__Morgana__

I know I’m starting to sound like a johnny one note here. Or perhaps as though I’ve had a thorough brainwashing prior to induction into the cult of Samovar. But I am now officially… what is it? I’ve lost count. I think it’s six for six, or maybe I’m up to seven for seven. Perhaps I should just say I’m batting 1000. Or bowling 300. To sum it up, when it comes to Samovar’s offerings, I haven’t met one I wouldn’t buy again and the trend continues with the ginger pu erh.

In the sample packet, the aroma has a surprising chocolate note to it. Chocolatey, spicy, leathery. As with other Samovar teas I’ve tried, one of the most interesting things about it is that it isn’t fixed. It’s like shifting sand. Sometimes the chocolatey smell is primary, sometimes the leather, sometimes the spice. They each swirl forward and then recede, shift, do it again.

The rinse awakens and makes more powerful the ginger and orange scents. The ginger is spicy-sweet, not at all harsh. After steeping, the aroma evens out again. I found the chocolate again, and another surprise, a coffee note, along with leather, earth and spice.

The color of the liquor is very like how I remember the orange pu erh looked. Deep, woodlike. I think I said mahogany, can’t recall — it’s not the black petrochemical look of the Numi pu erhs. It’s deep, but translucent.

This may be the most successful use of ginger in tea I have experienced. Of course it is the only use of ginger I’ve experienced in a non-green tea except for in chai. What makes it successful is that it is part and parcel of the blend. Though it is definitely a focal point, it doesn’t blot out the other flavors. The orange is present, taking a far back seat compared to its role in orange pu erh (as it should), and the pu erh itself is deliciously smooth, rooty, and wet-earthy.

And with that, I can hit the free shipping number without waiting for Breakfast Blend and Chai to come back in stock. So I’ll be placing an order today. But not until after I’ve held this one’s hand through its remaining steeps.

Note: I am definitely going to have to recalibrate my pu erh ratings. Samovar’s are qualitatively better than Numi’s to my taste (even the Numi chocolate). But I will probably wait to do it until I’ve tried some other types of pu erh.

Let’s start with the name. I’m a sucker for evocative names, and how can you argue with Passion? Who doesn’t want to feel that? It would be a real bummer to hate something with this name.

Second, the look and smell of the “full leaf” sachet bags is quite pretty. And the color of the brewed tisane is pretty amazing. Deep reddish purple, very wine-like.

But rose hips and hibiscus. I was afraid, I was very afraid. Because they can really ruin things for me, but somehow they worked in this.

I’m sure I have had passion fruit or at least its juice, but I can’t as I sit here remember what it tastes like. I made this with two bags in about 14-16 oz of water and unsweetened, the dominant taste in the infusion was of unsweetened black cherry juice. A surprising discovery as there is nothing cherry or even berry listed among the ingredients, but a pleasing one.

I decided to sweeten it up a bit to see what difference that made. OMG — grape juice! Seriously, it’s just like warmed grape juice, with a slight raisiny note.

Its shapeshifter qualities make this drink quite interesting, and while it’s not something I would make a daily habit of drinking, it’s unique enough to earn a place in my cabinet, at least when the cabinet isn’t full to bursting with things I like better.

Number 2 from the Den’s sampler — this was what they put in for the variable, seasonal tea. It’s leaves are lovely and delicate, almost feathery, and very green. They smell juicy and vegetal, like the unflavored Chinese greens I’ve tasted: a mix of cabbage, spinach, asparagus and butter, but there is also a fresh, field-like note to them. I hesitate to call it grassy because some people view that as a negative. Bucolic would be an apt substitute. There is something else as well, a slight marine scent. It’s interesting to me that this can coexist with the pastoral one. It’s rather like what you’d expect to smell if you were standing in coastal farmland.

60 seconds at 160F got me a gentle chartreuse colored liquor with extremely fine solute suspended in it. The aroma was very like that of the dry leaves, though milder.

The taste is fresh and pleasant, vegetal but not as much so or as buttery as in the Chinese greens I’ve tasted. Though I haven’t tasted that many green teas and certainly have not knowingly tasted a sencha before, this is what I think of when I think of what a green tea tastes like. It’s a sort of Platonic ideal of green-teaness, which is a cool association, though I have to wonder why I have this archetype in my head when I have no experience to back it up.

