Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Yellow
Where to Buy: Nan Nuo Shan
Tea Description:
A truly original yellow tea produced according to a traditional recipe in an ancient Chinese tea region. The sprouts are picked when still tiny and tender to be carefully processed in small batches.
The taste is very clear and rich, refreshing but not fresh. Warm, brisk and mineral with hints of hay and a pleasant, slightly sweet, aftertaste.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
For those of you who are familiar with my love of tea, you are probably aware that yellow tea is my favorite variety of tea. So when Nan Nuo Shan offered to send me their new harvest of Huang Ya Yellow Tea, I leaped at the opportunity. Yes PLEASE!
To brew this, I got out my gaiwan. They sent me 6 grams of the tea and since I have a fairly large gaiwan, I poured the whole 6 grams of tea into the bowl of the gaiwan. I gave the tea a 15 second rinse and followed it with six infusions (1 minute for the first infusion with 15 seconds additional steep time for each subsequent infusion). All six infusions fit quite nicely in my YiXing mug designated for yellow teas.
And how I love this tea. It’s so lovely!
Before I proceed with the review, I wanted to highlight some information on the Nan Nuo Shan website about yellow tea that I found rather interesting:
The production of yellow tea is not only difficult but also risky. During yellowing the tea might turn moldy, causing the lost of precious raw leaves. So former yellow tea producers decided to focus on more popular and risk-free green teas or at least to shorten the yellowing phase to few hours instead of days, thus producing yellow tea undistinguishable from green tea.
That is something to keep in mind when you’re purchasing yellow tea in the future. It’s important to communicate with your tea purveyor to find out what you can about production of your teas!
This tea! It is pure loveliness and joy in liquid form.
Sweet! The tea is sweet with a lovely contrasting note of bitter toward the end of the sip. This is not the “oh no, I steeped the tea incorrectly” kind of bitter. This is not an off-putting kind of bitter. It’s a delicate, savory note that contrasts with the sweetness and adds complexity to every sip. It hints at the layers of flavor that are waiting to be explored by the sipper.
It has a soft, creamy texture that is similar to a Chinese green tea but without the strong, grassy/vegetative and/or kelp-y taste that you might notice with a typical green. Hints of butter with a light, tangy quality that reminded me a little of the tangy note that I might experience from buttermilk.
It’s lightly earthy as opposed to what I’d call vegetal, but the earthy tones are vegetal tasting. It doesn’t taste like earth as in loam or peat, it tastes like an earthy green taste. Like kale that has been cooked to perfection: earthy with a little bit of bitter and and a hint of tangy. Only this is better because it also has that delightful sweetness! I’d take a cup of this over a plate of kale anytime!
It’s so smooth. There’s no astringency. Even the tangy quality here – it’s a flavor without the sensation that accompanies an astringent tea. This is one of the very best yellow teas I’ve yet to encounter. I highly recommend this to all who are looking to expand their experience with yellow tea! (All of you, right?) It’s an incredibly beautiful tea!
Yunomi Tea Discoveries Club, January Review (Part 2)
As promised, this is part 2 of my review of January’s Tea Discoveries Club package from Yunomi.
We’re going to start off where we left off last night, moving on to the third tea I tried from January’s collection of teas: Bancha Green Tea from Onocha Tea Factory & Shop. Similarly to the other teas in this collection, this tea is not available for purchase from Yunomi. That’s part of what makes the Discovery Club a MUST for tea lovers. It will expose you to teas that you might never have tried! What a unique and wonderful opportunity!
This is a really pleasant Bancha. It has a crisp, uplifting flavor: fresh, vegetative and clean. There is a nice contrast between sweet and savory. It has a nice, brothy sort of texture and taste. Nutty, sweet, hints of bitter to offset the sweetness. Nicely smooth.
It’s a soothing tea that reminds me a bit of sipping broth. That warm, nourishing sort of feeling that I get when I sip broth, that’s what I get when I sip this Bancha. It’s not too sweet, not too bitter – just really pleasant.
This is the kind of green tea that I like to have on hand for “every day” sort of drinking. It is a great tea to drink with meals because it’s not an aggressive tasting tea – it’s really smooth and satisfying.
