Jillian

The weather is getting hot these day so I dug out my tea and made a pitcher of iced tea. Steeped according to the directions it’s nice and refreshing although I do wish there was a bit more black currant/berry flavour. The base is smooth and not bitter, which is a problem I’ve noticed with some iced tea.

Because I’m Canadian I like my iced tea sweet, although the commercially available bottled and powdered iced teas are way too sugary, so one plus of making my own is that I can control the amount of sweetener (in this case agave nectar) that I add.

Life has hit a few bumps lately for me so it’s been awhile since I’ve had the chance to peruse Steepster. Those of you who are waiting on packages from me – I’ll deal with those in the next few days.

Now on to the tea. This particular tea is a Ceylon from the Uva region of Sri Lanka. I picked up the last time I visited the shop in the Granville Island Public market (which is a wonderful place, BTW) and according to the owner this one they only recently acquired.

To be honest I was expecting something with a bit more flavour. It has a generic tea taste and…that’s it, mostly. The body of the tea is quite light, even with an extended steeping but oddly enough I found I still needed to add milk in the end to smooth out the taste. It would make a good introductory loose-leaf black tea I think, or maybe for an afternoon tea where you don’t necessarily want a robust, full-flavoured brew.

De-cupboarding this tea. I’ll miss it as it was a great breakfast tea.

The tea smells like a sweet, ripe peach – or at least something close to it. It brewed up as a nicely mellow tea with sweet fruity notes. Normally I find Adagio’s Formosa Oolong to have a bit of an unpleasent burnt flavour, but the peach and the white peony in this blend seem to even things out. It’s a good tea to drink in the evenings when you want something light and smooth.

No notes yet.

Wow this tea smell strongly of seaweed when I open the pouch! It’s a very fine-textured tea, with litrle dark-green pieces that would probably be called Fannings in an Indian-style tea. It brews up a murky, green cup that looks a bit like over-diluted matcha. The flavour is full and complex – a mix of savory, sweetness and grassy bitterness, though the bitterness is less pronounced than it would be in another tea like a sencha. I’ve always liked the high-quality Japanese greens Den’s Tea carries, and this one is no exception.

I haven’t drank this tea in awhile so for some variety I had it iced. The green rooibos base lends itself really well to iced tea and the fresh flavours of the aloe make for a truely refreshing drink. I wish I had more as I’d love to make up a jug to keep in the fridge.

My sense of taste is mostly back to normal so I figured this was as good a time as any to crack open my Adagio order. I sort of expected bigger leaves out of something touted as a high-quality tea, but I suppose size isn’t everything, lol. :D Dry, the leaves were black with flecks of gold but when they brewed they turned a light brown shade.

The flavours are bold and dramatic – bitter cocoa with a little bite that actual does resemble pepper a bit. There’s also a hints of tanins and smoke, something I’ve come to recognize as a characterstic of most Chinese black tea to one degree or another. The tea has a substantial, almost thick feel in the mouth and it lingers on the tongue, not letting you forget it.

I think a five minute steep is on the light side of things as my cup tasted a little bit weak. It was quite an intriguing tea (or tisane, I guess), lightly grassy with fruity strawberry flavours and a smooth, almost creamy feel in the mouth. I’m not getting any heat from the peppercorns so the ‘blazing’ part isn’t really happening at the moment – but at least the ‘strawberry’ is!

On a side note, I’m glad I finished my tea before reading the horror stories about finiding snail and worms in this tea – now I’m afraid to look at the spent leaves. 0_o

Braaaiiiiiiins….Braaaiiiiiiins. Okay maybe not quite, but I’m feeling pretty zombie-ish – who the heck gets a bad cold this late in the year, anyway?

I was looking for a green tea and this was the first one that came to hand. I could have sworn I reviewed this blend back when I first got it, but it looks like not. I still can’t smell terribly well right now but the flavour is nice – vanilla and caramel, and maybe if I tilt my head and squint I can pick up the fruity apricot notes as well. Of course my sense of taste might be off kilter as well, so I’ll give this tea an actual numerical rating once I’m feeling better.

This was a very minty tea, so much so that I could barely tell there was any green tea present. Though I seem to be coming down with something as my throat has become very sore over the course of the day, so it just might be that my tastebuds aren’t all working right now. I should add that it was still quite a pleasent tea and I enjoy mint teas in almost any form.

Thank for sending me a sample of this tea DaisyChubb, I really need to patronize more of those little Canadian tea companies.

