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Yay, a green tea I have liked!
I got this as a free sample from Zen Tea Life (thank you!) and just brewed it up today – I haven’t really been in a green tea mood for a long time.
I used a little bit more leaf and a little cooler temperature than called for and steeped on the short side because I’m cautious with green teas now.
And… I like it! It is nutty, with a little bit of walnut like astringency but just the right amount. I get hints of almonds, green beans, and a little bit of butteriness at the end.
I’m rather relieved – I think I’ve broken through my green tea aversion now.

I keep thinking I’ve reviewed this tea and I keep being wrong! So here it finally is.
The bottom line for me is that I like this much better than Adagio’s other oolongs. That said, it is not anywhere near my top oolongs. I do like it enough to keep drinking it, but it is forgettable enough that I can’t remember I’ve tried it!

I’ve been saving my Verdant teas for a special occasion. I have been so busy, so unable to turn my mind off, I know I can’t appreciate them.
I decided to kind of take today off, after I fell asleep midday and kind of burned out. So tonight is a night to relax, watch the Daily Show, and drink this tea.
The leaves are adorable they are like something from a woodworker’s bench, little curls of tea, spiraling like wood planeings.
Brewed up for the first infusion, this smells refreshingly interesting. I’m not usually a fan of green teas, but I keep trying. This smells nice – a little bit buttery, a little floral, as if you could eat the creamy sweet scent of gardenias.
I’m picturing a summer porch where wisteria grows (I think there was a children’s book about a porch of wisteria that was guarded by a cat? I’m picturing the cover illustration here), in the summer. The porch rails are painted white but chipping off in places. The wisteria and the latticework cast mottled shadows in the creamy light. A wickerwork basket of green beans sits on a white wicker chair with a flowered cushion. A couple of small yellow flowers sit scattered upon the beans. The afternoon is redolent of half remembered snippets of hiding in gazebos and dreaming under bushes. Seriously. I’m getting a very defined synesthetic image from this.
The flavor was interesting. It was very vegetal, with an artichoke like back of throat feel. I honestly think I just don’t care for green tea that much. I found it nice but not very complex, certainly not living up to the aroma or some of the other Verdant teas I have tasted.
That said, I did make three infusions and enjoyed them, but I did find the flavor profile fairly one dimensional.

The leaves smell wonderful – my first impression is high sweet sugary notes of cream and sugar cane. Delicious.
The liquor is much lighter than I expected and has a wonderful creamy milky oolong scent.
The taste of this is different from the other milky oolongs I have tried. It has a really really nice creaminess and a wonderful, exquisit aftertaste. The main flavor profile has a funny kind of bite along with it, almost along the lines of something fermented (which I guess milk oolongs are?) I had never gotten that from any of the other milk oolongs I have tried. It’s an element I’m not sure if I care for entirely, but I like it enough that I’m proceeding to the second steep, so that says something!
The second steep was a little mellower. I upped the steep time to three minutes. The milky flavor was still there and there was less of the bite I had been getting.
I think this is my favorite milk oolong so far!

This is nice – it tastes like a cider actually. It really is a great Winter tea – wonderful to curl up with. Not at all bitter or astringent, not sweet either, just super wonderfully pleasant and fruity with great apple elements. After I brewed it up there were big pieces of orange peel in the strainer :)

This smells like coconut candy. Which is amazing right now because I seriously need something sweet and relaxing.
Actually… it really smells like buttery coconut shrimp. Which sounds weird but is, again, amazing. I seriously love oolongs.
I was a little disappointed with the flavor – it was kind of thin. I added a little extra leaves anyway so I think I would need to brew this longer, closer to three minutes to really get the flavor – I was missing the lilac notes too.
It does smell amazing though.

Hmm – somehow I wasn’t thinking when I brewed this up. I treated it like an oolong! In my defense, I did brew it a little cool for that, ~188 so just take this with an extra pinch of tea leaves in case I botched it, right?

More tea that I have had freaking forever. And yet it still smells good. The dry leaves had a great deep caramel flavor, with brown sugar elements. The leaves were rolled up tight in little balls – there was a slight amount of dust and broken leaves.
When I brewed it up, they unfolded into these incredibly long spindly skinny leaves – really interesting looking, like something out of an Edward Gorey drawing or a Lovecraftian opium vision (what, too fanciful? Come on, it’s almost Halloween! … and they really look that strange).

The liquor smells great – almost a caramel or tobacco flavor. I still get some of the notes of oolong butteriness, but it is more like a smokey sweet kind of scent. It smells like it would taste like butter spice cookies. (This is really not sounding like a green tea, is it? …)

This tastes suspiciously like chestnuts. I definitely brewed this too hot – I taste bitterness but that might be an illusion exacerbated by the astringency of this tea. It is very nutty in a great walnut/chestnut kind of way.
I definitely have to try this tea again and make sure not to mess it up because I can see the potential here.

Yay! I love this matcha.
Like… love.
I have tried a few other kinds of matcha before this and they had had a sharper more vegetal bite. This is much smoother.
I still like to make my matcha with cold milk but this has nice nuttiness and isn’t sharp. Eminently sippable and it got me through three days of filming on around 3 hours of sleep each night! That gets a serious A+.

ETA – thank you for the free sample, Kaimatcha! I love it :)

This was neat – it smelled like jolly ranchers loose but had a decently subtle taste when I brewed it up.
It only had a mild kombucha bite to it, and the oolong didn’t sing to me but somehow I still liked this. I’m backlogging so I am sure I’m forgetting a lot of what made this great. Suffice it to say I enjoyed it.

I’m a little scared of this one – it smells medicinal. Not in that cough syrup way but in a kind of dental novocaine/disinfectant kind of way.
I actually like the way this tastes. The scent remains but this has a nice hibiscus flavor. I am one of those people who really likes hibiscus.
I have to take points off for the scent though because that is seriously off putting. I don’t like feeling like I’m drinking poison, ya know? The flavor is nice and I’m getting tired and ready to go to sleep, so not a loss at all.