The next tea that I tried was the Sencha Suiho. Immediately, I found myself curious as to how it would differ from the other Sencha I enjoyed from this month’s Discovery Club package: Sencha Suiren.
Upon first sip, I got my answer! These are really two very different Sencha teas! This Sencha Suiho is sweet, buttery and smooth. Very little bitterness. Very little astringency. I noticed more bitterness and astringency with the Suiren – and that wasn’t even a really strongly bitter or aggressively astringent tea!
This is beautifully buttery and pleasantly mellow. Nice! The resteep is almost as nice as the first cup – still really beautifully creamy and sweet!
I saved the Hojicha for last as Hojicha is one of my favorite types of Japanese green teas! Hojicha Soybean Blend to be exact. I think of all the teas that I received this month, this was the one I was the most excited about, mostly because I found myself curious about the ‘soybean.’
Unfortunately, I’m not able to provide a picture of the tea itself because the battery in my camera thought it was the right time to die. So, I just have a picture of the package. 
The dry leaf looks a lot like … well, it looks like dried, chopped up leaves and stems. The first thought that went through my head when I saw it was “mulch.” I’m hoping it tastes better than I can only imagine mulch tasting. Since I’m not planning on brewing mulch and drinking it any time soon, I’ll have to imagine what it would taste like.
Ah … yeah! Yum! There’s that lovely sweet, nutty flavor that I’ve come to love when it comes to Hojicha. That delicious roasty-toasty flavor that evokes thoughts of autumn.
It has a smooth texture to it and it’s not an astringent tea. It’s not bitter. It’s sweet and a very soothing, calming sort of drink. Really lovely. However, I don’t know that I taste any ‘soybean’ in this tea, I just taste sweet, nutty flavor, very much like I’d experience with a top-quality Hojicha.
Overall, I found this adventure with the Discoveries Club from Yunomi to be really enjoyable. Spectacular teas – I love that these teas are exclusive to the Discovery Club. It’s certainly well worth it to take part in this adventure and discover some amazing Japanese Teas!
Yunomi Tea Discoveries Club, January Review (Part 1)
This is going to be a rather unconventional review, because rather than review just one tea, I’m going to review the first two teas that I tried from the Yunomi Tea Discoveries Club (scroll down a bit when you get to the page and you’ll find the Discoveries Club in the middle of the page!) and then tomorrow, I will review the other three that I received in the club. Plus, I will review the club itself.
The main reason I’m doing the review this way is that this month’s Discoveries Club included teas that aren’t available on Yunomi’s website, so they aren’t available for you to buy from Yunomi. These are exclusive teas available only to the Discoveries Club subscribers, and you should be one! So this review is more about the club itself rather than the five teas that were part of the review, although I’ll tell you about each of the teas too!
This month’s Discovery Club package was filled with five different teas: Sencha Suiren, Sencha Suiho, Mochi Rice Genmaicha, Hojicha Soybean Blend and Bancha Tea Blend. All five of the teas are from Onocha Tea Factory & Shop.
The first tea that I decided to ‘discover’ was the Sencha Suiren. It’s been a little while since I’ve had a pure Japanese Sencha so I found myself very excited at the prospect of a fresh tasting, clean, invigorating green tea.
And that’s just what this tea delivered for me. It’s a lovely tea. I found my palate refreshed after each sip. There’s a contrast between sweet and savory bitter notes. The sip starts out with sweetness and by mid-sip, I feel the savory notes tantalizing the taste buds. The finish is sweet and clean. There is very little astringency to this – as in I’m finding it difficult to detect much astringency at all! I feel a slight “tangy” sensation on the palate and on the insides of the cheeks in the aftertaste, but it’s very slight.
What was nicest for me about this particular tea is how the palate felt so clean and refreshed after I’d finish a sip. I felt it slowly rejuvenate me, as if it was removing the stress of the day.
It’s sweet, it’s light, it’s refreshing. It’s a really lovely cup of tea! After I enjoyed a couple of cups of this tea (the leaves resteep very well!), I scooped out the leaves and put them in a little bowl with a light vinaigrette and ate the leaves like a salad. Delicious!
Time to move on now to the Mochi Rice Genmaicha – also from Onocha Tea Factory & Shop.
