__Morgana__

Hmmm. I thought I’d written a note on this one, but maybe not. Anyway, I’m drinking the last of the tiny tin sampler tonight because… I don’t have a good reason. Turning over a new health leaf perhaps? (How many times have I said that?) I did work out today and had some tilapia and couscous for dinner, and there’s no Diet Coke within reach so it seem like the right thing to do.

In any case, as is probably obvious from some of my more recent tasting notes, I have become an unfan of untea. I’m drinking this one only because some of the fruity flavor samples were better as honeybush goes, and there wasn’t much left in the tin so I could wave goodbye to another tiny bit of house clutter.

Honeybush is somewhat more tolerable to me than rooibos because of the (duh) honey aspect, but it still has that woody thing going on that makes me feel like I’m inhaling the cedar chips from the bottom of a hamster cage. It’s best and highest use, as far as I am concerned, is to temper the sour and bitter in blends that have a high citrus or hibiscus quotient.

Tonight, however, it is serving another purpose. It’s making me feel virtuous, which can only be a good thing. It’s not a bad honeybush if you like honeybush, but as I don’t, for me it was just part of a misplaced buying frenzy a while back and I’m not sorry to see it go.

This was the first tea I had upon arriving at the Samovar Tea Lounge in Zen Valley last Friday following our excursion to the SF Zoo. To round out the picture, my older son, 8, had Tea Lemonade (it was awesome! Not sure what was in it but it tasted like green tea and lemonade), my younger son had Moorish Mint, which I adore and he liked at first but grew weary of after a few cups, and my BF had Tart Peach which was lovely as well.

This was served in a little pitcher with a built in strainer, and an accompanying cup.

I have quite enjoyed many of the Samovar Pu-Erhs, but this was not my fave, for a reason that is extremely subjective. I thought I might get a chocolate flavor out of it, and I did get some around the edges, but it was secondary to a somewhat alcoholic flavor that predominated. To be precise, the main flavor I got from it was brandy, cognac perhaps, and I am not a fan of either of those flavors. Like most pu-erhs I have tasted it is overly simplistic to reduce this one to a single flavor, and I could discern as well the earth, bark and barnyard components. But the overwhelming note was the brandy. If you like that flavor, you will love this.

I give it points for obvious quality, though.

I’ve been wanting to go to a Samovar tea room for years, and since I live in the Bay Area it’s somewhat astonishing to me that I never made it to one before Friday. We took the kids to the SF Zoo and then went to the Zen Valley location for tea and dinner. It was chilly outside and the tea room was warm and peaceful. A lovely place to sit.

This is one of the two teas I had while there (on the menu it is called “Golden Phoenix”). It was served in a gaiwan, which I’ve never quite mastered, but I did my best. I was reminded of why I love oolongs and why I don’t drink them often. I had this after dinner and the fam was getting restless and wanted to leave, while I kept trying to squeeze in just one more infusion.

This is a richer flavored oolong than the Four Seasons, but still somewhat delicate, not as floral, more “oolongy” with a stone fruit and woodsy flavor. I wasn’t able to control my infusion times what with the distractions of being in company and my somewhat bumbling gaiwan style, but I found that I preferred short infusions to longer ones. The longer ones took a turn toward bitterness, while the shorter ones had a very subtle peachy note with a pleasantly sweet aftertaste. I can’t help but believe my experience would have been improved if I’d ordered this one before dinner when I had more time to savor how this changed from infusion to infustion.

Finishing and decupboarding this one today. It remains my favorite among the Kusmi chocolates, but the Kusmi chocolates remain not my favorite Kusmis as subtlety and chocolate do not go together in my book. Still, the spice blend is nice on a chilly day and it’s not that the chocolate isn’t there, it’s just a second-seat to the spices and too much of a second seat to be what I’m looking for in a chocolate tea.

I meant to record a tasting note for this a while back and I see I never did. I must have been distracted. Probably had some rejection slips pop into my mail box which sent me scurrying to find another market to send a story to. ;-)

I’ll have to go back to it and write a more in-the-moment reflection, but the good news is this is a memorable tea. Even without having tasted it in three months I remember a thick mouth feel and a really nice currenty raisiny flavor over a mild and tasty black tea base. More later, but I didn’t want to leave this one naked. It’s cold out there.

I bought this sample a while back as part of the experiment described here:

http://steepster.com/teas/harney-and-sons/6603-organic-rooibos

which I extended from rooibos to honeybush.

