Dinosara

Hmmm, this one is also old, and as a white tea I would expect it to age worse than its black counterparts, but I wouldn’t have expected it to gain an odd bitter note. I wonder if its the coconut? Other people have complained about coconut teas going rancid after a while (coconut oils not as shelf stable I guess?), so I wonder if this one is suffering the same fate? It doesn’t smell off or rancid though. That would be very sad if its the case. It did stay good for quite a long time, I just seriously neglected it.

Well, it was ok, just not as good as it once was. I wonder if I can steep it for less time and tame it a bit. Also will try cold steeping, as I always liked this tea cold steeped.

Operation drink up old teas! I’ve been doing well with sipdowns (very well, since I’ve cut my cupboard in half since the beginning of the year), and I will still be going after them, but I also realized I need to start really drinking down some of my older teas. Some of those I have only a bit of left, some of those I have a large amount. This is one that I have had for apparently about 2 years now, but I actually got some fresher tea of this about 5 months ago (and it was probably not old when I got it). So I think I have about two ounces of this, an ounce that is ~5 months old and an ounce that is ~2 years old, all mixed together.

Well, it seems to be doing ok. This was super flavorful and rich. Sweet sweet almond, this time it reminded me of an almond cookie. Yum. Plus the tart, juicy cranberry. This really is one of my favorites!

Sipdown, 135. Cold brew.

So I had been using some large tea sacs for cold brewing my teas because it makes cleaning up in the morning easier. I got a pack of them in a gift set and I never use them because in hot brews I can taste the paper, but I figured cold brews might work better. I did wonder why it was so hard to get an optimal cold steep on a green tea since I used to get awesome cold steeps on greens back in the day. Then I started running out of the sacs so I started cold steeping with the leaves floating free in the glass again. I would never have thought that the tea sacs would make a difference in the finished product, but somehow the seem to! This cup was green and jasminey and perfect, with no hint of bitterness. Total yum! No more tea sacs for me, in any use.

I think the splendor of this one is fading. The flavor is no longer rich, but thin and most of what’s left of the fruitiness is the tartness and a slight bitterness. Oh well, it’s two years old and almost gone. Taking the rest of this one home to cold steep.

Some teas age better than others, although most (excepting puerhs of course) seem to fade at about 2 years. I sorted my cupboard by date added and it looks like I need to get moving on some old Harney (because they do fade pretty hard after 2 years) and a few others. I have some Dammann teas that are 2 years old now, but they are miraculously still lovely.

Sipdown, 136. Gongfu today.

I think I prefer this one western style. Brewed gongfu it has this kinda funky note going on, especially in the early steepings. I say funky not because it smells bad, but just unexpected for a tan yang, to me. It’s almost floral, and while I love floral-added black teas, I tend to dislike black teas that bring their own florals to the party (like darjeelings). I still got a nice amount of honey and grains, but it wasn’t quite spot on for what I look for in a tan yang. I tend to prefer my black teas western style anyway, so it’s not too big of a deal, though.

I got up early this morning to go birding and climbed a lot of big hills. Saw a baby Barred Owl, which was amazing. But now I am exhausted; it’s warm outside but cool in our house; all of these things seemed appropriate for a white tea, and I admit I have been quite curious about this one. I recently decided, upon tasting several whites from Teavivre, that Silver Needles are my favorite type of white tea.

The dry leaf on this is some of the most gorgeous leaf I’ve ever seen. The leaves are ‘plump’ and large, and covered with the softest downy covering that felt like the finest velvet. Beautiful. I don’t have a gaiwan and can’t justify a purchase of the one I want right now, so I decided it would be fine if I brewed this one in my ru kiln gongfu pot. My rinse was almost colorless but I took a sip anyway… you never know when a tea will provide an amazing rinse. This one was not super flavorful, but it does have some light, creamy, hay notes popping through as well.

Even my first steep at 10 seconds was quite light in flavor, although it was quite tasty. I think I had expected more sweetness from this, but instead it is more like a dry white wine. The flavors seem like they should be sweet but the tea itself is not. I do think I get a sense of marshmallow from this, though it’s more the pillowy-ness than sweetness. Later steeps were thicker, more squashy and also more like clover honey. I am getting a bit of the breadiness that I have gotten from silver needles in the past, but not a lot. A nice, smooth white tea that isn’t too hayish nor too green. I did get some interesting cucumber notes as well in late steeps.

