Golden Monkey Superfine Grade

Another great gift from Dexter3657! Thank you.

This is good on a bitterly cold night like this, when I feel snug as a bug in a rug, relaxed, cozy and gratefully warm. It’s smooth and gentle in that Chinese black tea way, but full of warming flavors—the common clean sweet starchy, sweet potato quality (but tamped down some which I appreciate), but peppercorn too! I’m really digging the peppercorn. Golden Monkeys are generally a little too subtle and light-bodied for me—I find myself reaching for and buying Golden Needle instead—but this one’s a nice offering.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve logged a tasting note. I thought that staying away would curb my tea buying, but that approach didn’t really work for me.

I got this tea from Dexter3657. I really enjoyed this cuppa. Yesterday when I drank I found the sweet potato in the early sipping, and plum and honey after.

Today I got sweet potato and honey. No plum. Don’t know what I did differently…Either way a tasty tea.

Thank you Dexter!

This is another mucho nummy tea from ifjuly

It’s one of the only teas I’ve had that I’d describe as savory. It even smells savory, like a soup broth of some kind. Maybe there is a little smoke lending to that impression, but if there is, it isn’t a harsh smoke or something that sets off my smoke alarm. It’s thick and hefty and serious. Yes, this is a serious tea. And of course I like it a lot – I have expensive tastes. I wish I had the funding for all of my expensive tastes. :)

Trying to use the steepster app as much as possible but it’s slightly challenging :) I haven’t yet figured out how to add or remove teas from my cupboard or edit teas but I do like the interface so far.

This tea was from dexter! And it’s quiet delicious. There are some chocolates notes in the background that are quiet nice, though it’s not like, say laoshan black.

I’m currently sipping steep number six of this tea and thinking about how different it is from my other Golden Monkey. While my other one is cocoa, jelly and violets. This one is more like a full meal with savoury notes of roasted sweet potato, butter, pepper, malt, and chestnut (in early steeps) blending with cocoa, honey, plum, cinnamon and longan ( which to me is kind of like a sharper tasting citrus lychee cross). When allowed to steep for longer steeps a slightly floral honeysuckle note comes out as well. In early steeps the sweet potato and cocoa notes are stronger and the tea is sweeter, but as you continue to steep the longan notes become stronger. This tea has tightly rolled leaves with about 30% golden tips which smell of sweet potato, and sweet cocoa, bubbles appear on top of the liquor when you brew it and the liquor is a orangish brown with tints of green. As the wet leaves unroll the long furry hairs are quite apparent on the leaves. I’ve steeped this tea using both longer steeps and shorter steeps and am enjoying the blend of flavours the shorter steeps bring out. Altogether a nice comforting tea for winter with great warming notes and a variety of flavours. Thanks again to Capital tea Ltd. for providing me with such a generous sample!
http://www.capitaltea.com/shop/product.php?productid=154&cat=6&page=1

When I first started drinking loose leaf tea, I began with black tea with milk and sugar. Someone suggested a golden monkey as being super sweet, so I bought some and added sugar. YUCK! I tried honey. YUCK! I felt betrayed by the tea-recommending stranger.

Then I tasted it plain and went….“Oooooh, this is delicious! It really is sweet on its own.” And I haven’t looked back. Now it is rarer than rare for me to add sugar to tea.

My favorite GM teas are Harney and Sons and Teavivre’s. This is a nice one, too. Much better than Teavana’s! We had it with Inside Out Pumpkin Muffins at tea time today and it was a great pairing. I hadn’t realized how wonderfully Golden Monkey would pair with pumpkin! I simply chose a good plain black tea for starters as usual, but I think I will keep this pairing in mind because a lot of our desserts will be pumpkin theme for the next couple of months.

Backlog from last night!

I just got this tea as part of a huge swap/care package from Dexter. Thanks so much, Dex! I asked her if she could recommend some smoky/leathery black teas to replace my much-beloved (and now unavailable) Golden Yunnan from RiverTea. She sent me at least half a dozen different teas to try!

This is the only tea I’ve tried from the swap package so far. However, I didn’t get a lot of smoke. I sensed a teensy bit of smoke/leather at the back, but the biggest notes I remember were sweet potato, menthol, cocoa, and a bit of fruit. Definitely sweet potato, at least.

So much tea! I’ll never be able to finish it all!

A really excellent Golden Monkey. Smoky, yes. Leather-y, yes. But also rich with notes of chocolate and undertones of caramel and I like the way all these flavors play together. Pleasant and smooth. Robust.

Thank you Ost for sending me a sampling of this tea. It’s a pleasure to be sipping it.

Okay, so I was expecting the other tea to be smokey. Wasn’t expecting it from this one at all!
But this one is super smokey. I’ve never had a smokey tea before. But that’s the main flavor of it. Other Golden Money teas that I’ve had have been bready and malty. This wasn’t at all what I expected!
The steeping aroma of this one actually smelled kinda like leather, which also threw me off. But not as much as the taste.
I don’t think this one is for me. I don’t think smokey teas are my thing….
This just reminds me of BBQ, which I’m not a fan of at all either!
So yeah, just not for me. And pretty disappointing!
Glad I didn’t waste my money on this one though!

Another black tea sample from Dexter! The leaves are very thin and wiry, similar to jin jun mei. They’re about half black and half golden. Dry scent is malty and a little bit savory, which makes me a bit excited since I haven’t had a yummy savory Chinese black for a while.

Oh my… The aroma of this tea makes my skirt fly up a bit. It’s very heavy on the savory smoked meats with a touch of a bread accent. I hate waiting for tea to cool! :P Mm, definitely very smoky, but not in a harsh charcoal way. This tea reminds me of smoked beef jerky, and it’s making me extremely happy. There’s a bit of bready taste and thickness supporting the smoky flavor. So good…