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This is another tea with two listings so I just picked one.

Unfortunately I didn’t love this one. Or, to be perfectly honest, any of the Mandala oolongs I’ve tried. This one is just a bit thin. In taste and mouthfeel. Overleafing/steeping gives a bit more mineral in the brew. There’s a bit of spice and bark but nothing noteworthy. Just a bland brew overall. Tried gong-fu and mug brewing, and both were insipid. Perhaps this was just a poor harvest.

I really love his matcha. While I am by no means a matcha connoisseur I have tried my fair share and this one rates pretty highly amongst them all. It is definitely one of the sweetest matchas I have had. Just opening a fresh tin you are greeted with a beautiful, lasting sweet scent which directly translates to the liquor once mixed. The color is an entirely gorgeous vibrant green. Seriously, this stuff is almost electric.

My only complaint is that it does clump a bit more than other matcha I have. Perhaps due to the fact that it takes quite some time to get it through a strainer. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s nothing a good shake after blending can’t help.

My matcha drinking suffered during winter, but now that we are back to having bearable days (temperature wise) I am again drinking my daily matcha latte. Currently I’m near obsessed mixing this one with ~3/4 of a pump of Monin’s cantaloupe syrup. Gorgeous! Pure decadent refreshing summer in a cup. Today I had some with their cucumber syrup and I can see this becoming my new favorite. If you haven’t tried any of Monin’s syrups I can’t recommend them enough. Especially along with this tea :)

Oh, boo. This harvest is a bit of a bummer. I’ve tried it a few times now, with a handful of different parameters and I just can’t get it to work all that well. It’s not bad, but compared with the previous harvest which has to be one of my favorite teas ever, it’s very disappointing. Where that was hefty, perfectly chocolatey and malty. This is insipid. With a terribly odd aftertaste. I’ll definitely try the next harvest, but fingers crossed it’s back to where it was before.

Wow, fresh indeed! Unfortunately it’s more along the lines of fresh vegetation than fresh flowers as I had hoped. Probably not a bad tea, but one of the most vegetal teas I’ve ever smelled or tasted. Which is not at all to my taste. There might have been the tiniest hint of floral hiding out in there, but I spit out the one sip I took and am not interested in trying another. I’ll be sending the rest off to Amanda SoggyEnderman with hopes she’ll find vegetal notes more preferable than I do. It’s a huge bag though, so if anyone wants me to take out a sample for them let me know!