I very much enjoyed this tea, and now I am feeling the buoyant energy of a white tea. What a pleasant afternoon tea.

Sipdown, 137. Awwww, sad. I will miss this delicious tea, although it is hard to be too sad about sipping this down because I have a pile of other delicious green spring TGYs in my cupboard right now.

Just realized that the first time I steeped this one western style I used Teavivre’s instructions (boiling, 2 min), whereas this time I defaulted to my standard western style TGY parameters (195°F, 3 min). Will be interesting to see if it’s noticable!

I’m not sure if the change in steeping parameters made much difference, but this tea is still awesome. So buttery, sweet and floral, fresh and green and lovely. Wow, this just continues to blow me away. I always go out of my way to try the Verdant green oolongs as they are released, and let me say that this is up there with the best of them (like the reserve club first pickings). So good!

I plan on cold steeping the rest of this, but I thought I should try it hot once to accurately assess the flavors and its performance as a jasmine green.

I would consider this to be a fairly middle-of-the-road jasmine green tea, even though they qualify it as “special grade.” The tea base is not very grassy and is actually super smooth and somewhat “thicker” feeling than most green teas I come across. It is moderately flavored with jasmine, being neither overwhelmingly perfumy nor very faint. Actually in the body of the sip itself the jasmine is rather faint, and I mostly taste buttery green tea, but it is certainly present in the aroma and it shows up in the aftertaste as well.

This tea is tasty but there is not really anything exceptional about it. I guess I would put it at a notch above the jasmine green you might get at a restaurant based on the quality of the base tea, but the jasmine itself lacks nuance. You can get amazing jasmine greens at a good price right from China (Teavivre), so why bother with a middle man?

Swapdown this morning (not this tea, but getting rid of a few others, and actually not acquiring new teas in return, just postage), leaving me with 138 teas! Woot! It’s a good thing because I am approaching some travel times, which means few sipdowns, and then in less than a month I will be in Paris, buying way too many teas.

Anyway, this tea. Two ounces of black dragon pearls, which is what I had ordered of this one, is really not a lot. Some teas are like that I guess! My pouch already seems pretty empty, but may have more servings in it than I think. This tea is good but not great. It shows its Yunnan roots in the light hay notes. They discontinued selling this tea at the same time that I bought it on clearance, so perhaps my pearls are fairly old, but these pale in comparsion to most of the other pearls I’ve had. I don’t get much chocolate, I don’t get sweetness. I get a fairly normal non-golden Yunnan black tea that just happens to be rolled into pearls. Well, if I drink this up then I can order some pearls from Teavivre (my favorite!)

Sipdown, 146. Woot, last of the MBSC teas in my cupboard! Hallelujah.

I cold brewed this, and this is the second large glass I’ve had of it. This tastes way better with a glug of simple syrup in it, but it’s certainly not my favorite. Its just kind of generically fruity. Ah well, it’s gone now. Moving on!

Pretty sure this Huang Shan Mao Feng is my new favorite type of green tea. I also often enjoy a good dragonwell, but there is something about this one that is so good.

I think this is the first time that I’ve had a wide variety of different greens at the same time, and it has been interesting trying them. I think I have one pouch left of each green sample that Teavivre sent me, so I will be able to compare them all again, along with the Laoshan greens I now have through the Verdant Reserve Club.

Even though I used way too little leaf for this cup, I really do enjoy it a lot. It is less vegetal and grassy than some greens, and I love the chestnut flavors. Really quite good.

Sipdown, 147. Cold brew. I decided this one would be a sipdown this afternoon when I took a sip of my cold brewed tea and realized it just wasn’t that good. I have maybe two more cups of this left, but it’s just not worth it.

