TeaSource

A fruity black tea. Dry leaves smells like sweet potato. The tea has a playdough-like scent, floral, fairly tart with a liquorice flavor. Not terrible for the price.

edit: The tea got significantly better after weeks of opening it, the playdough smell went away and the malty, flowery flavors started to show up. Changing the score from 83 to 88.

sold for $9.60/4oz

https://www.teasource.com/products/purple-beauty-black-tea

Inkling Advent Day 24. This is heading toward bitterness, so next time I’ll certainly give it a shorter steep. The flavor really does taste like chestnuts, plus that slightly harsh black tea. I’m enjoying it sweetened with milk, but it may be a little simplistic for me to want to purchase for myself. And as always, I wouldn’t mind the flavor being even stronger. I like the nuttiness though.

Inkling Advent Day 22. This one smells so creamy and nice! It doesn’t taste as strong as it smells, but the cream/vanilla flavor is quite pleasant, if a little artificial. There’s also a bit of pepperiness randomly. I’m conflicted about this one because I do enjoy the cream a lot, but I feel like it needs to be paired with something like bergamot or something else.

Inkling Advent Day 18. Hot, I can taste apple plus the plantlike tea base, with a bit of sweetness that’s meant to be the candy. I feel like the candy and the apple mix better cold, and the base tea is still quite present, but it has a nicer quality. This one feels a bit sophisticated and mild, but nice.

Inkling Advent Day 16. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, and I couldn’t find it with a quick search online. I can’t tell what the flavor is – maybe lightly floral or fruity? I can’t tell. It’s not as smooth or delicious or heavily flavored as I prefer, but it was decent both warm without milk and cold with milk.

my all-time favorite tea. great value, buttery, cashew, floral, minerality, and such a warm taste. the sweetness and slight bitterness balance perfectly. great for quite a few steeps. if i had to pick one tea to drink forever, it would be this one. it’s so complex yet so enjoyable.

intense and rich experience. feels like drinking warm liquid caramel and peach jelly and chocolate. on the second steep it thins out and is easier to drink. it’s the tea i drink when i wish i had a latte.

maybe i am just brewing too hot but ive never gotten a good cup from this, it’s always far too bitter! Might as well keep experimenting until the bag’s gone.

Delicious. So buttery, sweet and flowery. It’s like a croissant and a beautiful bouquet. it tastes like a jasmine green but better. i am always delighted at how much the leaves bloom and expand in a tieguanyin!

its also delicious iced.

an incredibly reliable, simple hojicha. this is my go-to for when i’m showing a friend my tea cupboard and i want to give them a flavor theyve probably never tried in tea. and so cheap, too. i always have a bag of this around.

Best iced tea i have ever had. don’t bother with it hot. makes a great cold brew too – cold brew in a french press or with a big bag. i cant wait for it to be summer again so i can make this.

impossible to oversteep so i have it grandpa style. strangely, tastes exactly like the delicious smell of the lumber section in any home improvement store.

I taste some woody ginger and some green tea that I can tell is pretty old – I guess that’s what happens sometimes with TTBs! The ginger isn’t too sharp or spicy. I guess I just find this one to be a little bland and unexciting.

This is my dads all time favorite tea. Definitely great if you’re a fan of honeydew flavoring!

The pickiest, snarkiest green tea I ever attempted to get along with—an Assam green—came from Teasource. The temp had to be exactly adjusted to the one-one hundredth of a degree and the time within .001 millisecond to keep from being so bitter it’d take the skin off your tongue. I never did get it right.

So my expectations were kinda low with this sample.

Steeped it at the office, so I couldn’t be too exacting, but with steaming rather than boiling water and a 3 minute steep, the base came out tasting like green tea should taste. Ditto with the mango. The AC is still flaky, so I put it immediately on ice and it’s pretty pleasant!

I’ve tried this several times and it never compares well to Mandala’s big red robe, or Lapsang Souchon. This tea is just mildly woody and smoky and I’m left wanting more. I’ll finish the smallish bag I have and then go hunting in my cupboard for the better version. It’s in the ‘save for later’ or ‘break in case of emergency’ section of the cupboard.

I’m not sure what possessed past me to buy a 2oz bag of puerh tuo chas, when I don’t even really like unblended puerh. But I did, and now I have to drink through that fact…

It’s still raining here, so at least it seems appropriate for the weather. I placed one tuo cha to steep in 350ml of 205F water, and just left it there for about ten minutes before straining.

There is a strong leather aroma from the steeped tea that is quite pleasant — I’ve been working on a project in our local special archives collection, the Idaho and Pacific Northwest History Room, and it reminds me of that old book smell, though smokier, and with a bit of a peppery spice.

Tastes pretty good, too! The earthiness is rich and deep rather than the dirt/potting soil taste I usually get. There is a bit of a wet rock/plant taste, but again, it’s very smooth and not that “swampy/marshy” sort of taste. And the leather/smoke/pepper flavor is so strong that it really gives it some dimension.

Pretty impressive for cheap tuos.