I was relieved that it wasn’t bitter or grassy (in a bad way), and I think it’s the sort of taste that will grow on me. Though I’m naturally drawn to the big, bold, robust flavors of black teas, there are times when you want a sauvignon blanc rather than a big cab.

Den’s tea sample numero uno. I’m fascinated by the suggested temperature and steep times in the pamphlet that accompanied the sample “kit.” 15 seconds. Boiling. It’s intriguing enough that I have to follow it at least for the first try and see what happens. I just hope my reaction time is quick enough to be able to get the filter out in 15 seconds. Heh.

The leaves are uniformly brown but have gradations from a light milk chocolate color to a dark chocolate color. And they smell like…. toasted rice! Really toasted rice. Like the kind of toasted that sticks to the bottom of the pot and starts to carmelize when you don’t get the water/heat ratio exactly right. Fortunately, I’ve always loved that smell. :-)

At 15 seconds I get a liquor that is a tawny golden yellow, and a toasty aroma reminiscent of some oolongs but less intense and less full. The flavor, however, is surprisingly green! There is a roasted, nutty note, but mostly I taste a celery-like, sweet green flavor, with a bit of a rice-like flavor mixed in which I think is mostly coming from the aroma.

The second steep (20 seconds), brought out a slightly deeper, less green flavor, but I preferred the first steep. Next time I’ll go 15 seconds on the second as well and see what happens.

Like this one. Like.

One of the teas of the month for March from the Teavana Classic tea of the month club. I am not going to tell you how many tea of the month clubs I have joined in the last couple of weeks. I can’t even think about it too long without a minor freak out. I am fairly sure you’re only supposed to join ONE tea of the month club. But they all look so incredibly interesting. Sigh. I keep telling myself that at least tea is good for you and pretty harmless as addictions go…

This is not a tea I would have chosen had it not been part of the tea of the month club. I’ve been a little wary of flavored oolongs for no really good reason, other than I’ve really enjoyed the tastes of the unflavored ones and I’ve not become a fan of flavored greens. Oolongs seem to have a lot of personality on their own, even moreso than greens, and like greens seem to me to have fairly nuanced flavors that can be overshadowed or even poisoned by attempts to introduce other flavors into the mix.

If I’m remembering correctly, this is my first flavored oolong. I put about twice as much of this in the infuser as I would ordinarily as I was afraid the tea part of it would be too weak otherwise; it has that Teavana cornucopia of fruit thing going on and I thought the chunks of papaya and pineapple might result in too little actual tea going into the cup. It’s very pretty, with full tiny rosebuds strewn throughout. The tea is dark and brownish and resembles the Formosa fine grade I have from Upton though with slightly larger leaves. The dry tea smells fruity, floral and slightly pungent.

It brews to a light yellow, and smells of sweet, tropical fruit and cinnamon with an undercurrent of toasty rose. It actually smells much nicer than I expected it would. The fruit isn’t overpoweringly sweet and it has a clean, fresh smell.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the taste. I’ve not had great luck with pineapple flavoring in green teas, but it works fairly well against the backdrop of the oolong. The pineapple itself isn’t bitter, which helps quite a bit. The papaya and orange smooth it out some as well. The cinnamon, fortunately, plays a minor role in the flavor portfolio as it could easily stamp out the other flavors if it had been any stronger. As a tropical/pineapple blend, this is more successful than others I’ve had with green bases, and it gets points for that. I’m not discerning the oolong flavor in the mix on the first steep, but I expect this is something it will take a few tries to identify. (I’m finding that it often takes a few tries of a tea for me to really get it. It’s sort of like muscle memory in the palate, it takes a baseline taste or two before I can really start tasting the nuances.)

I was curious how well this would stand up to multiple steepings. With oolongs I’ve been going at least four, sometimes five or six. I wondered whether the fruit would become soggy, tasteless, or bitter, or just give up the ghost altogether. The first two steeps were pretty much the same. The third was interesting. By this time the fruit flavor was receding and mellowing, but not disappearing. The taste became more buttery and the tea silkier in the mouth. By the fourth, the tea was discernible if I tried really hard to taste it.

