Genuine Tea Co. Milk Oolong Tea
A tea that tastes like a latte, without the milk.
INTRODUCTION
I’ve never been much of a tea drinker because I neither need the caffeine nor enjoyed the majority of herbal or black teas I’d tried in North America. Coffee is more my thing, and even then I’m happy to avoid 98% of them. This tea is special enough to occupy a regular spot in my cupboard.
I first tried this tea at a local coffee shop called Carbonic. When they gave me the tea I asked “where is the milk?” They explained, “it’s tea that tastes like a tea latte, there’s no milk.” Skeptical, I smelled it. Sure enough, it had a great milky sweet aroma. Most noticeably it smells exactly like how my favourite Japanese milk candy tastes.
If you’ve been to Japan you might know it. Definitely worth picking up. Back to the tea… the aroma is intoxicating and underscores just how much sweetness can be appreciated through the nose. When you take the first sip, the tea is not sweetened, but there is a brain association to it so it provides the same pleasure as sugar. It’s wonderful. As the leaves bloom, they grow exponentially in size, unfurling from little round balls into quite large leaves.
I like to steep it with lower than boiling water, about 93 degrees C to extract a lot of flavour, letting it steep for 4 minutes so it maintains a fresh taste. As it cools it still tastes good, it just loses a bit of the bite and acidity of when it’s hot. Because this is a very smooth tea, I much prefer that little bit of bite at the beginning to balance it out versus a lower extraction temperature and more time.
The photo above shows full bloom after 4 minutes. The tea remains fairly transparent, with a beautiful honey tinge. You can remove the leaves or use a strainer although I find it tastes best leaving them in. In a more cylindrical cup most of the leaves will sink to the bottom and you can drink around them. When the tea is very fresh there is a great natural feeling to the leaves that I like. This tea loses flavour quickly if it is old so it’s essential to buy only the quantity you need and to drink it promptly.
The taste of this tea is shockingly like a very weak milk latte. It has the richness of a coffee base, round mouth feel, exceedingly smooth, yet with extremely strong heated-milk aroma and almost rose-like sweetness, although there is probably no actual sugar in the end result.
CONCLUSION
For those of us who are enamoured with good coffee, and perhaps never understood the appeal of teas, this is a shocking revelation. I’ve never found a tea that has so many of the pleasurable aspects of a latte— creamy mouth feel, rich caffeine boost, sweetness, and satiation. The compelling use case for this tea is obviously for people looking to cut down on their coffee drinking, for a lower caffeine choice in the afternoon, or for the lactose intolerant. I’m sure this tea is also much healthier than any coffee based drink, and of course it has zero calories so there’s no guilt in drinking a lot of it. A truly wonderful discovery.
PRICE
$10.00 USD
AVAILABILITY
Genuine Tea Co.
Unit 103, 100 Sunrise Ave, Toronto, ON, M4A1B3
THE RATING
10/10 Absolute
10/10 Relative
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