This sample has been following me to the point where I considered a restraining order. Every drawer I put it in, it manages to float to the top (in that uncanny way that tampons seem to float to the top of any handbag, so that when you open it up in the grocery line to get your wallet, it’s the first thing the attractive man next to you in line sees, amIright ladies?). If I put it in a cabinet, it falls out when I open the door. The only reason I didn’t dig a hole in the back yard to bury it in was because I feared a zombie version would rise from the grave and eat my brains while I slept. (Just kidding. I would never put any sort of tea in a hole in the backyard.) I decided to drink it to put an end to the madness. ;-)

The dry honeybush smells quite woody to me and in fact I can’t really make out anything but wood. Brewing, however, released a lovely honey smell that pretty much extinguished the wood. I got a cloudy, red brown liquor reminiscent of apple cider.

I was prepared to say I wouldn’t drink this again before I tried it, simply because I can think of so many other things I’d rather drink than plain honeybush, even if it is from Samovar. Now, though, I’m not so sure. As the description says, its absurdly smooth, and I can see this as a balm to a sore throat on a miserable rainy stay at home sick day, or a kind stroke to the mouth after a bad visit to the dentist. I do get cedar notes, though not in a sawdust, hamster cage way. More like the smell of a sweater after it has spent the summer in my cedar chest. And something I’m getting that isn’t even mentioned in the description is a nutty flavor, almost like a roasted chestnut aftertaste. It has a sweet little upswing to it, but not a strong taste of honey. There’s a slight earthy/metallic note which I suppose is what they mean by gravel that is evident in the aftertaste, and something that is somewhere between green and wood. It’s surprisingly complex for something I bought to better understand the flavor as a base for blends.

While at the rate I’m going I have enough tea to last me until I’m 100, I wouldn’t turn this down if offered. I can’t justify buying any, but mostly because I can’t justify buying ANY tea. I just spent the morning rearranging the tea that isn’t in cupboards in my kitchen or eight small shoe-box size plastic containers into tubs like this:

http://www.containerstore.com/shop?productId=10010964&N=&Nao=60&Ntt=stacking

Four of them. Insanity. Just insanity.

Finished and decupboarded this one today. I’ve said a fair amount about it already so I’ll just add an anecdote.

Yesterday morning I made this for my first morning beverage. I asked the BF to taste it, wondering whether he’d pick up on the flavor and fairly sure he wouldn’t because he’s the sort that puts Tabasco or BBQ sauce on everything so he can taste the food. He’s not at all about subtle when it comes to flavors.

Embarrassingly, he picked up on the chocolate, immediately. Is there a word for the opposite of vindication?

I haven’t had an earl grey of any stripe in months. I remember being on a comparative earl grey tasting tear at one point, but sadly after all that work I can’t remember much about what I tasted or what I liked without referring back to my own notes. Yay for Steepster, for remembering when I can’t. I wish I could download my tasting logs. If anyone knows a way, please tell me as I can’t find one.

Looking back on my logs, it seems I haven’t logged many earl grey cremes. The front runner among those I’d tried was Upton’s, though I also liked TeaFrog’s blend.

This one has a delicious perfume coming from the dry leaves. Lots of vanilla and not too strong on the bergamot. The leaves are dark brownish with cornflower blossoms adding color to the mix. I’m such a sucker for those little cornflowers! Is it wrong to wish they were in every tea just for the cuteness factor?

The tea is a crystal clear cinnamon brown color with a hint of orange and it smells divine. There’s a very light malty substrate to the aroma. Sweet creamy notes predominate, but a light citrus takes the edge off and add some depth.

The tea has an interesting thickness, or perhaps I should say creaminess, to the mouthfeel which really suits the vanilla cream flavor. The vanilla cream is the dominant flavor I’m tasting, but its also a delicate flavor, not at all overpowering. I’m partial to beany vanilla more than to creamy, but this is quite nice as creamy goes.

I don’t like strong bergamot in my earl grey. I prefer just a hint, enough to wave and say hi and then fade into the background. After reading some of the notes I thought I might not like this one much, but I don’t get strong bergamot. The citrus is there, but it’s sweetened and somewhat diluted by the cream, like lemon icing or the orange in creamsicle.

