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It would appear that overnight I’ve gone off smokies completely.

In the future I’ll only drink herbal infusions. Preferably with tons of hibiscus in it.

;)

You are not seeing this post. This post does not exist because I am totally working on writing and totally not posting on Steepster. If you can see this post, you need to get your eyes checked. Cause it ain’t here.

That said, TeaEqualsBliss sent me a sample of this when we swapped earlier and I can’t really remember why I rated it so low, but I gather that I rated it that way in comparison to the Adagio IB which I can’t currently remember what tastes like, so I’m not going to tamper with the rating.

I used 50% more leaf for this pot because I thought I could finish the sample off that way. Turns out the sample was larger than I had expected and now I’ve only got an estimated amount of leaf left for half a pot. By the time I discovered that, though, it was of course too late to do anything about it.

The tea actually carries the extra strength quite nicely. I can’t tell in the flavour that it’s stronger than usual, and reading my previous comment on it, I still completely agree with myself.

So evidently what we’ve got here is a pretty forgiving blend, which kind of surprises me a little considering that it must surely have Assam in it, and in my experience you can call the Indian blacks many things, but ‘forgiving’ generally isn’t one of them. It’s possible that the Assam aspect is a bit more astringent this way, but it’s not something that really mars the flavour on the whole.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the Irish Morning Blend from A C Perch’s hold up to this and to Adagio’s equivalent.

Back to work (HA!) for me, and remember, this post does not exist, it isn’t here and I never wrote it.

The start of my Easter holiday.
Payday.
Having a minimum amount of bills in april.
Lexitus informing me that the AC Perch’s order has arrived, and I can get my tea on friday.
Caravan in my pot.

Plenty of things to celebrate.

OM NOM NOM NOM NOM!

Okay, this is not at all what I wanted. What I wanted was that Samovar from Kusmi that ~Lauren posted about. Unfortunately, I was not in luck there. I checked the places on my way home from work that I knew carries Kusmi, but none of them had the Samovar.

After a little indecision, I decided instead eventually on some of this stuff that I got from my turkish colleague and some of the german fruit potpourri that Lexitus bought for me in Germany. Two parts tea, one part fruity mix.

When I tried this combination before it was the other way around, but this way feels more logical to me, with more tea than fruit.

I’ve steeped it a little too long for this ordinary western brewing style and the tea is warning me to not do it again.

Apart from that, it really is a win-win situation. The black tea is made more interesting without being brewed turkish style, and the fruit mix is kept from being too… fruity. Or something.

Oh yes, this is more like it. This another of the teas that I got from EvaPeva.

After a 30 seconds steep this is already almost as black as coffee and the aroma is all full of earthy goodness.

Ouch, bit too hot, though.

Compared to that awful green stuff, this is the nectar of the gods. On it’s own, though, I’m not really getting anything out of this first steep other than standard pu-erh. It does taste like there might be a lot of steeps in it. The sort of leaves that you could keep using all day without any noteworthy change in flavour or intensity.

The last untried tea from the pu-erh sampler. I wasn’t too impressed with the loose green pu-erh, so really I’m just hoping that by being pressed into touchas this will be somehow different and better.

The smell when I poured it into the cup wasn’t really too assuring. Sweet and extremely butter-y. Little bit salty too. In the cup where the liquid is at rest, there is the well-known pu-erh smell too, but at this point I still have the vast amounts of melted butter fresh in my memory and it comes across as too little too late.

This is salty. It reminds me a bit of TeaSpring’s Long Jing, which I don’t think I’ve actually posted about yet. I think I’ve got notes for that one in my Backlog Later files. I didn’t care much for that one either, as I recall, due to the amounts of salted butter notes in it. I wonder if this stuff might be based on Long Jing, or a Long Jing type tea.

I can pick up a little of the characteristic pu-erh earthiness, but again, it’s really just too little too late.

I have a strong suspicion that whoever invented this type of tea did not have the likes of me in mind at the time. I can drink this, but I’d sort of prefer not to. I’ll probably finish off the samples just to be rid of them because I don’t like throwing stuff out unless I really seriously didn’t like it, but it’s definitely not something I’d purchase another time.

Give me a proper ordinary pu-erh anytime.

Lexitus was in Germany recently and brought this stuff home for me. I asked for something fruity, and fruity was exactly what I got. This stuff is nothing, really, but dried fruit. Apples, strawberries, pineapple, papaya and carrot pieces, along with a couple of things I had to look up, namely elderberries and beetroot.

Beet.

Root.

My german is rudimentary at absolutely best, but I was pretty sure that I had that one right. I was just kind of hoping that I was wrong.

It doesn’t have hibiscus in it. It doesn’t say so in the ingredients and I can’t spot any in the actual… can’t really say leaves…. mix either.

But it does have a very very very bright red colour. Like hibiscus-red. It smells mainly like a hot mix of apple and strawberry juice.

It doesn’t, thankfully, have any hibiscus flavour, so now I know they didn’t try to hide some in there. I can usually pick up that metallic flavour of blood hibiscus even in small amounts, so I’m feeling much safer now. I’m not surprised beetroot would produce such a colour (if you are peeling both potatoes and beetroot, do the potatoes first and the beetroots after, unless you want funny coloured potatoes. Just saying)

Not a lot of flavour as such actually, which surprises me because the dry mix has a very LARGE aroma. The pineapple especially is really tearing at the nostrils.

