Hallieod

I’m rotating between this and the English and Irish Breakfast blends, but never managing to make the definitive tasting note on any. I think this might be my favourite, though I feel I should be loyal to the Darjeeling-less blends (which the Irish definitely is, and I’m guessing the English too). I make them all with two teaspoons for a cup about 300 ml, and all are nice and strong, round, and astringent enough to know you’re drinking a strong black without taking your mouth off. None is too round either, and someday I’m going to figure out what I mean by too round so it’s remotely comprehensible to others.

My wonderful tea-drinking day yesterday started off with the best cup of this. Good stuff!

My only complaint about this is that I wish there were more info about the teas in this ‘most traditional tea blend’. Love the sense of history you get drinking it, and obviously, love the taste (strong, smooth – very smooth – and just the smallest sweetness as the sip goes down), although there isn’t really “more” history to this than any other tea. Never mind! Like my imaginings as I’m sipping. I’ll probably end up prodding the nice guys at PAT for a breakdown, just out of curiosity. Wiki says Keemun, Oolong and Lapsang Souchong, but that still leaves a lot of territory, and probably isn’t true for all Russian Caravans anyway.

Makes a great breakfast tea, as do both PATs breakfast blends, which I’ve enjoyed and will note soon.

Another of the generous handful of samples Stacy added to my order! Such generosity had to be matched, so I split this with Cara, instead of hoarding my cup’s worth.

If I’d had this before the Pistachio Ice Cream (or the Caramel Vanilla Assam – note to come), I think I’d have assumed I’d ordered the wrong teas, as this must be the best. (My tenses and conditionals are a bit mixed up there, but best I can do atm.) Or if it had been called first-rate green with very delicious touch of vanilla (catchy name, no?), then I’d have expected less eggnog. Having read Stacy’s note here about her original plans for the spicy eggnog additions that went the way of all flesh when she tasted it as is, I think I agree, but it took me a bit of sipping time to get kapow! eggnog out of my head, leaving room for no-punching, no-knockout delicious, smooth, SO GOOD green with just the right touch of vanilla. The tea itself seems to have the creaminess of some greens, but it could be the magic of superior flavouring. Whatever, it is a fantastic tea, which didn’t quite manage to knock Pistachio Ice Cream off its green Butiki pedestal. (I got four infusions, btw!)

Another of the samples Ysaurella sent me – thank you again! Cara and I had this the other afternoon, but I had no chance to make a note then, so finished off the last of it in a small cup just for me. I think if this one had tasted as good as it smelled, I’d have been in trouble. I sniffed and pondered and sniffed some more, and finally came up with strawberries and cream with vanilla sugar. And some undefined but gentle floral note. Now, I haven’t eaten strawberries and cream for ages (although soya cream is a really good substitute these days), and have no idea if cream actually smells, but this is still what my sniffing was telling me. The cup itself didn’t have quite the same richness and depth of flavour, and again, my imperfect tasting gave me very slightly underripe strawberries, vanilla and again, that elusive light floral taste. (Is it the sunflowers? They sure look pretty, but even tasting one gave no clue as to whether or no they taste sweet. Yes, I do regularly taste the leaves after infusion!) Very nice, and the black & green tea base is very good – though I wouldn’t have got green myself, I don’t think. Perhaps if I hadn’t had Ysaurella’s careful preparation notes to hand I might have got the green in the bad way?

I’ve tried the Pleine Lune as well, but going to brew it up again for tasting note for that, but so far, I’m extremely happy that the Pouchkine has been the hit of the teas Ysaurella sent for me. This way, I know which Mariage Frères teas I want to get when I get to the London shop, but am not so smitten I have to pay MF shipping rates to Ireland Right. Now.

