Mandarin Silk

I’ve been wanting to try this tea for a while so I broke down and got one of the little mini tins. If you have the coconut pouchong from Golden Moon, there are some similarities. This flavored oolong is slightly buttery, with vanilla notes from the silk flavoring. It reminds me a bit of kettle corn. I don’t love it, but I am pretty happy with it.

I decided at the last second to throw this on my Art of Tea order and I’m really very glad that I did.

From dry leaf to steeping liquid to final product, this tea’s scents remained rather consistent for me, excepting a variance in intensities. That, and the wet leaf took on an unsurprising vegetal quality. What I smell is, also unsurprisingly, mandarin orange. It mingles somewhere between actual mandarin oranges and those mandarin orange gummy slices, but as I enjoy both of them it’s not an issue for me. The warmly fresh and sweet citrus scent combines with the scent of some kind of baked good. This tea uses pouchong, which I am beginning to identify as one of my favorite types of oolong, and I’m pretty sure that’s where the bake-y portion of today’s tasting is originating.

How many people have had fruit tart? Raise your hand.

Sorry, that was very Blue’s Clues of me [though, if you actually raised your hand, then please wave it around like you just don’t care]. The reason I ask is because the taste of this tea made me think very much of the base pastry that has been used in fruit tarts that I have had. If you haven’t fruit tart, then imagine, perhaps, a sugar cookie with about half the sugar. If you haven’t had either of these, may I suggest that you expand your dessert repertoire immediately.

Mandarin oranges have always had a bit of softness around them in the taste as opposed to navel oranges, which aren’t biting in flavor but read as sharper to me in flavor and acidity. The orange taste in this definitely treads solidly in mandarin orange territory, and the rounded flavor of that meshes very nicely with the warm, buttery, doughy qualities of the pouchong.

I went two steeps deep on this one, and the flavor had noticeably faded on the second steep. When I have more time, I may try lengthening the steep time on the second steep even further to see what that does, but the tasty first steep is reason enough for me to keep this tea around and perhaps even re-order once it’s gone.

I haven’t been impressed with some of their other offerings, but with mandarin silk and caramelized pear on my tea shelf, I don’t really need anything else from Art of Tea to wow me. I’m pretty happy here.

Hands down this is my new favorite tea! Hot, cold, iced, with milk, without milk, sugar, no sugar it’s great every which way! I highly recommend this tea, sweet and smooth as silk!

The dry leaf smells creamy. I can occasionally catch a whiff of pouching greenness. But the foremost smell is creamy… something. Vanilla, a hint of dreamsicle-like citrus and something that reminds me of calendula. A tingle or something. Hard to describe so I’m really just stuck with calendula.

And duh, I just read the tasting notes and it says it has marigold. Which I think is the same (or similar?) to calendula. So whew, not crazy.

Brewed up, there is more of a pouching smell and that makes my mouth water. Then I get vanilla and calendula spikes with a little dreamsicle sweetness. So pretty much exactly what the dry leaves smell like but in different proportions.

The taste literally made me go ‘wow’. Very creamy on the front end. Very. Then it mixes with a soft calendula and citrus/dreamsicle, then the pouchong buttery green freshness at the end and then, after the sip, a little tingle on the tip of my tongue from the calendula.

Honestly, I’ve gotten to the point that I’m not a huge fan of calendula in my teas, but I can totally work with this. The tea is unrepentantly creamy and thick tasting, – like the thickness that differentiates whole milk from skim – it is thick and it coats my mouth.

It’s a pretty distinct tea so it’s going to take a few times for me to figure out exactly how much I will enjoy this – crave-ability, addiction level, etc – so this score is a bit soft, but I’m pretty sure it will only go up once I better get to know this tea.

ETA: Second steep @ 2:30 and 195°. Pretty similar to the first steep, sweeter once it cooled a little. Third steep @ 3:30 and 195° poured into a cup then into the pot – I’m tempted to dub this the money steep. The sweetness pops a bit more and the calendula tingle is almost non-existent but the flavor of it is still there and blends well with the very faint dreamsicle thing that’s going on.
3g/6oz

Another one of my teas that I tried early on and didn’t much care for. I thought I didn’t like oolong, but this is the 2nd oolong that I’ve had in the last couple days and I think I’ve definitely developed a taste for it. This one has a great vanilla flavor in the first steep, a buttery cream flavor in the second, the last one has lost the buttery-ness, but it’s still pretty good. I’m glad I’m trying out the oolongs again. I’m really enjoying them!

