My Cup of Tea (Montreal)

Really good red tea, it tastes very fruity actually. Made a cup on the go from a hot water dispenser found at the school caf. Unlike some straight black teas I think i can go on drinking this day to day. I think this is only sold in teabags, which is kind of a pity; I would go buy more if it was in loose form. The tea has a hint of natual sweetness, which also tastes slightly floral. Keemum is definetely worth trying out.

This is a strange one.

Whenever I rate Earl Grey teas, I’m always torn because I have a very clear idea of what an Earl Grey tea should be, and if a tea deviates from that too much, I have a difficult time rating it high because it isn’t what I asked for.

If I ask you to draw me a damn circle, draw a circle! I don’t care if you draw me the best triangle in the world—it isn’t a circle!

When I opened the bag, I was impressed! It certainly smelled like bergamot, so I was expecting a pretty traditional Earl Grey flavour which is exactly what I needed to make getting up in the morning a little easier…

…but this tea tastes like…flowers? I’m not sure what flowers, because it doesn’t have a distinct rose taste or anything, it just tastes like flowers! It’s…sort of nice…It’s a light, fresh tea that really is kind of wonderful…

BUT NOT WHAT I WANTED!

To this tea, I added a splash of lemon and a spoonful of sugar.

This is another gift from Jillian that came with my christmas card. At least I’m pretty sure it was. I think I need to invent some sort of filing system in the Bits’n’Bobs Basket or something to help me keep track of these things.

I’ve never heard of this before. I would never even for a moment have imagined that such a thing existed, or even that anybody out there would ever think of it.

The leaves appear to be pretty much just small dried bamboo leaves and indeed they aren’t fermented at all. Merely withered. You can forget about teaspoons and scoops and whatnot when measuring out an amount. In fact I ignored the concept of measuring entirely and just moved a small handful to the pot. It seemed easier.

They have an interesting aroma when dry. It’s not overwhelmingly strong, but it’s quite grassy and surprisingly sweet. I have never really made it a habit to go around sniffing at bamboo, but I hadn’t expected it to smell like this. I didn’t really have any expectations of the aroma, but this still struck me as unexpected.

After steeping it had a very pale colour with some of that radioactive glow-in-the-dark colour that you can also find in a good sencha. I didn’t get to get a good look at that though. As it turns out when I removed the strainer, my strainer is in need of some maintenance and so there’s a bit of contamination here. (This is a phenomenon (do-doo-dodoodo!) that I’ve seen before with greens, but have never actually had any effects on flavour that I could tell at all. So nothing serious, other than a few points off in presentation)

The aroma after steeping rather reminds me of that sticky rice pu-erh that Auggy shared with me. It’s got an uncanny note of rice to it. Rice and newly mowed lawn. The latter isn’t really all that strange, is it, considering bamboo is a species of grass.

It tastes rather like the rice pu-erh as well. It’s got a rice note and that sweetness from the dry leaves as well. I can only compare it to rice pu-erh weakly brewed and with too much sugar in it. I’m not getting any particular grassy notes out of it in the flavour, though. The flavour is very smooth and there is no hints of anything that might turn into bitterness.

I’m surprising myself by rather liking it. To drink it feels very like your average middle-of-the-road sencha. A bit weaker, perhaps, but very similar. I would prefer a real sencha, but this will do as well.

Not nearly as earthy as I expected it to be! It has a taste similar to a green tea than what I consider to be a typical pu’erh. Quite nice, and I want to try a few other teas from this shop in the future.

Thanks to Jillian I was able to try this!

I wasn’t found of the berry smell but the tea was “ok”…it didn’t really taste berry flavored but it wasn’t awful tasting. A bit confused by this but I can’t say it was a “bad” cuppa either.

From Jillian – thanks girl!

This is some CRAZY Leaf Tea right here!

The liquid color is yellow-green and smells like veggies. It tastes like the outside or skin part of a zucchini…it has a sweeter finish.

Best than I thought it would be

I just noticed that this tea/tisane brews up a very bright, almost neon yellow color – I’m not sure I’m fond of drinking something that looks like it’s practically glowing. 0_o

It’s been five months and I still can’t really bring myself to like this tea – it’s too vegetale and hay-like in it’s flavour and it tends to leave my mouth feeling a bit dry after drinking it. Meh.

I was expecting a finer-leafed tea, not something with leaves the length of my finger. It wouldn’t fit into my tea scoop and I don’t own a scale sensitive enough to measure by weight, so the amount I used was pure guesstimation.

It smells like boiled hay pure and simple – it makes me feel a bit like a horse or something. XD It tastes rather like boiled hay too – sweetish, grassy, and fairly mild, although that might be due to the amount I used rather than the natural flavour. I’m getting a hint of the same tang I taste in the bamboo shoots that are sometimes added to stir-fries. I’m not a fan of bamboo shoots, but coming from the leaves it’s not as objectionable a taste.

According to the package bamboo tea is supposed to help cool the body and it actually seems to have helped a bit – though that might just be wishful thinking on my part – the weather here has been disgustingly hot for the past couple weeks. Hence why I haven’t been drinking much tea.

I had 3 cups of it in a row in successive steeps at work today.

This tea is amazing looking dry. The picture does NOT do it justice. It is composed of 3/4 inch leaves rolled up so that they are fat little shiny logs with furry seams. They look so delicious I briefly considered eating them instead of soaking them.

Bamboo is the owner’s favorite green and I can see why. It is very flavorful. I will say that it is classically Chinese tasting; having an earthy, malty, robust flavor. It has another quality that I couldn’t fully place. In retrospect it was maybe crayons or freshly sliced rubber.

It won’t be replacing Dragon Well as my favorite green quite yet, but it is definitely in my top five.

I decided to have the last bag of this tea iced to see if made a difference. Turns out I do taste more of the white tea’s flavour when it’s cold, though the goji berry flavour seems to make the tea almost a bit smokey. It might be improved with some sweetener, but honestly I don’t really care about this tea enough to want to bother trying.

The taste of goji berries is pretty unique – tart, a bit like a rosehip, but they have an underlying almost salty-umami flavour to them aswell that I’ve never come across in any other fruit.

/random blog post is random

I tried this tea again with a higher steeping time and temperature and the results were better. The white tea base is still a little bit whimpy but the goji berry flavour was nice – though I suppose that’s partially because I deliberatly mushed the berries against the side of the cup as I was taking the bag out.

I’m still not sure if I want to keep this tea or give it away. Maybe I’ll take half and put the other half up for adoption. I sense another post in the “Take It Away” thread in my future. ;)

Second steeping and there’s a bit more flavour, but I really have to look for the white tea in the cup. It’s a light, faintly nutty flavour, but it’s oddly seperate from the flavour of the goji berries. They just don’t seem to mesh for whatever reason.

The pyramid sachets are filled with little rolled pearls of white tea that look quite similar to my Harney & Sons’ Dragon Pearl Jasmin. They lack the sweet, floral scent of the former however; instead they smell more or less like the dried goji berries that are mixed in with them. The tea brews up quite pale with a very faint, almost savoury odor.

The flavour is disapointingly dull and weak. Mostly it just tastes like goji berry-flavoured water. I’ll have another go at it with the second steep which’ll hopefully be better now the the pearls have had time to absorb water and unfurl.

It’s a nice tea, has a light, sweet taste. Very enjoyable overall.