Lovely sample-sized sachet sent to me by Ysaurella, who thought I’d like it. You were so right, Ysaurella! I have a somewhat uneasy relationship with Earl Greys, as I love the flavour of bergamot, but often find it so overpowering I can’t get enough of the base tea tea-ishness, so it’s more like licking a bottle of essential oil than it should be. This, however, is delicious! The other citrus flavours make a huge difference, as you get orange, lemon and bergamot flowing over your palate, but they’re all restrained enough to keep them from being too dominant. And the touch of smokiness is surprisingly right with the citrus – well, it surprised me. I could see vanilla with Earl Grey immediately, but wasn’t sure about smoky.

I’ll definitely be getting this when I order from B&B again – thank you so much for introducing me to this one, Ysaurella!

Generous sample sent to me by Stacy along with my order – aim: to make me no longer fear the puerh, accomplished! Thank you, Stacy! I’m not going to be able to do a proper tasting note for this one, especially given the number of infusions I got before I had to leave it and do other, more boring things. (Like cleaning.) But briefly, some of the notes I got were tobacco (strongest in the first infusion), honey (ditto), oak, a peppery bite (didn’t taste like pepper, but had that kind of bite – strongest in 3rd and 4th infusions), and then back to a very smooth oaky smokey one, with that lasting through all subsequent infusions. I was trying to get the flavour of the ‘bite’, and it was driving me crazy, as I could not pin it down. And suddenly I got it – serendipity helped, because we’d just got some Amaretti biscuits, which I haven’t had in ages, and we’ve been eating at night with our rooibos. These are totally different tasting from the macaroons I’m more used to, although the package translates ‘Amaretti classici’ as ‘classic crunchy macaroons’. The ingredients are sugar, apricot kernels, almonds and egg white, in that order, and I don’t know if it’s the apricot kernels that give the bite, although other than very bitter almonds, it can’t be anything else? If it was just the baking longer to make them crunchy, they’d taste more of toasty almonds. Anyway, that’s the bite in the Puerh!

Very much enjoyed drinking this today, and still have enough for another session!

No time for a proper note, but I made this yesterday for Cara (23 y.o. daughter)and me, managed to add a bit too little tea, and served it with a smidge of coconut palm sugar. Cara took one sniff, then one sip, and said’ and I quote: Aw, YUM. She then asked rather desperately if it was just a sample size or if I’d got a lot, and said it was her new favourite tea. I agree! However, wasn’t sample size, but I think I’ll need to order again x a bunch to consider that we have “a lot”.

No notes yet.

This is only in my cupboard because the local shop was out of Clipper’s Everyday Tea, which is a staple in this house (in teabag form – wasn’t impressed with the loose leaf). I had to get something for the daughters, though I’m not drinking the Everyday much these days, and I picked this one up, having seen that the Organic Assam with Vanilla was a hit. But not so much. I can well imagine the vanilla de-puckering this one, but it’s really not very delicious without. SO astringent. I didn’t even bother getting either Becca or Cara to try, as I knew they’d hate it, but now I have quite a few bags left to get finished off somehow.

I got this along with a bag of my beloved Chilli Chilli Bang Bang, because it was limited edition and I didn’t notice the aniseed in there. (Or possibly hadn’t figured out that while I like anise/licorice fine as flavours themselves, I dislike them in most teas.) For a good few cups I thought it was just the unfair comparison with CCBB that stopped this being a winner, then read *cteresa*’s note and went “Aha! Aniseed!”, but then it started to grow on me. The anise flavour is just tempered enough by the strength of the other flavours (all favourites) that I like it. It’s not a problem that it’s limited edition, as long as CCBB comes back for the colder weather. But if not — there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth! (The new Red Chai has aniseed as its first ingredient – not cool, Yumchaa!)

You know what? This might be one of those teas that makes a liar out of me. I like my spicy teas spicy – and that goes especially for chai – no messing around, plenty of ginger and cinnamon – pepper, cloves, I like ‘em. And then I got this one, and it’s so smooth and sweet from the vanilla and cardamom (both favourite flavours, but not without the other spices for chai), and the Assam works so well as a base, with its typical astringency tempered by the vanilla and cardamom, that it’s just a lovely cup of sweetly flavoured tea.