It could also be that the bergamot mellowed while this tea sat on my shelf for a while. It was sealed before I opened it today, and the aroma didn’t seem stale, but maybe bergamot is volatile and fades over time? Perhaps that accounts for the difference. If so, then it worked to my benefit, because I find this quite nice. The longer I drink it, the more I can discern the bergamot, a tiny “gotcha” at the back of the throat but not in a bad way at all. It also shows up some in the aftertaste, a little cut to keep the cream from becoming too much.

Some earl greys can do a number on my stomach. The bitterness or harshness of the bergamot, which seems sometimes to have a synergistic effect on whatever bitter or harsh notes are in the tea itself making them more pronounced, can leave me feeling like I need something to coat my stomach lining. This isn’t doing that. The tea base plays a supporting role here, and I mostly taste it at the edges of my tongue during the sip and in the aftertaste.

Having been away for so long I no longer have an intuitive feel for what I meant when I established my ratings, so I’m rating this on an absolute rather than a relative scale. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be perfect to be good and something I’ll look forward to drinking.

How is it that I have no notes on this? I know I’ve tried it, and even if I didn’t remember that, when I opened the sample tin up half of it was gone. Usually when I try something for the first time I write a note to record my first impression so that I don’t bias my tongue, and if my opinion changes I write another note. Hmmm. Very suspicious.

Be that as it may, I also remember having fallen out of infatuation with honeybush, which was around the same time I fell out of infatuation with rooibos. I would rather drink a decaf tea or a fruit herbal blend than their woody cousins if I’m looking for something without caffeine.

But that sort of makes me sad, in an extremely illogical way. I admit that I feel sorry for the honeybush still in my cupboards. Does anyone remember the IKEA commercial about feeling sorry for the lamp? (If you don’t, you can see it here):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEBV1TUfxXM

This one is one I feel doubly sorry for because as honeybush goes it tries pretty hard. Once you get past the unfortunate eau de baby aspirin coming from the tin that is the orange flavor and that is not improved by the wet-rattan honeybush scent, things look up. After steeping, the aroma is mellower and more of an undifferentiated citrus. More lemony than orange to my nose, though if I try really hard I can get some orange.

The flavor is actually pleasant. The woodiness that I don’t love about honeybush isn’t very evident in the sip, only in the aftertaste, and there’s a light orangey flavor that has some depth to it, almost like a mandarin orange. Really, if I cast aside my prejudice, this is honeybush I can appreciate.

Maybe I didn’t write a note for it before because I was so counfounded that I actually found a honeybush I didn’t have to give at least an orange face to?

It’s overcast and misty here, so not too hot for tea, and after jumping on the jasmine oolong bandwagon I have a little momentum going. Thought I’d give this a try, from the Adagio oolong sampler.

I quite like oolong and I quite like darjeeling so this sounded really interesting to me. I steeped according to the directions on the sample tin.

I get a strong, sharp fragrance from the dry leaves — a little like champagne. Hard to say whether the oolong or the darjeeling smell predominates. The leaves are a pretty mix ranging in color from almost black to pearly. The tea liquor is crystal clear and a peachy orange-brown.

Maybe I’m out of practice, maybe I didn’t use enough leaf, or maybe my sample’s a bit too old, but I don’t get the spices and complexity others have described. Instead I get an interesting sensation of having a see-saw on my tongue, with flavor swinging to something like a Formosa oolong with an aftertaste of tangy butter to a more musty, winey darjeeling flavor. I give it extra points for interesting, and for potential user error.

Hi! I’m alive, but I’ve not been doing a lot of tea drinking. Life has been too busy to savor a cup properly, and I really hate rushing the process. Of course, on vacation, things are less busy, and we were in Canada for about 10 days a couple of weeks ago. We stayed in Lake Louise and generally had a great time hiking, canoeing, rafting, horseback riding and many other fun things.

If you’ve been to Lake Louise, you probably know that there are a couple of hikes you can do that take you up fairly high elevation increases to tea houses waiting at the top of the trails. We did the one to Lake Agnes. The day was exceptionally hot, the elevation was not what I’m used to, and I’m generally out of shape, so it was tougher than I thought it would be and I was really happy to get to the lovely tea house where we had sandwiches and sat for a while before doing the (really easy) downhill. The first tea I tried there was a Formosa Oolong (nothing else in the description) which was nice. The second was a jasmine green that had an interesting name, but alas, I didn’t have the foresight to note what it was, which is unfortunate because it was heavenly.

