Christina / BooksandTea Send Message

Backlog from last night.

This note isn’t going to be so much about this tea as what happened to me before I drank it.

Last night, I finally sent out my swap package to Ost (~hi there, Ost!~). I brought the baggies of tea with me to the post office and then chose a padded envelope for everything.

I’ve been to this post office before, and the person behind the counter is almost always this sweet old woman with grey hair. She looks like she’s a nice person, you know? Competent, knowledgeable, demure – just someone who projects an air of comfort. She doesn’t raise a fit if I don’t know how much the package weighs beforehand, for example.

So, I’m stuffing the bags into the envelope and writing the mailing address on the front, and I’ve got the envelope all sealed up. She’s putting in the destination zip code and measuring the weight to see how much the postage will be, and she asks me if I’m doing something more with tea.

Nine times out of ten, now, if I go to the post office, it’s because it’s got something to do with a tea package. She’s noticed this by now, obviously. So I say “yes” and tell her all about Steepster. The conversation below is heavily paraphrased:

“Oh, I’m part of this site, and we review tea, and we talk about what tea we’re drinking. We share tea, too – so I might try something and then we arrange swaps so other people can try the same teas.”

“That sounds nice!”

“It’s fun! I’m sending out a swap right now, that’s why I’m here.”

“So what did you send out this time?”

“Oh, I sent out a black tea with [flavour redacted, because I want it to be a surprise for Ost], black tea with chestnut flavour, black tea with caramel, some green tea with [flavour redacted so it will be a surprise for Ost].”

Meanwhile, all the while, she sounds so excited, saying things like “that sounds delicious!” and “wow, that’s so neat”. I sense I’ve got a budding tea convert here.

“So what sort of teas do you like?”

And then we spend the next 5 or so minutes talking about different tea flavours, where I buy all these different kinds of tea from, and even fancy/novelty-shaped infusers.

The long story short, ladies and gentlemen, is that the next time I go to the post office, I’m going to give that nice old lady some of the teas in my cupboard to try. Baby steps, though: she likes sweet things and herbals; I’m sure that if I even tried to tell her about pu’erh it would blow her mind.

I’m reminded of a comment that ashmanra made in one of her tasting notes a few weeks ago: “Tea makes friends. Friends make tea.”

Well, it looks like I’ve made a new friend! :-D

By the way, this lemon meringue tea was ok. I just needed something without caffeine, and I also got to break in my new Mr. Tea steeper.

Backlog from yesterday.

First note for this tea. Woo!

I’ve only ever had 1 or 2 Ceylons before this – in particular, I really liked the Kenilworth Ceylon that I got through Simple Loose Leaf back in August. When I bought this tea I hoped it would be more of the same.

However, the flavour in this upon first scent and sip is that it’s quite non-descript. It doesn’t have the blanket-warmth of the Kenilworth Ceylon, or even the lemony/rosy body of some bagged Ceylons.

I’m going to hold off judgement until now, as I remember I wasn’t too impressed by RiverTea’s Golden Yunnan when I tried it, but it’s grown on me a lot since then. I’m hoping that this Ceylon will also grow on me.

Backlog from a few days ago:

I’ve had this twice since I bought it, and I quite like it. The ginger flavour is really strong here and melds well with the lime and lemongrass – the whole thing smells like ginger ale when I open it up, which I love.

The base here is not too strong, but not too weak, either. I’m really happy I got this blend, as I’ve been looking for a good ginger/citrus green for a while.

I have to say it: I really like RiverTea’s blends. Not all of them work, but when they work, they work.

I’m a sucker for Bi Lo Chun teas, and the fragrance when I opened this sample packet from Teasenz was heavenly – buttery, vegetal, savoury…

I steeped it at 80C water for 3 mintes as per the recommended instructions. When I pulled the infuser out from the teapot, the leaf smelled vegetal and heavenly.

However, the tea was quite bitter at first sip – when it hits the tongue, there’s a chemical tang that I’m not very happy with. Mid-sip it’s nice and vegetal, and there’s a surprisingly delightful grassy note in the aftertaste, but the initial bitter jolt when it hits the tongue is unpleasant.

I suspect that I will really need a scale to serve this tea properly, as Teasenz’s instructions specify gram weight per cup rather than volume (teaspoons) per cup. Considering I wasn’t too thrilled with their Lychee Black yesterday, I’m chalking the whole thing up to user error on my end.

