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IT has become my habit to start my day with a green or white, or two, or five, and then move through into blacks during the day. That seems to be the opposite for most people, probably because of the wildly inaccurate belief that greens have less caffeine than whites.
So, the sun is coming up, I’m working on a press release and sipping some Jasmine.
The colour today is kind of mystical, I am peering into the tea bowl and trying to see the future.
The warm tones and perky bouquet of this tea are helping me to see that said future will contain much tea.

Up at 4am for a webinar from the US!
I’ve put together a large pot of this delicate tea to keep me going.
And it’s great.
Flowery, sparkly on a dry tongue and sweet!

Most people think of a jasmine tea in a delicate cup, taken neat. But that’s not the way I have it. I like it to be slightly sweetened, and for that me, regrettably that means a sweetener.
In order to reduce the impact of the sweetener, I use half a sweetener in a 450ml super mug with my CJ tea.
The result enhances the natural sweetness without overpowering, or even competing with the tea.
It remains delicate up front on the palate, with the main green tea flavours following the initial jasmine hit. The tea has a dryish backtaste that instantly suggests another sip.
A very lovely tea.

Home again! At last! Visiting family is nice and all, but nothing really beats coming home and sitting down in your own furniture with your own door closed behind you and just… breathe… out.

And now I just needed some good honest solid invigorating proper tea. And then I make this mix of Adagio’s Chocolate and Adagio’s Raspberry in more or less equal measure. Yeah, I can’t really see any logic in the choice either, but there you are.

I could have sworn I had tried this mix before, but I couldn’t seem to find it in my logs. I must have been confusing it with something else.

It smells mostly of chocolate. Milk chocolate actually. I think the raspberry is sort of smoothing it out and adding sweetness, although it doesn’t actually smell like actual raspberries the way the dry leaves do.

While the smell is awesome, the taste is kind of watery. With that sort of smell I was expecting something more viscous like milk, so the first mouthful actually seemed kind of watery. It tastes quite nice but just not of chocolate. Or of raspberry, really. It’s like it’s sort of cancelling itself out.

I really can’t understand if I haven’t done this before, though!

Tried brewing this with a bit of green tea and did not enjoy it but I think I really went overboard with the peel. Will try putting only a few shavings in next time.

OK… this has me curious so since we have a real tree this yr. I’m gonna try it.

30 needles (didn’t chop them)/6oz boiling water.

Hmmm… virtually no liquor, and the liquor that it does have formed almost immediately after the needles were added to the water so I’m thinking it might have been from the stains on my filter. VERY light sent, a lil sweet maybe? There is a very light taste, but it’s a lil sweet so I’m thinking this may also be left over from my prior usage of my ingenuiTEA. Good theory though, if I can get it down I’m making pine matcha. How’s THAT for a holiday drink?;)

Delightful! The tea tastes pretty much how it smells. Go up to a pine tree and inhale through your mouth… that’s pretty much it. However, mixed with a good spoon of honey and it makes for an excellent and nutritious winter tea.

So we’ve never tried this cold brewed, and I thought that I’d give that a go. I’ve actually never done a black tea cold brewed (just tisanes) so I had no idea how long to brew it for. I stuck it in the fridge and every so often we’d taste it.

It went from “not strong enough” to “OMG, something is WRONG with this!” in between two tastings. I think the lemon got stronger than the english breakfast and threw the balance off. If I was going to do it again, I would go lighter on the lemon, but I don’t think I’m going to do it again.

I thought I’d update on the experimentation we’re going through with this blend and the triniTEA.

I’m using about 6 tsp of English Breakfast and 2 (heaping) tsp of Lemon Youkou. It’s on the hotter setting of the triniTEA (II) and brewing for 2 minutes.

We’ll get about 32 oz of tea, which will then have sugar added to it (about 1/3 cup) and the pitcher will be topped off with ice (it’s a 1 L pitcher).

The bitterness seems to be gone (good, because I can’t brew it for any less time on the triniTEA!). I’m still playing with the amount of lemon because the last one I thought was not enough but the husband said it was too much. I’m making it more to his taste becuase he tends to drink it more than I do.

More a review of the triniTEA than this particular tea blend…

The bitterness from the last brew totally covered up the taste of PLASTIC! Yuck! I wrote to Adagio to see what they would say, but it’s totally undrinkable (IMO).

