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Sipdown no. 26 of 2017 (no. 307 total). A sample.

It did ok on its one and only assignment at work, though since there was only enough for half a Timolino, I supplemented with a sencha. Nothing to add beyond my previous note.

I’m easing myself back into heavier tea consumption as the weather grows a bit cooler. I’ve been wanting to try this one for a while but somehow never got around to it.

The dry leaves smell like sugar cookies! The aroma of the tea carries this over pretty well. The sugar part is definitely there, the cookie a bit less so — and yet, there’s a pastry undertone. It’s been a while since I had a black tea in a clear glass and I remember why I love clear glass now — what a pretty color. Deep red with a touch of brown, but not quite enough brown to make it mahogany.

It’s a slightly sweet black “tea” flavor with a sweet finish and aftertaste and some astringency to the mouthfeel and a briskness to the tea base. The pastry note is very subtle, but sneaks up on you.

Leland is pretty close to me. How is it I’ve never been there?

I also have two packets of this and I’m going to count them separately for sipdown purposes.

It has been a while since I had a genmaicha. It’s one of those things where I never find myself sitting around going, “you know, a genmaicha would really hit the spot now,” but when I have it, I enjoy it.

Usually, when I have genmaicha, the mix also has matcha in it. This one doesn’t, and the tea’s color isn’t green. It’s a medium yellow color and clear. The aroma is as expected — toasted rice.

The flavor isn’t as robust as I recall genmaicha being, but that could be because of the matcha factor, or it could be because the leaf is old (but it was stored in a dark, dry place, and hermetically sealed).

I quite like it, though. It’s a gentler version of a genre I enjoy from time to time.

Don’t look now, but this is the 666th individual tea I’ve written a note about.

Steepster says otherwise, but that’s because there are three mystery teas in my log (teas I never tasted nor possessed, nor even came into the same room with as far as I know). I can’t get rid of them no matter what I do. I’ve written to the Steepster overlords, but I fear that, like the two mystery private message notifications that won’t go away, this is a break that no one knows how to fix.

I have two packets of this. I’m treating them as separate for sipdown purposes because it’s container space I’m really counting.

I didn’t believe the directions when they said that this should be steeped for four minutes, but next time I’m going to try that. 1:30, my usual green tea steeping time, is probably giving this short shrift.

I smell the bamboo in the aroma, a sort of green, woody smell. But this isn’t, right now, giving off as much flavor as I expected and the liquor is very pale. It has a very interesting rose gold color.

I’m not going to rate it yet.

Sipdown no. 25 of 2017 (no. 306 total).

The end of an era.

This is the last bit of one of the very first tea orders I placed. Any sane person would have sipped this down long ago. But I liked it a lot, and I hoarded it.

Now it’s time to let it go. But boy, did it age well. Tastes just like it did when I first wrote about it. Bumping the rating.

Sipdown no. 24 of 2017 (no. 305 total).

My sons have become fashion plates. They like certain “designers” and that’s all they will wear. Gone are the days when I could find a T-shirt with a cute saying on it or something geeky and get to adore them in it. Now they only wear surfer stuff and they won’t even wear the free swag I bring them from work (which believe me when I say, most kids would find these items quite cool).

I tell this story because one of the things that drives me nuts is their desire to “save” certain clothes, particularly shoes, for certain occasions. They get me to buy them Jordans and they spend hours keeping them clean, but when I ask why they aren’t wearing them often the answer is “because I want to keep them nice.” When I point out that in two months they’ll have grown another size so there’s no point in not wearing them, they look at me like I’m from another planet.

And yet, that’s exactly what I do with teas I like. I save them for just the right time to drink them. Then they grow old and I wonder why I didn’t just drink them in their prime.

That’s what I did with a lot of the black teas I like a lot, including this one. But I keep telling myself I have to become ruthless and just drink them and enjoy them.

So there may be a number of other flavored black tea sipdowns coming up soon. I picked this one to start with because I’d given it the lowest rating of all of the Dammann Freres in my cupboard.

But now I’m wondering why. It’s delicious. I shall miss it, but I must set an example for my kids (at least that’s what I tell myself). Bumping the rating.

I steeped according to the directions on the sample packet except that I used more of the mix than directed, 1 teaspoon rather than .5. The pieces of cardamom are huge in this mix, and if I’d used .5 teaspoons I would have gotten very little else in the mix.

When I opened the packet, I got a lovely spice aroma that was mostly — you guessed it — cardamom.

The tea is pale gold and clear, and smells of… cardamom.

And guess how it tastes? Did I make you guess cardamom? Gotcha! It has a very clove-y flavor. Not a lot of cinnamon coming through, but clove in abundance and also some cardamom.

Fortunately, I like cardamom. But this is just OK in my book. It isn’t knocking my socks off. I remember quite liking the Adagio green chai and being surprised that I did. Looking back at my notes on that one, I see that it had a gingerbread flavor and a peppery kick. This has neither and not much else going on other than the cardamom and clove, which seem to be fighting it out in my cup rather than trying to blend. The base is supposed to be gunpowder, but I can’t taste it.

It has been a long time since I had Gyokuro, and I made this wrong. I didn’t remember that the Breville only heats water to 160 degrees. I’ve set the Zojirushi for 140 degrees now, so I’ll be able to have the right temperature water.

I was also messing around quite a bit because I had put the tea in the Breville basket before I realized the temperature problem, and it was damp from having rinsed out yesterday’s leaves. So a lot of the tea stuck to the basket. I transferred as much as I could from the basket to a Finum basket, and then poured the water through both to loosen up the leaves in the Breville so I could move them to the Finum. As a result, I really don’t know how long I steeped. In any case, I am going to try doing it Samovar’s way next time because however I did it was apparently quite inauthentic even though it approximated the directions on the back of the sample packet.

But I will say that despite all the error, this is a nice cup of tea. I’d forgotten how dark and beautiful Gyokuro is in the dry leaf and how green and murky it makes the liquor. I’d forgotten the richness of how the dry leaves smell and the dusky, brothy flavor of the steeped tea. One day I’ll learn to make it correctly.

Sipdown no. 23 of 2017 (no. 304 total). A sample.

An old sample, one they no longer offer. Made worse by my having apparently prepared it for steeping and then not gotten around to it — leaving the tea in the Finum basket exposed to who knows what.

And yet, I didn’t have the heart to ditch it.

It smells like a combination of flowers and fresh water and it’s a nice, clear, golden color.

I am sure it would have knocked my socks off had I sipped it when it was young (though white tea supposedly ages pretty well) and hadn’t mistreated it. Even after said mistreating, it is a pleasant, dewy, sweet tasting blend with a really interesting sugary finish. Almost like a little pop of granulated sugar in a couple of places in the mouth — entirely unpredictable and infrequent. It happened twice during this cup.

I am almost through all of my aged Samovar samples. I think there’s only one left.

I used some of this to fill out the leaf for my Timolino full of Todd & Holland Copacabana last week, and was surprised to find I hadn’t written a note about it. I know I was drinking this pretty steadily for a while sometime back.

You can’t tell from the picture, but the dry leaf is really pretty. It’s the flowers, which add a dash of color. They have a generic tropical fruit (minus coconut) smell.

I recall this being very heavy on the pineapple to the exclusion of any other flavor, but this cup isn’t like that. It’s possible I got less pineapple in these spoonfuls. The aroma is rounder than I’d expect for pineapple which has a sharper smell, and I can definitely smell papaya and something lightly floral. I don’t really smell the underlying tea.

The color is a medium gold and clear. The flavor is pretty much just like the smell, though with a tad more pineapple and a definite, grassy tea taste.

I like this a lot.