Jasmine Tea

A little birdie that goes told me I should try this one so I thought I’d brew it up. The jasmine smell is lovely but I’ve become a bit cautious (and pretty darn picky) with jasmine flavored things, so we shall see.

This sampler has 4g of tea, so I’m making a big cup. The packaging states that this is green tea but that it should be brewed in water ‘just below the boiling point’, which I am taking as 195° (and water that has been freshly boiled ‘but allowed to cool slightly’ I’m taking as 175°). But since it is green tea, I want to do it at 175°. But I’m not. We’ll see how it goes. And in fact, the leaves don’t look super green. More dark olive maybe. And once the leaves are wet, I think they’d definitely be classed as olive.

On one hand, that’s good right? Not a super-green leaf so it should be happier at a higher temp, yes? But at the same time… olive? I would be lying if I weren’t starting to get just a little concerned. After all, GM has to strike out sometime, yes?

Hmmmmm…. I’m a bit torn. It definitely isn’t a strike out, but I don’t know if I love it. It’s different than what I was expecting and from what I’ve had before but I can’t quite figure out why. There’s an additional flavor there that I don’t normally get with jasmine teas.

AH! I’m a dork! I just figured out what that end taste/aftertaste is! TEA! There’s the blip at the end, right before I swallow, that is almost all green tea and then it reappears in the aftertaste when I inhale (after an exhale of jasmine). It makes this one of the more deeply flavored jasmines that I’ve had. Samovar’s had a good depth to it but a more cookie depth. This one has more of a salty, almost astringent Chinese green depth which, as it flows back into the jasmine, gives a bit of a tang for me. Of course, along with being hard to please with my jasmines, I’m hard to please with my Chinese greens.

So, is it good? Well, it’s not fake tasting or heavily done so sure. It’s good. Is it in the same class as there coconut pouchong, sugar caramel oolong or rose? Nope. It’s a good jasmine that I don’t hate and it has a brilliant scent to it which is so delightful that I could probably smell my cup for days. But I like Samovar’s jasmine pearl better for a jasmine tea with depth and I like Adagio’s jasmine silver needle best for a soft, fluffy, light jasmine. I think both of those are better done than this one, at least for my own personal tastes.

That being said, I might enjoy this more if I had done it at 175°.

ETA: Resteep at 175° for 4mins. Still good but not in love. This one reminds me a lot of Adagio’s Jasmine #12. That’s a good thing.

Longer steep this time with the same leaves. This time I’m mostly tasting green tea and almost no jasmine. It’s not bitter, and it’s a fine green, but where is all the nice floral flavor? 52/100 for this cup.

ETA: There is a teeny bit of jasmine there in the aftertaste. Teeny. I didn’t even notice it until halfway through the cup.

Time for my Afternoon Green!

This is another one that was rated rather poorly by most of the Steepsterverse, but I think it’s very good! Mild jasmine taste. No bitterness. Very enjoyable to sip. I think a low water temp and brief steep time suits this one.

To totally contradict myself – the second steep, forgotten about in the pot and brewed for 7 minutes (!!!) is very good too! I thought it was going to be a bitter nightmare, but it’s enjoyable!

I can’t say that it distinguishes itself from other jasmine green teas – like A+D has that unique banana/tropical thing going on. A solid B but I am looking for a little more pizzazz for a whole tin purchase.

As I sit at my desk for a few minutes pondering the next part of my day, Pandora Radio – which always plays what I want to hear – blasts “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” by CCR – why yes, I have, as it is pouring now, as it was for my entire commute and will probably continue to do so all day…good thing I had some of this tea to keep me going.

There were surprisingly few leaves in my sample, you do not need a lot of tea when making Jasmine tea, but I tend to over do it for some reason. As I said, the sample had fewer than I would normally use, so I infused longer. Hot, 6 minutes, no additives. The aroma is faint, slightly sweet, jasmine in lukewarm weather, it smells fabulous. The flavor is so light and delicate it is perfect. As I said, I usually aim for stronger and more Jasmine flavor when brewing my Jasmine tea, but this really hit the spot and brightened my otherwise drab day.

This one took second place in the tea comparison the night before last. It had the same apple like sweetness to it but the jasmine fu was much stronger with this one. It was done well enough the jasmine did not have super powers. I would really enjoy this one if I hadn’t fallen in love with Teavivre’s jasmine pearls.

Sampler Tea #9, chosen at random from the Golden Moon Tea Sampler

I don’t love Jasmine but I don’t dislike it. I found this tea to be “pleasant.” I think that I use the word “pleasant” in a lot of tea reviews where I find nothing objectionable about the tea, but I don’t get excited at all. I don’t particularly want to or need to purchase these “pleasant” teas because there’s an entire world of “pleasant” teas out there.

I have not sampled a lot of jasmine teas, so I cannot make any meaningful comparisons.

I’m trying to figure out whether I like Jasmine teas. So when I saw the SS I was totally confused because I know I do not like EG’s I think I would like Caravan and the verdict is still out on whether I like Jasmine I’ve tried Adagio’s Jasmine #12 and thought it was meh.

So today I thought I’d try jasmine from my GM sampler and see if we could get a verdict. The open packet (I think of Ricky and his comment about little silver suits) everytime I open one of these packets (random thought). Anyway once steeped this tea is more to my liking than the Jasmine #12 I think that this is much lighter and I like that. Which is strange because usually I like in your face flavors!?!

