Meng Ding Gan Lu

I’m still finishing off the ridiculous amount of green tea I bought this spring. Camellia Sinensis had two versions of Meng Ding Gan Lu this year, this being the first. The product description matched the one on this page almost exactly, so I’m including my tasting note here. I steeped 3 g of leaf in 250 ml of 185F water for 4 minutes, resteeping as needed until the tea faded.

The dry aroma is of nuts, bread, sweet corn, and flowers. The first steep has notes of hazelnut, bread, corn, kale, spinach, butter, and faint florals. This tea is fairly vegetal right off the bat. Further steeps reveal slightly more florals, plus grass, minerals, and what Togo calls lime. The tea is rather drying. The final steeps are grassy, nutty, mineral, and vegetal.

This is a nice enough green tea, but it gets too drying and vegetal to be a favourite. The hints of citrus and florals are fun, though.

Very nice green! I got the 2022 harvest of this tea from my CS order, and it’s one of the better greens I’ve had. Beautiful beautiful leaves with a great buddy look, paired with an absolutely rich aroma both in the dry leaf, which displayed notes of nuttiness, and the wet leaf which displayed potent notes of vegetalness. Liquor is decently vibrant and thick, flavour is decent to pretty good with a nice delicate balance of floral vegetal and bittersweet. Texture is decent, nicely smooth and juicy but could do a bit of work in potency, character is average to decent with some steep variability but pretty unidimensional. Finish & aftertaste is pretty good, nice elderflower bitter-floral lingering aftertaste with a slight astringency to boot. Cha-qi is almost non-existent and steep longevity is decent, lasting up to steep 8 or potentially more.

Overall, a good green which would be a 80-85+ tea if it had a better cha qi and better character.

[Spring 2021 harvest]

Fresh green teas are always something to look forward in the spring (if one can get hold of some). Even though this one isn’t the most remarkable one, it certainly satisfies that need.

The profile is quite vegetal with floral, umami, sour and herbaceous notes trailing behind. Some of the flavours to be found are eucalyptus, alfalfa, lilac, kohlrabi. In the aftertaste, a mix of lime and green wood sweetness emerges. The liquor texture is velvety thanks to the large amount of leaf hair present, but it also has a nice bubbly quality. After swallowing, a minor drying sensation remains, but there isn’t really any astringency. The aromas are hard to describe. Some of the notes I’ve already mentioned – such as lime zest and eucalyptus – but there is also a scent that reminds me of moss covered in dew.