Doulton

I’ve just finished McNulty’s Vanilla and the best thing about it is a top-note after-taste of vanilla. It’s a decent “basic black” over all with hints of vanilla that start to emerge as the tea cools. They decided to very very slowly come out and play on my tongue. The taste is there; it’s just subtle. And nobody accused me of being subtle or of truly appreciating the subtle.

Overall, I like a stronger vanilla flavor. I would recommend this for vanilla junkies who are fond of nuance, understatement, and insinuation.

I picked up this sample from the marvelous Travelling Tea Box and am eternally grateful to Angrboda for getting it started. I think that Vanilla by McNulty’s has got “a good beat and you can dance to it” but it’s not balletic.

This is a pleasant brew. The citrus really emerges. I had a very small sample and did not have enough to try this on ice. I agree that it might make an excellent iced tea. There’s a touch of astringency here even though I steeped it for only one minute and 30 seconds.

This is a decent tea in search, I think, of an identity. I think it will make a good basic black for iced tea. As a morning brew, it does the trick adequately but is not audacious or bold. It’s like the shy kid at school who hangs back a bit so it won’t get bullied. Black Frost most certainly has got some fresh-mown grass mentality, It’s a Nilgiri but does not speak to me of high elevations—more of gently rolling slopes. It’s most certainly a black tea which smells and tastes as if it’s been travelling with a group of green teas on the same bus.

The aftertaste is naturally sweet in a gentle, mellow way. Overall, it’s not a spectacular tea that boldly asserts itself but I think it might be an overall “good chum” of a tea—a regular pal who can be trusted and respected. I’ll drink more and possibly revise the review.

I posted a review of Florence by Harney & Sons here last November. It was my first review and Florence was the tea that launched a thousand tea orders….and still remains one of my top five teas. If we were forced to go to an unlikely dessert/desert island and only allowed to bring 5 beverages, Florence would be one of mine.

I’ve got some notes to add: I’ve been drinking Florence (I’m now on my third tin since November) regularly. It never disappoints; it never fails to evoke richness and wonder. I do love that taste of chocolate.

When I was in the real Florence I used to zip into Robligio’s -http://www.robiglio.it/index_ing.asp - several times a day for a coffee. They had lovely thick little slabs of chocolate that you could put into your coffee as well as many other accoutrements. It was easy to make the chocolate dominate the coffee. (Aside—thank that Italians for not allowing Starbucks within their borders!). So I have a lot of great taste memories that this tea evokes.

Today I tried Florence iced for the first time. And despite my trepidations, it was simply brilliant. I feared I would get some watered-down chocolate concoction or something akin to a sugar-free melted fudgsicle. Oh, me of little faith! How wrong I was. This is a new and unique drink for me. It’s certainly related to my lovely hot Florence tea, but the chill seems to crystallize the chocolate taste in place. The black tea stepped forward to make certain that there was a good dash of caffeine. I added no milk but a certain creamy taste remains. Florence has a natural sweetness and I rarely add sugar. To add sugar to Florence is gilding the lily and I absolutely love to gild my lilies frequently but this is not essential. With the iced tea, I get the natural sweetness.
So here I am with a sweet, creamy, chocolatefull, caffeinated taste-filled beverage and the expenditure in calories is miniscule.

I want to stress that Florence has been there for me on cold days and hot days; on sick days and ebullient days. Like the ancient city itself, this tea endures with elegance, beauty, panache, and true artistry. Meraviglioso! Rivelazione divina! Voglio baciarti, Signore Harney (e figli)!

Jackee and his compadre Thomas arrived chez Ca’ dei Gatti late yesterday afternoon. My first morning choice was Jackee. I had read the reviews and the mention of “smoke” enthralled me. I love “smoke” when it comes to perfumes, teas, salmon, prunes, paprika, nuts, and scotch. “Smoke” has got to walk a thin line between enhancing and highlighting that which is smoked and overwhelming it.

Jackee Muntz is a fine, rich, deep tea with a smoke that does manage to evoke the burnt sugary taste of caramel—but I liked to linger on the smokiness. I thought of an excellent poem I read recently called “Shopping List” by Anna Adams. The premise is that “all of life /
is hinted at on strips of scrap”. The imaginative mind can take a simple shopping list and go places—dig deeply like an anthropologist or archeologist.

“Cornfields come with the brown bread rolls,
orchards with apples, and the sea
heaves, vast, around the herring shoals,
and China swims in Lapsang Souchong tea.”

A tea that wakes me up, makes me think of poetry, and which unfolds layers of taste and meaning is a great one. I’ve already re-ordered.

I need to become a serious Buddhist to cope with all of the limited edition teas I’ve fallen in love with. I’ve wept buckets when books and perfumes go out of print, Jackee, my man, you’ve reversed the ill-effects of a bad night of sleep.