I suspect this will be different from cup to cup as a lot of these chunky mixes are, depending upon the amount of each type of fruit and tea that ends up in a particular steep. Though it’s not something I would have sought out and probably won’t seek out again, I can tell I’m going to enjoy drinking it while I have it. And it may even grow on me.

I feel Erin’s pain. My sample didn’t have any stars either, and that was the main reason I wanted to try this. I wanted to see the stars.

That said, this is quite tasty. The tea base is smooth and deep, almost a little chocolatey. The vanilla is substantial and rich, and smells and tastes natural and of high quality. I have a number of vanilla flavored teas at the moment and I may readjust the rating after I try more, but so far if I was to order one of the teas I sampled from The Jade Teapot, it would either be this or the White Peach. Right now I’m thinking more likely this, simply because it’s an oil painting of a tea.

This is part of the “green savant” sampler from Adagio, which I find an amusing name. I don’t consider myself anything close to a green savant, or for that matter any type of savant, but I got this sampler because it had two kinds of green tea I’d been wanting to try, gyokuro and dragonwell.

For my last caffeinated round tonight (I can already see a sleeping pill in my future) I chose to taste this. I am not going to rate it because (a) I’m not sure I prepared it correctly and (b) it’s my first gyokuro and I want to compare it to others before I give it a number.

After reading up on gyokuro on the net, I made this at a very low temperature after preheating the cup, with about a tablespoon of leaves, and steeped for 2 minutes.

The dry leaves are a gorgeous color. A very deep, intense, almost emerald green. They are fine little things. If oolong is dreadlocks, this is baby-fine hair. They smell like sweet, cooked spinach with a pat of butter melted over it.

The liquor is a light greenish color. The hue is pretty close to lime. There’s some sediment in it (the smallest of the fine leaves are close to powdery and they were too fine for my finum filter).

The tea smells like the color green looks. Seriously. If someone put this under your nose and asked you what it smelled like, I’m guessing you’d say “green.” There’s the spinachy note of the dry leaves, but also something that is mown grass-like. In any case, it is verdant, more in the sense of field than jungle as this verdure is fresh-smelling and airy. The mouthfeel is thick and soft. It’s thicker than brothy; it’s milky. Very smooth.

The taste is slightly sweet, slightly not sweet. It’s not bitter, but it has a tiny downswing right before the finish that could be bitter if it was any stronger. But it’s not true bitter of the sort I’ve experienced in green teas before, where it’s downright yuck. This is much more complicated and interesting than that. I am going out on a limb here and guessing this is the taste that is called umami, but since I don’t know whether I’ve tasted umami before I could just be talking out of my… And then, in the aftertaste, this sweetens up to a pleasant vegetal memory. It leaves a fresh taste and feel — the same kind of feel you get after chewing Clorets, but far less crass.

This was a nice introduction and I’ll enjoy exploring this one some more, and others on its heels.

It’s a sorry second to the Samovar Masala Chai, but I have found myself craving it since I can’t buy the Samovar (it being out of stock and all) and I’ve been consuming it in mass quantities over the last couple of days with milk and splenda. So I’m giving it a little bump for being its little comforting self.

Little by little, my original stash of what seems like thousands o’ tea bags that I bought to try to turn myself into a tea drinker (before I started reading up and realized that was not the best way to go), is diminishing if not yet dwindling. This is among that group, and one of the first I bought. I think it was part of the second wave of splurge, after the original Bigelow/Twinings purchases. It’s in one of those spacious rectangular tins that the full leaf “sachets” come in.

The sachets, by the way, are pretty nice. I feel confident I’m not going to taste paper, I can see the leaves, and there’s lots of room for them to swim in once they hit the water without being too compressed. They do expand to fill the bag and bump up against the sides a bit once they’ve steeped fully.

I expected to like this one quite a bit as it has a reputation for being one of the tastier Tazo blends. But I think I may have to come to terms with the fact that I am not generally liking flavored green teas. Green teas on their own, yes. But I haven’t yet found a flavored green tea that really sends me. This one smells quite nice, a little minty, a little green, and a tiny bit of citrus if I really try hard.

