Certified Organic "Yunnan Moonlight White" White Tea

Warm smell in warm gai wan: exquisite, floral, sweet, with a funky quality. (I love when dry leaves have an inexplicable funky kind of smell mixed in. It tells me there will be character to the tea.)

150 ml gai wan was half full of dry leaf.

30 sec first steep: light amber color, highly fragrant. Sweet nectar smell and taste. Very sweet and delicious. Savory note in the background that I suspected would come out more in later steepings. A bit thin in the mouth, but still textured.

Second 30 sec steep: amber color, less sweet smelling. Interesting taste and smell that’s hard to define. Sweet starchy leafy kind of taste. I really can’t think of a food or drink to compare it to, but some other delicate fragrant teas like Oriental Beauty can be like it.

Pushed it at 195F for 1 minute to see what that was like. This was great. Reddish tinge to the brew. More of the sweet nectar with some lubricating texture in the mouth. Very delightful and complex taste.

Kept going as such for several more steeps. It’s a good tea for sure, and organic as well which is nice. Definitely one to sample. I wouldn’t say it’s amazing, but it is very good. Very drinkable. It’s not a tea that leaves you like . . . meh, whatever. You’re definitely like . . . mmm, that’s good. Though again, not 90+ in rating in my opinion, which stands for truly excellent and exceptional. Would probably also be good in a large teapot or pitcher, too.

Love this. Thick as hell. Combined with the sweetness, it conjured up the image of honey. Rose, grape, wheat, dry grass throughout. The really interesting part to me was the cooling menthol aftertaste that came out after the third steeping. Wet leaf after brewing smelled immediately of green vegetables but after a few seconds smelled floral, also a nice effect.

This is my first loose leaf moonlight white. I have the spring 2020 harvest. It just arrived this afternoon but so maybe it needs some time or something. It doesn’t smell like the pressed moonlights I’ve enjoyed. I’m not sure what it smells like but not the fruity aroma I was expecting. I really wasn’t into it for the first couple gongfu steeps. There’s kind of a grassy bite to it that was a bit much for me at first. That mellowed out some as I kept steeping and I started getting the more of the fruity flavors I expected. It’s less creamy citrus than some of my favorite moonlights and more exotic tropical fruit…like when you get a particularly tart piece of dried mango, but maybe with some papaya and pineapple mixed in? It’s been ages since I’ve had papaya, though, so I can’t really be sure. It seems to get more fruity as it cools. I thought I’d had enough moonlights to have a pretty good idea what they’re about but this one and White2Tea’s Nightfall are weird to me. Maybe I need to compare the growing area, season and year of all my moonlights to see if my favorites (and least favorites) have anything in common with each other. I think Mengku might be my preferred region for raw pu-erh but I’m not sure where I like my whites to come from. It smells…not really like grass or hay but maybe like tromping through the weeds at the edge of the hayfield or alongside the road? I dunno. It doesn’t smell especially good to me but the flavor is growing on me with each steep. I keep thinking I’m getting whiffs of banana now and then but I’m not sure. I’m not a banana fan (nasty, slimy, stringy things!) but that part of the aroma isn’t really off-putting. Still, it’s weird that my tea smells like someone walking through weeds while eating a banana. The more I think about it, maybe it’s more banana custard than fresh banana. Not that that makes it any less weird. But I don’t taste any banana. It’s weird and I’m not sure I like it. I’m glad I tried it but I don’t know that it’ll be added to my reorder list (which is fine, the list is plenty long already). Unless I can find a way of steeping it that impresses me more.

Edited to add: I’m really bad about getting distracted during the longer steeps at the end of a gongfu session. I let this one steep until it got cold. Not sure if it was the long steep or drinking it cold but something brought out some interesting floral flavors I didn’t taste in previous steeps.

(gongfu). Dry, this tea has a beautiful mixed white and black appearance depending on if you’re looking at a bud or a leaf. ~80C steeping.
In early steeps, this tea is extremely thick, hydrating and refreshing, not astringent whatsoever. This was a very vibrant sweet sugarcane taste (turns out that’s what’s advertised). In later steeps, an aroma of freshly steamed green vegetables emerged, with some savoriness and astringency. This is a great-tasting sweet white tea, I highly recommend this to anyone who likes milder white teas with body