is awesome, but I have so much more tea I need to finish off first), I’ll keep it as a pleasant memory.

I have always been amazed by this company’s quality. I tried this tea around last year and it didn’t disappoint at all. I decided to brew it in the Laoshan style with the leaves drifting at the bottom of the cup. I love this approach because the flavors start out delicate when you have more water and as you go on, the flavors become sweeter and more bitter at the same time. It was good for a couple resteepings throughout the day. The flavor started out with a savory sort of soy-taste and sort of a carob-like taste? It was hard to put my finger on. Later on it got sweeter and more delicate almost like a sencha surprisingly. I was glad to have such a nice tea and I look forward to more from Laoshan village in the future.

did not like

Arrived in their 5 for $5 assortment, and i decided to give it a try, even though I’m not a fan of green tea. I decided to use my Bodum Yo-Yo tea set for this one. The dry leaves were strongly scented of smokey vegetables, NOT a bad thing, but not what I expected of a green tea. They had an almost Oolong appearance.

1 tsp. of leaves, 175F water, and 1 minute later the tea was a soft buttery yellow, sweet and mild but sill rich in flavor. NOT a shrinking violet here. Taste of grass and toast.

1 1/2 minutes second steeping was the same color, but stronger in taste, with a more pronounced fruity finish.

2 minute third infusion was just slightly darker, milder in aroma and taste, but still more pleasant than many other green tea first steepings!

I have found a green tea i will buy and brew.