I get more chocolate and caramel than I do cookies and cream from this tea. The tea might just need a bit longer steep though, and I bet it would also be tasty with some milk.

Interesting – I was afraid that the longer steep would bring out the herbal notes of the yerba mate more, but it seems to have done the opposite and capitalized on the coconut. I think I’m liking the blend more this time around.

I picked up this tea as part of Adagio’s Chai Sampler and while I’m not generally a fan of red rooibos all the positive reviews made me curious about this tea. Drinking it, if it weren’t for the reddish colour of the tea, I wouldn’t be able to tell this had a rooibos base as it blends so smoothly with the spices as to be barely discernable. It’s a well mixed chai and the spices are nicely balanced if a bit heavy on the cloves. The vanilla gives the tea a surprising smoothly-sweet note, so much so that I’d say that this doesn’t need sugar at all. Very nice Adagio!

I added milk to the tea this morning for my breakfast cuppa and found that it really improved things. So I’ve decided to up its rating by a few points.

A new tea store opened in my town – much to my surprise since we’re mostly a Tim Horton’s coffee kind of place, in my opinion. I checked them out and they’ve got a pretty decent selection – not so many single-estate teas, but lots of good blends.

This one is great as a good, basic chai tea. The base is a robust CTC black and the spices are well balanced. Nothing too special but it’s a good, solid tea and goes great with daal pakoras. I might try doing a traditional-style chai latte with it next time.

I added a teaspoon of wildflower honey to this cuppa and found that it make it taste like citrus-flavoured candies. I was hoping that it would also bring out the cheesecake flavour a bit more, but no such luck. Despite this lack I find it hard to knock such a great-tasting tea.

Adding milk gives this tea a nice creamy note. However the base strikes me as a little bit weak – may so it doesn’t overwhelm the strawberry flavours?

The smell of the dry blend is rich and vanilla-y with a nutty undertone. It turned a bit more herbal as the tea steeped and the colour was super dark – like a cup of black dark-roast coffee, I guess.

The first sip was shockingly bitter but after that inital mouthful the flavour improved. I almost never drink coffee (because it makes me hideously ill) but I imagine that it’s meant to taste similar to it – I know that chickory root was used as a coffee substitute when the latter was too expensive or scarse (such as the infamous Ersatz coffee). It’s maybe a bit strong for my tastes, but I’m tempted to try it with milk and/or honey next time. Colour me intrigued. :D

I think this tea came out of the Travelling Teabox and it’s been sitting in my cupboard for a fair while. It’s clearly labeled as comming from SBS Teas but I can’t seem to find it anywhere on their website, although given the length of time I’ve been hanging on to this blend I guess that isn’t too surprising.

The tea itself is rather underwelming, mildly floral – mostly jasmine and only a hint or orange, but mostly there was just a generic tea flavour. It’s not terrible – the floral notes aren’t too perfumy, but it doesn’t wow me. I’ll probably trade off this one.

This is a fairly unremarkable tea in my opinion. The orange flavour is quite subtle and takes a backseat to the honeybush base. I do like straight honeybush, though so I found the sweet orange accent to be rather nice. Maybe I just need to steep it for longer.

I used 2 tablespoons this time instead of one and noticed a definite improvement in the flavour. The colour is still a weird-looking shade of greyish green, but I supposed I can get over that. ;) I like that despite being a powdered mix it isn’t super-sweet unlike, say David Rio’s chais.

Normally I don’t drink Chinese blacks with milk apart from the occaisional keemun. Yunnans, which this tea resembles a bit, in particular don’t work well with additives I’ve found. None the less I decided to experiment this morning and added a splash of skim milk, which to my surprised worked out quite well. It really brought out those faint cocoa notes and gave the whole thing a nice, smooth finish.

I’ve seen this tea in the store before but I always gave a it pass thinking that it was just another fruit tea that used a bunch of hibiscus to replicate the tart fruit flavours of the pomegranate. It wasn’t until I got a few bags of this tea in a swap that I was proven wrong. Firstly when I added the water there was no tell-tale bleed of red – the tea stayed a soft, pale-golden hue the entire time it steeped.

The flavour is lightly sweet and fruity – I wouldn’t say it’s quite real pomegrante, but it’s a heck of a lot closer than the hibiscus blends usually are. It’s still quite a natural-tasting tea, delicate and subtle. It would be lovely iced, I think.