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Mmm. Smells bready and chewy and I just wanna gnaw on it a little bit. Even though this is a Chinese tea, it smells like a super-tasty Assam. Then, once it is fully brewed, a bold and rich Tiger-like Yunnan. And the taste? It somehow manages to be both! Chewy and nom-worth Assam on the front, smooth and sweet Yunnan on the back – it’s like the mullet of teas! If this had a little smoke and cocoa thrown into the mix, it’s be the slightly less developed twinsie of the fantastic Tan Yang Te Ji from TeaSpring. This one falls short of that high standard but it’s still a pretty darn good tea. Thanks to TeaEqualsBliss for this tasty number!

Okay, must add that as it cools, it’s getting insanely thick feeling with a strong fig-like note of sweetness. It almost makes me think I’m sipping on syrup. In a good but crazy-rich way.

A TeaEqualsBliss rooibos! Sadly, it’s a bit too rooibos and tart and not enough berry for me. There is a nice hint of vanilla sweetness at the end but the tart front taste and rooibos-ness just doesn’t do it for me. Rooibos is just a tough one to make me not hate. But I enjoy trying them!

I’m not sure how I feel about this tea and the whole GABA thing, but this was included in the Tea from Taiwan samplers I got forever ago (yay for vacuum sealing!), so I’ll drink it. Well, maybe I’ll drink it. Cause this tea smells weird. Like honey-covered soybeans. Or boiled vegetables. It’s freakin’ weird. Especially since the dry leaf smelled buttery. But this? Not buttery. Weird.

Uhm, okay. So it kind of tastes like honey-covered soybeans too. Or maybe decaying leaves. That’s just not cool. The front of the sip has the honey so at the beginning of the sip I think, “Oh, that’s not bad, maybe I’m getting used to it.” Then the soybean comes in and I think, “Eew, maybe I should pour this out.”

Yeah. This one does not get a resteep.
8g/16oz

I just got a good report at the dentist and now my teeth are all clean and shiny. So I’m gonna muss them up with some tea! Yay! This one is another one from TeaEqualsBliss – thank you!

The smell is hitting all sorts of notes that I’m familiar with but I can’t quite place. Mango maybe? And maybe Tan Yang? With a dash of something like wet ash? It smells sweet but also smoky. Not Lapsang or Bohea smoky though. Cigarette or cigar smoky.

The taste is pretty much like the smell but in reverse. Wet smoke/ask, some Tan Yang-esque tea, a dash of mango (or something fruity sweet). The cigar smoke taste backs off a bit when it cools, showing up consistently at the tail end, followed by a typical “tea” taste. This reminds me a ton of SpecialTea’s Formosa Fanciest Oolong, but thicker.

I would say that fans of darker oolongs would probably really enjoy this one because it has a very similar taste profile. It’s a good tea, just not entirely up my alley.

When I was at Ikea the other day, I couldn’t resist picking this up. First off, it’s rhubarb flavored. I’ve never had a rhubarb tea before (shoot, I’ve only had rhubarb itself maybe twice, both times in pie form) and I’m always up for something novel, even if it ends up icky. Second, it was cheap ($2.50 for 3.5oz!) so even if it was icky, I wasn’t going to feel bad about blowing a couple of bucks on it. Third, it’s tea and apparently I have a disease that makes me compulsively purchase tea whenever I see it for sale.

This tea is definitely more vanilla than it is rhubarb but it’s a pink-tinted vanilla. There’s vanilla but it has a noticeable hint of something else that just tastes lightly pink. (Or maybe that’s just me. Does anyone else ever taste colors? And I’m not talking about when you eat fingerpaints.) Eventually I figured out what the pink taste made me think of – lychee. Yeah, yeah, I know. This is rhubarb. But I still think this tastes like a lychee tea, though more on the lychee fruit end, not lychee flower end (no hint of rose). Of course, this could be because my only exposure to rhubarb has been in pie-form and, since I didn’t add half a cup of sugar to my mug this morning, I don’t really taste the similarities. Not that I’m much more versed in lychee – I think I’ve had lychee once but I have had a couple of different lychee teas and that has to count for something, right?