I haven’t reviewed this one either?!

My most local teashop (they closed permanently due to Covid) at one point carried “Pomegranate Cranberry” black tea, from International Tea Importers. I really loved that tea. The next year when I visited them, they had “Pomegranate Black” on the menu which I assumed was the same tea, but instead it was the same tea that comes from TeaSource (whatever that source may be, but it isn’t the ITI blend). I never quite warmed up to it the same way, and it appears that TeaSource isn’t carrying it anymore (though other tea shops are still sourcing it).

The dry tea does have a pretty sharp/fruity aroma that simulates pomegranate fairly well. The steeped cup has a leather/smoky note from the Chinese base, and the sharp fruitiness has turned a bit medicinal in aroma. There is a nice flority to the aroma as well, but nothing like the distinct peony floral note that the “Pomegranate Cranberry” I liked so much had.

The base really comes through on this one, and I’m a fan of Chinese blacks… deep, a hint smoky, a hint rosy. A fruitiness is present, but either the flavoring itself or that flavor combined with a Chinese is somehow making it come off with a slightly metallic tang and it just tastes like watered down Robotussin to me.

Conclusion… I still don’t vibe with this tea. I just want to use up the package so that one day, I can replace it with the ITI blend.

(I forgot Talk Like a Pirate Day?! Inexcusable…)

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day! Today the prompt be t’ include pirate-speak in a tastin’ note. I plundered this tea from the galley t’ be me nightly herbal fer a while. It has t’ stink o’ a Christmas candle, but ‘tis pleasant. I smell a strong spicy aroma o’ cinnamon ‘n clove, an’ pick up a wee o’ the earthy/peppery smell o’ turmeric. Alas, it reminds me o’ pillagin’ th’ ports o’ India! The flavor be most strongly turmeric, aye, but ’tisn’t too hot at the aft o’ the throat… the raspberry/blackberry leaf add enough mellow sweetness t’ keep the spice from burnin’ like th’ streets o’ Port Royal, ‘n also add a generic fruitiness t’ the blend. As wit’ most cranberry teas, the cranberry be missin’ like th’ plundered gold o’ Treasure Island. Thar be a mild ‘n generic fruitiness , but th’ spices be mighty, ‘n any tartness I’d associate wit’ cranberry be o’ lemon citrus.

It be a fine herbal spice blend for those nights a’stormin’, but nah wha’ I was hopin’ fer wit’ a name like “Cranberry Crush.”

This is probably the sort of tea I should prepare warm in a gaiwan, but lacking the time for that sort of thing, I’ve instead been using it as cold brew.

My last batch was 6g to a liter, my typical measurements for white tea, brewed overnight, which produced a very sweet, slightly citrusy brew, with a lot of straw and chrysanthemum notes. I wondered if with this sort of leaf that was under-leafing it a bit, so the batch I’m drinking today increased he leaf by a gram, and it is a stronger flavor. The strongest flavor is melon, with a hint of vegetal zuccini, fresh cucumber water, wet hay, and a light florality on the finish. Slightly different flavors, but both have been very quenching cold brews.

I’ve had a sealed bag of this since January of 2018… just now opening and drinking it. (Hur-hur…)

The dry leaf does have a chocolately aroma, in a very “chocolate liquer” sort of way. Brewed up the tea is thick and dark like coffee, still with the strong chocolate liquer aroma, though there is a sort of vanilla/cream sweetness to the aroma, which does make it lean closer to milk or white chocolate in aroma than dark chocolate. That sweetness is maybe just a hint floraly, as well.

I quite like the flavor! It tastes more like dark chocolate than white chocolate, but it is very rich and smooth. The pu’erh itself (a flavor I tend to dislike) is quite mellow here, with an inoffensive earthiness in the background. The thick mouthfeel from the pu’erh is quite nice, making this cup feel less thin/oily than many chocolate-flavored teas.

It doesn’t top Art of Tea’s Dark Chocolate Peppermint for me in terms of a flavored pu’erh blend, but definitely comes very close!

In this unending heat wave we’ve been having here, I’ve been pretty much just keeping two liters of cold tea in the fridge at all times. I am trying to work through big 50g bags of tea, and since I don’t tend to leaf my cold brews heavily (heavy fruit teas being the exception), it has been taking me a while to work through my sipdowns. While it looks like “less” numerically, by grams my drinking has been pretty consistent, even during these hot months.

This is my newest 50g bag I’ve pulled out to work through with cold brews. An old TeaSource acquisition from 2018, and I hadn’t even cut open the bag yet.

I’m finding this TGY much smoother than the Alloy Goddess from Boon Tea I just worked through, which had a sort of metallic and astringent edge to it. There is no astrigency in this tea. I’m getting a light and fresh vegetal note, with subtle notes of fresh grass, cucumber, garden peas, pineapple, and spring water. The aftertaste is a faintly sweet floral. It’s very refreshing and nicely thrist quenching — I really like green oolongs and green tea cold brewed, and find even my oldest teas of these types taste nice brewed in the cold water.