Teavivre

I love the idea of a orange pu-erh. I think pu-erh would be a nice base for a TON of different flavors. I’m a little hesitant on having an orange filled with pu-erh around, it seems like it would me messy, but I most certainly wanted to try the sample!

Steep #1 // 2 tsps. // rinse //15 min after boiling (accidentally) // 3 min steep
I love the look of these pu-erh leaves, chocolate brown twisty leaves. I scooped two teaspoons out from my sample, leaving a decent amount left for next time. There was a big piece of orange peel in this, but somehow to me it seems more like pine trees to me than orange. I’ve never had a pu-erh smell like pine trees to me before, and the taste is there as well. Hints of orange in the background, even with this huge piece of orange, it isn’t much. The three minute steep time seems like a long time, but Teavivre actually suggests more than five minutes, and I had waited for the water to cool to long after boiling anyway.

Steep #2 // just boiled // 3-4 min
Another delicious pine cup… if you’re in the market for teas that taste like pine trees, go for this. I mean that in the best way possible. It’s very unique.

Steep #3 // just boiled // 10 min
Another intriguing cup that hasn’t lost the flavor yet. Very sweet, not bitter or astringent of course, since this is a pu-erh and the good ones don’t get bitter. There is a flavor here that is intriguing but I couldn’t tell why… it seems like all of the pu-erh teas over at Teavivre are all very unique. I’ve loved all of the ripened that I’ve tried so far.

An Ode to Tea challenge #2– T

Time for this last lingering teaspoon to go!   I really enjoyed this one fresh.   I’m sad that oolongs lose their distinctness so quickly when they get this old.  But this IS old.  Not much to say as a unique oolong profile becomes Generic Oolong Flavored as it gets older.  It tastes like oolong!  But not how it once tasted. A tough lesson to learn, but I won’t be amassing a ton of tea like this anymore. But also, I only used one teaspoon this time and the past note says 2 1/2 teaspoons did NOT seem overleafed, so that could be the problem too. It’s hard to tell which of the oolongs are my favorite from Teavivre.  They were all so good back when I was trying most of them around the same time.
2021 sipdowns: 103

I bought an oolong sampler variety with my order, of course all of them sound amazing. I wanted a roasted oolong today which I thought this was, but looking at the bright jade green bundles, I don’t think so. The fragrance of the leaves convinced me I wanted this one anyway: very sweet, very milky and buttery. I used 2 1/2 teaspoons of leaves, as that was an entire sample pouch (Teavivre suggests 2-3 teaspoons). The flavor suggests I did not overleaf this one in my 12 ounce mug. I REALLY feel like I have found the perfect way to steep these types of oolongs, as the Iron Goddess is really nice this way as well, but I know all oolongs have different steeping parameters with perfect results. I simply just want to try all of my oolongs this way as I definitely haven’t been rinsing, using boiling water, using two (or more) teaspoons or steeping for such a short time:

Steep #1 // just boiled // rinse // 1 min steep
The flavor is a wispy mystery: I can’t quite pin down what I’m tasting. It is a standard delicious oolong! Definitely not astringent, so this is the way to go with this oolong. At first, the top of the mug is vegetal but very buttery and milky, just not as milky as an actual milk oolong. I think I’m getting hints of peach or pineapple… I’m not sure which. This is a very sweet oolong though.

Steep #2 // just boiled // 2 min
A two minute steep time was a little too much for this one, not anything to ruin the cup, just some tanginess that shouldn’t have been there. I think 1 1/2 or 1 3/4 minutes would have been better. The color of the cup is neon yellow, a nutty flavor, I still can’t tell if the fruit flavor is pineapple or peach but there is still a strong butter flavor, but much less sweet and milky this time.

Steep #3 // just boiled // 2 min
Another juicy fresh cup! No astringency here at all this time around, just a bright cup of oolong. I like this one, but the explosion of flowers that is Teavivre’s Iron Goddess TiGuanYin is my favorite by far!

Sipdown!

I took this from the GCTTB3 last summer, and the remainder of this has been sitting around since then. Unfortunately, I think I should have finished this off much sooner – I don’t think I sealed the package with the remaining leaf very well, because this tea was very light in flavour. I could smell a great green-bean sort of vegetal scent in the leaf, but the liquor was very underwhelming.

A pity, because I recall enjoying this last summer.

It’s with great pleasure that I write my 400th note on Steepster, and an even greater pleasure to do so with this tea! Hooray!

I first tried Dragon Well teas a few months ago when I made my very first order from Teavivre and chose their basic Dragon Well tea as a sample. I remember not being impressed with it then, though I don’t know if that was because it was their basic (non-premium) kind of tea, and thus lower-down on the ladder when compared to their premium varieties, or whether it was because I hadn’t tried as many other Chinese greens.

Suffice it to say that in contrast, this She Qian Dragon Well is a delight. The dry leaves are a beautiful shade of apple/olive green, and they smell like heavily buttered vegetables – so salty and savory. The resulting liquor was just as delightful.

I steeped it twice, the first time for about 3:45 and the second for about 5 minutes, and both times the tea was really savoury. For a long time, I thought that Dragon Well teas weren’t my bag, but this tea may have just made me a convert. I can’t wait to brew the remaining leaf with a gaiwan.

Many thanks to Lala for placing this in the GCTTB3!