While this is a significant improvement over the Orange Blossom by Tazo, I like their China Green Tips better as a green tea. I can taste a grassiness in the Zen, but it doesn’t have the sweetness and succulence of the Green Tips. And I like Refresh quite a bit as a mint tisane. The combination of peppermint, spearmint and tarragon really works well, and is much more interesting to me than the spearmint present here. In fact, Refresh is still the frontrunner in my Tazo experience and I plan to buy more of it (loose this time) when I run out of the bags as I’ve not been able to duplicate the blend using my own peppermint, spearmint and tarragon.

This isn’t bad, it just isn’t as great as I’d expected, and it’s not something I’ll feel compelled to replace when I finish. I could see having it every once in a while when something I like better isn’t available.

Also, I should say that it steeps well at a longer time without bitterness, but there’s not a noticeable change in flavor between 1.5 min and 3 min.

My iced attempt was, unfortunately, not successful, but it wasn’t this blend’s fault. I only had enough for three cups instead of four, so my concentrate wasn’t strong enough. There was a root beer smell, and a weak rooibos taste but not much else. And it wasn’t a great day for iced tea on top of all that — cloudy, cold, dreary. Oh well, I hope someone else is able to get it to work nicely.

I now understand what people mean when they say that white tea takes up a lot of space. The five samples I got from the Jade Teapot are all in bags the same size, but this one is a white whereas the other three I’ve tried so far are greens. The samples are easily two cups worth for the green. For the white, I have about enough left after weighing this out for another half cup. The grandeur of white leaves is something to behold. In general I think they tend to be the prettiest dry leaves, though there are always exceptions; the curliness of oolongs, the various geometries of greens and even the classic look of plain black leaves can be quite becoming.

These are pretty — though in color they’re not all white. They range from silvery to brown to green, with some light brown which I suppose is the osthmanthus. The smell in the little sample bag is, interestingly, pretty similar to the smells of the others from Jade Teapot. Cough syrup. It must be something about how the aromatic oils used for flavoring interact with the plastic of the little bags.

The steeped tea smells peachy, sweet, and a little creamy. It’s not a full, deep smell, but I hesitate to call it light as that seems to connote weak. And that doesn’t seem appropriate as this tea is a water color, not an oil painting. At least that’s the difference that occurs to me between this, and, for example, the Blood Orange Pu Erh that I had earlier. This is painted with a much more translucent palette. There’s a very slight “planty” smell, a little floral, a little green. The color of the liquor is yellow, with a tinge of pinky peach. And it tastes pretty much exactly as it smells.

It must be my current mood. Perhaps I’m in need of comforting. But I’m finding oils more satisfying than water colors these days. I might order some of this, though. I can see it being a nice spring time tea.

After today’s lovely pu erh experience, I decided I needed something sweet and chewy, and I thought for a minute about having some Tazo decaf chai. Then I thought since it was a relatively slow Friday, why not have something that was likely to be better when I had some time to make it.

So I broke out my sample of this.

OMG. OMG. OMG. This flavor. I can’t believe I even considered the Tazo decaf. I must have been temporarily insane.

First, let me say that I didn’t even follow the instructions very well and I used ingredients that would likely make purists wince. I used splenda instead of sugar (hey, I’m a middle aged mom and I have to watch those calories!), I used 1% milk instead of whole milk (same) and I used the only loose leaf “black” tea within easy reach and not flavored, and that was the Mariage Freres Princeton Darjeeling.

Second, there was a scary moment when all the water boiled away and I feared I would end up stir frying the leaves. I remember thinking when I dumped the leaves into the pot that 1 cup of water boiling for 10 minutes was likely to completely boil away and what then? The “what then” turned out to be that almost exactly at the moment the water disappeared, it was time to put the milk in. Whoa.

Third, I am the first to admit that I have only recently been deflowered when it comes to chai, and the chai I’ve had has been Tazo/Starbucks. So whether this is good on the scale of chais is something I can’t say.

But whether it is good in an absolute sense, I can. It’s like drinking freshly baked gingerbread. Even with 1% milk, it’s rich, thick, creamy. It is so yum, there ought to be a law.

And of course, I went to add it to my order and they’re out of it. Sigh.