For one think, I really just don’t like gunpowder green teas. Green tea with some smokiness? No thanks, not for me. The flavor on this one has also faded dramatically and it’s really just like rose green, which in theory I should like, but this one isn’t doing it for me. I think I liked it better when I could still taste the lemon. Anyway, I don’t feel bad about throwing out a little bit of leaf. It’s pretty liberating.

kicks Steepster This is the first time in like 18 hours that I have actually been able to get Steepster to load. Granted I was in bed for some of that time, but geez.

Last night sucked. A huge storm system came through from 3:30am to 6:30am and kept me awake for much of the night. I have been known to sleep through anything—storms, fireworks, fire alarms—but there is something about large hail on your roof and thunder that shakes your house that was impossible to sleep through.

So I am pretty significantly tired today. Hoping I can perk up this afternoon a bit. I decided some guayusa might be a good idea; not sure if its working yet, but maybe it just needs a bit more time. This one is pretty good, but I think I like Good Morning Sunshine better. I like the cider flavoring in this, which is spot on, but the guayusa itself is kind of weird here. I think Good Morning Sunshine more successfully masks the weirdness of the guayusa with the citrus, and to me guayusa is still pretty weird. But I did enjoy my cup of this.

This was unintentional, but I guess it’s been a Lupicia kind of day. I wanted to try this one again while I am thinking of swaps (see my swap list on the International swap thread if you’re interested). This is one of those teas that has almond pieces in it, and lately those teas haven’t been sitting as well with my taste buds. I prefer my almond teas to just have almond flavoring, it seems. Kinda like how I never used to like to eat almonds, but I loved almond extract and almond flavored things. I still greatly prefer the extract (and marzipan, almond paste, amaretto, etc) to the actual nut.

The other thing about nuts in blends is they tend to leave a film of nut-oil on the tea, and that is also the case here. In this case its not too bothersome, but it’s another one of the reasons I dislike nuts in tea. I have a feeling that this would be amazing brewed really strong with additions. As is, it’s decent but not that impressive. It is rather smooth and creamy for a black tea, but it screams for some sweetness. I think I’ll hold onto it for now, though.

Another tea from my swap with Becky. I actually at one point thought the “mandarin” in the name of this tea referred to mandarin oranges, not the fact that it was Chinese. But it’s just a straight up jasmine green tea, which is fine. It occurs to me that I should try this hot as well, but I cold brewed it for my cup today.

I like jasmine green tea cold brewed, but it can get too strong and bitter very quickly for some reason, so you really have to watch it. At 8 hours, this bordered on too strong but it was ok in the end. Nice and jasminey, not-too-grassy green tea. It’s simple, but it works.

I got some of this ages ago in a swap with Becky, but have yet to try it for some reason. I love lychee, I usually enjoy Lupicia’s teas (and some of my faves are Lupicia), so it should be perfect, right?

I adore Lupicia’s keemun base that they use for their Earl Grey tea, and I’ve had good experiences with a few of their other black bases (but not all of them). This is also a keemun, but it seems to be a different keemun, or it is reacting with the flavoring differently. I don’t get any smokiness in the Earl Grey, but this one most definitely has that characteristic keemun smoke. It happens to be a flavor I do not like all that much.

The lychee in this is quite lovely; juicy, sweet, both citrusy and floral. It really reminds me of eating a lychee. It’s too bad that I just really don’t like this keemun base. I left it for a while and took a sip when it was cold, and the smokiness was even worse. I will try cold brewing it but I am afraid that this might be a tea that I just will have to swap away.

Man, this tea is delicious. Really, really good. Honeyed, malty, warm and rich. I drank it up quickly this morning, and didn’t have many lucid thoughts about it except, “damn, this tea is tasty.”

I have been thinking about this tea lately for some reason. Maybe it’s the influx of tieguanyins to my cupboard, maybe it’s just thinking about teas I’ve had for a long time. I actually have a significant amount of this tea left. I ordered four ounces of it when it was going out of stock forever, and those came in two pouches. The second pouch hasn’t ever been opened. I have a strong drive to hoard this tea, even though it’s a tieguanyin and I know it is just losing flavor sitting there.

And yeah, it has faded a bit. But this tea, slightly faded, is still miles beyond so many others (to me). It has lost a bit of its natural sweetness, but it’s still floral and buttery. It will probably take me forever to drink this tea, and it will likely be old and flavorless when I finish it, but I will always remember how delicious it was at the beginning when I drink it.