So… we bought Adagio’s triniTEA (automatic tea brewer) to supplement the Zarafina. It was getting crazy with waiting for the other person’s tea to finish brewing and for resteeps, what do you do with the leaves, and so on. We thought that the increased capacity of the triniTEA would be nice for making large pitchers of iced tea, as well.

The first batch didn’t go so well. We’ll ignore the machine’s faults and just talk about the tea… Nathaniel followed the instructions that came with the machine and not the instructions that came with the tea, so he put the timing knob on 5 minutes (Teavana says to brew the English Breakfast for 2-3 minutes and the Lemon Youkou for 5-6 minutes, but we usually just brew it as a black tea). The result was BITTER and had no lemon taste. UGH. It was totally overbrewed.

Not the tea’s fault, or the machine, really. We have to do another run with a shorter time.
(I’m leaving the rating where it is because when brewed right this tea is really good)

backlogging from the weekend…

I’m thinking that perhaps I need to ask the hubby to cut back on the sugar a touch (gasp!). I know we’re from South Carolina, but it was just Too Sweet. I think I’ve been living in Maryland too long.

Still loving this blend, though. It’s awesome.

We’ve been drinking this particular blend a lot, so I thought I would just add it as a custom blend.

Preparation Details:
Zarafina Tea Maker: Black, Loose, Strong, 2 cups water, 2 scoop English Breakfast, 1 scoop Lemon Youkou (Teavana)
Sweetened with 1/2 cup sugar, then iced and water added to make 1qt tea.

I love it. It’s a perfect blend of black tea with just a hint of lemon/fruitiness.

And another gone and another gone, another one bites the dust. This time Adagio’s vanilla that got the last act of mercy. I didn’t even have a full teaspoon left of this. Nearly but not quite, so I decided to mix it with the caramel from Luka, my local shop, which is a mix I know to be awesome. Since I usually do it half and half and couldn’t do that this time, I tried adding little vanilla sugar to the mix. I tell you, it feels utterly weird to stand there and stir a teapot!

I have no clue how that last additive will influence the flavour. I figure the worst that can happen is it’s a little sweeter than usual. I need to try the vanilla tea from my local shop and see if it’s better than Adagio’s. I liked Adagio’s to begin with but have found myself using it primarily to mix into other stuff.

Probably shouldn’t have added the vanilla sugar. It’s quite vanilla heavy now and the caramel is a bit overpowered. Now whether this is because I used too much vanilla sugar or if it was because adding just doesn’t work, I can’t really know.

It’s still delicious, though.

For those of you who own Adagio’s vanilla and find it a bit lacking in the vanilla department, perhaps a little bit of vanilla sugar can bring it out a bit more?

Because this was such a success the other day, I’ve tried to reconstruct it today. I needs it. I need something that is so good that it can take away the sneaking girl-stomach issues and the general pouting that the fact that my presence has been requested at work on wednesday, which because I work part-time is normally my day off, has brought on. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I hate, abhor and just generally dislike meetings. Especially those I can’t get out of.

So something sweet and distracting, yes please.

When I tried this the other day, it was the second steep of the caramel, and this is the first steep all round, so it’s intersting to see if it’ll turn out the same success or if I’m in for a bit of a disappointment.

Nope. Still good. Still sweet. What girl-stomach? What meeting?

Okay, I’ve got some tea in me now and some other cool stuff has happened and I’ve listened to a cool song, so I’m feeling a bit more optimistic about the rest of the day now.

Still, I do have domestic chores to ignore, and what better way to do it than having another cup of tea.

This is a Sudden Inspiration blend. Kind of brave actually because it consists of my Caramel tea from Luka with half a teaspoon of Vanilla from Adagio in it. The brave thing about it is that the Caramel is a resteep of the cup I had a couple of hours ago, and I haven’t got the foggiest clue as to how well that tea handles resteeps… I may have just made myself something that will be rather weak and taste slighly of vanilla.

The aroma is quite nice. There are definite vanilla and caramel notes in it. A bit fleeting which I imagine must have something to do with most of it being a resteep.

Oh my GOD! This is… I can’t even… I just…!!! The caramel SO didn’t get hurt in the resteep and the vanilla is really bringing out the sweetness in it. Like a bit of sugar can bring out the sweetness more, but this is just without that side-flavour of sugar. I will totally have to try this again except without the caramel being a resteep. The whole thing is rounded off by the astringency of the tea, so it doesn’t get cloying.

