Nonpareil Te Gong Huang Shan Mao Feng Green Tea

Amazing…yet incredibly subtle. I would only buy this to drink it once every long while, due to the attention that must be provided to it.

Further thoughts forthcoming on CreateWriteDrink.com.

Very light both in color and in flavor, but not lacking. A subtle delight and excercise in sensory awareness.

Silky smooth with flavors of water chestnut, a light vegetal taste (I’m inclined to compare it to a nice mild cabbage flavor), with some notes of coconut and a natural sugar cane sweetness. This is a wonderful tea. It is delicate and requires your attention and focus in order to be fully appreciated. I feel very calm and centered after appreciating this beauty. Definitely recommended.

I’m back…again :)

Thank you, thank you Angel from Teavivre for this free sample!!!

For anyone that has not tried Teavivre, I highly recommend it, their teas and customer service are amazing.

So life has been getting in the way of tea, what a bummer :(

OK on to the review…

This dry tea smells like pickled cabbage to me. Delicious, just delicious.

The recommendation on the package for this tea was to steep for 3-5 minutes. But I don’t like my green tea too strong, so I brewed only for one minute. The brewed tea is a very light hay-like colour. The taste is quite light. In hindsight, I could have steeped for longer.

The brewed tea has the vegetal, cabbage, bean greens type flavour. It is smooth and very slightly sweet. Even though it is smooth, there is definitely a crisp and clean taste to this tea. This is my favourite type of green tea. Reading the description on this one, it says it is a high mountain tea. I quite like high mountain oolongs, so I am going to make an assumption that I will like high mountain greens.

Thank you again Teavivre!

Edit: A two minute steep yields a thicker liquor, the flavours are a bit stronger but not by much.

Angel sent this one my way and i’m afraid it’s lost on me. I found this was my least favourite of the greens because there wasn’t much of a taste that i could discern and i wasn’t blown away like i was with the dragonwell. Now, that being said, take my review with a grain of salt as i’m really much more of a black tea lover. I’m glad that i got the chance to try it though since you never know what you’ll love. :) thanks so much for sharing angel!

Very fresh green tea leaves largely intact – one bud with two leaves – with the slightest hint of malt in the scent. Steeping the dry leaf produces a very pale clear yellow tea soup. First sip is very much vegetal and a bit buttery but quickly becomes a light creamy tea with a little nuttiness in the background. Resteeped nicely another two times. This is a very nice mild, gentle cup of tea which I very much enjoyed!
Many thanks to Angel at Teavivre for providing the opportunity to try this tea.

I received three packets of this tea from Angel! I have never heard of this green tea before by this name. Upon opening it up, there were fine, slightly downy, fuzzy, vertically curled up leaves. They were a nice light green-yellow in color. The liquid was a pale yellow. The leaves smelled a little smokey and vegetal. The liquid was a light, buttery, slightly malty in taste. Delicious! It wasn’t bitter or astringent. Good cup!

Thanks to Angel at Teavivre for sending me a sample of this! I brewed it Western style, 1tsp/8 oz of water. I got three solid steeps. All of them were at 185f.

First steep – about 3 minutes
The brew is a very pale green. It smells fresh and spinachy. Maybe a hint of asparagus. It tastes like butter and spinach. This actually quite reminds me of Obubu’s Kabuse Sencha, which was smooth, creamy, spinachy, and fantastic.

Second steep – about 4 minutes
There’s an unexpected and delightful toastiness here, especially as it cools. However, it leaves my mouth feeling somewhat unpleasantly dry.

Third steep – length of steep unknown, I got distracted
This tastes like roasted spinach. Dry mouthfeel with a mildly sweet, fresh aftertaste.

Overall, I find this wonderfully green and springlike. However, the dryness is detracting from my enjoyment because it undermines the smoothness of the sip.

Thank you Angel of Teavivre for this wonderful sample! The package of green teas arrived the other day, and I just couldn’t resist it any longer. I opened this package up for a quick sniff, but it smelled so fresh and tasty that I had to let it jump the queue!

It’s the last week of school, and suitably hectic, so I made this Western-style in my travel mug. Sipping it now, I think it definitely deserves better treatment, so next time I’m going to get out my gaiwan for the full experience.

This morning I added 2tsp of raw sugar (which is actually pretty restrained for me, as I have a horrible sweet tooth) and I think that was just right. The flavor is light and fruity, with a crisp, grassy aftertaste.

I look forward to trying this again in the weeks to come!

Thanks so much again, Teavivre! Teavivre’s three year anniversary will be soon! For some reason I thought they have existed for so much longer. The leaves here are very unique – I don’t even think I’ve seen a Mao Feng that looked like this before. They look like tiny green branches. The scent of the dry leaves is surprisingly stronger and sweeter than the tea actually tastes. Teavivre suggests THREE tablespoons for 17 ounces of water. Tablespoons! Not teaspoons! Wow, that is a lot of leaves… that would not even fit in my infuser. So I went with around four heaping teaspoons of leaves (difficult to measure by teaspoon), an entire sample packet, which had to be the most leaves I’ve ever used for one steep (also… three tablespoons would be nine teaspoons! I figure my mug is nine ounces so nine divided by two is around four teaspoons anyway.)

Steep #1 // 20 min after boiling // 2 min
The brew color is a very light yellow. The flavor is also very light, but it does have a hint of bite to it. Not surprising with four teaspoons of leaves. Usually to me, a Mao Feng tea tastes like a creamed/breaded corn side dish that would go to a meal. This is a much lighter version of that. Some Mao Feng teas would have this much flavor with just one teaspoon, but maybe I’ve been brewing them all wrong with just one teaspoon. I’m starting to think “maybe I should try this tea how Teavivre would suggest brewing it” to most of the teas that I steep. They usually seem to know exactly the right way to steep a tea. I know I’m always describing some green teas like corn, but that is all of my green tea knowledge or tastebuds at the moment, I guess. There is definitely something here that makes this cup special, even if I don’t know what that is. But I can definitely enjoy sipping this tea.

Steep #2 // 20 min after boiling // 3 min
This cup has even more of a briskness to it (but a pleasant sort – not astringency) as well as a nutty flavor. It’s very good! Mao Feng is one of my favorite greens. I’m off to watch some Akira Kurosawa movies while sipping this… Oh and when I sipped the last of this after it had sat in the mug over night (I don’t usually waste ANY tea, even the next day) it was even nuttier and I liked it even more. Maybe this would be really nice iced? I almost wanted to steep up a third cup but I needed my black tea in the morning.

Haha, my mum drank a small cup of this and said “it tastes like the last one.” Oh, if she only knew…

Sure, green teas are probably all going to have a similar base taste, but this tea was much more buttery, and less nutty.

Steeping it also had more of that vegetal smell. I don’t think I’ll ever quite like that scent. The taste though, as I said has this wonderful buttery flavour, with a touch of an extra sweetness in the aftertaste. It’s got a slight vegetal taste, but it’s pleasant and not overpowering. Didn’t take it with cream. Will do that on my next tasting. Thanks again, Angel!