Mountain Organic Indonesian Oolong Tea

I used a couple ounces more water than intended but the results were good. This is a solid contender for a everyday oolong. The liquor is highly floral scented and a lovely green. The cup is much more behaved than the aroma might suggest. It is buttery, tasting of honey with a spiciness that reminds me of mild ginger. Reading the description I see orchid mentioned and yes I think that nails what I’m getting later in the sip. The aftertaste is sweet but dissolves into a drying sensation without really seeming astringent.

My favorite thing about this tea is though it smells highly floral, the taste does not overpower your senses with flowers. This is a smooth and gentle cup. Not being in love with oolongs, I found this to be an interesting and delicious cup.

Smoooooth is the first impression. The leaves are dark green and wrap-curled into small beads with tails. I don’t notice much of a smell when I open the package. After brewing 2 tsp to 8oz at 200F for 3 minutes, it has a gentle creamy taste with a perhaps a little bit of honey flavor. It has a gentle milky aftertaste. Very pleasant. This tea is silky and mellow. I like just a little bit of stevia in it. It seems to bring out the flavor a bit more. It is definitely the kind of tea you want to sit and savor. Don’t throw this in the travel mug or tumbler… it would be a waste of the tea experience that can be found in this cup. For me it’s the perfect cup to sit and enjoy while I am snowbound with another 6 inches of snow outside (again!) I’m on my fourth resteep and it remains smooth and flavorful without tasting watery. Definitely a tea I will keep in my cupboard for when I need that relaxing moment, not just a cup of tea.
Oolongs have a long tradition of health benefits (obesity, diabetes, “hardening of the arteries”, high cholesterol and to boost the immune system) and I can certainly see that just the relaxation involved in drinking this tea would by healthy for everything ☺

Well…. I have to say I’m impressed. The tea is delicious. I got this as a free sample which arrived yesterday in a beautiful packaging with the cutest little sailboat. :) Thank you! I’m loving the fact that the sample packets have little ziplock although for this tea I used the whole packet. I like to overleaf my oolongs and steep them at a shorter time, allowing for more steeps. :)

The dry tea smelled delicately vegetal. I steeped it at 90C for 1 minute. The resulting liquid was pale green/yellow with beautiful sweet floral aroma. The taste – exquisite. Really lovely. It was just right amount of floral, a little vegetal and creamy with sweet notes of honey. Everything I want in oolong was present.

My second steep was 1.5 minutes long and the resulting cup once again full of aroma and flavour. There was a milkiness to it that I would associate with natural milk oolong… Yummy!

I will continue steeping this and see how far I can take it. I will say again… I’m impressed. I’m definitely considering a purchase.

Edit: I forgot to mention that before the first steep I rinsed the leaves and waited 30 seconds to wake them up before proceeding further.

I received a free sample of this from Tea At Sea. Thank you for allowing me to try this tea.

This tea arrived at my door in very cute packaging. I received two samples and they were in small sample size packets with the company’s name and a tag attached to the package that described the tea and gave temperature guidelines for steeping.

I am usually more of a dark oolong verses a green oolong person. This tea is a less oxidized oolong. It steeped up with a yellow/green color. It has a flowery, green, honey taste. This is really nice! Some of the more green oolongs the floral notes over power the tea for me and I have a hard time drinking them. This one the floral is there but is well blended with the honey sweet notes. The sip also has a creamy/buttery feel and taste to it. I don’t think this is a milk oolong, but this has some of the same feel to it.

The way I rate tea is based on my personal preference. It is based on if I am driven to drink or buy a given tea again. In this case I will definitely finish this sample and would consider making a purchase from Tea At Sea to own more of this tea.

I have a sad confession, I think I burned myself out making Perler bead creations over the holidays, I just made so many things so quickly (and not really out of inspiration, more necessity) that I am in a creative slump. Luckily I have felt inspired to make Lucky Stars, so I brought some down to my Tea Lair (which still needs a sign) to work on until the desire to play with pixels comes back. Luckily the desire to drink and write about tea is going strong, so let us journey down the path of the leaf.

