Jillian

Woah, smells like bacon! This Russian Caravan is maybe a bit more smoked than what I generally like. Rather than using the usual Chinese black teas they seem to have gone with the more conventional (and cheaper?) Indian black teas. And you can tell as the tea has more bitterness and astringency than what I’m used to tasting in most Russian Caravan blends. Meh.

The problem with rationing tea is that no matter how much you want to save it eventually you have to drink or else it goes stale on you. This is the dilema I face with my teas from SpecialTeas; some of them, like this one, are very good, high quality teas with nothing to replace them with when they’re gone (Teavana doesn’t count – I refuse to buy from them). But I guess all good things have to come to an end sooner or later.

I’m drinking this tea with milk today and, while I think I prefer it plain ultimately, it’s fine this way as well. With some teas the milk will drown out the flavour but in this case I can still pick out the delicious citrus and cocoa notes.

This blend smelled very orangy when I opened the pouch and it was more of a sweet mandrin orange scent than your more tart navel oranges, I found. At first the orange flavour wasn’t readily apparent in the tea, though equally the woody rooibos flavour wasn’t as strong as I’d feared. There’s an strange flavour that I couldn’t identify that came across as being a bit bread-like or maybe nutty – it was odd, though not unpleasent, just not very orange-like. However as the tea cooled off the orange flavour made a re-appearance and interestingly the tea also became sweet, depite me not adding any honey or other sweetener to it.

It’s not a bad tea, but I don’t think they quite hit the mark with the flavouring.

The tea gives off a roasted aroma both in the canister and while it steeps. The recommended steeping time was longer than what I’d normally give a green(ish) oolong on the first round and it produced a fairly dark-coloured cup of tea. Despite the dark colour though the first steep was light-tasting to the point of being bland.

The second steeping @ 6 min was a bit better, and I could taste some lightly sweet flowery notes at the beginning of each sip, but even so it lacks the vivid flavours I’d expect from a Tie Guan Yin oolong. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by better teas. ;)

This was certainly a pungent-smelling cuppa – very herbal with added lime. The flavour is…interesting, again it’s rather pungently herbal with some slight bitter notes. The coconut is more readily apparent giving the tea a nutty aftertaste, but I’m not getting as much citrus as I thought I would given the scent.

I’m not entriely sure what I think of this tea yet, so I’m going to hold off reviewing it for now.

I brewed up a nice big jug of iced tea out of this blend, which this tea is totally suited for, I might add. The white tea base doesn’t hide the fruitiness of the strawberries and the cucumber is a fresh background note (and thankfully not the least bit dill pickle-y). The boyfriend-creature likes it too and he’s not generally a tea fan.

It tastes slightly better sweetened, but I’m still not feeling this tea as it’s too bitter to be truely enjoyable. This one is going up for trade methinks.

It was pretty hard to measure out this tea as the leaves and pine needles wouldn’t fit in my scoop, so I ended up guesstimating the correct amount. I don’t see any tinges of pink in the steeped tea, but then there weren’t too many sumac berries that I could see in the blend to begin with.

It’s rather unfortunate that this tea tastes mostly like watery Pepto Bismol – not surprising I guess since PB is flavoured with wintergreen. So it isn’t the poor plant’s fault that its flavour immediately brings stomach medicine to mind, I gues,s but it does make it harder to enjoy this blend.

An important thing to note is that the mulberry in the title refers to mulberry leaves, not mulberry fruit (which are very tasty BTW). The leaves form the base of the tea and give it a bit of a vegetale flavour, although it’s not too strong or annoying. The tea is also surprisingly sweet – is that from the vanilla flavouring or the mulbery leaves I wonder? The macademia nuts are a good choice for this tea I think, as they’re more subtle than almond or walnuts and with the vanilla they give the tea a nice rich flavour.

This teabag (from oOTeaOo I think) produced a rich, dark red cup this morning. I’m not sure if I’d call it malty – not as much as I would Assam anyway, but I could definitely taste some slight berry notes. It was a nice, solid cuppa that perked me up out of my usual morning zombie state.

Bleh, too much hibiscus – and that pretty much says it all. It’s just too tart for my tastes and there’s no actual acai flavour that I can taste (and yes I have eaten actual acai berries before). This one is looking like a good candidate to put on the trading block.

I bought this tea at the Victoria Tea Festival back in February and my friend and I both agreed that it was the best tea there. It was one of the new blends that Murchie’s was sampling and it was the smell that attracted me first – deliciously rich and sweet with hint of the banana and coconut. Of course I figured that, like a lot of flavoured teas, there was no way it would taste as good as it smelled.

Boy was I wrong. This tea tastes exactly like a slice of coconut banana cream pie; it’s almost uncany how well it matches the flavour. There’s nothing the least bit artificial about the flavour and I can clearly taste the real banana, the real coconut and the real vanilla as I sip it. This may very well become my favorite flavoured tea.