Sam O. Var is my new love. I’m going to elope with him. Right now. He can do no wrong, in my book.

I know what you’re going to say — it’s just so much pixie dust, that tinkling of little bells you hear in your mind, that image you see of little cartoon hearts floating up around your head like soap bubbles, that frisson of anticipation. He’s bound to disappoint you at some point. Just give it some time. It always happens.

You could be right. You could be. But not today. I am six for six today, six for six of Samovar samples that I would most definitely drink again. (Now if only Breakfast Blend would come back in stock in the large tin, I could complete an order and qualify for free shipping.)

The aroma out of this packet is deliciously orange. Not tart, not thin, not artificial-smelling. It’s a rich orange smell, almost creamy, like the orange in fine orange-flavored chocolates. It predominates over the pu erh until the leaves and those little bits of orange rind and ginger are wet, when the tea starts to share the stage. After multiple steeps, the aroma of the wet leaves and the tea itself is still deliciously orange, and the grapefruit is there as well. The ginger is pretty subtle, but that’s fine with me. I like my ginger subtle.

The orange in the flavor is mellow and deep, like a very ripe, very juicy orange — but more. The fact is I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a fresh orange that is this orangy. It must be a synergy in the blend, with the other flavors bringing more orange out of the orange. I suspect this is the primary role of the ginger, along with adding a bit of spice that stays on the tongue along with the orange in the finish, and persists, pleasantly, for quite a while.

This is not a star vehicle for the pu erh; rather it is part of a terrific ensemble cast. It balances, it interacts, it comes to the front from time to time to deliver a forest-floor-after-rain note and then retreats to a foundational presence with the rest of the flavors.

I took this through 5+ steeps. Unfortunately I was interrupted with a phone call during the third, and didn’t get off the phone until it was time for the fifth. All the more reason to add this to my next order, so I can enjoy it again in peace.

Alas and alack. My jasmine blueberry sample is devoid of blueberries. Seriously. I looked for them everywhere and it appears not a single one made it into the sample. Sob. Sniff.

But the dry leaves do smell like blueberries, and of course, of jasmine, though these are underneath the cough syrupy thing that the Tropical Green also had. The tea steeps to a dark yellow and has, as Stephanie said, a blueberry aroma — that distinctive, tart smell that comes from berries that have been baked into something and are fresh from the oven. There is jasmine mixed in as well, which brings to mind breakfast outdoors under a vine-adorned arbor.

I am disappointed with the lack of blueberries. I don’t feel I can evaluate this properly without them. The tea is tasty enough, but I’m left with the feeling that what I’m tasting is just the blueberry flavoring, and wondering what the taste would be like with the actual berries….

This, too, is not a bad decaf choice for those nights when you’re too tired to spend much time on preparation and just want something to warm you up as quickly as possible.

I can’t say I know what lotus is supposed to taste like. I haven’t eaten lotus that I know of. Of course, if I was a lotophage, I probably wouldn’t care what it tasted like. Or indeed about much of anything. This tea doesn’t exactly have a narcotic effect, though it is relaxing enough.

Regardless of what it is supposed to taste like, the lotus in this tea is a very subtly flowery, slightly sweet, slightly green-tasting flavor. It isn’t as strong as jasmine or rose. It smells a tiny bit like the polleny smell you get when you stick your nose into a flower.

It’s interesting the first few times you have it, and though I can’t imaging ever craving it, I can see having it from time to time when I’m looking for a decaf. One thing it has going for it in that department is that it doesn’t scream “I’m decaffeinated! I’m less than!” like some others I’ve tried recently.

About the same as the last time, even with a significantly longer steep. I didn’t have a lot of the sample left though. Scale showed it was slightly under 1 cup’s worth.

I will say, though, that I just went to take a sip to find my cup empty. The cup smelled so divine, I wanted to lick it!

More flavorful and less subtle with more leaves. I used my new scale (the one from Upton with a cup measurement) and actually went to about 1.2 cups worth of leaves, and tried steeping a bit longer as well. Significant improvement. Bumping the rating a couple of points

This is now the third tea with this general flavor profile that I’ve tried. The other two were bagged, from Tazo and Numi, respectively, and neither was anything to write home about.

