Element 2023 Mengsong White Tea
Price range: $4.50 through $15.00
- Description
- Additional information
- Reviews (9)
Description
All of the general tea categories (white, green, black, etc) cover a wide range of processing styles, picking standards and terroir, so there is no single white tea that can demonstrate everything this dynamic category has to offer, but this Mengsong white tea does as good job as any at capturing the natural sweetness associated with white teas.
Aside from a slightly fruity-sweet character, this tea has a pleasant texture and calm, relaxing energy.
For gongfu brewing, we recommend brewing this tea similar to a dragon ball or other single serving format. This tea takes a little extra time to open up, due to the picking standard, so either extending the rinse to 30-40 seconds or performing a second rinse will help open the leaves a bit. This biscuit also performs well when western brewing, for which we advise performing a 90 second rinse, followed by a 60 second (to allow it to open further) brew in a 350-400ml vessel, and a shorter brew time of 30-40 seconds (or to taste) per brew after that.
Each of the convenient single-serving biscuits contains 7g (+/-1 gram of tea).
Additional information
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Alexandra Verville-Paris –
Cozy and comforting!
//Smell: Raspberry coulis, almond cake, big flowers, clean clothes
//Texture: Suuuuper creamy – like a blanket for the tongue, cold on the teeth, thicken saliva, thick texture
//Taste: Raspberry candy, cream & sugar coulis, roasting notes
//Body sensation: Good mood, eyes awake, smiling cheeks, nice calm energy, light heat production
Alexewallace64 –
This white tea is incredibly nice and comforting. Soft, silky, pillowy, sweet, and delicate. Whipped honey cream, nice florals, vanilla, faint orange(?) like notes, delicate raspberry cream, sugary, but so balanced. This is lovely and the perfect tea to relax with.
Billy Galvez –
A cheap and nice introduction to white teas!
Denise De Fazio (verified owner) –
Very creamy, very comforting
Alen D –
It’s an OK Shou Mei for me, it’s clean, a bit fruity (especially in the initial steeps), wood note is on the lower end (which I like), but it doesn’t check enough boxes for me to get more of it, and I tend to be picky when it comes to Shou Mei. The pressed slice didn’t open up entirely by the end I was done with it.
robertjboyd612 –
This was a lovely tea with a sweet, vegetal flavor and a luxurious body, but I definitely needed to break the leaves apart. After three 20 seconds steeps, the middle of this very thin wafer of tea was still completely dry. But once it was broken, the leaves produced a wonderful tea. I’d be thrilled to drink this every day.
mysticfire1111 (verified owner) –
This was a really good relaxing white tea for me, i often drank it later in the day, even before bed even, so very relaxing. The taste and smell i got all the time was cherry pie, i couldn’t stop smelling the gaiwan. Its one of my favorite white teas to date, especially for that relaxing tea energy. Good white tea at a fantastic price.
jade –
I really wish I could’ve enjoyed this tea, but I was never really able to consistently get a good steep out of it.
I’ll start by saying that the aroma from the wet leaves is incredibly wonderful, a fruity floral sweetness that was more enticing than any of the other teas in the elements set. The one good steep I got out of it really captured that sweet aroma perfectly, and in that moment it was a wonderfully comforting tea, with notes of raspberry and caramel.
Getting there, however, took a significant amount of trial and error. Seemingly no combination of temperature and steep time could break open the cake, instead simply wetting the outer layer. Even once I tried manually breaking it apart before steeping to get the leaves evenly hydrated, the flavor would swing between wildly bitter to extremely mild with seemingly very little room for error on my end.
It’s entirely possible that this is all due to my inexperience with white teas in general, but I simply wasn’t able to click with this tea.
Maybe I’ll come back to it after getting some more experience with white teas. After all, its price-point makes it very attractive for experimentation.
mineralitea_E.C. –
Had this as part of the Element tasting set. As mentioned in the description, it was difficult to break up the biscuit just by steeping – would recommend allowing for a bit of steaming in the gaiwan / brewing vessel after the rinse to help loosen up the leaves. Simple shou mei – has a bit of florals, malt, and a bit of a velvety texture.