Uh, sipdown. (No bold or exclamation marks, as I have lots more tea in my real cupboard than in my virtual one, so the virtue of a sipdown! is not mine!)

ANYway, this came from sil – thank you again, sil! Second time I’ve had it, and have to admit, this is a bit of a miss for me. Not a bad miss, but just a miss in comparison to the hit it is for a huge number of people here. The thing about it is that I got one overpowering aroma/taste/memory, and that is cocoa, as in the beverage, rather than the cooking ingredient, but more specifically, the kind of cup of cocoa that gets a skim of milk on top. Now, I haven’t had any kind of cocoa for a while, especially any made with milk (migraines and diary intolerance), and I have to doubt that that kind of a cup of cocoa smells any different from your ideal cup of cocoa, but that’s what my smell memory brought out. It’s slightly burnt-roasty, a little malty, and it’s not what I imagine when hearing a tea described as having chocolate notes. When it cooled, especially on later infusions, I got a bit milder taste, and maybe a raisin smell behind the cocoa one, but never got cinnamon or honey or caramel… Not unpleasant but not something I’d rush to buy either. Unless possibly this is the autumn/spring thing, in which case I’d try the spring.

Thanks to cteresa for the sample – my first green mate/maté (in memory, at any rate!) I drank this a few days ago, but didn’t get a chance to make a note at the time. I liked it! I didn’t immediately become fired with the desire to find more mate teas and become one with them, but I liked the flavouring a lot and it all worked together well. Big fan of lemongrass here.

Funny thing though – I’d caffeinated up with my usual two strong cups of afternoon black tea before drinking this, and about 30 minutes later, was hit by a wave of sleepiness I found hard to fight. What was that about?

Another sample from *sil*’s generous swap! This sounded – and smelled – delicious, but I found the cup pretty much exactly as sil did. I don’t see why the grenadine was added, and found overall the tea tastes fairly weak with a slightly odd mix of fruity/sweet tastes barely making it through. Tasted better with milk (almond, unsweetened), but then was far too weak to be really enjoyable. Glad to have tasted it, and certainly nothing objectionable, but at least there’s one tea I can knock off the grand list of all the teas that must be tried!

Another “thanks to sil” tasting note! Had a few too-stupid-to-brew-cuppa days there, which had me avoiding trying this, but today I was up to the challenge. (Totally sarcastic, both about the challenge and about being up to anything.) Anyway, I brewed this according to Red Blossom’s instructions – though I simply had to taste the rinse water, like the big child I am. (It was mildly pool-water tasting, I thought, so they were probably right to say discard it.) But then I was dutiful and did as I was supposed to.

I’m going to have to leave it rather vaguely as not as much to my taste as the Pure Aroma Teas Keemun Spruce, but a nice cup all the same. There was a bit less silky smoothness to the smokiness compared to the PAT one, which left it ever so slightly tasting of burnt wood, to me. Well, obviously, smoke comes from burnt wood but it doesn’t mean the tea tastes like the wood itself. Yes, this tasting note is FULL OF SMART. I could get slight sweet notes – a hint of cocoa/chocolate and maybe a hint of raisin, but they weren’t quite as strong as the burnt notes. Which weren’t strongly burnt, but still dominant.

Thanks again for the sample, sil. It’s great to have had the chance to try this Keemun!

Sample thanks to Sil! I’ve delayed tasting some of the wonderful teas in Sil’s generous swap because the ideal time for me to try them (afternoon) is usually eaten up in caring duties. (I’ll go so far as to bring some tea with me, but nothing special or hard to obtain!) Today should have been a day I didn’t have to spend the afternoon there but ended up having to, so I decided to try one before going up – but one that Sil didn’t much like, so as not to waste it by rushing. There’s method to my apparent irrationality! I think?

