The Tea Spot

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!

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 :)

I also had this version this morning and, 3 yrs later, still find it the same. Slightly malty, a little sweetness and overall preferable to the organic version :)

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!

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.

Another chance to revisit this courtesy of terri. It’s nice to see that even 3 yrs later, my opinion of this one hasn’t changed. It’s a decent cup, but slightly less enjoyable as it’s a tiny bit astringent. Still though, goo for starting the day out.

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.

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 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.

Yay, I’m first to rate this one! All the more special considering that it’s the first loose tea I ever purchased (on january 30, 2012). The bagged teas that I drank before were mostly green teas and I wanted my first loose tea experience to be close to what I was used to. However, it took me a while to fully appreciate this tea. In fact, I left it alone for a few weeks, thinking I just don’t like Sencha. I never worried about steeping times with my bagged teas. I’d just leave the bag in the tea while I drank it. If I didn’t like it, I blamed it on the tea, not on the over-steeping. I followed the recommended brewing instructions for this loose tea, but I wasn’t too fond of the result. As for a second steeping, yuck! The tea kept giving, what I described as a muddy/dirty flavor. I suppose that’s supposed to be the bitterness? I never thought of it as bitter though.

After much research into ‘proper’ tea brewing techniques, I found one that gives me a really good result: Fill my (glazed) kyusu with two or three times as much tea as recommended and steep for 50 seconds with water at 165deg. I finally discovered what Unami must be! yummy <3 I can even get a decent second cup if I steep the leaves with near boiling water (around 190) for 30 seconds.

Going to brew my second steeping now :) …

I’ve recently been introduced to loose leaf teas, so this would be my first log. First, I should mention that finding a pocket of time during the day to have tea uninterrupted is pert near impossible. More times than not I start drinking the tea hot and finishing it up room temperature. I find boulder blues to be pleasant to drink from hot to room temperature.

This tea tasted a lot better when I was drinking it while eating chocolates. By itself, the cherry flavor is stronger than the chocolate. It doesn’t taste medicinal to me, but it’s not as wonderful as it seemed the first time. I like that the chocolate isn’t over powering. I may have steeped it just a bit too long as the base was ever so slightly bitter. Still a good tea, but I’m going to lower my rating a little. I also think that my over-all dislike of chocolate in tea has increased since I started exploring flavored teas. This may have something to do with my experience with this one now.

I seem to have such a struggle with dessert flavors in tea. Many of the teas I don’t like represent flavors of foods and pastries that I love, but they just don’t come through quite the same in tea form.

First a summary of my preferences:
*I love dark chocolate, not a fan of milk or white except as a pairing with something else
*I absolutely love the smell of cherry, artificial or not.
*I have yet to find a chocolate-only flavored tea that I’m crazy about
*I absolutely hate black forest pie (the one with the cherries and chocolate). . .go figure, but something about putting the cherries in there produces a chemical-like flavor that, apparently, only I can detect.

Yes, my taste-preferences are contradictory. But I am that way about a lot of things ;)

So, as for this Chocolate Cherry Bomb tea. I bought a sample for my husband, more so than for me. He loves cherry and not as sensitive to flavor peculiarities as me. But I always try any thing I get for him too because, why not?

So today is Easter. We don’t have children, but we don’t want to miss out on the childish fun of the holidays, so we always give a small basket to each other on Easter. Mine had a box of chocolates, See’s candies (the only chocolates worth buying lol). What a perfect time to brew up a dessert tea, I thought. It was soooo worth it. Seriously, you all have to have this tea with a piece of chocolate and remember to convince yourself that its not a sin. haha.

It has a very smooth, almost creamy texture like a hot chocolate (as far as a tea can be anyway) and the blend of chocolate and cherry comes out absolutely perfect. Neither overpowers the other.

Yay for trying my husband’s samples. (^o^)

ETA:
Apparently, this tea only tastes good when I’ve been eating chocolates (which probably adds to the perceived creaminess). By itself, it’s not so great. However, as far as chocolate teas go, this is one of the better ones.

Slept in today to make up for the lack of sleep I’ve had all week. It was the week after spring break and it seemed like all the “catch up” I did during the break was in vain. I’m so glad I made it through though, barely!

Enjoying a cup of mango tango with my brunch-time breakfast. It doesn’t taste so strong of mango or passionfruit as it smells, but the flavoring does have a lovely effect on the tea. It is sweet (as if I added plain sugar to it) and not too bitter. The flavor definitely mellows out the black tea’s usual bite.

