Carolyn

A headache is pressing in on my brain after a night spent up with a server on-call issue. Dragon balls are just the thing! Their strong, full-bodied sassiness is willing to hold my head with gentle soothing motions while the caffeine kicks butt, drives out the pain and gives me energy to spare.

The tea brews up into a copper brown liquor that smells sweet. The balls release themselves from the tight black pearls and expand into full chocolate brown leaves, a process that never fails to amuse. There are notes of cocoa, caramel, and a touch of earthiness in the taste.

The only bad thing? I’m now out of dragon balls. I guess you could say that I have no balls.

No notes yet.

Oversteeped on purpose to get the strong kick-in-the-pants wake-up power. Today is the start of NaNo and I am definitely feeling as if I want to do nothing except make a blanket cave in my bed and hide in it. Sinharaja is always good, though. I feel marginally less like blanket-caving.

It is a very pretty green tea with purple flowers. It brews up into a yellow liquor that smells of pineapple. The underlying tea has a vegetal note and a slight astringency.

It has dark twisted leaves with a pretty fruit smell. Steeping it creates a sweet oolong tea with a bit too much bitterness for my taste. One of the few teas I couldn’t finish.

When I need something strong to get me through a difficult morning, I call for balls. (God I love saying that!)

I’m tired and achy so this tea is perfect comfort tea.

The tea is a brilliant chartreuse with little pieces of bright green popped rice and roasted rice kernels. It brews up into a pale cloudy green brew that smells delightfully roasty and has a light rounded roasted, slightly salty taste. There are other notes that have a very light sweetness to them as well.

When I visited Dream About Tea in Chicago I asked the proprietor for advice about Pu-erh. I told him that I hadn’t found any I truly liked and that they upset my stomach. He asked what I had tried and so I told him the most recent experiment Tuocha: Camel’s Breath. He told me that Tuocha is made with broken leaves and that I would likely enjoy full leafed pu-erhs better. This rang so true for me I felt like slapping myself for not realizing it. Afterall, I prefer full leaf teas of every other sort of tea, why not pu-erh? I asked him for a recommendation for a beginner pu-erh tea and he showed me this one.

I rinsed it with hot water and then brewed it for 30 seconds (as per directions found on the web). Brewed up it smells like a combination of honey, light sweet fruits and apricot. The taste is very light, though that may be due to the 30 second brew time. I am looking forward to the second steeping which I may do a longer steep. There is no bitterness, no compost like taste. Just a sweet good tea. I really like this one.

Second Steeping: 45 seconds this time. It has stronger notes of honey and apricots.

No notes yet.

It smells wonderful in the bag, like candy. It brews up into a slighly murky, light brown liquid that smells of coconut and some kind of sweet spice. As advertised, it pretty much tastes like a candy bar as well. I will probably steep it longer next time to get a stronger the tea and chocolate taste from it, but so far I like it.

I haven’t liked most of the rooibos teas I’ve tried, but this one is quite good. It doesn’t have the dusty taste I’ve come to associate with rooibos, though it does dry my mouth a bit, but that’s ok. It has a strong scent of Bourbon vanilla, which is one of my favorite vanillas. In the cup the vanilla and rooibos combine to create a creamy delicious whole.

It’s nice to have a soothing non-caffeinated choice for evening drinks.

I love this tea. It brews up into a sweetly scented pale copper colored liquor. It smells and tastes as if a few drops of a Midori had been added to the tea. It is a lovely, luxurious taste.

My giant half pound bag of Sinharaja arrived. When I saw it I feared I’d made a terrible mistake. What if I’d been overly optimistic about the tea? A few sips dispelled that. It is still smooth, sweet, and delicious. If aliens came and took every other tea, I could be content drinking nothing but this. Mmmm!

I’ve been waiting for another “Be Brave” day to try Lapsang Souchong. I like the salty, smoky way it smells dry but I have a hard time seeing it as a tea. I can picture using it as a marinade over seitan or tofu and I may try that at a later point.

I brewed it light with less leaves than I normally do and for less time, just 3:30 minutes. (It smelled so strong in the sample, I couldn’t imagine doing my normal kamikaze tea routine.)

It brews up into a light honey colored amber, though I’m sure that if i brewed it for four or five minutes it would be darker. It has a campfire smell that is reminiscent of smoked food, as someone said it smells like bacon or smoked meats. It has a light sharpness in the smoky taste. I can definitely see using this tea in cooking, especially to soak seitan or tofu in. I don’t mind it too much as a tea drink, either. Though I put it in the same category as drinking pickle juice: something fun and strange to do to wake up my taste buds, but not an everyday quaff.

The sweet, hypnotic scent of roses rises from this very pretty tea decorated with rose petals. At a 3:30 minute steep it brews up black and produces a sweet rose-flavored brew. The taste is reminiscent of fine halavah made with rose water. The tea blends well with the rose flavor but its taste is not very prominent.

I bought a canister of this after trying the sample and I’m glad I did. However, it is not an everyday tea. It is something that demands quiet sipping time and space.

Lovely nutty fragrance and a pale yellow green liquor. The fragrance translates into the taste beautifully. It is a delightful tea with low levels of vegetal taste and no bitterness. Very calming and beautiful. Definitely a buy-again tea.

Fragrance has sweet floral notes. The tea is a bit sharp with a nice sweetness.

My beloved and I are both tired and achy this morning (hopefully we didn’t catch something in Chicago) so I had this nice mellow black tea to wake me gently and persuade me to get on with the day.

So what does one say to one’s tea collection after certain members of it have given one a splitting headache? Balls! Balls! Bring them on!

It really is a great tea. Sharp like good chocolate without being bitter and with a full ration of caffeine to chase away the most troublesome headache. Bring on the Balls!

No notes yet.

It’s an average chai, nothing special. I prefer the chais from Upton Teas.

One problem I’ve had with all of Adagio’s flavored teas has been that I get a splitting headache after drinking them. I didn’t want to blame the tea, but so far this has happened every single time I’ve tried an Adagio flavored tea and not at all with their non-flavored teas. (It also hasn’t happened with the Golden Moon or Upton Teas flavored blends.) I tried a number of them on my Chicago trip but didn’t log them because I didn’t want to be unfair to the tea. However it seems that I am probably sensitive to the base they use for their flavors. So, I will not be trying any other flavored teas from Adagio.

I really like this one. It has a sweet, buttery, floral scent. The taste is a very light buttery, nutty, with a very slight vegetal. It reminds me more of a white tea than a green tea in its light taste. The color is a pale, cornsilk yellow that is very appealing. I may steep it for a little longer than 3 minutes next time to see what it does.

These are really big pearls. In fact, they are much too big to be called pearls. Let’s just go with takgoti and call them balls. It’s a good name for these. They expand into beautiful brown leaves and brew up into a red-black liquor.

The fragrance is slightly fruity with a slight smoky note. It’s a strong tea with a slight astringency and a very slight bitter chocolate taste (I may have oversteeped it slightly). The smoky notes exist within the taste as well. It’s a good strong tea and better than I expected. Not as good as my favorite blacks but I wouldn’t toss these balls out of the room. They have a lot to offer.