Mackie Send Message

I finally got my new gaiwan after breaking the lid of the old one, and I’m really happy that I can get back to gongfu drinking, so this is my first review with the new one :D

Esgreen sent 5 samples with my order which is like.. a lot considering I didn’t even know they were going to send any, and this is one of those samples;

This moonlight white is only $3.50/50g which is a really good deal cause this is actually a fantastic tea; the leaves smell of a bai hao yin zhen without as much florality, but in my first steep, I was welcomed by a wonderful suprise:

It has pretty obvious notes of coffee and flowers (weird combination, right? it totally works though) and maybe even a bit of grass and a hint of earthiness, it’s really thick and sweet and it’s starting to develop into more of a melon kind of flavour, with no astringency. This is honestly probably the best white teas I’ve ever had and… seriously it’s only $3.50/50g like what the heck right, I’m really glad to have found this company and I’ll definitely be buying there again.

Okay so I think I got this for Christmas like.. a year ago? It’s just one of those sample tins, I actually don’t know when I got it. It’s just sort of always been sitting in my cupboard.. Anyways for some reason today i smelled it and it didn’t repulse me which is odd right cause it usually does (I’m not big on mint – which will be affecting my review. this is 100% biased)

Anyways! okay, so i brewed it in my cast iron teapot – like 3 tsp to a .. You know, I don’t know how big this teapot is, I think it’s almost a liter so lets go with that. I’ve got to say this tea is not very minty. Granted this may be like a year old so they could have changed the blend in fact they probably have at least a bit and my review may be completely worthless but..
Hey, I’m procrastinating so..

Alright I’ll start with some pros,
It’s nice and thick and full, which i quite appreciate, and quite smooth, and the minty taste is nice and subtle which is great for me, also there’s a really predominant vanilla flavour coming forward and it is quite sweet and a bit creamy, but then..
the cons;
..there’s this weird.. I dont know, grainy.. earthy.. wheaty.. you know what it is, it’s like how i’d imagine eating some sort of spearmint leaf would be if the leaf wasn’t minty. And yes I do realize how strange that description is, but yeah the cup is really dark actually quite floral and it really just feels like a tea that doesn’t know what it’s trying to be, there’s sorta no sense of direction here and I guess it’s just really strange.

I drank the whole teapot though so it wasn’t the worst.

okay right okay so basically I impulse bought this cause .. giant leaves? How could I resist? Now I have no idea why they’re giant leaves, it says they’re from wild bushes which is weird cause i was gonna suggest.. gmo.. (they’re like 3 inches long!) but anyways. The package says 1 leaf to 4 cups of tea and can be resteeped, theres no time or temperature .. even on the website, so I figured i’d try starting out with sort of a basic green tea kind of steeping.

I put a leaf into my perfectea maker, and steeped for like 45 seconds, and it was basically flavourless which took me by suprise because everyone at Silk Road had told me how potent the tea was. at this point i just put the tea from my mug back into the perfectea maker, steeped for maybe 2 more minutes and there was still very little flavour.. except.. There’s a lot of astringency. So I’m thinking this might actually be how this weird giant leaf thing is supposed to be.

Basically it’s got a bit of honey flavour and sweetness, with a lot of astringency, but I think I need to stop thinking of it as a green tea, I think this type of leaf should have its own classification .. “Giant tea” gets my vote.

You know what else it has though, is that empty flavour of a tea too far steeped.. right from the start (I’ve been getting a lot of this today)

So much astringency.

But yeah I dont really know, there’s some other stuff going on with a different leaf I brewed. There’s all the other stuff I mentioned but somehow it’s .. thicker I guess. I only steeped for like a minute. The one leaf was sort of two leaves I think, so yeah it was more flavourful which makes sense. Maybe it’s growing on me but I’m starting to really enjoy it. No rating because I really have nothing to compare this to.