I can find the apple, mostly. The strawberry needs a little searching for, but it’s also there. A dash of pineapple is there too with the elderberries. The papaya and the carrot doesn’t seem to have much of a presence and I suspect the beetroot is mainly there for the colour.

On the whole it’s a wee bit on the tart side, which for me is a bit odd, because I generally prefer the more sour apple sorts. I’m sure I’ll finish off the bag that the englishman bought for me easily enough, but I’m not going to be heartbroken when it’s gone.

I might try mixing it in with some of the black tea my Turkish colleague gave me. I never seem to get around to doing that turkish tea brewing and I didn’t really find them over the top wonderful in a western style brewing. A small amount of this stuff mixed in should be able to give almost anything a bit of a lift.

All in all, not bad.

CHAPTER 2 (Lexitus said I should call it that, the mocking … thing!)

I’m on steep 1½ now. My first cup was only about half the contents of the little pot I made, so I still had the other half left. I dumped a spoonful of the turkish leaves into the pot and topped it off with boiling water.

The result is a darker red and with the addition of some real tea, it’s actually quite nice. There’s a very sweet sugary note suddenly that wasn’t there before. It tastes like the strawberry is really brought to the front of the flavour this way.

It’s possible that I didn’t steep it long enough the first time around, but for me it just seemed a bit flighty and lacking without the solid base of tea underneath it. It’s got some support now and becomes more of what I had initially expected of it.

I’ll give it a nudge upwards from 64 points, and will likely be having it this way in the future.

I’m so pleased that Auggy liked this one as much as she did! I knew I was right about it having a strong smoky note, even if by my usual seat-of-the-pants western brewing of standard amount of leaves + standard amount of water for until-either-forgotten-or-impatient brewing style, it was a bit difficult to reproduce.

Auggy went by the recommendations on TeaSpring’s website so I felt inspired to do the same. And discovered that this meant twice my usual amount of leaves in half my usual amount of water. Oh dear me. The tin only have enough left for half a pot by my usual sloppy brewing style now. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Whatever shall I do??? (Order more. Right. Adding Tan Yang Jing Zhi to shopping list and hope desperately that that leaf grade is as good as this one. If not, I think I’ll cry)

Anyway, I’m definitely finding that when I brew it this way I get all those different layers I found at the same time instead of one overpowering the others. Interesting. I’m not as good at identifying each note as accurately as some you other people are, but if I drink this and compare it to Auggy’s post, then I’m finding I pretty much agree completely with everything there. Except the extreme amounts of cocoa notes in the aroma. I’d caught that one by myself.

It does win by being brewed properly like this, but the amount of leaves used this way is a bit of a hold-back for me. I’m too damn stingy for brewing like that, especially with this one! I mean money ain’t growing on trees, Steepsterites! Unless, apparently, you are growing this tea. $10.50 for 50 g. And the leaf grade that they have left now is $17.60 for 50 g. Just saying.

Wait a minute…

Is that…?

Can it really be…?

YES!!! IT’S THE ELUSIVE SWEET NOTE! I’M NOT CRAZY!

confetti

It’s been a while since I’ve been in a proper oolong mood. I had oolong yesterday, but that wasn’t a green one. I would say, though, that it was probably that one that gave me a push back to oolong territory and made me look in the NBT oolong sampler box. Most of the ones I have left are regional oolongs and a couple of more specific types. I wanted a green one, and I couldn’t be sure about the regional oolongs and I couldn’t remember about the chinese types which was green and which wasn’t, and rather importantly, I couldn’t be bothered to go look it up. Also didn’t really have time to do so because the water was already close to boiling.

So I went with the safe choice. It’s not exactly a new tea for me at all, but it was the only one I could be certain was a green oolong.

First impression wasn’t greath, though. I poured a few of the leaves out in my hand before putting them into the pot, and while they did have that pellet-y rolled up shape, they seemed small in size. Almost broken. TeaSpring’s TGY has the best leaves of the TGYs I’ve seen so far. They are large and with a clear deep green colour. These ones seemed to have a withered yellow tint to them.

There’s nothing wrong with the colour of the tea after steeping. It’s a pale golden yellow and completely transparent. The only thing here that could be even loosely described as murkiness is my own fingerprints on the glass cup. And that totally doesn’t count.

The aroma is barely worth mentioning. What is there is sweet and vegetal as it should be. There is just so very little of it. I really had to sit here and search for it and that’s just not right.

I’m sorry to say that the flavour here is as pale as the aroma. I’m brewing this by guesstimation like I usually do, so it’s not impossible that someone with the patience for it can get more out of it than I can by tweaking some parameters. It has all the right flavour notes here, sweetness, grassyness with a touch of nuttyness and a slightly acidic aftertaste. It’s just sort of muted a bit.

After the cup has been allowed to sit and develop for a bit, this improves considerably. It’s not inconceivable that sometimes a cup of tea has to ripen a bit and that this is one of those times.The flavour as such doesn’t change. The same notes in the same combinations and the same proportions. It’s just more intensive now and I’m feeling a lot more happy with this tea. I was concerned that such a pale flavour wouldn’t really hold up to re-steeps, but now I don’t think that’ll be a problem.

I still don’t think I can really justify rating higher than this, though. At least not at this point. Perhaps later.