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.
