Mountain Organic Indonesian Green Tea

Thanks to Tea at Sea for providing me with this lovely sample. As others have noted they have lovely packaging even these samples come in lovely resealable packaging with cute graphics.

This tea is tightly rolled like a green oolong. It is not smooth and smokey like a gunpowder green tea, but pellet like light to dark olive nuggets that smell of seaweed, dried alfalfa and a touch of red clover flowers.

I steeped 1 TSP in about 135 ml of water and got 4 good steeps out of it (45, 60, 80, 100s) at about 85°C.

The tea brewed to a nice bright yellow tinged green initially smell in of a light and soft slightly spicy floral with alfalfa underneath, becoming both sweeter and nuttier with later steeps.

The tea itself had mostly a rich smooth taste with the flavour initially more savoury and becoming sweeter and nuttier.

Flavour notes I noted were: slight spinach note, hay, clover, butter, plum, apricot, cream, honeydew melon, choclo ( a type of corn), alfalfa, buttery sweet greens, clover nectar, cooked peach, and chestnut.

Altogether a nice, smooth, and mild green tea.

2/8/14 Sipdown. 4ish g / 12oz/212F/4 min approx. Nice. Tasted like a proper green tea to me – grassy, a little buttery, slightly astringent.

I have bad news, sadly it is another one of those days where I cannot think of anything witty to open today’s tea review. I just found myself staring at the screen and nothing of note came to mind. It would be best to assume that since the world outside my window is covered in snow that my brain decided to hibernate. Perhaps I have been spending so much time researching lately that my mind fizzled, that means that tonight I will be spending folding stars.

Today’s tea is Mountain Organic Indonesian Green from Tea at Sea. Grown on the Halimun Mountain (800m above sea level) and fed with spring water and mountain air. Very similar to the Mountain Organic Indonesian Oolong I reviewed the other day. In fact at first glance I thought they were the same tea, but on closer inspection the color was a bit more vibrant for the Green tea and the aroma was subtly different. At first I noticed the creamy, sweet, honey notes blending with baking bread and a touch of floral, similar but stronger than the Oolong, but there is a kelp and lettuce undertone giving it more of a vegetal quality. It is less heady and more fresh vegetation than the Oolong.

Once the tea leaves relax in their hot soak (the term agony of the leaf seems so incorrect, it always looks to me like the leaves are relaxing and stretching out to enjoy a hot bath) the aroma is a bit mineral at first with a touch of fresh kelp. It then fades to a mellow sweetness with a very gentle citrus note, like orange blossoms. The liquid without the relaxing leaves has a very faint aroma with honey tones and a very faint hint of vegetal.

At first sip the taste is fruity, like biting into a juicy plum. After the initial fruity sweetness it fades to vegetal tones and ends with an aftertaste of sweet cherries. The more I sip the more little hints of flavor pop through, a bit of mineral here and bit of baking bread there, quite tasty!

Giving it a second visit I notice the aroma of the leaves steeping and the tea is for the most part the same except it has more of a delicate quality. The taste is also more delicate losing most of its fruit notes and leaving subtle sweetness and notes of artichoke. I found this tea fascinating, it was so similar to the Oolong that I tried earlier and yet was different enough that you could clearly tell it was a different tea.

For Blog and Photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2014/02/tea-at-sea-mountain-organic-indonesian_5.html

I LOVE Tea at Sea’s teas! The two samples that they gave me are like.. really nice quality.
Tea leaves dry are rolled up so tight, and I actually brew my tea in a mason jar (because I’m a cheapo college student and it has the oz. markings already so I know how much water to put in for however much my tea weighs) and THE LEAVES JUST EXPAND SO BIG AND IT’S SO FREAKIN GORGEOUS AND I LOVE IT WHEN YOU SEE NICE AND BIG FULL LEAF TEAS IT’S SO PRETTY. I SEE THAT THE TEAS TAKE UP LIKE NO SPACE AT ALL IN THE MASON JAR, I DO WORK AND MY TIMER DINGS, AND THEN I LOOK UP AND BAM THE LEAVES HAVE EXPANDED AND ALL YOU SEE ARE THE LEAVES EVERYWHERE IT’S GREAT.