I had expected it would be nice, but I’m surprised that it was THIS nice. It reminds me a bit of the Elephant Vanilla Chai that I had yesterday. Only sad thing is that I’m running very low on the vanilla sample from Adagio. I should be able to get a vanilla black from my local shop, though, so I just hope that it’s as good as Adagio’s.

Overnight Fridge Tea at it’s best!!!

My Overnight Coca Tea technique is what I use for Maté. In Seattle there isn’t much sun, outside of the summer, to make sun porch tea, so I came up with a overnight fridge tech.

Just fill a Gallon or more jug with cold water, immerse stainless steel ball with 4 (four) Tablespoons of Maté, (used two roasted, two raw), place in fridge and try to sleep with the anticipation of tomorrow mornings brew.

This process also is amazing with coffee.

~paganbuddha

I wanted the gentle energy boost yerba mate provides but I felt like I wanted something a bit more interesting than the normal nutty/vegetal flavours of the drink. All it took was a few crumbled leaves of dried mint and this cuppa has a nice refreshing kick to it. :)

Oh dear, this is bravery and courage of the worst kind. Another adventure into the Big Tins of Mystery. It started with the question, “what tea should we have? Something plain or something with something in it?” and the reply was, “something out there.” Now we’ll see if my mention of the BToM might have been a dreadful mistake. And alternative name for it might have been ‘Bracken Water Blend’, but this sounded nicer and more like something you might actually want to try and put in your mouth.

I had lemon grass, red rosebuds and honeysuckle flowers. I have no clue what the latter might possibly taste like, but it does smell kind dusty and kind of smokey. Certainly doesn’t smell like honey. We mixed all these with Ceylon Pekoe for the base.

It has a light brownish yellow colour, which is probably just due to the Ceylon and it smells really a lot of honeysuckle. That’s not a smell that’s easily mistaken. I can pick up something sweetish too which I think must be the rosebuds.

We tried a sip which was followed by silence. And the remark that it was odd that no side effects had been encountered. Yet. (Now I’m having my grammar corrected in a really sort of demonstrative way with looks and everything!) Anyway, I can taste a heck of a lot of honeysuckle and underneath it I think I can find some lemon grass. The rosebuds seem to be only there for show and the tea is um well camouflaged. To make a short story long it’s a rather flowery concoction.

This all sounds very off-putting, but it’s not really quite as it may sound (or smell). The word ‘refreshing’ has been spoken. I think we can say that we’re leaning more towards Care of Magical Creature than we are towards Defence Against the Dark Arts here.

(And another plus, it seems to make the drinker kind of silly. Wait, are we sure that’s really a plus?)

Goodmorning Steepster.

Continuing on the almond pandemic we’ve had around the site lately, after I went to bed last night and just on the verge of sleeping, this combination popped into my head.

Usually I have noticed a trend of preferring green and white in my travel mug in the morning, but today I wanted to try this, so black it was.

I took half and half (just about) of Adagio’s Vanilla black tea and the black almond tea from my local shop, Den Lille Tebutik (they’ve changed their name since, though, due to having been sold, so now I’m debating whether or not to edit the teas I’ve logged from there).

It worked really well. The two flavours suited each other and the vanilla countered some of the enormous sweetness of the almond and making it less of a dessert tea. I really liked this combination and will have to see if aforementioned local shop have a vanilla tea so I can try to recreate it.

Backlogged. I had this this morning. It’s what you get when you don’t really have enough of the white tea with kiwi and strawberry and you got inspired by a fellow Steeper the other day just add something else to it. So this is half white tea with kiwi and strawberry and half white tea with pomegranate.

The former was once quite nice but has faded a little. The latter have never been more than a bit better than mediocre and has never actually really tasted like pomegranate all that much. Obviously, what could I call this other than ‘fruit salad’?

It was nice enough, but heavily dominated by the strawberry/kiwi half. It’s not something that I’m heartbroken over not being able to make more of, but it was quite nice for the travel mug on the train.

To cut the sourness of the Very Berry I recently reviewed I thought I would pair with a black tea. It helps a lot but is still not very good…oh well…at least I tried. Looks like I will be throwing away the Very Berry from Teavana…

My blend so I have to rate it high but with a little room for improvement. I suggest you give it a try.