Was a bit surprised this didn’t get boiling water, but followed the instructions, not expecting too much. And at first I thought the tea wasn’t good, but it grew on me as I sipped on (possibly as it cooled). The black base is quite nice, and the mango flavour is being held against Yumchaa’s Mango Sunrise and a mango tea I got around here, both of which are very superior mango teas indeed. Teajo website says it’s natural flavour, and I think the slightly artificial whiff I was getting at first was in fact the orange peel, which was giving a slightly bitter note. (Orange peel has its place, most definitely, but I don’t think this is it.) It’s not going to surpass either of my other mango teas (both greens, admittedly!), but I’m glad to have got to find that out, and will also try it cold. Thanks again to Sil for the chance to try it!

I’m going to be doing a bunch of possibly pointless, definitely uninteresting to anyone but me, notes about straight-up strong black Irish/English blends. No ratings for the time being, but at some point.

This — I find confounding (though it’s not alone, as everything about this applies to a couple of Bewley’s teas that aren’t in the database yet). I don’t get a loose leaf tea that’s – as far as my understanding goes – made to be a perfect teabag tea. This is tiny CTC tea – possibly the tiniest bits I’ve come across, and the only way I can make a decent cup of tea is to put it in a teabag. Otherwise, too much dust and you can’t strain it well, and it gets bitter & overly astringent in a flash. So I’m getting a very high quality teabag, by filling one of the huge ones – plenty of room for leaves to move – but I’d rather get a loose-leaf tea when I buy a loose-leaf tea! Taste is good if not mind-blowing, and it is nice and strong.

Drank this the other day, and was very pleasantly surprised, after my expectations about 52teas had been lowered by Weeping Angel. Thanks for the tea, sil! I was both amused and intrigued by how very cola-ish the cola flavour is – it certainly predominates, but it’s not only that, it’s that it’s so true-cola that I almost felt a faint bit of the fizz of a fresh cola, even while drinking it hot. Didn’t get too much rum, and only the merest hint of lime, but it was still very tasty. Cara agreed, and we thought it’d be excellent iced, as others have said. On a whim, I tried resteeping a smallish cup, sweetening it a bit with brown sugar and sticking it in the fridge. I was surprised at how much flavour remained in the resteeped cup, and it was definitely good iced.

Kind of makes me wonder if it’s worth playing with the Weeping Angel… hmmm, that sounds very odd indeed! I didn’t make a note on that when first tried it, so might try different temps and times, to see if I can’t get it a bit better.

Oh good, back in I-love-all-Yumchaa-teas mode now. Thanks to cteresa for the sample! I didn’t both reading the notes for ingredients for this one, just assumed it was a green chai. I prefer chai as proper industrial-strength black or the other end of the (caffeine) scale and rooibos, but my mind was open to a Yumchaa green chai, and this turned out to be lovely. I love ginger, cardamom and pepper, and love them together (usually with cinnamon), I love Yumchaa’s green tea bases (this one is sencha) and I love spearmint, but I’d never have thought the spearmint would go so well with the other tastes.

It’s going to be interesting, choosing from the growing list of tried-and-loved teas for the next Yumchaa order! Thanks again, T!

Another quick note, as I didn’t want to leave my only Bluebird Tea Co tasting note the not-very positive one on Vicky’s Sponge Cake, after I’ve enjoyed some of the other teas I got from them. This is probably my favourite, as I’ve not had the jasmine & spearmint combo before in a green/white, and it’s a real winner. I may have been a bit over-cautious with water temp, as it was definitely below 80, and the smell is stronger than the taste, but it’s such an utterly wonderful smell that I’m not complaining. Nice blend of white (which I’d guess to be a white peony?) and green tea for the base, and overall balanced and delicate blend.

I didn’t want to edit the tea info (which is the same as the website) as I’m not positive about this, but the ingredients on the package say orange flowers, not orange, and I’m definitely not getting any orange taste. There are lots of beautiful flowers in with the tea & spearmint leaves, though I didn’t have time (or probably, knowledge!) to spread them out and decide what type they were.