Until fairly recently, I had never even heard of Golden Monkey tea. I picked up a large envelope (4 ounces) at the Tazo Collection sale late last year, and fell in love with it immediately. Naturally, I have been looking forward to trying Teavivre’s Golden Monkey, and today was the glorious day.

I read in The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea that Golden Monkey is a relatively new offering out of China, and that it has in a short time garnered a big following. Well, there’s a reason for that. The moment I opened this sample pack, I knew that I was in for major deliciousness once again. The leaves are crinkly with lots of golden light tips and powdery yumminess portending rich caramel wonderfulness. Believe it or not, sniffing these leaves is a source of olfactory delight.

This Golden Monkey is essentially the same tea as the one I fell in love with from Tazo. (I’ll do a side-by-side at some point to confirm.) That’s great news for me, because Tazo is being morphed into Teavana and the Tazo Collection has been axed—the last of it was sold off by Starbucks recently. So my future source of this fantastically flavorful unsweetened caramel black tea—with no flavoring added!—will definitely be Teavivre.

If every black tea were this delicious, there would be no need for flavorings whatsoever.

Now that I’ve figured out how to brew it, this organic Mao Feng from Teavivre has turned out to be one of my favorite green teas. Happily, I took advantage of the awesome BF sale and ordered another pouch. It’s very fresh and smooth and less vegetal—closer to Lu Shan Yun Wu than to Mao Jian or anything Japanese or Korean. I even like it better now than the Huang Shan (just lucky, I guess…).

A perfect post-lunch pot!

I enjoyed a delicious pot of Teavivre Organic Tian Mu Mao Feng right after a lunch of rainbow swiss chard quittata (a cross between a quiche and a frittata) prepared with a mixture of Italian cheeses. The accompanying bread (also homemade) was whole wheat white with some oats and a touch of molasses thrown in for extra interest. Toasted and slathered with butter—of course!

This tea was the perfect complement because it is slightly vegetal but also very smooth. In addition to the taste, I also love the appearance of the long spindly and crispy dried leaves.

I drank two glasses of this tea from Teavivre, Organic Tian Mu Mao Feng, earlier today. I really prefer to write “in the moment” tasting notes but, alas, I kept encountering the dreaded Steepster black page, so I’ll have to try to remember how I felt.

I do recall that the light greenish yellow liquor was very satisfying and both vegetal and slightly sweet. I was trying to decide whether I like this organic variety more or less than the non-organic Huang Shan, but honestly it was impossible to say without doing a direct side-by-side steep-off. Fortunately, this sample envelope contained a whopping 10 grams, so I’ll be able to make that comparison soon, as I have a full supply of the Huang Shan on hand.

One interesting discovery is that this tea is less expensive than the Huang Shan, since it is sold by the 100 gram portion, not 50 grams. I really like Mao Feng, and I’m always happy to drink organic tea, so I do see a full supply of this Tian Mu in my future.

While the Organic Nonpareil Ming Qian Dragon Well wasn’t too my taste, this sample from Amariel is more appealing.

It has spinach, an abundance of roasted nuts, and a dash of sweet butter that mixes up into a creamy nut butter. There’s a subtle touch of floral and salty notes too. Just how I like it, for the most part!

Backlog:

This is an AMAZING black tea. As I said in my full-length review: http://sororiteasisters.com/2014/04/28/nonpareil-yunnan-dian-hong-chinese-red-black-tea-teavivre/ this is one of those “memorable” type of black teas that I think every tea lover should try!

Thick, silky and full-flavored. Notes of dark, bittersweet chocolate with a caramel-y undertone. (Hey, you can’t go wrong with chocolate and caramel, can you?) There is also a rich, bake-y, cake-y like flavor to it, like a freshly baked loaf of bread. Mmm!

Malty. Very, very little astringency. If you’re someone who shies away at the mere mention of astringency, I think you’ll find this tea very much to your liking. This tea reminds me a lot of Dawn from the Simple Leaf. I miss that tea … but this one makes a suitable substitute for that extraordinary tea as this too is quite extraordinary!

I haven’t logged a tea here in a long time but I had to with this one. It is nothing short of amazing. Intensely aromatic and complex, I could not get enough of it. Compared to their other offerings it’s on the expensive side but it is seriously amaze-balls.

This sample was included in a swap from Amariel.

The flavours in this Dragon Well are milder than I like them. The butter and nut (chestnut here) share a minimalistic philosophy, and don’t seem to like hopping up on stage and stealing the show. That’s unfortunate, because I like it when they do. The sweet fruity and vegetal notes here are more involved.

The first steep of this tea produces a cup that is very smooth and refreshing with an almost honey-like texture. It has a subtle sweet, slightly grassy flavor with no hint of astringency or dry mouth. The fact that it doesn’t produce a dry mouth after tasting it makes it the perfect tea for the long, hot months of summer. As the temperature begins to rise I tend to look for lighter flavored teas that will quench my thirst without leaving me with the dry mouth feel that many other green teas produce. This is one of the few teas that I’ve tried in the past few weeks that does just that. It produces a very refreshing cup of tea and I could see myself consuming a lot of it this summer.

You can read the full review on my blog:
http://www.notstarvingyet.com/index/2014/7/22/tuesday-tea-nonpareil-te-gong-huang-shan-mao-feng-green-tea.html