The Tea Spot

SIPDOWN! And thanks again to Terri for sharing this with me. I’m not sure how to rate this one. I’ve got similar feelings as terri on this one. crap busy at work. finish this later.

SIPDOWN! In case you’re counting that’s 248…finally starting to feel like i’m getting close to 200 again, mostly because unless i place an order tonight, there are no other orders coming my way until May….just lots of swaps. lots of lots of delicious, wonderful, exciting swaps. which will of course temporaily increase my cupboard size with their samples of goodness…and probably get me to place another order when i fall in love with a tea. eesshh…and so the circle of life continues :P

BUT! this tea! Tried it as a cold brew and the word is YES. Not too sweet but just mango-ey enough to delight my senses. I didn’t share any with my other half because i wanted ALL THE TEA. So this is likely going on my shopping list for the summer. whee! Thanks again Terri!

Sipdown.
Strangely, today this one seems to have a bit of a fishy taste to it, kind of in the background. Maybe I’m imagining it…

Another swap from Terri (that leaves what, 60+ more to go?) This isn’t something that i’d have normally picked up myself since i don’t seem to enjoy yerba mate. However, in this blend? i am digging it. Maybe it’s because there’s about 9812309182309218 things going on in this blend but it’s pretty darn tasty :) The smells makes my nose itch a little but not to the point of not enjoying sitting here with a steaming mug of this.

This tastes almost like a vanila chai tea blend to me. though it’s not overly vanilla by any stretch of the imagination. There’s also some citrusy notes going on that i can’t place. Cinnamon is present, but not in that way that makes you scream CINNAMON! OMG! There’s a sweetness here as well that might be the licorice root? but i have no frame of reference for that really. :)

Overall a pretty pleasant cup.

What I like about Keemun is the smoothness & the natural sweetness of it. It is also gently smokey, not in an ‘in your face’ kind of way though.
One of the teas in the verdant TOMC reserve box this month is a Keemun. I have sampled it, but haven’t written any notes on it, as yet. I’m thinking I need to go through all of my other Keemuns, & then come back to it, for comparison. I want to understand what, if anything, makes it special.

Anyway, this one is nice, although probably not the best Keemun I have had, but still very pleasant.

more backlogs though sadly as a result my tasting notes are admittedly kinda of crap. that’s what you get for having a steepster that decides to up and die on the weekend BOOOOOOOOOO!

thanks again to terri for swapping some of this with me. a pretty decent assam over all!

No notes yet.

Gotta get ready to leave in a few minutes to play at a wedding over in Collinsville, IL.
I’ve enjoyed this tea, which re-steeps very nicely. I reviewed it a few weeks ago:
http://steepster.com/teas/the-tea-spot/36508-qu-hao-silk

Sadly, it’s a sipdown, but it is on the list for my next tea spot order!

sipdown!

heh yeah here’s hoping that can happen a bit today. Still enjoyed this one today though it’s most certainly more of a ginger tea than a peach tea. There’s a nice kick to this that helped clear up my nose right away while drinking it haha. Thanks for letting me try this terri!

Fine. Look at me being the first to review this, though how that makes sense I dunno.

Anyway this tea? Man i wish it was a Pear tea, because this ginger is spot on for what i’ve been wanting in a ginger pear tea. It’s got just a small kick to it to say HEY i’m ginger! which helps balance and offset the sweetness of the peach. Overall i’m a fan of this.

I’m thinking that the tea spot and i are going to have to have a chat soon about putting some of their teas into my house. Terri was awesome enough to send me a bunch of their teas and I’m thoroughly enjoying a bunch of them. I’d take tea spot teas over tealux teas every day! (and no i have no idea why the two are comparable in my mind) I wanted a cup of this without any additions but i for sure can see how amaaazing this will be with a bit of sweetner and possibly milk added to it.

Without additions this is a cocoa chocolate malty delicious sort of tea. Kittenna better be careful or i’ll steal her samples that Terri sent along. :)

Edit: This resteeps really nicely too!

Thank you Terri!
I have a feeling that this tea will be wonderful iced. It’s not bad hot, but the flavours are slightly muted. As it’s cooling, the flavours are coming out a bit more. I also added a little sweetner to the cup and now the mango is more present. Looking forward to using the last of my sample from terri for a cold brew :)

oh Terri….i tried. For you, i tried. I pulled this one out of the box of samples that Terri sent me after seeing Dinosara’s post about rose tea. I warned Terri and promised myself whatever she sent i would try. So try i did! For the record? I’m sure this is a lovely tea if you enjoy licking flower beds ;) Ok so it’s not that bad, but floral teas are truly not up my alley. If i rated this purely on the basis of how pretty it is, it’d be up there in terms of rating. As it stands, i’m not going to rate it because i don’t like floral teas. In an attempt to try and provide some unbiased feedback – this is a smooth tea that captures that rose essence. Additionally, if you like jasmine pearls, the rose in this blends really nicely with it.