Oh, happy days – another new-to-me tea I really like! I’d never, to my knowledge, had a straight Keemun before the other day, so again had no idea what to expect. I ended up getting a sample of this and a small bag of the Keemun Orchid from Kent & Sussex Tea & Coffee Co. at around the same time. I tried the Kent & Sussex first (I’ll add that to Steepster eventually), expecting at least some of the promised “sweetish flavour”, the honey, plum and orchid. Getting instead the very mild smokiness I now know is characteristic of a Keemun, with a woody flavour and slight sharpness I didn’t find very pleasant, I decided to brew up a cup of the Pure Aroma Tea to compare. They say it’s delicate and “perfumed”, but given that the K&S was called orchid and the PAT was called spruce, I expected more sharp woodiness rather than less. Instead, I got a lovely cup of smoothness. The touch of smokiness plays nicely with the hint of woodiness, but here there’s no sharpness at all, rather a taste that balances beautifully this side of sweet. I wouldn’t describe it as perfumed, but that’s not a bad thing. I drank a bit without milk, as per the notes on the package, but then enjoyed the rest with a splash of milk. (I’m kind of funny about black teas, because of drinking so many strong Irish/English breakfast blend types daily over so many years. Sometimes a taste can be nice, but I get a bit agitated if I can’t find the right strength to drink it with milk, or perfect taste to drink it without. This was unusual in that it was easy to enjoy the same cup both ways.)

Thanks to Sil for sharing this one! Only a short tasting notelet, as I probably oversteeped this one (no brewing instructions on the website and I figured a Ceylon should be okay for 4 minutes, anyway). The smell was amazing, and I now know that I must have an osmanthus tea somewhere in my cupboard, though this may not be the osmanthus for me. The taste was much weaker, and as the tea base was rather bitter, it was hard to get anything else. I’ll try again shorter and maybe cooler.

Finished the last of my sample today, which was sad. Especially as I’d ordered a Russian Caravan from the Kent & Sussex Tea Company (lots of Russian customers, figured it should be good), and found it very disappointing. I’ll order Pure Aromas again, maybe trying smoky and unsmoky, but just wanted to add that I enjoyed my last cup with the addition of a half teaspoon of honey. Not just any honey – Sarah’s Warming Honey with Cinnamon. (So, HTML doesn’t work. Okay then: http://www.mileeven.com/products.) It was an amazingly good addition, which didn’t make me feel I could only enjoy the tea that way, but added a fun other way to drink when in the mood.

(Backlog, I have one. Should be doing teas that have no tasting note yet, but what can you do when the mood to talk about a particular cuppa strikes?)

I’m feeling the need for Steepster to allow searching for people by region (Ravelry has it, Goodreads has it, can’t be that impossible!), after adding this small Irish tea company. Hello, Dublin??

Anyway, bought this in Fallon & Byrne’s the other day, totally intrigued by the list of ingredients, and always willing to pick up a new tea. When I drank it, it was an enjoyable but horrendously confusing experience – there is so, so much going on there it’s hard to describe! Also, I’ve never tasted green rooibos straight, so don’t know what that’s adding to the mix. Nor do I know what mallow blossoms, pomegranate blossoms, sea buckthorn berries, or even ginseng taste like. It ended up tasting very fruity, mostly some fruit that’s rather tangy – almost like Ribena without the sweetness, but not as far on the tangy scale as hibiscus. Apricot is not a heavily apparent flavour, though it could be part of the tangy fruity! With a little floral and — I don’t know. Slightly embarrassing admission – I dissected the leaves & other material after I’d finished. Lot of goji berries, but they aren’t that strong a taste even alone. I like it, despite its confusion-inducing properties, and made it last night and Cara also liked it, despite etc. It’s not my ideal fruity rooibos, but it’s tasty and keeps the taste buds awake!