Now… what do you guys recommend in terms of cheap, user-friendly digital scales?

First note for this tea!

I have to admit that I didn’t watch the clock carefully on this tea, so it’s entirely possible that I messed up the steeping parameters on this.

However.

Um… I’m not sure if I like this tea. I can definitely taste the lychee flavour, but it was really bitter and floral. I’ve had fresh lychees, and know they have a floral undertone to them, but I also know they can be quite sweet and juicy – I was expecting more of that juicy flavour to come forward.

Put it this way: I finished only half the pot before I had to leave the house in the afternoon, and then dumped the remainder down the drain.

I’ll need to experiment with this, as the sample from Teasenz was quite generous. But I really hope that my subsequent brews are more enjoyable than this.

Backlog from last night.

I had this while watching “Catching Fire” and it was okay. Still medicinal-tasting, but at least I have less of this to go through since I put a bunch into the GCTTB3 a while back. A little bit of agave nectar helps round this tea out.

Not much to say about this tea here. It’s bold, its bergamotty, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with loose-leaf yesterday afternoon, as this is one of the only bagged teas in my cupboard. I was lazy, what can I say?

I probably oversteeped it a bit though.

Backlog from a few evenings ago.

My sister came over on Sunday so we could all celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday, and after a stupendously large meal, I asked if anyone wanted tea. My sister asked if I had green tea.

Of course, incredulous, I said “yeah, yeah, what kind?”

She said she wanted jasmine. Now, I love my sister. So of course, I give her this jasmine tea, the good stuff. I’m not gonna fob off any sub-par jasmine tea on the woman who taught me how to read when I was an itty-bitty kid, am I? Of course not!

I don’t think she enjoyed it much, though. She waited a long time for it to cool, and by the time she left I don’t think she finished the 12 oz mug I poured her. I probably should have given us all 8 oz mugs and then shared some with a third person.

I stored the leaves in the fridge overnight and then steeped them a second time yesterday morning (I don’t often resteep, but this is one of the ones I do) but it ended up tasting a bit tinny. Ah well.

I felt like having a green tea this morning, and for some reason this one jumped out at me. It turns out that a 2.5 minute steep works out well for this one. There’s still some smokiness and astringency, but the green tea flavour comes to the fore more.

As a bonus, I now have only about 1 teapot’s worth of dry leaf left after this particular brewing, which means that it’s now firmly in sipdown status. Yay!

Sipdown Sunday Tea and Books!

This tea was one of the oldest teas in my collection as I bought it back in February when I ordered a Golden Moon Tea sampler. I learned along the way, though, that I’m not a huge fan of white teas, and hesitated to drink this.

Iced tea seemed like the best way to use up all of the leaf from the sampler in one go, so here we are.

The Tea

I used the whole of the sample on 2 L of cold water and let it steep overnight. I also added about 2.5 tsp of sugar to the pitcher. The resulting tea is not very melon-flavoured, as I can really taste the white base (I think it’s Shou Mei). However, I’m happy that I’ve finally dealt with this tea so that I have one less one in the cupboard to worry about.

The Book

This tea is supposed to taste like melon, and while I can sense the taste, it’s not very fresh and juicy, but more dark and dusty. I’m pretty sure that other people here have said that this tea tastes like muskmelon. So that’s the flavour I’m assuming to taste here.

When I think of muskmelon, a particular sci-fi story comes to mind: “Tiny Tango” by Judith Moffett.

This was a novella that got nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards after it was published in the late 80s/early 90s. It’s about a botanist with HIV who chooses a life of academic mediocrity to hide her HIV-positive status, as she’s worried that the stress and high profile of a successful academic career would both ruin her health and run the risk of “outing” her to the world. She instead devotes her time to breeding a new variety of muskmelon.

However, as time goes by, other issues become far important to the world’s landscape: the arrival of extraterrestrials, climate change, and a vaccine to prevent HIV. The story shows her reaction to all these things in turn.

I’m not really explaining this story well, I realize. It’s a hard one to sum up, especially considering the public discourse around AIDS has changed a lot since the story was first written. But when I thought of this tea, and the flavour of muskmelon, this was the story that immediately jumped to mind.

For those who are interested in reading it themselves, it’s available on Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IA66OAG/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00IA66OAG&linkCode=as2&tag=morein-20