All of this is a rather long way of saying that tonight when I found myself without any Diet Coke to quell my oral fixation and the choice was water or tea, I started going through tins at random and the third one I picked up was this. It sounded appealing because of my memories of Canada. The jasmine fragrance was strong in the tin, and the little pearls were a medium green-to-dark-green with a tad of yellow. My 8 year old said when he saw them, “I thought tea came from leaves, not beans.” Heh.

I steeped according to the directions on the tin in the Breville, and got a medium, buttery yellow tea which brought the jasmine scent from the tin with it in exactly the same solid strength.

The flavor is pleasant, and not surprisingly very floral. My only real complaint is on the finish and aftertaste which seems a bit flat and almost a little bitter to me. I’ve had oolongs that have knocked my socks off and ones that didn’t work at all, and this is neither. Since I have more tea than any sane person should and don’t get around to drinking it often enough to make a dent, this would not go on any refill list if I had one. Which I don’t because I still have more tea than any sane person should.

By the way, I also stepped into a David’s Tea while in Banff and it was a gorgeous little shop. I sampled a jasmine oolong there, too.

In revisiting the Kusmi Chocolate, I find myself having to bump it down a few notches, mostly because I enjoyed their Spicy Chocolate and even the Chocolate Mint better.

There’s a heaviness to the flavor of this that was doing a number on my stomach this morning. It tastes full and dense, but that didn’t equate to a rich chocolate flavor. The chocolate is around the edges, but somehow the synergy between the chocolate and the tea was making this sit like a brick today. I had tried a bit more leaf than usual to see if that would bump up the chocolate flavor. Note to self: this tastes better without trying to make it stronger. I haven’t experienced the brick sensation before with this tea — usually it’s been the other way — too quiet for what I think about when I think about chocolate tea (hello Raymond Carver).

I saw the suggestion to use sugar in a comment to my previous note on this. I’ll give it a try but I really hope the richness of chocolate flavor doesn’t hinge on the addition of sugar. Then I’ll have yet another reason not to repeat this purchase since I’m back on my diet big time.

I finished and decupboarded the Chocolate Mint before leaving for a couple of weeks on the east coast, and I’m now revisiting the other Kusmi Chocolates.

I’m all about subtlety for a lot of flavors, but not when it comes to chocolate. Chocolate is my comfort food and the stronger the flavor, the better. I was sort of hoping I’d taste this and say “wow, was I wrong the first time” but I find myself standing by my original reaction. I don’t get a lot of chocolate flavor. It is there, but barely as far as my tastebuds are concerned. If I didn’t know there was supposed to be chocolate in this flavor, I doubt I would have noticed it except in the aftertaste, and then not as much as I’d hope in a chocolate flavored tea.

At least this is called Spicy Chocolate rather than Chocolate Spice. The spice is definitely what I taste the most, almost exclusively. The spice flavor is quite nice on a chilly day, but alas for the too quiet chocolate, which would have really hit the spot.

Back in the day, I’d thought I’d save something special to taste for my 500th tasting note and then write something really thoughtful and penetrating about it. Oh well, c’est la vie.

After finishing off the rest of my Adagio chocolate honeybush sample, I decided to give the vanilla a go.

I didn’t smell vanilla when I opened the little tin. In fact, I wasn’t sure I smelled anything other than honeybush until I opened up the plain honeybush for a comparison sniff. There’s definitely a difference, a stronger scent to the vanilla version, but it’s kind of a sharp, tangy smell that isn’t what I’m used to in vanilla anything. After steeping, the aroma is very herbal but it’s kind of a stretch to find the vanilla. I wonder if my sample is too old to have held the vanilla scent/flavor? Possibly, though the chocolate wasn’t.

There is a subtle vanilla flavor but mostly I taste the honey-sweetness of the honeybush. It’s as though the vanilla brought out the sweet side of the honeybush and the chocolate brought out the woody side. Because I prefer sweet to woody, I’d expect to prefer the vanilla version to the chocolate, but I actually like the chocolate version slightly better. It just seems to have more flavor overall.

In any case, an interesting experiment in self-education about the many things one can do with honeybush, but not something I’ll return to.

Had some of this today for the first time in a while, and noticed that after the tea has been drunk, there’s a rather amazing chocolatey smell left in the cup. It’s much stronger than the chocolate aspect of the taste and there’s very little mint to be detected in the cup’s aromatic residue. Which is interesting because the taste is totally the reverse — lots o’ mint, very forward in the sip, with the chocolate on the back end and not nearly as strong.