Today’s tea is Mountain Organic Indonesian Oolong from Tea at Sea (who I would like to point out has some of the cutest packaging ever), according to their website this Oolong has an oxidation of 35%, was grown in the Halimun Mountains of Indonesia (at 800m above sea level no less) and is treated with spring water and mountain air. Fancy! The aroma is sweet, like honeyed bread with a distinct vegetal green bean undertone. There is also the faintest hint of orchids as well.

Once the tea has been rinsed and steeped the aroma of the unfurling leaves is significantly sweeter bringing out notes of creamy honey, orchids, and baking bread. This time the aroma that sneaks in as an afterthought is the vegetal. The liquid is also quite sweet, blending notes of cream, honey, and orchids. The aroma reminds me of a Jin Xuan, though not as sweet.

The taste is sweet and floral, mixing orchid and honey with a midtaste of yeasty bread. The mouthfeel is at first creamy then fades to dry fairly quickly. As the tea cools it takes on a slightly savor, lettuce like taste with a mildly citrus aftertaste.

I decided to give this tea a second steeping, which is fun because it has been quite a while since I steeped an Oolong Western style with multiple steeping. The aroma is still quite sweet, but it has a slightly mineral note hiding beneath the sweetness. The taste is quite mineraly this time around, it makes it taste like spring water and new pennies. The aftertaste is vegetal and there is a whisper of honey and orchids. This tea is good, I am not going to fall over myself in awe of it (you know me and my obsession with Oolongs) but I could see myself buying this for an everyday Oolong, when I want a fix but don’t want to break out the really expensive stuff.

For photo and blog: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2014/02/tea-at-sea-mountain-organic-indonesian.html

I steeped this western style in order to permit multiple cups from a sample. Thanks to Tea at Sea for the sample.

I’ve been trying to reduce my stash lately so this is my first new tea since Christmas. I’m excited. The dry color is quite green. The aroma is grassy, with a hint of veggies. Feels very full and rich in the mouth, even with a small sip. Very green in style, with grass and straw flavors but not the spice I usually see in an oolong. Clean and balanced in style with a bit of astringency but not a hint of bitterness. Not overly complex. Long but modest finish.

I’m not a big fan of green teas, so this tea is on the wrong side of the oolong style spectrum for me. However, it is very well made and would be a good oolong for a fan of the greener style of oolong.

You can really taste the quality in the tea. It’s cool watching the oolong knots unfold, and it was nice getting a taste of real original tea! Very smooth taste.

This partially oxidized Camellia Sinensis really woke up my senses and connected me straight to the mountains they were grown on. Like a breath of fresh air, I really felt like they developed in high altitudes.
Very comforting and delicious, I highly recommend this tea to anyone who wants a clean, quality grown Oolong!

have i srsly not reviewed this tea before? i’m finally closing down on that last teaspoon (one more lovely steep session after this one!) of bulk tea that i bought oh so long ago. if i didn’t say it before, i’ll say it now: i love this tea. for whatever reasons, perhaps because it was my favorite of the first oolongs i tried, this one remains my standard THIS IS WHAT OOLONG SHOULD TASTE LIKE in my book. it is light, buttery, fragrant, extremely hard to mis-steep, and just all around NOM! now, there might be yummier, better teas out there, but in my experience those are all harder to brew well, are much fussier about water temp and length of steep time and the price of tea in china at any given moment. Tea at Sea’s Mountain Organic Indonesian Oolong is none of that. it just is. perfect. every time. get some. (i shall refill my stash within the month!)

Dumped the whole (5 gram?) sample packet into my 100 ml gaiwan, which… maybe might have been a little too much, the leaves look a little crowded in there, ^^:.

Anyway, light gold color, light honey floral scent that matches the overall taste quite well. Starts off very silky and smooth with that intense honey taste, although a little thin tasting on top. Opens up into more of the same, but with some more mineral and body and additional florals that were hinted at in the aroma, although a little rougher than it started. Might have been better western steeped, judging by the other comments, but it wasn’t bad, although the syrup like-honey quality of this was almost… a bit overwhelming of the other factors of this tea, I think. Could have also been due to overleafing, but it was a solid upper middle of the road oolong, in my opinion, although not really what I prefer in tea.