Drank oodles of tea last night but didn’t get around to logging ‘cause I was too busy being all WTF DAWN I LOVE THIS SHOW SO OFF THE WALL, ha. None blew me away and none were terrible, so I’m just gonna do brief “I drank this!” backlogs pretty much.

This was ok, but there was that plasticky aftertaste vanilla flavored teas often get, and combined with the floral of the pouchong, ehh. I think I prefer the vanilla teas I’ve tried from The Tea Merchant slightly. But it wasn’t terrible.

This tea could not have come at a better time.
We are having unseasonable cold temps here, today is in the forties and rainy and windy.
I opened the tin and took a big whiff then I felt like Emeril Lagasse, because I said “BAM” right out loud.
With the dry leaves I immediately smelled sugar, caramel and cream.
Once I poured the water over the leaves, I smelled warm milk, then a smokiness…then finally then the earthy Oolong came through gently.
The color is light, more like the color of green tea.
The first sip again brings to mind of warm milk, maybe with a touch of sugar.
Rather comforting.
It finishes with a nice smooth, light Oolong taste.
The second infusion it lost a bit of its sugary milk smell and taste and more of an actual tea flavor comes through.
Now, I do normally like more of a classic Oolong tea.
Most experience I have had with Oolong were in pots of hot strong Oolong delivered to our tables at the local Chinese restaurant.
My father also drank Sunluck or Bigelow Oolong.
But, I do like this tea.
Maybe it is the rain and wind beating against the window right now or the fact this tea is like something a Mother might make for a child who was having trouble sleeping.
I am certainly enjoying this unusual flavored Oolong (this is my first flavored Oolong, by the way)
On a much warmer day than today, I am looking forward to try this tea cold brewed.

Guessing on the temp here, since I was impatient and added a bit of cooler water to my cup, then the 190 from the Zoji, and then submerged the leaves. Awfully imprecise of me, but this isn’t the first time I’ve had this despite the utter lack of tasting notes, so I feel qualified (finally) to talk about it.

Previously, the Coconut Pouchong from Golden Moon was the only pouchong I’d had, and it rapidly became one of my very favorite teas. I’d thought that the coconut milk was lending that pouchong the occasional scent of gardenia, but I’m getting it off of this cup too, so I’m wondering if it might not be a quality of pouchong? I should really go out of my way to get an exceptional unflavored pouchong to try.

The smell of the dry leaves echoes almost exactly the aroma and taste of the tea. It’s a creamy, soft, buttery, floral vanilla citrus, a bit dreamsicle-ish, but not tart at all — more rounded. My friend’s father used to have a mandarin orange tree when I was a little girl living down south. Our family always leaned toward bigger oranges and tart tangerines (which I still love to this day) — I remember thinking that mandarin oranges were watery and weak. Getting older, I can certainly appreciate their velvety subtlety more than I did when I was a kid.

Neither ‘pouchong’ nor ‘orange’ typically make me think, ‘I want to try this with milk!’, but with this tea I almost might. Maybe it’s the dreamsicle resonance. I usually find green oolongs unable to be iced without losing a lot of their flavor…but again, grown-up dreamsicle!

Definitely digging this one. It can stay.

This is one of my favorite teas. It was the first taste I ever had of Art of Tea, and caused me to buy multiple samples, most of which I liked quite a bit. The aroma of this one alone is enough to make you want to buy it.

Go get it. It’s smooth and tasty. One of the best oolongs I’ve ever had.

Still more backlogging from the weekend, I slacked with posting this weekend severely, but never fear, I drank tea!

This tea could not be more aptly named. “Mandarin Silk” describes this tea almost perfectly. The mandarin is slight, it is extremely light in odor and flavor. However, it flows through the tea easily. The tea is creamy, smooth and silky. It is sweet without being sweetened and creamy without having any such product in it. I would best describe this silk as the creaminess and smoothness associated with milk chocolate; that melt-in-your-mouth texture and flavor.

The flavor is difficult to describe. You do not taste mandarin, but you can smell it. This is probably because the mouthfeel of the tea is overwhelming, the silky smoothness, is really the only thing you can absorb when drinking it. A faint sweetness lingers in the tea that makes me think more of a white chocolate confection than a tea at all.

This tea was delicious, however, the body and aroma of it were not my cup of tea (pun intended). Worth a try, but I am glad I did not buy it.