Organic Huangshan Mao Feng

Sip down!

I gongfu brewed this tea while I made my usual mass breakfast cooking for the husband’s breakfasts for the week. Today’s huge breakfast: French Toast using a 1.5lb loaf I made the night before.

Sadly, this OHMF is at the end of the bag and kind of dusty smushed leaves as it got crunched a bit in my tea tin. Flavor is a little different – stronger and some interesting raisin notes early on ending with some corny sweet notes in later infusions.

Mmmm, the gorgeous emerald green leaves smell so sweet , vegetal, and nutty. Whenever I smell the leaves my eyes widen and I get so excited that it’s hard to wait for the tea to finish brewing. This first flush tea has been withered and roasted then rolled and dried. As I sip this tea, the first thing I notice is how weighty the body is yet it is also very smooth. The sweet juiciness is instantly apparent as well as a refreshing creaminess. I’m getting buttery white corn, sweet pea notes with some light Brazil nut and fresh cut grass notes. This is a tea I can drink all day long. I love how this tea lingers and leaves a sweetness.

I had a little “Butiki green tea face-off” on this stormy day. I brewed up and compared this, Butiki’s Spring Twist, Dragon Tip, and Sencha Superior and determined that this was my favorite out of the four.

The leaves are beautiful. I always love when a particular tea’s leaves are large and uniform, it’s a sign of high quality and lots of care being put into the tea’s handling. And I also love the fact that this tea is organic.

As for the taste, the biggest thing that comes to mind is how incredibly fresh it tastes. It’s extremely vibrant, juicy, and mouth watering. I get a great, juicy vegetal sweetness melding with flavors of sweet corn and raw nuts. There is also a bit of that “buttery” taste that I love in green tea. This is an absolutely fantastic tea and will definitely go on my list of tea’s to re-order. It’s really brightening up this dreary day.

So, I was quite curious about the base of the Creamy Eggnog tea (yes, even before trying it!), so had to order this one as well during the Black Friday sale!

Brewed up, the liquor is quite a light beigey-yellow, which darkens a bit as it sits. The aroma is faint lightly of a creamy green tea, that is, somewhat vegetal and distinctly like tea! Haha.

Although I definitely didn’t underleaf according to the instructions (2 tsp/8 oz.; I measured out a generous 2 tsp of the wirey leaf and then ran out of hot water, so it was shorted by probably 2 oz.), the flavour I’m getting here is lighter than I expected, given that I could definitely pick it out from the eggnog tea in spite of the flavourings. However, what I can taste is delicious, light, and creamy, with absolutely no astringency whatsoever. A delicate and delicious cup of tea. The flavour seems to develop a bit as the tea cools, so I would definitely recommend drinking this one more lukewarm than hot, at least once! I seem to recall that was the case with Creamy Eggnog as well, so that’s unsurprising.

All in all, a fairly tasty, light and creamy green, and one that I’ll enjoy finishing off!

Backlogging a few teas today. I’ve got all these notes and little time to write them up! First up is this fantastic green tea!

YUM! I love this tea.
It smells wonderful – sweet and refreshing. I could smell it all day!

The taste is amazing, too! Very crisp and fresh. My whole family enjoyed this one, which is rare. The beginning of the sip is buttery and smooth, with perfectly subtle hints of a grass-like nature. The rest of the sip brings a nice sweetness, something between sweet/snap peas and sweet corn. It’s just perfect, and works well with the buttery aspect I get from the brew. At the back of the sip and in the after taste is a hint of sweet nutty goodness. It really ends this tea experience on a high note! There is also no astringency to this cup whatsoever, and I LOVE that.

I think this has worked its way to the top of my favorite tea list. It’s so refreshing and soothing. It was also very yummy iced – perfect on a sunny summer’s day.

Received this as a sample! :) Thanks Stacy!

So apparently this is green tea that the Creamy Eggnog used as a base — which I also had as a sample a little while back — so I’m very interested to try it!

Not entirely sure how the dry leaf smells. Anytime I tried a whiff, I just smelled the Jasmine Pearls that was also in the parcel, heh. After being steeped, it smells of freshly mown grass, but not in a bad way. The liquor is very light, butter like in color.

The taste is buttery and sweet, and has that hint of fresh grass at the swallow. As I sip, I’m picking up on the floral notes from the sweet pea. It’s not bitter, or astringent.

It’s very pleasant. :) It’s making me want to try the Creamy Eggnog again sometime, because I think my palate is far more refined now than it was then. I remember when I had it before I couldn’t taste much beyond hot water until I added a bit of sugar, but I’m tasting this very clearly.

I’m not sure if I’ve been WOWED, but I can say this is one of the better green teas I’ve tried. :)

Thanks to a sample from Stacy at Butiki, I am getting to try one of the top Chinese green teas, and it delivers! Stacy’s description on the website is on target. When steeped, it produces a clear, very pale yellow liquor with a sweetly floral scent. The flavor is delicate and has a mildly nutty and maybe slightly buttery element. This is a clean and refreshing tea without any astringency. I really like it. Now, I’m going to have some of that Butiki Creamy Eggnog tea, which uses this as a base.

Now for a huangshan mao feng-athon! Both from Butiki, for this round it’s organic vs. wild. They are visually distinct which isn’t surprising, and both are pretty (the wild one a bit more so maybe), with gorgeous color and shape. They both smell awesome dry and while brewing, so much delicious vegetable savory-sweetness and roasty nuttiness going on, scrumptious. I smell artichoke again—yesss. I LOVE artichoke notes.

The organic HMF brews up a bit darker, with more rusty gold to it than the wild HMF. The aroma once steeped mellows, isn’t as intense as the dry leaves. I’m pretty amazed at how different these taste—the wild one is much sweeter, also smoother. The organic one’s slightly grassy (not offputtingly so) with more heft. There’s a crisp sweetness in that one too, namely sweet corn; it’s just the wild one is super sweet and in a more honey-like as opposed to vegetal way. Organic HMF also has a mouth-bursting juiciness to it I haven’t encountered before with greens that’s pretty neat. Both have buttery elements. The roasty nuttiness was more in the dry and steeping aromas; it recedes a lot once brewed, but faint traces do remain and go really well with the butteriness.

Really enjoyed both of these, finding it hard to pick one over the other as their qualities are surprisingly distinct. If you want veggie savory meal-like satisfaction, I’d go with the organic. If I wanted a sweet, delicate, nuanced treat that is more like being haunted by faint but lingering honey and buttery nut taste memories, I’d go wild. Both are excellent. I’m so happy Butiki exists so stuff like this is possible to try!

This is a great all around green tea. It is pretty complex, kind of reminds me of several different kinds of green tea all rolled into one. Smooth, buttery-esque mouthfeel.
Tasting notes: vegetal, grassy (in a good way), woody.

The dry leaves are long, full, fluffy and green. The wet leaves release a sweet vegetal smell. The liquid is incredibly lightly gold colored with a subtle sweet pea like flavor. The second steep is much the same, though I did add a generous amount of time to attempt to produce a stronger liquid. This tea is a little too subtle for my taste but still good.