The taste is very light, another reference to Ricky here in that I agree with his notes on this tea the base doesn’t taste to me like a green tea but a white tea base. Well no verdict today I still don’t know if I like jasmine teas or not. Hmmm maybe I just think there okay I can take them or leave them or maybe I haven’t found the right one yet? Now I’ll be wondering all day if A&D’s Jasmine Green is the right jasmine tea for me! Drats I hate that!!!

I can’t even begin to describe how delicious this tea smells.

This is my first experience with jasmine tea, and I was definitely not disappointed in any way. I opened Golden Moon’s little sample packet, and out wafted that most mesmerizing smell. A perfume that was wonderfully fruity and floral. I’d never smelled anything like it.

I’m not the resident expert on aromatherapy and lotions and the like. As a result, I really wasn’t sure what to expect from jasmine. Before today, if you asked me to identify jasmine, I wouldn’t have been able to. Now, it’s a scent that is so sharply ingrained in my thoughts and nose that I can recall it instantly from memory. I thought to myself, if this tastes as good as it smells, we have a winner.

The leaves unfurled delicately, and the resulting liquid was yellow, but rich-colored. The scent coming from the hot cup was amazing – a bit more floral than the dry leaves, but rich and fruity.

On first taste it was a bit difficult to grasp any of the distinct flavors, but as the cup cooled slightly I was in heaven. Seriously. The jasmine flavor is strong and wonderful and complements the taste of the green tea perfectly. It’s juicy and buttery and floral, fruity like ripe pears or something along those lines. The flavors all mingle together nicely on the green tea sweetness. It’s difficult to pick the jasmine apart from the green, since they’re blended so well together. Each complements the other so well!

If you hate jasmine, I wouldn’t recommend this. It’s really very jasmine-y. But if you love it, this tea is probably perfect for you. Golden Moon says that it would taste good iced, and while I won’t try it like that (I’m not a fan of iced tea), I can see why they’d suggest it. I’m so happy that my sampler was overstuffed with jasmine tea, and that I definitely have enough for another cup of this beauty.

I’m going to attempt to resteep this, but I’ll probably just include the notes here. The leaves still have retained their jasmine scent, and they haven’t completely unfurled, so we’ll see what happens.

EDIT: So I resteeped this baby for four minutes, and it brewed up to identically the same color. The smell this time had lost some of its fruitiness and become more of a straight floral scent. The taste… was okay. It’s probably one of the better resteeps I’ve tried in a while, but the evil-green-vegetal-second-steep taste started to drown out the delicate jasmine flavor and sweetness. I also found that I really didn’t want another cup of jasmine. I can see this not as an everyday sort of flavor, but as a special occasion or less-often tea experience.

Golden Moon sample No. 16 of 31. Selected randomly. I was sort of hoping for the Kashmiri Chai, but this was what came out.

I have some, but not a lot, of experience with jasmine tea. Most of my experience is with teas that don’t claim to be exemplars of the genre. So I was really pleased with how the dry leaves smelled when I opened up the sample packet. The jasmine provides a rich and very fresh floral scent. There is a lot of jasmine growing in my neighborhood and on cool spring evenings, it smells wonderful. This strikes me as very similar in fragrance. The tea smells quite nice too. Quietly herbaceous and a little earthy. It is darker than I’d thought it would be, not very green in color — more toward the browner side.

The tea is a dusky, light yellow, and it smells lovely. It’s pretty much only jasmine I’m smelling. Warmed and diffused by the water, the aroma smells even fresher than it did before.

Though I know it isn’t the best descriptor, the adjective that comes to mind upon tasting this is “pretty.” The tea is not distracting, nor is it absent. I am going to try steeping at 2 minutes and see if it becomes more present. It has a sweet, floral flavor, with a very slight vegetal note.

It seems to me a solid jasmine tea in my limited experience, but I had hoped for more green tea flavor to show through.

I looked back at how I rated the Numi jasmine which I think is the only other non-flavored jasmine I’ve rated, and which isn’t as nice at this. I gave it a 71, which is pretty high on my scale. Rather than bump this one up significantly higher, I’m choosing to bump the Numi down a bit. The Golden Moon is tastier and tastes higher quality to me, but as I’m fairly new to jasmine green tea, I am not yet sure it is the best example of its kind. So I’m making it the de facto standard “very good” for now, to be revisited as my experience grows.

I drink most of my tea at work, as a mid-morning or mid-afternoon treat. Am I too far gone if I say that one reason I looked forward to coming back to work today was so that I could try a new Golden Moon sampler?

I chose their Jasmine tea today; this has been one of my favorite flower scents since we had a jasmine vine at the house where I grew up. The smell reminds me of long evenings during summer vacation… I love jasmine pearl teas for their aesthetic qualities, so it’s been a while since I’ve had a straight jasmine tea. When I cut open the sampler packet, the first whiff I got gave me not so much jasmine as bubble gum/Juicy Fruit! Very sweet and fruity aroma. The leaves are quite dark green and it’s really a very generous sample size.

After three minutes, the tea is quite a deep greenish brown color, so I’ll call it quits there. The taste is very fruity, and again I wouldn’t call it a quintessential jasmine flavor or aroma. There’s also quite a pronounced astringency – I think this may have been better at a lower water temperature than the 190 I used this time.

It’s not unpleasant, but I can’t help comparing it to my favorite jasmine pearl teas, which are unmistakably scented with the flower and leave a lingering aftertaste for a long, long time.