This is a sipdown, and I’m partial for it to go. Like it’s a really great quality tea, I’m just not so big on the flavour? It tastes like.. it has a hint of seaweed so I don’t know if I like it all that much. I know that I absolutely love the Black Oolong so when I finally finish off that tea sample, I’ll be quite sad.

wow, took quite a while for the tightly curled leaves to unfurl. definitely 8+ minutes!! although it was past the recommended steeping time i wasn’t worried since this is an organic tea, and in my experience, they tend to have a very clean flavor & aren’t dramatically altered by oversteeping.

the aroma of the infused leaves reminds me somehow of corn. not really getting seaweed, grassy or vegetal notes, although this has a ‘green tea feel’ for sure but not a typical one, at least not for me. if i’m not mistaken, this tea tastes an awful lot like Stash’s Organic Premium Green (one of my favorites!)….the liquor is even the same color. in my cup it’s a light yellow/peridot, but in the tea maker it looked like more of a jade for some reason. the leaves are a rich dark olive green.

ultimately, the flavor is light and clean with an astringent bite, and i feel like there is a predominant corn note, but not a sweet corn. i will say, this tea got increasingly bitter (almost tart) as it cooled down, but i blame my steeping parameters. perhaps it wasn’t necessary for the leaves to unfurl quite so lavishly? 5-6 minutes might have done the trick. but it’s nothing that ruined this experience for me as i quite enjoyed it, and interestingly enough, as i said before, it reminded me of Stash’s Organic, a green tea i am thoroughly impressed with!

my first experience with Indonesian tea. cool!

thank you so much, Tea At Sea for your generosity in sending out free samples for everyone to try!!

I got this as a free sample from Tea at Sea last week. They seem like an awesome company, I actually found out about them through a steepster discussion feed where they said they would send free tea samples in exchange for reviews. I feel like that’s a pretty fair deal, and I’m always happy with free tea.

They sent their Mountain Organic Indonesian Green and Mountain Organic Indonesian Black. I figured I’d start with the green. Overall, it was a perfectly enjoyable experience. It was not by far the best green tea I’ve ever had, but it still tasted great. It actually reminded me a lot of Sleeping Dragon by Adagio, which is kind of my go-to “nothing fancy” green tea.

It had a smooth, buttery nutty taste to it – not grassy or vegetal at all. Towards the end I could KIND OF detect a hint of the fruit notes they claimed, but honestly, it’s really hard to tell.

So, honestly, I probably won’t be buying any more of this, but I was very grateful for the opportunity to give it a try, and I wish Tea at Sea all the best.

Lovely grassy tea. The seaweed notes are especially nice. It must be the same type that they use heavily in China because I can’t stop thinking about my trip to China when I drink this. Quite an enjoyable tea none the less. And somehow, it still tastes good even though I steeped it way too long.

I have a special place in my heart for Tea At Sea…teas!
Read about it here…
http://sororiteasisters.com/2016/05/01/add-tea-review-title-6-2/
As long as you don’t over infuse this one you should have ‘smooth sailin’ with this one. Pardon the pun but seriously…Mountain Organic Indonesian Oolong Tea from Tea At Sea is a nice, solid yet smooth, greener tasting oolong that I enjoyed very much!

I love how this green tea is rolled up in tightly coiled balls, just like an oolong. They are silky smooth, and produce a buttered spinach green cup. It was a nice and lightly floral green with a honeydew melon accompaniment. It is always a pleasure to watch balled up teas pop in my gaiwan.

Another one of the Indonesian tea sampler from Tea at Sea. Haven’t been disappointed yet. This is a green I can get behind!

I used the whole 5g packet in my 100ml gaiwan. I managed to steep this for about 5 or so times before becoming bored :P

Sipdown! And what a fascinating one it is. This one is rolled like an oolong but definitely tastes like a green. Buttery, very lightly vegetal to the point of being almost hay-like, and a soft sweetness at the end of the sip. If a dragonwell, a silver needle white, and a green oolong had a baby, it might just be this tea. Calming and delicious.