In a total tea vacuum, such as I have had for several months, it’s not bad. But in rereading my original assessment from about a year ago, I see I was evaluating it in the face of some stiff chocolate mint competition that better matched my preferences in terms of the balance of mint and chocolate, and the desire for less of the famous Kusmi subtlety where chocolate is concerned.

I have had hardly any tea in over… wow, how many months has it been now? So what made me reach for this? Well, it’s evening, so I wanted something sans caffeine and its chilly out, so I wanted something warm, and I finally got a new Brita pitcher which was what originally put a crimp in my tea drinking. So I have filtered water in my life again.

I didn’t expect much from this honeybush and so I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not horrible, it just isn’t something I’ll drink after it’s gone. The honeybush flavor is prevalent, woody, reedy, not very sweet. Kind of like sucking on a rattan basket. The chocolate is tastable, but nondescript. I’m not sure I’d even identify it as chocolate if I did a blind tasting. My five year old thought it was “okay.”

Oh, and if anyone I used to know here is still around, hi!

Hi guys. I know I continue to be scarce. It sucks, as I miss you. All I can say is yay for cooler weather! I’m actually cold in the house today, and craving tea for the first time in a while. And what exactly am I craving? Talk about 0 to 60 in 4 seconds… I go from being “meh” about tea to wanting something dark, smoky and as intense as possible.

I have been eyeing this one for a while, I just have, as I’ve said, been knocked off my singlemindedness as far as tea is concerned, and each time I try to stage a comeback it turns out to be too halfhearted to last. As it starts to get colder, I’m holding out more hope.

The first thing I noticed about this one is that it appears to have fluffed in volume between the time I opened the inner cellophane to the time I tried to close the tin. I don’t know whether this is how you’re supposed to do it or not, but with Kusmis I open up the inner cellophane packet, pour the leaves into the tin, and discard the cellophane. This is the first time the tea grew in volume so much that I couldn’t get the tin closed. It was slightly better after spooning some tea into the Breville, but I think it will take a few more servings before it isn’t a bear to close.

It has, as expected, an intensely smoky fragrance in the tin, heavier on the ash and lighter on the salty meat than some others I’ve tried. The liquor is lighter than I expected, a sort of dark honey color. The smoke mellows in the aroma; there’s some malty sweetness lurking under the lightly smoky overlay.

Now for the taste. Hmmm… I am a little disappointed, but I think there is user error here. I have to wonder whether I need to beef up the amount of leaf some (that could be why the liquor is lighter than expected) because it tastes a little faded to me. Almost watery. Kusmi teas are subtle, but in my experience so far that has never translated to watery. I must be rusty in my tea-making skills.

Despite the wateriness, it’s entirely not horrible. It has the smoke, which I was craving, but it doesn’t have the tar/pine/resin thickness of some lapsangs. Nor does it have much in the way of bacon, beef jerky, or other salted meat. I hesitate to conclude this without further experimentation, but my preliminary assessment is it’s a sort of lapsang lite.

This is part of the Adagio flavored white sampler. It sounded light and refreshing, and I’m hot and irritable, so I am giving it a try.

I’m using the Adagio-suggested time and temperature.

The dry leaf mixture smells like… um…er… something I haven’t smelled since college. (Yeah, that’s the ticket.) The leaves are big and dark with silver tips and there are chunky bits of what looks like citrus peel in among them.

The liquor is champagne colored. The aroma has a definite grapefruit note over a dewy, floral undercurrent.

I quite liked the Adagio grapefruit oolong so I was hopeful this would be a keeper as well. The jury’s still out, though. I’m not discounting it, but on this first tasting I’m not quite sure what to make of this. I’m wondering if perhaps my palate wasn’t clear enough to judge. I had the aftertaste of having chewed a fruity gum a couple of hours previously still on my tongue but I didn’t think it was strong enough to make a difference, but I forgot how shy white teas can be.

This one is quite shy. It has flavor, but the flavor is a mix of a sort of earthy white and some undefined other aspect that isn’t clearly grapefruit, though it isn’t clearly not. I recall the oolong version having a much more pronounced grapefruit flavor.

This fit the bill for a hot day, but I’m not sure it’s tremendously better than the plain Adagio white peony, which in turn wasn’t at the top of my list. I’m not averse to trying this one a few more times to see whether it grows on me, but if I had to pick now I wouldn’t run out and buy more.