Thanks Terri!

Since i had the organic assam that Terri sent me yesterday, I figured that i should try the regular version. I for sure prefer this one (or managed to brew this one correctly) This one still has a bit of a bite to it but it tastes smoother to me. I also really like the aroma that this one has – sweet almost. mmmm tasty malty goodness.

SIPDOWN!

I made a sil sized cup of this to help me tackle my meetings with China tonight. Thankfully it did the trick. This is little more bitter? than i like or rather the last notes in each sip have a bit of bite to them that isn’t my favourite across teas but isn’t terribly bad in this tea. I could have also brewed this incorrectly (read too long) as it got away from me a little. Thanks to terriharplady for sharing this one with me!

I can’t wait until we get my new bookcase/tea cupboards set up over the weekend.

I am a grumpus today.
I had insomnia until 3am, mostly due to allergies. I forgot to drink my Nettles for a few days, & my allergies came back yesterday with wild abandon. Gotta get back to brewing my ‘medicine’, cuz I hate feeling irritated from head to toe, & that is exactly what allergies do to me. It’s a whole body experience, not just sinuses.

So this was my first cup this morning. I steeped, & resteeped, & crawled into a hot tub of bubbles with both cups of tea. I realized once I started sipping that I wasn’t really in the mood for something this strong, but I drank it anyway. This is a bold brew, this is what Irish Breakfast is suppose to be (although I find most of them to be lacking). There is a very bright fruitiness to it, & it’s malty. I probably over t’d it a little, because it seemed especially brash this morning, but that also might be due to my over-sensitive allergy riddled cells screaming, “too much stimulation!!” about basically everything.

Just got this in a swap from QueenOfTarts. Thanks!

This tastes just like walnut brittle from Della Terra. So I like it, but don’t need to order any since I have a bag of the walnut. They literally taste exactly the same. Funny.

Many thanks to Shelley_Lorraine for thoughtfully including a surprise sample of this. I was so excited to try it! Alas, it does not stand up against the other bedtime teas I have been trying. The problem might be as simple as “too much hibiscus”.

The dry leaves smell very strongly like a haystack… hayfield? I don’t know, I’m a city girl, but the point is it smells like a farm. My partner literally recoiled when I made him smell this.

I brewed according to directions. This brews up a lovely, vivid red color, like strawberry wine. It smells much better brewed than dry. No more hay smell. Except now it smells too sweet, almost medicinal. The flavor is just all hibiscus. The hibiscus overwhelms everything except for a slight aftertaste of valerian. This tea is just not doing it for me right now. It might be worth trying again with a substantially shorter brew time, or blended with a rooibos base. Frankly, since there are so very many other teas to try, I don’t think it’s likely that I will be giving this one another shot.

I really wanted green tea and mint this morning but I wasn’t feeling like something of the Moroccan Mint variety, so I was glad I remembered I had this. My stomach was not feeling good due to the previous night’s wine celebration of the Canadiens making the playoffs. Oops. So I really wanted mint to settle things down and since it cooled off from the rain (and barely took any pollen away, gross) something a bit toasty and nutty for a base sounded great.

So now that I am over the fact this isn’t going to have chocolate despite its name, I do quite enjoy it. It’s a nice, different take on a minty green.

I’m going to have to give it a try iced too. I was actually wondering about that earlier and I wasn’t sure how it might be, but now I’m thinking it’s a must.

I love mint and smelling the dry leaves bring back pleasant memories of the mint fields of Oregon. I prepared this tea this evening for two. My daughter is sick with a sore throat bug, so I thought it would be a feel good tea for her. I plan on keeping this tea in my cupboard.

I seem to turn to this tea every time I’ve had a long stretch of flavored tea sampling. So many hit or miss experiences require that I return to a trusted favorite to clear my mind and senses for the next round of sampling.

This tea is always a happy tea. Slightly nutty and fruity with a comforting texture and so forgiving no matter how careless I am with the brewing.

First tea of the day, & a sipdown…sort of. I emptied the container, but then I immediately refilled it because the Tea Spot sells refill size packages, which I bought recently.

No notes yet.

Admittedly, I haven’t drank a lot of darjeelings lately.
I drank some years ago, & since I don’t follow instructions well, I think they were steeped at too high of temperature, or for too long.
I tend to fawn over Yunnans & Assams, mostly, but am trying to expand my horizons. So I followed the instructions.
The dry smell: kind of earthy fruity
The wet leaf smell: hmmm…it seems like most teas have a stronger wet leaf smell than dry. This is the opposite.
1 heaping tsp + 12 oz
“boil water, cool 1 min (203F)”
I did that, then steeped 3 minutes
The resulting cup: fruity & earthy. There is a brightness to it, a sweetness, a bitterness (which I kind of like sometimes), & an earthy muskiness.