Tea Review Tuesday - A Review of Mandala Tea's Torch Festival Roasted Green Tea

It has been a while, since we featured a Mandala Tea offering here on the site, but I am excited for that to change! Today's review covers a tea sample that I received a while back with an order but never had the opportunity to try. While I see that it is currently out of stock on Mandala's website, I hope that it will be available again soon! Enter Mandala Tea's Torch Festival Roasted Green.

Torch Festival Roasted Green receives its name from the traditional roasting process in clay jars, which has been applied to this tea. Once I had decided to drink this tea today and read about it on Mandala's website, I got pretty excited; "a fiery cup in terms of flavor and potency" does not sound like my standard cup of tea! Preparing to brew the leaves, I was already being treated to some of the intensity. The dry leaves smell toasty in the same way that roasted vegetables might.

Following the instructions on Mandala Tea's website, I gave these leaves a brief rinse, having added a large amount to my twelve ounce mug. (Not very precise measurements today!) The suggested brewing style leans toward more leaves and less steep time, so that was what I intended with my cup. Following the rinse, a horde of roasted and nutty aromas rose from the leaves. Potent aptly describes the smell! Thirty to forty-five seconds of steeping later, I have a cup of Torch Festival that is releasing all kinds of roasted and dark vegetal notes. It almost reminds of a cross between the smell of a green oolong and a sheng pu'erh.

Oh, the flavors. One sip and the flavors roar across the tongue, smooth and dark. The roasted green tea definitely carries nutty flavors, along with notes of damp earth, bark, moss, and maybe some mushrooms. Sounds strange? It just has me waxing poetic about the complexity of the leaf and the feelings evoked by the Torch Festival. On my personal enjoyment scale, I would rate Torch Festival a 95/100.



Photo credit to Built from Ink and Tea.
Mandala Tea's Torch Festival Roasted Green is usually available from their website, here, though it is currently out of stock.
This review was unsolicited and uncompensated.
Text is copyright 2016, Built from Ink and Tea.