I’ve only had bagged mates before, and I wasn’t overly impressed. I basically concluded that if the choice was between mate and actual tea, I could see no reason to choose mate. So this is definitely not something I would have bought intentionally. It arrived as part of the Teavana tea of the month club classic plan and sat on my kitchen counter staring at me for a while.

I’m still off tea. Not sure why, I just can’t get motivated. I may have had too much of a good thing for a number of months and just simply burnt out. The 100 degree heat and stress at work and home could also have something to do with it, as well as the frustration with my Brita pitcher which decided to become a fish tank for a while. I seem to have eradicated the algae for now, but it was off-putting. It’s not just tea tasting that is suffering, it’s my workouts and my writing and pretty much everything else. I keep telling myself October has to be better because the first month of school will be past and the kids will have reestablished their routines at least. (On the upside, I’ve become interested in chess because my first grader has become interested in it, so I’ve been reading chess books and practicing on the computer trying to develop a game that isn’t embarrassing so I can keep up with him. I have something of a mental block about it, though. I keep telling myself I just don’t get it, so I don’t. See the rock, hit the rock.)

But back to this mate. I finally gave up and cracked it open.

The good thing about it is that you can’t taste the mate. Which if you like mate, is probably also the bad thing. It’s got chunky fruit pieces and blades of lemongrass and basically looks just like a fruit blend. Smells like one too, in the bag. It has a berry-ish, raisiny-ish smell. If there’s a mate smell I can’t detect it. I expected something sort of earthy, but it’s buried under the fruit.

It looks like a fruit blend after it steeps, too. It has that hibiscusy red color. I didn’t pile in the spoonfuls like I do with fruit blends because I didn’t want the mate to be too dense, so I get a Hawaiian punch colored liquor. It doesn’t have a lot of aroma, but what it does has a fruity edge. (Mostly it just smells hot to me, with maybe a disturbing twinge of overheated plastic. I’m using a glass cup so this is mysterious.)

Taste wise, it is basically a fruit blend. I don’t get anything that makes it taste like anything else. Which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned, because if I could taste the mate I probably wouldn’t like it. As it is, it’s on a par with the average fruit blends I’ve had. Nothing that makes it unusual or unique, and at this point being an average fruit blend isn’t enough to elevate something like this to my shopping list. Particularly since I’m most likely to drink them at night and having the mate in this, albeit rather silent in its participation, takes it out of the running as an evening candidate.

I’m not really feeling caffeine as I drink this. But maybe I’ve overwhelmed myself with increased coffee and Diet Coke consumption while I’ve been off tea and it isn’t making a dent.

This is a tea of the month for August on the Classic Plan. I am so behind in my tea drinking that I still haven’t tried all the July ones. Ugh. Things continue to be crazy around here. Getting the house painted on top of the usual work trauma and the start of the school year. What I wouldn’t give for some quiet time to catch up on my tea drinking.

In any case, these dry leaves smell very earthy (a bit like soil, actually) and a tiny bit leathery. They look like their picture, so I won’t dwell on that. Steeped, it’s a deep reddish brown. Very pretty. Not the russet of many Ceylons, but more of a cherry wood color. There’s a fruity aroma. Berry-like, really.

The flavor is strong and malty. What I think of as stout. It’s pretty close to some of the Scottish Breakfasts I’ve tried, more that than English to me. It’s not overly sweet, as some malty teas are. And I’ve had smoother teas than this. It has a little grab at the back of the throat on some sips.

It’s better than average, but it doesn’t send me over the top. I have a whole slew of black blends that I quite like, and I don’t think this one is different or special enough to require a place in the finals, or even the semi-finals. I would not pass it up if offered, but I don’t feel compelled to put it on my must order list.

Finishing and decupboarding this one. I still taste raw potato emanating from the mineral and metal notes. It makes me think of factories and smelters. Interesting at first, but not what I’m looking for in an Earl Grey or indeed any daily breakfast tea, and it didn’t grow on me over time. I’ve only tasted a couple of Tavalon teas so far, but I’m wondering if in general they try to go for a sort of a stark taste. They say their aim is to bring tea to the American palate. Perhaps the belief is our palates are too coated in trans fats and high fructose corn syrup to be able to appreciate subtlety and they need industrial strength purging?

Backlogging from pre-vacation. I think. I can no longer find the sample tin of this and I have a vague recollection that I finished it up, but I had been trying to establish a pattern of saying both hello and goodbye to my sample tins in tasting notes so I could log whether I changed my opinion. Alas, I find no tasting note for the goodbye. It’s entirely possible I forgot to write one.