Okay so straight off the bat, opening this bag.. the smell of this tea is unbelievable, its like this fruity strawberry melody its just oh my god. Also another thing is that they used 5 different green teasas the base, (sencha, genmaicha, gyokuro, bancha and kukicha) (don’t genmaichas use sencha, isn’t that redundant?) thus the name.
The brewed tea has a really different flavour to the loose tea, it leans a lot more back towards the leaves than the fruit/flowers
I’m having a really difficult time noticing notes in the leaves.. I expected it to be really complex, but it seems .. simple cause you can’t tell whats going on. Okay i’ll try though;
It’s definitely vegetal, there’s a hint of bitterness behind the predominantly floral, and berry flavoured. There’s a bit of roasty notes as well from the bancha/genmaicha. The leaves also have a sort of.. empty taste, you know like when leaves have been steeped too long and then you steep them again and they’re just empty.. theres that but its like with the flavourful leaves which makes me think all the different leaves have different optimal steep times.. I dont really get why they needed to use so many base leaves lol but I mean I still enjoyed it.
oh! and you can resteep this one and its still good. which is really nice for a flavoured tea

This is sort of an interesting tea, for the first few steeps, it had a very strong sort of.. spiced flavour? (im not knowledgeable on my spices so I dont know which) In later steeps this gave way to creamy/milky flavours, all while having a subtle vegetal and floral background. It was nice towards the later steeps but I wasn’t all that big on the spiced notes

Alright so this is the 6th oolong that I’ve tried from Zen Tea, and the second to be labelled floral, which is really something I tend away from. Now the first one, the TieGuanYin (Review here: http://steepster.com/teas/zen-tea/30494-tieguanyin-iron-goddess-mercy-oolong) was really not enjoyable, and so with this being the very next tea I reached for, I didn’t expect much. But luckily I was pleasantly suprised; the floral flavour is more of a subtle lightness, a sort of root flavour, but what jumps out at me are cream and milk and vegetality, it’s also very sweet with slight astringency. But what it does have is that really nice combination of astringency and creamy/sweetness that makes me unable to slow down my aggressive sipping, It’s a very nice tea :)

Ooh this one is interesting! This is the type of oolong most companies use as the base for Milk oolongs (Including Zen tea’s Milky Oolong, which I reviewed rather extensively here: http://steepster.com/teas/zen-tea/56529-milky-oolong) since it’s regarded as a Milky tasting tea already and that they add to that with flavouring. If your mind went straight to davidstea’s Quangzhou milk oolong, yes they use a different base tea. Anyways yes so Jin Xuan is often referred to as Milk oolong just on its own.
Right okay I should probably talk about the tea,
The first couple steeps for me were really vegetal and almost more like a black oolong rather than the green oolong it is. The tea’s pretty bitter and astringent, at least while steeping according to Zen’s GongFu instructions: 2 tsp, 6oz water and 2.5-4 mins for about 5 steeps, which I listened to at first but then I put too much water into my Perfectea maker (yes, this is how I brew gongfu okay) and poured maybe 2oz out straight away and it was almost as flavourful after 5 seconds of steeping as it had been in about 3 minutes so I started to feel like they were messing with me and i went for like 30 second steeps. Granted, at this point the tea had lost a decent bit of its flavour. Alright anyways.
I should maybe talk about the tea at least a little.
So after i started doing shorter steeps, the tea was actually really creamy and a bit milky, with hints of seaweed and vegetalness, .. wait, vegetality? vegetal.. lets go with vegetal flavour. You know what, I liked vegetality. I’m gonna say that from now on.
Anyways, yes, so the vegetality is rather light amongst the creaminess, but at this point im getting a bit of that taste of an empty flavourless oolong (you guys know what i mean by that right?)

This review was weird. I like weird
I’m gonna make more weird reviews

okay so maybe I oversteeped this one a bit, but it tastes like a cross between drinking floral perfume and a really dark oolong. This is not for me, but I really rarely like floral teas, so don’t necessarily take my word for it; if flowers are your jam then maybe give it a shot.