JacquelineM put this into the traveling tea box and when it came to my door there was only one scant tsp. left. But I am the kind of person who appreciates the labour of love that trudging through the snow can be. The best way to honor JacquelineM is to thank her for her efforts and not allow this tea to travel to a potentially less appreciative home.

I am going to need to place an order with Premium Steap. I like coconut teas and this one is so utterly true and pure and rich. There’s been no compromise whatsoever on flavor. It’s Full Metal Jacket Coconut with no frilly little nods to the tropics. So many times the exquisite flavor of coconut gets lost in a marriage with chocolate or in a threesome with chocolate and pineapple or into a tropical melange of flavors. The purity of this tea really allows one to focus on the coconut and the satisfactions it offers.

This flavor is excellent. Coconut has taken rather a bashing with all those synthetic shampoos and soaps and sun-lotions. This is not a Copper-Tone kind of coconut, but rather a Tea at the Savoy kind of coconut. I could imagine the Queen of England sipping this whilst murmuring endearments to her corgi dogs.

This is an exquisite tea that I will need to keep in stock. It’s a tea for grown-ups. I added a tiny crystal of brown sugar and an ort of milk.

So here I sit sipping a cup of … " Cabochard? “Boss?”
“Thé Vert au jasmin” by L’Occitane? Matthew Williamson’s “Sheer?”

I associate Jasmine so strongly with perfumes that I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy drinking jasmine with any frequencly. But yet I wanted to try this, thanks to the great Travelling Tea Box. Pearls are fun to watch. I wonder if there’s a very slow film of them unfurling anywhere? I watched these little pearls unwind and slowly get bigger. I won’t call it an agony exactly. They looked more like that were transitioning from nap time to recess at a little nursery school for tea.

This tea smells very nice, but I have just not conditioned myself to tasting this odor. The great thing about the Travelling Tea Box is that I’ve been able to try things that I might have hesitated to spend money on. You make new friends with teas you have not tried before; you find new tea companies and race to the internet to place an order; your prejudices are either confirmed or toppled.

Jasmine, for me, is a nice middle-note or top-note for perfumes. I’ve never liked it as a base-note. I don’t think I can ever accustom myself to drinking it but I suspect it’s a taste once acquired that does pay dividends. I’m in no hurry to run and spray Clinique “Aromatics” into my mouth but I also don’t feel a need to rinse out my mouth. The aftertaste is pleasant.

Adieu, Jasmine Pearls! You’re moving on to your next destination!

I typically do not have an affinity for green tea. The problem lies not in the tea, but rather in my limited palate. A bad green tea tastes like nothing to me. Just warm water. A good green tea, and I suspect that this is one of them, opens up a world of vegetation in my mouth.

“Spring Snail Shell” tastes like the smell of a really funky warm rainy day in Florida when the heat and water brings out the vegetable smell and the air smells like burgeoning fecundity. It tastes rather like lounging in deep meadows (much like a snail might do) and taking in the green, grassy, aroma that is part funk, part fresh with a dash of sweetness and clarity.

I did think of Andrew Marvell’s line: “A green thought in a green shade” from “The Garden” when I drank this. I suspect that green tea aficiandos would really like this tea. And, as I finish my cup here and now, I start to think that perhaps I should purchase some and maybe I should make certain to keep green tea on hand. It’s a nice change, and it makes me feel like a “back to nature” person which is pleasant because my inner essence is so very library and bedroom.

Edited to add:
Three days later, I have sent this Spring Snail on in the Travelling Tea Box. Yet somehow I long for it. I keep thinking maybe I could just have some spinach—but yet that isn’t it. Maybe I do want some more of the grassy, vegetable tastes? I simply will have to order some. I’ve got a Jones and his name is Mr. Spring Snail.

This tea is good. It’s soothing. Yet it does not “pop” in my mouth with the excitement that a Mariage Freres tea typically manages.

According to the web site,
“Easter bells are ringing in a gourmet treat: the flavour of a black tea scented with fruits and citrus, spiked with notes of noble spices and sweet overtones for a heavenly delight.”

I had a good, but fundamentally generic experience with this tea. No bells rang. I could not pick up on the citrus and spice. There was neither nobility nor heavenly delight. I wonder if the sample I have is past its expiry date? I got it in a swap and I don’t know when it was packaged. Could it be from the Easter of 2004? Or maybe from when Charles De Gaulle was around?

I expect a superb experience from Mariage Frères and I would give this tea a second chance. I may try to find it new and see if it gives me that Blair-Waldorf-on-“Gossip Girl” sense of privilege.

I hope to lay hands on some more of this tea and return to give a revised report.

