Lennon Tool Bar - Muzha Tieguanyin

Lennon Tool Bar - Muzha Tieguanyin Tea - Ink drop

This is Muzha Tieguanyin Tea from Lennon Tool Bar, and it’s one of three inks in their Taiwan Tea series. The series honors the important role that tea plays in Taiwanese culture. Tieguanyin is a rolled oolong variety famously produced in the Muzha region for the past 100 years. Processing involves many stages of rolling and roasting. The results are highly prized, deep green and brown, dried tea pearls, and they match this ink nicely.

Lennon Tool Bar - Muzha Tieguanyin Tea - Ink range

Visually, this is a rich, earthy, organic green with strong brown and yellow undertones. When wet, there are beautiful amber brown areas inside strokes and areas of pooling. As it dries, the browns merge with the greens leaving the beautiful forest floor, green-brown, final color. This isn’t a strong shading ink, but slight variation can be seen. The splatter shows a blackened edging in areas of pooling, but nothing shows in writing. Muzha Tieguanyin Tea is a gorgeous, verdant green.

Lennon Tool Bar - Muzha Tieguanyin Tea - Ink Swatch Card

As a writing ink, Muzha Tieguanyin Tea performed very well on all papers. It’s a smooth flowing ink, neither wet, nor dry. Strokes were clean and crisp on all six test papers. Although there was no real stroke halo, coated papers produced a slightly sharper edge. Shading was seen on coated premiums. It added a little character but wasn’t aggressive. At under 5 seconds, drying was quite quick on office copy. However, on both coated and uncoated premiums, it was considerably slower, ranging from 15-20 seconds on Kokuyo and Fabriano, to 25-35 seconds on Rhodia, Mnemosyne, and Apica.

Although the drying time on some papers was longer than I prefer, the writing experience was very comfortable and enjoyable. It’s a beautiful brownish green, exactly the kind that I like. If you like Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrün, or KWZ Green Gold 2, you’ll love Lennon Tool Bar’s Muzha Tieguanyin Tea!