I’m drinking the 2015 winter harvest of this one, with Gong fu style brewing in my very traditional Perfectea maker from teavana. I only have experience with davidstea’s milk oolong, which I love, so I was really excited to try this one! When I first opened the bag, the very familiar milky aroma washed through me and I was overjoyed.

The First sip made me realize that maybe davidstea’s had too much milk flavouring for its own good because this is quite balanced and im very happy about it. I taste the same milk flavour .. or a very similar one, but its right alongside it is the taste of the oolong itself. The Jin Xuan seems quite vegetal and a bit roasty, though it’s a bit hard to differentiate between the milk and the leaf itself. The milk flavour, however, is rather thick and filling, it’s almost exactly like a deep fried milk ball, you know those? its really quite lovely, and very sweet.

Second steep is sort of.. less creamy? but still very milk ball tasting, I’m also noticing fewer vegetal/roasty notes, and this steep is really astringent.. I actually didnt notice whether the first steep was astringent or not. I’m gonna go with yes, but in any case, this steep is a bit more prominently milky than the first. Less complex.

Yeah I forgot to time this steep but I guessed and I usually have a pretty decent internal clock so… yeah anyways so this one seems to be creamier than the last, which is strange it sorta went back and forth there (maybe i just steeped this one really long .. ) It’s a little less sweet, and a bit more like the dt milk oolong im familiar with. There’s a weird feeling in the back of my throat kinda like im getting sick.. im not sure if thats cause of the tea but at this point im kind of hoping it is.. I really better not be getting sick right now.

I think it is the tea.. It’s kind of a weird sensation, honestly I’m not sure how to feel about it..

But anyways, the 4th steep was still nice and milky, just less creamy and sweet than before. It’s actually so impressive how much flavour these leaves are holding, i’m already like 10 minutes in and Zen Tea says I can go for about another 10? We’ll have to see

This is almost definitely some weird psychological thing but I swear the fifth steep was creamy again.. but nevermind that it probably isnt. lets just say its not, cause yeah so anyways it’s getting a bit more vegetal again as the milkiness is fading, which I’m not at all opposed to. Also i should say that it’s still quite milky after the 5th steep.

It’s just barely holding on to that milk aftertaste now, and the colour is fading a bit

Alright I’ve written about too many steeps now, It’s just waning in flavour all around (still delicious and flavourful, mind you)

This one just seems to go on and on (hey! just like this review is), even when I stopped expecting it to. Well done, my milky oolong. You’re a real trooper

lol I feel like a bachelor going around finding all the teas I can get my hands on and then never ordering it again, like I don’t know if my goal is eventually to settle down with the few best teas in the world, but I don’t think I’d ever be satisfied..
God I love tea culture right now

.. ugh Steepster crashed just as i was finishing off my review, so I’m gonna try to recreate it..
The first steep was wonderfully complex, with notes of earth and rock, as well as peach/mango notes. It tasted kinda like a black tea, with mild astringency. there were some fishy notes that I’m not sure how i feel about but it’s not overwhelming in any way, so I quite liked the first steep.

The second steep was a bit less of everything, and somehow the fishy notes became way more prominent. This kinda upset me, but I pushed through. As it cooled, the fish was replaced with peach, and the second half of this cup was delicious!

the package said it would go for 2-3 steeps, but i also put a bit less leaves in than it wanted me to so I guess it’s fair that the 3rd steep didnt really work out to all too much, it was pretty empty with a few of peach notes still lingering.

If you’ve got this tea and you’re planning to steep it western style, I’d recommend either doing the 2tsp/8oz that Zen tea recommends and then steeping for maybe a minute and then incrementing your steeps, or going for what i did at 1.5tsp/8oz and steeping maybe 90s → 120s.
I may update with a gong fu style review; overall a very enjoyable tea :)