This is a nice, albeit rather pedestrian, black tea. There were no particular flavor highlights I could pick up on. Because I am a huge “flavor” junkie, I have downgraded this tea.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a good and strong “basic black” with a hint of creaminess, this one might just be your proverbial cup of tea! Smooth and strong, this is the sort of tea that could convert anyone to abandon supermarket-brand tea-bags.

Out to a bookstore/tea/coffee place with some friends late on Saturday night. Caffeine is out for me. I notice that Harney & Sons teas are being sold.

This is a post-prandial cup of tea and I’m stuffed to the gills. Plain peppermint seems like an excellent, simple, uncomplicated choice for the occasion.

I ordered a “medium” and they put two tea bags in the cup. I am quite certain that their water was about 50 times the temperature of boiling—maybe their water was about 2500 degrees on the Kelvin scale. So my tea steeped for a good ten minutes before I could take a taste.

Finally I was rewarded with a big, single-note peppermint tea that was more flavorful than other peppermints I have had. I don’t feel a need to keep this at home, but if I ever wanted a straight, strict peppermint, I would turn to Harney & Sons. This refreshing tea kept me perky and also permitted me to descend into the arms of Morpheus when the time came.

I love almonds and almond flavors so I came to this tea with a propensity to like it and I feel abundantly rewarded. There are many flavored teas that disappoint me because I just cannot pick up on the flavor. Perhaps the fault is in my tongue or my nose, or perhaps the teas are insipid and/or cheap.

SpecialTeas has done a bang-up job with this one. With a very small amount of sugar and milk, I have a sweet and creamy and very flavorful brew in which the almond flavor really “pops.” I’m about to order some more from SpecialTeas, which is my highest accolade. When I want to make sure that I am within a minute’s reach of a tea, I know that I like it.

If you like almond, you might want to try this. It’s the first really successful nut-flavored tea I’ve had.

David’s Teas have consistently pleased me. I had this in the late afternoon, instead of “after midnight” as the title suggests. The good news is that it works at any time of day, I believe.

The complex blend of chocolate and orange and a touch of spice takes a couple of sips to establish itself. And then it explodes! I could really tell that the chocolate was dark—deeper and richer and with just a tiny touch of bitterness. It ended up being more effective than milk chocolate teas, I believe, in delivering the chocolate taste.

After a bit I added milk and I would suggest going with milk from the start here. The milk rounded out the slight bitterness and only seemed to make the tea richer and smoother. Ultimately I added a touch of sugar and I would recommend that you add sugar if you want a sweeter drink—duh! The tea is excellent both with and without the sugar.

Overall, David’s continues to delight me and this will be on my reorder list. So many chocolate teas simply get it wrong. “After Midnight” has it right.

I have mixed feelings about Mighty Leaf. Sometimes they do things very right. I love their Chamomile Tea and I am not a chamomile fan. I tried the Organic Detox mixture last night. The peppermint came through most strongly and overwhelmed the other flavors. But flavorful it was. It was most pleasant.

For the record, I did sleep unusually well last night. I don’t know yet if I can credit the tea, but it certainly was a great late-night beverage for me.

Ignore the picture of the orange-peel on the bag. Any citrus flavor does not emerge.

52teas is consistently brilliant and original in their blends. I loved this tea and I don’t typically like green teas. The interplay of the spearmint and the “bubbly” creamy extra is superb. If you are a fan of spearmint, you will most certainly like this. The tea itself has nice, large green leaves which unfurled beautifully. It is a refreshing way to end the day and I have used it as my last little bit of caffeine before I move to the evening’s de-caf regime. It does not absolutely feel as if this is cocktail hour, but it makes a good college try. A sweet, creamy, nifty cup of tea is always something to celebrate.

I have tried this tea several times. I finally found a good cup of tea: but it took 3 full tablespoons and a long steeping time to get some real flavor here. I may certainly have some sort of taste-bud deficiency, but this seems as if the yield is so low for the investment. I think if you have a sensitive palate and if you react strongly to tea and love the chocolate flavor, you might like this one.

I was slow to taste this. Firstly, I do love cucumbers and I love melons. They are clearly related in texture and affect: how they do love to return! Green tea is not my favorite. But yesterday I had an impulse to try this. 52teas has never led me astray nor have I ever had one of their teas that was not flavored brilliantly.

And this is another winner! The green tea leaves are large and unfurl beautifully. The melon and cucumber tastes nicely complement each other. On a cold February day, it felt like a perfect antidote to the grey-flannel sky.

The tea is remarkably full-flavored for a green tea and it will have me revisiting my prejudices about green teas. 52teas has done it again. They never stint on flavor.