I got this tea at the Victoria Tea Festival this year. My friend and I were a bit lazy about getting started that morning so by the time we got to Vastu’s booth they were all out of their black Masala (which we’d been lookign forward to trying). But we made puppy-dog eyes and they scrounged up some samples for us, so it was all good. ;)

Two things I noticed right away about the tea – the leaves are very small and it smells strongly of pepper. It doesn’t match the western idea of a masala chai with cardamom as the main flavour, but you have to consider that in India (where the company’s owner is originally from) there’s no set recipe for chai and often each household will have their own special blend.

The pepper is quite prominent and it gives the tea a slight bite and leaves a trace of heat on the tongue. There are other spices in there too – cardamom and cloves and something that’s a touch herbal – the valerian root maybe? I drank it with milk as that’s how most chais are meant to be drunk (in my opinion) and it tames down the spiciness of the pepper.

This is a very unique chai and I really enjoyed it. Too bad the sample only had enough for one cup – I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of this tea in the stores.

I’m tasting a lot more pumpkin flavour in this tea than I got from the other 52Teas pumpkin blends, which I appreciate. I’m not getting the pancake part as much though, even with added milk and some agave nectar. The tea tastes rather bakey, but it’s sort of a generic bakey and nothing like syrup or butter in my opinion. Even so, I’m enjoying this tea, it has a comfortable, homey feel to it.

I believe this is the first Teavana tea I’ve consumed; I got it in a trade with DaisyChubb rather than buying it myself. Let’s just say that I have strong moral objection to the company’s business practices so I’ve decided not to give them any of my money – not that I don’t appreciate the tea, Daisy. ;)

This is an interesting mix – chai spices without the ‘chai’ and mixed with chocolate basically, though it smells totally awesome. The result is a little bit light for my tastes, though I could see this going well with a sweet dessert or something similar. I was expecting it to have a stronger chocolate flavour than it actually did, there are some mild bitter cocoa hints but the flavours seem to mostly be from the spices. I swear I’m tasting chicory root in there as well, though it doesn’t seem to be listed with the other ingredients. Hmm.

No notes yet.

My boyfriend came across this cool recipe for tea-infused creme brulée – it actually called for earl grey tea but I couldn’t find any of that variety (I’m sure I’ve got some somewhere, it’s just buried in the depths of my cupboard) so we decided to use this tea instead. The result was quite delicious with the creme brulée bringing out the sweet grenadine flavours and mellowing out the tannins in the tea. Yummy!

The longer steep brought out more strawberry this time around but I think it could still use a bit more. I’m also getting a bit more of a ‘baked pie-crust with spice’ flavour this time rather than straight cinnamon. It’s interesting but I’m finding that I feel rather ambivalent towards this blend. It’s on the right track but it needs a bigger, bolder strawberry flavour to really convince me.

Rinsing this tea did wonders for removing the fishyness from the pu-erh, so I highly recomend that anyone else who has an issue with it do the same. That along with an increased steeping time seemed to bring out a more pleasent, softly earth flavour that had been lacking the last time I tried this tea.

You know, maybe I should revise the score I gave this tea way back. I tend to compare all dragonwell teas to that wonderful one I regularly get from Specifically Tea and I’ve had the opportunity to try them side by side and I found that this tea was a bit lacking. Not a lot lacking mind you – it’s a good-quality tea in its own right. But I noticed that it didn’t have the same fullness of flavour and doesn’t resteep all that well. It’s also lacking that hint of smokiness I get from the Specifically Tea Dragonwell, but that’s more of personal preference, I think.

First of all, a thank you to Daisy Chubb for letting me try some of this tea, which I’ve been eyeballing for quite awhile. The tea smells sweet and fruity but at the same time a bit spicy – when I taste the tea it’s clear the spice is cinnamon, not a lot, but it’s a nice touch. It’s mildly sweet but I do wish the strawberry was easier to pick out – perhaps I just need to steep it longer.

Another tea from the 12 Days of X-mas sampler that I haven’t got around to reviewing until now. I’ve got to say that Frank got the right idea – this tea is truely delicious iced. It’s wonderfully fruity and thirst-quencing and you can really taste both the strawberries and ‘lemon-aid’ in the tea. The white tea is a good choice of base for this because its light, delicate notes balance the fruit flavours nicely without drowning them out like a black tea might.

I’ve also tried this tea hot (and apparently forgot to log it) and it was pretty good like that too although I couldn’t taste the strawberry very well. It reminded me a bit of watered-down hot lemon-aid or may Neo Citron – so while it wasn’t bad at all, I still prefer it cold.

Some skim milk in this tea seems to bring out the flavout a bit more, particularly the banana. Still I’m rather ambivalent about this tea so I think I’ll probably end up either putting it up for adoption or sending it away as a freebee in one of my swaps.

While I wasn’t particularly enthused about drinking this tea again, it came in one of those assorted boxes and I wanted something that tasted vaguely like a black tea without the caffeine hit. It’s still as whimpy as I remember it, even though it was steeped longer and I added milk. I can maybe pick up the vanilla flavour this time around but it’s rather weak and it still has that odd chemical scent. So yeah, it’s just as mediocre now as it was a year ago.