EDIT:
I’m not liking this tea so much as I did at first. It still smells wonderful and the taste is largely as I described it before, but the last two times I had it, i noticed an unpleasant aftertaste.

A sad, very sad fate for this tea. It was my go-to tea when all else didn’t suit me. But, alas, something was amiss with the most recent batch. I tried to pretend that i still enjoyed it, but I couldn’t keep up the act. I threw the rest away. :( I will mourn its parting for a long time. I’m removing the rating for now b/c I don’t know if this is a temporary problem or if future batches will be the same. I’m going to reorder after a season or two, hoping that it will be from a new and better crop.

In previous notes for this tea, I commented on its sweetness and lack of hay flavor. The current batch that I just opened today tastes different. There are definitely hay notes this time and I cannot find that apricot.

I’m not changing my rating, however, b/c I had more than one batch previously that was superb (so this isn’t a case of the way-to-numerous teas that I dislike after the second or third cup, and anyway I don’t dislike the current cup, it’s just more basic-white flavored)

Sometimes I forget how much I love this tea after I haven’t had it for a while.

I have tried quite a variety of white teas since I first discovered this one, but none of them come close to the yummy contained in this one.

Creamy and fruity, hay and barley free
Everyone needs to try this tea!

I got two new white teas to try from my swap with TastyBrew

I am going to compare them all here (with my original white tea) and post the same note to the others.
I brewed 2 tsp of each in small teacups, steeped for 3 min at 180F

Monkey Picked White – The Tea Spot: Still my favorite white. It has the most pale liquor of all three and the most amazing creamy texture, with just a hint of citrus. When I say hint, I mean that it is so slight that I don’t always detect it.

White Symphony – Adagio: is this even a white tea? wow, the liquor is really dark golden and the flavor is strong of hay and barley. It kind of reminds me of brewers yeast (I had a lot of that (mixed in cups of water) growing up because my father was obsessed with the stuff). I actually like this one, but I don’t think of it as a white tea. It’s in a unique league of its own. I don’t know that it’s a tea that I’d want all the time, but I could be in the mood for it sometimes.

Snowbud – Adagio: My least favorite of the three. Liquor color is in between the other two. Flavor is slightly bitter and its not as creamy as my Monkey picked. There is another flavor, I don’t know if its nutty or mineral, maybe a blend of the two?

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.

I had this tea this morning, but Steepster was down (for me, at least), so I could not log it then.

I set my timer for 2min30sec as I usually do for this tea, but when the timer went off, I turned it off without taking the infuser out of my cup. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I have these moments sometimes. I estimate that it was another 5 minutes before I remembered the tea, so I can definitely vouch for its lack of sensitivity to over-steeping. It was still a really good cup!

This is one of my favorite teas from the teaspot. It has a fruity flavor and does not seem overly sensitive to over-steeping. It can be re-steeped 3 or four times with no loss to flavor. I prefer keep my first steep to a minute and a half or 2 minutes, adding 30 seconds each time.

I really like the plain puerh from the teaspot, so I thought I would definitely like this blend too. But I did not like it. It has a faint chocolate aroma, but hardly detectable by taste. I can definitely detect the puerh over the black tea, but it’s like puerh stripped of all the qualities I like about puerh. It has a flat flavor with nearly non-existant after taste. As far as a “dessert” type tea goes, I think that the plain puerh has more “sweet” attributes to it.

I was excited to try this tea because of the vanilla flavor. However, I did not like it at all. It tasted to me like straight-up vanilla extract (too much of a liquor flavor). It seems to have great reviews from everyone else, but it isn’t for me.

Sipdown, 241.

Can you over-leaf a rooibos? This sample has been sitting around for far too long and I wanted to use it up, so I used 50% more than I normally would have for my pot. It’s not like it’s going to go bitter.

I figure this one will be similar to the other almond/marzipan rooibos teas I’ve had in the past. I think that nutty rooibos is the way to go for me, as I can never really get behind fruity rooibos.

Ok, maaaybe I shouldn’t be eating speculoos cookies with this, but speculoos cookies! Oh well, they are only making it taste better. This is pretty creamy and almondy, although even with the overleafing not particularly strong; it is possible that the flavors have diminished over a while, though it was in an airtight pouch. Yup, me and rooibos are not best buds, but it’s ok for an evening pot of tea that won’t keep me up.