It does look pretty. Remember that old commercial where a petulent old woman demands to know “where’s the beef”? Well, I have tried this and I want to know “where’s the tea?”
I am right now brewing about 8 ounces with 6 spoonfuls of the tea and I’ll revise this review if I can discern any taste aside from a sort of sugar water from this. I know it’s possible to get an excellent chocolate taste from a decaf tea. So far, this hasn’t done it for me.

I have not yet tried this iced. It’s delicious hot. It smells exactly like a good pina colada with real pineapple. The taste of pineapple is strong and true. When I added milk and sugar on the second infusion, the creaminess really came out to play and I thought that the faint strains of a mariachi band were emanating from my mug. A cold January night became a little bit sultry and tropical (in my mouth and heart, at least).

53teas is very strong on flavor, which makes them a favorite with me.

And tonight, in honor of spring, I tried this iced. Very nice. I made about 24 ounces and added only one brown sugar cube. Most certainly this will save so many calories! It holds up quite well; I think that the flavor “pops” more when it is hot, however.

I was disappointed here. Mighty Leaf can make excellent teas. This one simply seemed to lack any flavor—it was a bit like steeping saw dust. I really prefer bold flavor, so perhaps I’ve missed something here.

52teas has done a remarkably consistent job of producing new flavor blends that are characterized by strong, true, vivid, lively flavor. They are a real antidote to the many insipid teas out there.

The smell of the dry leaves blew me away. There’s no way that a person could distinguish this odor from a good Cinnamon Raisin bread toasted, with butter. And the taste carried through. Truly delicious, I could almost feel the toast crumbs at the side of my mouth.

I must commend 52teas for having a plethora of ingenuity when it comes to envisioning teas. They like big, bold, true tastes and I’ve yet to encounter one of their teas that had a hint of “false” or “synthetic” flavor. Their teas are consistently satisfying, rich, hearty blends that sometimes break my heart with their purity! (In a good way). Their base blacks are very high quality; strong, friendly, and adaptable.

I think you owe it to yourself to visit their web page and see what they have that grabs your attention. I have become so addicted to the weekly delivery of what promises to be an amazing tea experience, that I signed up for the 6 month subscription.
No affiliation….

I have tried this tea black and with sugar and milk. It is great both ways. The sugar and milk were nice, but it’s sweet enough on its own. The flavors are strong and true and were not overwhelmed in the least by the milk or the sugar. Excellent concoction.

Both the aroma and the taste of this tea uncannily are exactly like a real, rich, sopping Tiramisu. It’s got a lovely chocolately taste with the overtones of coffee and cream you would find in a dessert.

This is a dessert tea that I would say has a BIG taste! It’s ebullient and has a succulent, sweet taste. One could certainly add sugar and milk. I ultimately added about 1/3 teaspoon of sugar (a very small amount) and I thought it made the Tiramisu taste and aroma even more deliciously pronounced. The miraculous thing about this tea is I felt as if I had consumed a heavy 600 calorie dessert—very satisfied and filled. Indeed, if I could close my eyes I would think I were at one of those spectacular trattoria in Roma or Firenze!

I have to give David’s Tea great kudos (or is it kudoes?) and compliments. Their customer service is excellent and speedy. I should also note that I am not affiliated with any tea company or with any mail delivery service. I’m a simple English teacher who reads, grades papers, and prepared lectures to the constant accompaniment of tea. This will be a definite re-order for me.

I like David’s Teas very much. I was amazed by their customer service: it seemed that they sent a package from Canada to the USA in half the time that most USA companies take to reach me. They have got some amazing flavor combinations. They can do remarkable things with fruits, chocolates, and spices. I liked this tea somewhat less than their other teas but I don’t think it’s the fault of the tea.

It’s dawning on me that Rooibos might not be my favorite delivery vehicle for flavors that are at all subtle. Sure, it can handle the bombast of a heavy cinnamon or clove of deep chocolate. Creme Caramel is certainly creamy and as smooth as satin; it’s got a satisfactory richness and natural sweetness. It’s not as BIG in the mouth as other David’s Teas. I think that I have a natural affinity for the bigger flavors of the Chai blends. And when David’s Teas adds chocolate to rooibos it really pops! I would certainly recommend this tea for those who like caramel flavors and for those who appreciate a bit of subtlety in their tea.

Troika is a nice, modest Earl Grey. I had hopes that this trio of flavors would send me off on an old-fashioned Russian reverie and into the land of a 19th century novel where the samovar is always heated.

My impression of Kusmi teas is that they are excellent and subtle; they are geared towards a sophisticated and worldly palate. The cultivated mondaine might drink this at 4 o’clock. I prefer a bolder, brasher Earl Grey. I like to be stunned by flavor. With my tea I am like a 1980’s lady who reeks of opium perfume and wears gowns by Bob Mackie.

Troika is for the elegant, refined palate. I would call it a very scholarly interpretation of an Earl Grey. It held up very well to a second infusion.