I think I will try another of these Kusmi teas. They have been the victims of changing tastebuds, because there are several Kusmi teas that I used to love (or at least enjoy), and now they are not tasty at all to me. All the Russian blends apparently have the same base (a blend of Chinese, Ceylon and Indian teas), and one of the components doesn’t sit well with me. It’s not any sort of bitterness or astringency but a flavor I just don’t care for.

Yeah, no. This one is the same way. It’s pretty frustrating really, to have a quality tea that you just don’t like anymore. The one good thing is that I still like the teas cold brewed, so I guess I’ll be drinking a lot of iced Kusmi this summer.

Edited: Actually I ended up enjoying this one enough to drink the whole cup. Maybe it was the combination of citrus fruits but even though I didn’t love it, I liked it enough. It did get a bit astringent when it got really cool, though.

I was poking through my stash, opening tins to see how much was left of certain teas and sniffing them at the same time. There were a lot of delicious smelling teas in there, but for some reason when I sniffed this one it just made my mouth water and I had to make a cup.

I am going to boost my rating on this one as it really is delicious. It’s not just the pineapple but the coconut too… a little piña colada-y, but not too much for the morning. Last time I wished for more buttery oolong flavor, and I do still want more butteriness from the oolong, but the flavorings are so good it doesn’t matter all that much. This is certainly tasty and a nice balance of flavoring.

I see that the last time I drank this I didn’t really write a tasting note because I was distracted. Well, I guess I better remedy that!

This is quite a lovely tea. It is kind of one of those black teas that reminds me of a honeyed dan cong oolong, but better because it’s a black tea (not the biggest fan of dan congs here). Anyway, this is definitely on the fruitier side for a black tea, and I do get a sense of stone fruit (peach, apricot) and a hint of lychee. There is almost a floral quality as well. I’m usually not the biggest fan of fruity (unflavored) black teas for some reason, but this one I quite enjoy. I think I like it best when it is toward the hot side versus once it really cools down… as it gets just warm it starts reminding me of a darjeeling (fruity florals, I guess). Quite tasty overall.

Forgot that I had this one yesterday and never logged it. I bought an ounce of this because it sounded like a fantastic combo: apples, roses, pistachio. But then I started falling out of love with flavored greens in general, so I put off trying it.

The good news is that the green tea base actually works fine for me. It’s not that super low quality sencha that so many flavored greens seem to be, and it tastes ok. Not great, but ok. The bad news is that the flavoring tastes like candy. For me, not even green apple candy (which I do love), just generically fruity candy that’s really fakey. I didn’t get any rose from this, surprisingly. Toward the end, once it was cool I would occasionally get a hint of pistachio, but it was far from prevalent. Overall disappointing; I will of course try a cold brew of this one, which I suspect will bring out the rose at least.

So I got this in a swap aaaages ago from darby, I believe. Thanks for the swap, and sorry it took me so long to get around to it. I probably should have been drinking it before, because now I am losing my taste for teas like this. This is definitely sourced from TeaGschwendner, and I haven’t had the best success with their base teas, which is part of the reason I have put off trying it for so long. Also I think I got it around the time when I was starting to have a harder time with nut teas.

I will say, I am enjoying it more than I thought I would. It probably has lost some flavor and potency over time, but it’s still marzipanny. It’s not bitter, but it’s also kind of boring. There is maybe a hint of something off about it, perhaps the nuts in the blend. I am finding that I dislike actual nuts in my tea, and although I love nut flavoring, real nuts give off some kind of something when steeped that doesn’t sit right with me.

I will probably take this home and drink it strong with milk and sugar. Perhaps I can coax more flavor out of it that way.

Sipdown, 148. Cold brew; most of my sipdowns now will probably be cold brews for a bit, since it is summer and cold brews are a good way to use up leaf.

This was quite good today. At first I thought it was too strong, but as I kept drinking it it seemed to mellow out and was just yummy green apple with green tea. There was a hint of astringency, but that actually made me really think of eating a granny smith apple and how they can have that astringent, drying character. It worked well, and made for a tasty tea today.