Ah, the joys of drinking furniture polish! Okay, I’m kidding. A little bit. But show me someone that doesn’t think of Pledge when smelling this and I’ll show you someone that needs to dust more.

I’ve never had Lemongrass straight before, but now thanks to TeaEqualsBliss’s generosity, I can! I thought today was a good day for it since I seem to be fighting off a cold or some other illness most likely related to getting caught in the rain yesterday. Herbals always throw me off since I measure my tea by weight but I’m never sure how much of non-tea leaf to use. A lot of times I’ll use the same .5g/1oz ratio I use for greens and oolongs but if I did that for this, I’d probably be using way too much lemongrass since this is some pretty light stuff. So I did a generous heaping teaspoon for my 10oz then rounded that amount up to an even 2g.

The smell definitely makes me think of Pledge (though perhaps you wouldn’t assume that I could make such an association, given how dusty my house is). But it smells like a tasty, sophisticated version of Pledge. Lemon-fresh without the chemical foam. The taste, thankfully, is not like Pledge. It’s darker and a little grassy with a bright citrus sparkle that makes it feel clean and refreshing and reminds me more of lemon rind than lemon juice. It’s sweet and thankfully not tart or astringent. Just really tasty. And it’s kind of making me feel like my sinuses have been given a light dusting.

This is by far the tastiest furniture polish I’ve ever had the pleasure to sip. Thanks TeaEqualsBliss!

ETA: The second steep (7:00) has more lemon flavor but also more grass flavor, making this almost like a very strongly flavored green tea.

Ah. The ingredients say that this contains sour cherry. That would explain it. I got this because it smelled a bit like Mariage Frères’ Sakura the Blanc. But as I continued to sniff it ended up smelling more like cherry LifeSaver. The scent mellows out a bit when it is brewed, once again reminding me of StB, but the tea looks like a mix of pink lemonade and fruit punch. I wish the taste matched up more to the smell but instead I get sour cherry. The sour part hits immediately and doesn’t let go. There’s some really pretty stuff going on behind the sour, stuff that reminds me a lot of StB, but it’s barely peaking out because the sour pretty much beats it to death. Couldn’t just be normal cherry, nooooo, had to be sour.

I’m seriously contemplating picking out all of the non-tea-ness from this mix and seeing if I can get the pretty taste without the sour. Because the sour is really not happening for me.
10g/20oz

I was brave and got a cup of this while out running around with my mom. It’s not horrible. It’s got a decent green tea flavor to it but it’s a pretty dark and murky taste. But it more made me go, “Huh! This isn’t bad!” instead of “Wow! This is good!”

Another TeaEqualsBliss swap tea! This smells very Ti Kuan Yin-y. But the taste is fruitier. Unfortunately, I don’t think all of it is natural as there is a tiny hint of that plum spice flavor the Mellow Monk Top Leaf had. It’s fairly faint and I can pick up a brilliant, almost citrus taste hiding behind it. Sadly, the plum spice is a bit distracting so it’s hard to pick out what is the tea and what is the flavor it picked up from elsewhere. This tea has a lot of promise and I’d wager is really quite excellent, but because of the (thankfully faint) contamination, I’m going to leave it unrated.

Well, since today has officially been dubbed Unofficial Ceylon Day, I thought it time to pull this one out again. Typically, Ceylon just doesn’t do it for me but Teas Etc’s Ceylon has made me rethink my fairly anti-Ceylon view. So I thought it was time to revisit the only other Ceylon in my pantry. And the fact that it will lead to an additional decupboarding is just a bonus.

Yeah, still just not really feeling it. It doesn’t have the sweetness Teas Etc’s does, or the malty-esque notes. There’s a hint of fruity in it but it is overpowered by something that is akin to bitterness or tartness but is not quite there. A mild sourness perhaps? Maybe a nutty sourness? Something like that. Whatever it is it makes me think that this tea needs a little sugar and milk to taste properly balanced.