This one, on the other hand, has something going for it that the other two did not: the tea. You don’t have to search for it — it’s right there, mild, juicy, and green, without any bitterness at all, knitting the other flavors together. It’s successful enough in this respect that I don’t even realize I’m drinking lemon myrtle. Bless you, dear tea.

The ginger and lemon are nicely balanced as well. There’s nothing harsh or artificial tasting about them and there’s no single flavor running away with this tea, which is what I appreciate most in a well executed blend.

I am coming to realize that though I thought I liked ginger pretty well, having survived on the dry version of it during the early months of my pregnancies and appreciating it with sushi, I am not sure it’s my favorite ingredient for a green tea blend. I think I appreciate it more in a tea as part of a baked goods flavor which tends to belong more in the black tea blend genre. That said, if I were going to partake of a ginger/lemon green tea blend, this would be the current frontrunner.

One of the reasons I started drinking tea a couple of months ago was because I thought I was drinking way more Diet Coke than any one person ought to, and I was looking for a tasty no-cal alternative. Never would I have guessed at the time that the worlds of fizzy, flavored water and tea would overlap.

It occurred to me to ask myself whether this is in fact a good thing. But on balance it seemed snobby to even ask that question, and so I answered that I am much too much of a tea neophyte to start displaying snobbery (at least openly) at this point and I should just shrug and say why the heck not.

Yeah, it is unmistakably root beer when you give this sample a sniff upon opening the packet. And since I now know what rooibos smells and tastes like by itself, I can smell that as well.

Brewed up, it does smell like hot root beer, minus the head, though I don’t get a creamy smell as I’d expect from the float part of the name. There is obviously no fizz, and drinking a hot/warm root beer flavored beverage is a little weird, but then I am a pro at drinking room temperature Diet Cokes so again, why not. The flavor is sweet like root beer, but not overly sugary, and the rooibos complements it nicely. As others have said, though, there’s no perceptible “float” aspect.

In all, I think this is well done. It’s something I might drink every once in a while. I don’t drink root beer that often, so I’d probably drink it about as much as I drink root beer, which is to say maybe once or twice a year at the most. It’s not that I don’t like root beer, it’s that I don’t think to seek it out to buy. It doesn’t have caffeine, which is something I normally want in a soda. And when I’m eating out it’s not typically on the menu, at least not in diet form.

It would be interesting to try this iced and taste next to an actual root beer.

I think I may have nabbed the last of this, and I’m glad I got a chance to try it. :-)

I am about to start a chocolate tea frenzy. I have a number of different varieties that have arrived in the last couple of days, and I am sorely tempted to lock myself in a room and drink them seriatim until I achieve a state of enlightenment or pop, whichever comes first. But given the realities of reality, and the fact that I’ve become more caffeine sensitive over the years, that’s not happening.

Since I don’t yet have anything to compare this to I am not going to give a numerical rating at this time, but I will say that this is an adorable little tea — the rose petals give it a very sweet and cuddly look and are soothing to watch as they drift placidly in the water while they steep. They seem to contribute a slight sweetness and softness to this blend, though they aren’t something I can distinguish by taste individually. But that’s ok, because the main attraction here is the chocolate, and that is present in spades. Nice job, LIBER Teas.

In my book, anything with the name ecstasy in it can either be discounted immediately as puffery or has a very high level of living up to do. Ecstasy is, after all, not just a run of the mill, mild feeling. It’s sheer rapture.

The fact that I have had a four for four success rate with my Samovar samples thus far (I am intending to order more of all of the ones I’ve tried, something unsurpassed in my admittedly limited experience) left me doubtful this name could be discounted fully, so I had very high hopes for this one. And I haven’t been disappointed. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to state that drinking this left me ecstatic (wouldn’t that be cool, though? maybe one day I’ll find a tea that really does leave me ecstatic and then I’ll know all the secrets of the universe and more), I can say that I’m now five for five.

My only pu erh experience before this has been the Numi bags. They’ve all been varying degrees of enjoyable with the chocolate out in front. But because they’re bags, there’s a visual component to the experience that is missing. I’m finding more and more that I really enjoy examining the dry leaves of the tea I’m about to drink, and watching how they change after they’ve had their steep.

