Starfevre

Thus begins the berry matcha experiment. Do I like the generic berry better than the boysenberry? I don’t know. I wish I’d remembered to bring my raspberry in from home, but black cherry will have to do as a substitute.

Thanks to Lariel for this sample. Just enough for one cup of tea.

And apparently I totally missed my 300th tasting note because this one is #307. Oh well.

I didn’t particularly enjoy the smell of this tea so I didn’t have very high hopes for it, despite all the good reviews. However, upon tasting it (while it was cooled off, I didn’t drink any while it was warm), it’s quite tasty and very burnt-caramel. I’m not sure I pick up on any salt though. I’ve never really had a ‘salty’ tea so I’m not sure what to look for besides the obvious in this.

Very berry. I don’t know if this is better to me than the generic berry one or not. I’ll have to try them both tomorrow and compare.

A little more sugar than usual today, about 2/3 tsp. Quite tasty.

Tasty. And I see that there are new offerings at RLT. Might have to break my no-tea-buying oath.

Thanks yssah for the sample.

This is a tolerable fruity tisane, but nothing particularly special. The lemony part of it is quite present, but so is the hibiscus. Glad I had only a bit.

Drank this. Looking forward to having tins free because I bought the other cherry matchas as well and I want to compare them.

A little too much matcha today. Tasted vaguely bitter at the end.

Haven’t had one of these in almost a week. Still tasty although I was occupied when I drank it so I don’t remember much.

Well, this is certainly figgy. And I’m finding the spices a bit overpowering, but they are spices that I am particularly sensitive to. Clove especially. There’s a reason I don’t particularly like traditional chai. Can’t really taste the apple in this. Nor the rooibos or oolong, though that may be a blessing since I either don’t have much experience with (oolong) or actively don’t like the taste of (rooibos). It did make a mess in my steeper though, another reason to not like rooibos much. Going to be miserable to clean when I finish drinking this pot.

Thanks to yssah for this sample back in December or so. Just now getting around to drinking it.

I’ll have to steep the next herbal LIT sample for less time than I did this one, because the hibiscus is quite strong in it and it is drowning everything else out. It tastes slightly peachy, but more just generically hibiscus-fruity.

First attempt at making iced tea in a long long while. Somewhat haphazard even though I have an iced tea pitcher now.

Made with the hot brew method, hot water to steep and then cooled off in the fridge for a while (well, days really because my fridge inexplicably stopped making ice) and then drunk with ice. I added about a tsp of sugar and I expect I should have added more. If nothing else, this experience has taught me that I prefer my cold beverages to be sweet.

This tea that I’m drinking is not so sweet. The flavour doesn’t really hit me until I’ve stopped drinking and then it’s a very lemon tea. I should probably get up and put more sugar into it, but I am surrounded by and covered in cats at the moment so I don’t want to get up, so I guess I’ll suffer through this. I have a couple of more glasses of tea in the pitcher so I’ll experiment with more sugar later, and probably an un-lemon black tea.

Tasty, tasty. Offered some to my mother but she took one smell and turned me down :(

Sharing this with my mother, though I’m drinking 2 cups to her 1 because she thought it was just ‘okay’. Actually, she just asked me to pour out the rest of her cup, even though she only took one sip. Guess she didn’t like it after all. Probably the rice part.

I can taste the chocolate better this time, along with the wonderful roastiness of the rice. I do like this tea a lot. Not picking up a lot of different things from the black part of the blend. I’m also quite distracted from adding a bunch of new teas to the database to add to my cupboard. I think I just sorted the rest of the unsorted pile on the floor into the sorted box. Yokotea is a hard company to add because they don’t have many subscribers here on Steepster, I think I’m the only one actually and they don’t have much online presence. I’ve mentioned to them that they should come on here and they said they’d take it under advisement. :p

Made a pot of this to share with my Mom. Used the smaller cups so there’s an extra cup for one of us.

I like the vanilla. It’s nicely strong and bold and it’s a very pleasant taste. I do not like so much the Ceylon base and my mother agreed when I talked to her. There’s just something not quite right with this combination. This ranks around the middle of the pack for vanilla black teas. This would have been much much better had the Steap Shoppe chosen an Assam or something for their base. Then I would buy again. In this instance, not going to.

Tasty

Tasty. I think I used the perfect amount of matcha today, because it’s really better than normal.

This was tasty but I’m a distracted mess today. Blah.

I know it’s probably technically impossible to ‘oversteep’ an herbal tea, but after a certain point the hibiscus, if it’s present, takes over. I think that is what happened here. I set my alarm and when it went off, I failed to take the tea bags out and then forgot I was making tea. Not my best execution.

With this, I can certainly taste the berries, what must be the wildberry flavour because I’m mostly unfamiliar with it. Unfortunately it’s also very tart and that detracts from it. There’s something almost sour with the berry flavour and I find that I’m just not enjoying this tea.

Backlog from yesterday. I drank this during a stupid meeting. I don’t remember much, but I think I enjoyed it. The meeting room was very hot.

This is the one matcha I drink without sugar, it’s too sweet with it. Still, not quite what I wanted.

So I got this tea a million years ago in a trade with ChuckieRoy so thanks!

This tea is really pretty with all the little extra things in it and it has real marshmallows which I’m really not supposed to eat because I’m a vegetarian but I’m making an exception for this tea. Slippery slope that is, but I think it’s okay. Not like I’m going out and gorging on bacon just this once or anything. It smells pretty fantastic too, clearly marshmallow. I did a survey of the other tasting notes for a steeping time for this because 2-5 minutes is really broad and came to the conclusion that most people did 4 minutes or so because at that point the marshmallows would be completely melted. I hope it wasn’t too long.

Nope not too long. Absolutely delicious. I’m with the consensus of the majority, this is a very very nice tea. Wonderful dessert tea. Nice marshmallow, the caramel is kind of subdued but that’s okay. Base is a nice supporting actor but not adding anything in particular. Yum.

Sipdown! I’m just writing this tasting note to say that. I’m not actually drinking the tea, I’m giving it to my coworker. He was surprisingly difficult to boil down to what type of tea he wanted. Or maybe I just have too many choices. It’s probably excessive when asking for a fruity herbal for me to come back with 10 choices. Strawberry? With or without cinnamon?

Sweet and tasty this morning. Smooth and delicious. Drinking it earlier than usual this morning because I actually enjoyed the pot of tea I had earlier so I drank it quite fast. So, earlier matcha. I love matcha so much you have no idea. I have no idea how I lived my life without it previous to this month.