Maybe I dreamed it, but I think I steeped longer after reading Ricky’s comment the second time around and did find that this had more flavor, but it didn’t make a significant enough impression on me to bump the rating… and now, since my memory is so far removed it seems hardly fair to mess with the rating at all. Mostly I just wanted to record that I finished this for completeness’ sake.

Made on the stovetop with Teavana English Breakfast (High Grown) as the extra black tea, just because it was close at hand having arrived as part of the tea of the month club for August while I was on vacation.

I haven’t made chai in forever, it seems. I forgot how much I like it. To me, it’s really a comfort food instead of a drink. I’m wondering how this one will turn out.

This mix says it has six spices in it, but declines to be more specific. Let’s guess, shall we? A few are easy to discern. There are big honking whole cloves in this mix, as well as green cardamom pods, and a light brown bark-like substance that is probabably cinnamon though it could also be ginger, I suppose. There are also some broken, crispy green leaves that look suspiciously like bay leaves though I somehow doubt that’s what they are. And there is an aroma of anise or fennel though I don’t see anything that looks like anise seeds in here.

Then I cheated and looked it up on Amazon, where the full product description is far less coy than it is even on the Kusmi web site: cardamom, ginger, laurel, cinnamon, anis seed, and cloves. The green must be laurel. Guess what? I looked up laurel and one form of it is the source of bay leaves!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Laurel

Am I good or what? ;-) This is a different mix than any I’ve had before and also missing pepper, which completes me if I am a chai. I’m skeptical about how I’ll feel about the taste, given the lack of pepper. I am prepared for this to be a rather mild chai, based on past experience with Kusmi flavors.

The flavor has more of a black tea flavor than I’d expected, but I’m going to attribute this to the Teavana addition and move on. There’s just a hint of the anise, not enough to make it taste like licorice, which I’m thankful for. I get a fair amount of cardamom, a bit of ginger, not a lot of cinnamon. Whatever function the bay leaves are serving is not immediately apparent to me. It isn’t converting the gingerbready effect of chai into something savory in any case. If I really concentrate, I can make out a bit of bay leaf like flavor around the edges. But for the most part it is probably there to boost the flavor of something else in a way that isn’t obvious.

I’d say this tastes almost exactly as I expected. It isn’t at all spicy, there’s no kick to it. I like it better than some of the other milder chais just because I find the flavor a bit more interesting. It’s been a long time since I had the GM Kashmiri Chai. I really should have some of that soon to compare. I’m not sure whether I like this better or not, primarily because I can’t remember the GM well enough.

BTW, my Brita pitcher recently began to insist on growing something that looks like algae. I washed it well, changed filters. Algae again. I washed it really, really, really well and am waiting to see if it grows more algae. Anyone else had this happen? Is there a solution or should I buy a new one?

Sorry I’m still rather scarce. I’m such a creature of habit and it doesn’t take long for me to break habits. Which is a pretty good thing, actually. As long as I go cold turkey I can pretty much kick anything whether I want to or not. This probably says more about my attention span than I ought to admit in public, but there you have it. I haven’t gotten back into the habit of logging onto Steepster, mostly because it is the first week of school and there’s a ton of additional paperwork, plus back to school night, etc., but also because it’s so hot here and I’ve been too busy to work on an iced tea method.

But I am working on reestablishing my habit. I need to, or I’ll have cartons of tea tins all over my office for the rest of my life.

In any case, though it’s a weird time of day for me to drink this, I noticed that there was just a smidgen left in the tin and I wanted to free up the tin for further use. So I’m having it in the morning and herewith, I am decupboarding. Good thing I had two cups of coffee this morning and a cup of Earl Grey (Tavalon, I’m almost ready to decupboard that one as well).

I just reread what I wrote about this the first time, and I don’t have much to add. I’m pretty sure that if I wanted a lime flavored tisane around, this would be it rather than the Numi Desert Lime, simply because this is mellower and doesn’t require extensive mental preparation to prepare for the tartness on the tongue with each sip, or taking the easy way out and adding sweetener. The apple sweetens it up just enough to avoid having to do either.

However, I don’t feel the need to keep a lime tisane around, at least for now. So it’s bye bye until I’m possessed by an uncontrollable need for something lime flavored. I am not holding my breath.