The Maiden’s Ecstasy leaves are brownish green, dark and pretty. A little on the small side, and not overly curly. Dry, they smelled to me as they smelled to Auggy after rinsing — like sweet tobacco, right from the pouch, with notes of leather and earth.

After rinsing, the leather aroma came to the fore. This, I think, is what I smell where others might smell fish. There is something slightly fishy, but not in an unpleasant way, about the smell of certain kinds of warm, pliant leather. I’ve had belts and shoes that have had a fishy note to them that body heat brings out and I know I’ve smelled this in horse saddles. It’s not always the case, but common enough. The smell of this steep makes me think of a new, buttery smooth, black leather English saddle.

My first steep at 2 minutes delivered a beautiful mahogany colored liquor.

The taste. It has that Samovar thing going on for me, an almost preternatural smoothness that makes their teas taste like velvet feels. I love that. To me, it is the difference between something that is nice and well made, like a shoe or a car, that you wouldn’t mind having, and the same thing delivered by a luxury brand. There’s a little luxury in every sip.

Within the smoothness, there is also a flavor that verges on leather — but is kept from being a stark leather flavor by its sweetness. I’m not getting raisin here, but perhaps a pre-raisin (i.e., grape) fermented sweetness, as though the tiniest drop of a fine port has been dropped into the tea.

The second steep at 2:30 yielded a similar flavor. The nose became more sugary, more carmelized.

OK. I’m about ready for my third steep and I am going to stop now and just go enjoy this for a while. I want to sit with it and see how it changes. I have all kinds of time for this tea.

This isn’t a bad choice as a decaf as it turns out. When I tried it the first few times, I drank it plain and it was fairly harsh and peppery — and had that something is missing decaf thing going on. BUT. After having a latte at Starbucks the other day I tried to approximate the flavor with low fat milk and splenda, and was able to get pretty close. Close enough for it to be yum. The only reason it doesn’t make it into a higher bracket for decaf is this: if I’m looking to drink a decaf it’s probably late at night and chances are I’m really looking for something less meal-like than this is with milk and sweetener — it really is borderline chewy!

I’m breaking out the Jade Teapot samples I received the other day. I thought it would be interesting to compare another pineapple green tea to the one I had from The NecessiTeas.

This tea is visually lovely in a heartwarming way. There are pretty red-tipped gold dried blossoms which I would guess are the safflowers, and blue dried blossoms which I would guess are the cornflowers, mixed in among the green tea. The dried leaves smell slightly pineapply, but oddly, the aroma I get from them mostly is rather like cough syrup. This does not, however, play out in the steeped aroma, which is very subtly fruity but green at the same time.

The rating I’m giving here reflects several things. First, and perhaps most importantly though obviously most subjectively, I am enjoying this more than I did either the tropical green or the pineapple upside down cake from The NecessiTeas. The reason is, I think, primarily because of the green tea. It is mild, slightly sweet, and slightly vegetal, with not even the slightest bitterness. The fruit flavors are subtle, as they were with the other tropical green, but the blend is harmonious. There’s nothing forced about it, there are no gaps to it, and though the taste is subtle it has some substance to it. It doesn’t feel pale.

I have enough for one more cup and I’m going to try steeping a bit longer next time to see whether the flavors will come out a bit more. Even if they don’t, it’s a very nice blend.

G’day mate. ;-)

I am a babe in the mate woods. The only ones I’ve tried are this and the Tazo lemon. I have no idea what mate tastes like on its own, but my experience of these two drinks leads me to believe that the analogy mate-is-to-tea as chicory root-is-to-coffee may be apt. Or veggie burger-is-to-hamburger. If this is the case, I expect I am not destined to become a mate drinker. I am too much of a purist, and I tend to fixate on the thought that I’m drinking something that is ersatz something else, rather than something to be appreciated in its own right. This won’t keep me from trying mates, but it may keep me from cultivating a taste for them.

In any case, this one also has lemon myrtle, which is my bane. The Tazo has lemongrass, which I find more pleasing as a lemon flavoring. That said, this has a certain smoothness that feels creamy in the mouth and the green tea adds some “green” flavor as well. I have had this one several times and though it isn’t bad, I don’t expect it to grow on me.