Most Genmaicha has roasted brown rice, not Mochi rice. So I wondered how different this would make the flavor of this tea.
I noticed as I measured out the tea that there are very few popped kernels. I think I only spotted one popped kernel, actually! The rice looks different from the toasted brown rice in other Genmaicha. Other Genmaicha looks a bit like crisped rice cereal that had been toasted, while this rice looks much more solid. I didn’t notice the ‘air pockets’ that I would normally see in the roasted brown rice.
As far as flavor goes, this tastes different too. The rice doesn’t taste quite as ‘roasty-toasty’ as a typical Genmaicha.
The tea is still sweet and I do still get nutty flavors from the rice. The sweetness is a little different, this is more like a slightly sugary sweetness as opposed to the roasty-toasty sweetness that I’m used to from a Genmaicha. The green tea has a fresh, vibrant flavor that I expect from a green tea in a Genmaicha and it melds nicely with the flavors of the mochi rice.
This is different, but it’s very tasty in it’s own way. It also has a similar soothing quality that I get from Genmaicha. I don’t get that roasty-toasty cozy flavor, but there is a certain cozy character about this tea too. I like it and I’m really grateful that I had the opportunity to try it, thanks to this month’s Tea Discoveries Club package!
Stay tuned to tomorrow’s post (same time!) to learn about the other three teas in this month’s Tea Discoveries Club package!
Chocolate Orange White Tea from sTEAp Shoppe
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: White
Where to Buy: sTEAp Shoppe
Tea Description:
Chocolate Orange Loose Leaf White Tea is a Delightfully mild citrus spice with a creamy touch on the tongue. The mild loose leaf white tea is the perfect vessel for this spectacular combination of creamy, tangy with a delicate touch of spice.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
I was a little skeptical about this blend, to be honest, because it’s a white tea … and I generally prefer chocolate-y teas to have a black tea base. I was also skeptical because I felt that with the chocolate and orange notes to be strong enough that the white tea would end up being overwhelmed.
Well, the white tea is not overwhelmed. It has a light, fresh taste to it … somewhat vegetative, with a creamy note that is accented by the vanilla. I find that this creaminess highlights the chocolate and adds some much needed emphasis to the orange flavor.
The chocolate comes through nicely, as does the vanilla. I wish the same could be said for the orange. I taste the orange, certainly, but it isn’t as bright or vivid a taste as I think it should be for a tea called Chocolate Orange.
My favorite part of this tea is the touch of cinnamon, which adds a very pleasing, autumnal taste and a sense of warmth to the cup. I like that the cinnamon is a gentle, sweet cinnamon, just enough to spice up the tea without adding an overpowering amount of flavor (something that cinnamon often does in a blend – I’m glad that’s not happening here).
Overall, this is a very enjoyable blend. A little weak on the orange, but, the other flavors are very pleasing – I like that the chocolate comes through, and I love the little touches: a touch of vanilla, a touch of cinnamon. It makes for a very delicious cuppa.
A Raspberry in Paris Rooibos from Bernideen’s
Tisane Information:
Leaf Type: Rooibos
Where to Buy: Bernideen’s
Tisane Description:
Spritely notes of raspberry come to the fore with light overtones of rooibos. Perfect raspberry jam finish.
Taster’s Review:
Another tea (or, in this case, tisane!) from the lovely Bernideen in Colorado City!
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to trying this tisane. I’m not big on rooibos, as I’ve professed many times. But, again, to be honest, lately it would seem that I find more rooibos blends that I enjoy than those that I do not. And this is one that I’m really enjoying!
But what makes this so enjoyable is not the rooibos, but the raspberry. This IS raspberry! I don’t think I’ve tasted a tea or tisane that has been more true to the fruit than this. This tastes like I just bit into a fresh, ripe raspberry. All that’s missing is the seeds (which I don’t like anyway, so I’m not missing them at all!)
That’s not to say that the rooibos is not at all present in this cup, because I do taste a light woody tone of the rooibos. But what makes this tisane work so well, I think, is that the raspberry flavoring seems to have brought out some of the subtle fruit notes of the rooibos which are often missed in other rooibos blends.
This tastes sweet with just a hint of that berry tartness, and the sip seems to sparkle on the tongue, reminiscent of homemade raspberry jam! YUM!