gmathis

The pace at work the next three days promises to vacillate between screaminess and utter wild-eyed hysteria, so we’re at least starting the morning with a bit of calm and elegance before I start pulling my hair out in panic-induced wads.

This is sweet and subtle and cocoa-y. Stress subtle. Very good, but not for a morning caffeine jolt. Better for afternoon cookies, or for you gentle non-black-tea subtle people out there.

Work friend shared a generous sample of this one. It is gorgeous. You could put it in a jar and stare at it all day, it’s so colorful and zazzy.

And for a white tea, it does a good job of making its presence known. First cup was at work, so heated unevenly and with a bit too much water, and I still got a nice fruity-pie kick. Sweet but not tart.

Next cup gets more attention, less water, and is expected to be great.

What wimps we are. Storms again (sigh); this time just wicked lightning and torrential rain—5" in 2 hours, give or take, power out for 2; Internet out for several; you’da thunk it was the end of the world. So hard up for entertainment, I was reduced to tying newspaper scraps to string and teasing Tazo with them. (He is still officially an outdoor cat, but I needed a diversion desperately.)

So grateful for a “normal” morning, a functional heating source, and decent tea. This one has been hard to pin down. Decent, but not stellar; something a little sweet and cedar-y or raisiny going on, too. May be the first entry in my “Junk Yard” tin I intend to start.

A couple summers ago, when kind Steepies helped me replenish my tornado-crashed pantry, JacquelineM tucked in a tin filled with odds and ends of berry-flavored teas that, shaken together, made a quirky mystery grab bag of fruit flavor. Just enough left for one last jar of sun tea. Chilled, it’s a lovely treat to spend the day with. (Writing and doing grungy housework via the carrot-and-stick method: Write, sip. Vacuum, sip. Fold, sip. Dishes, sip.)

Also builds a strong case for me, when the tin is finally empty, to start a “scrap” tin of my own. Waste not, want not.

Slow Saturday morning start. Yum. The caramel stays on your tongue long after you’ve swallowed. Definitely not a tea to hurry through.

Yeah. That kind of morning. When you wake up and your eyes are so dry and tired you bumble to the kitchen to get a couple of damp tea bags to use as compresses for a while…and you don’t realize there are holes in both of them, and when you flip the bags to put the cool side back on your eyes you get a face full of tea schmutz.

These bags, thankfully, had no holes. This is one of the strongest English Breakfast blends I’m aware of. (Many of you would make jokes about using to peel paint off lawn furniture.) Half to get these bleary eyes open; half to ice down and keep the bleary eyes open.

Green tea doesn’t make sun tea very well—my best results come from steeping a green tea properly, then chilling it. Tried it in a quart jar anyway with the peach variety out of this collection. Not bad—I probably pulled it a little sooner than I could’ve to avoid bitterness. But there’s some peach in there and there’s some green in there, and when you just want a slug of something cool, subtle nuances don’t matter much.

This little tinned collection is turning out to be surprisingly acceptable.

Thoughtful of my doctor’s office to offer me a cuppa while I was waiting. Not-so-thoughtful to whomever (I didn’t look at the brand) packages green tea for a Keurig that gets the water entirely too hot and ruins it. Bitter and plasticky. The manufacturer should know better! (I didn’t know it was going to be green, or I would’ve stuck with water.)

Last cup of my little sample. This is thick and rich. Pie.

One drinks red raspberry leaf infusion for the medicinal value, not for the flavor. It isn’t undrinkable on its own, but definitely has a tree-leafy taste to it.

So, since we’ll be imbibing it pretty heavily over the next week or so, a little experimentation seemed to be in order.

Put the raspberry leaf in a stuff-your-own paper filter (it clogs up brew baskets) and tossed in a bag of Celestial Seasonings True Blueberry. Voila. The blueberry neutralizes the leafy flavor of the raspberry leaf; the raspberry leaf neutralizes the hibiscus that runs a little strong in the True Blueberry. Win-win.

Win-win-win, if you add the fact that I’m sipping it in the patio glider on a sunny pre-vening (thank you Dr. Cooper) with Tazo snoozing with one paw draped over my leg to make sure I don’t leave. Simple blessings.

Fox Farm (local health food grocery) has significantly expanded its tea selection (oh, darn!) so I am dutifully sipping away at all my scraps and samples in order to justify a significant shopping excursion soon.

This one isn’t top-of-the-heap but it is tasty and an easy steeper, maybe leans to the more astringent side. A good inexpensive staple.

The green tea basket in my kitchen gets the least traffic—-so it’s always a happy surprise to paw through it and discover something I forgot was there.

I’ve written about this one several times; if you had to roll those tasting notes into one, it would boil down to this: the sweetest, most dessert-y green tea I think I’ve ever tasted. Syrupy and fruity and pleasant on what’s turning out to be a chilly June afternoon.

Second quarter’s investment at the neighbor’s garage sale. This one doesn’t seem to get much love in other reviews, except for the cute packaging.

I’ll be the rebel: I like it. The product description, at least the one posted here, doesn’t mention the varieties in the blend, but educated guess would say lots of Keemun and a little Assam. Sweet and melba-toasty without milk.

Not as strong as my preferred Assam weekday morning teas, but it’s Sunday and I’m blessed with an hour in the patio glider watching Tazo take his morning nap in the sun. I don’t need to be kicked awake today.

Tried the lemon tin out of this collection and again, was pleasantly surprised. For a set of inexpensive “gift teas,” these haven’t been bad.

This is my kind of lemon. Not the sharp squeeze-lemon tartness that makes your eyebrows sweat and your eyes water. Lemon rind, lemon bread, lemon pastry kind of lemon. Furthermore, it doesn’t appear to be finicky. Didn’t wait long enough for the water to cool to proper “green” temperature, then got sidetracked helping my 20-year-old hunt for a favorite childhood blankie (makes a mommy’s heart all squooshy). And even after 6-8 minutes, it wasn’t bitter. Go figure. Pleasant side effect of a cheap green tea?

I have been longing for a substitute for the San Francisco Herb Co. green and lemon tea I can no longer find. This could be it.

Love our little neighborhood—-local constabulary stops to play basketball with the older kids and flash his lights for the younger ones, neighbors speak pleasantly, people drive carefully for around pedestrians and patrons of the ice cream truck, and when you find a tin of tea for a quarter at the citywide garage sale, you can be pretty sure nobody’s trying to poison you.

Actually, I paid the quarter for the tin—it’s adorable, a little red call booth. An ounce of looseleaf in good condition was just a bonus.

I don’t go seeking out tea with bergamot in it. But this, even though I can’t vouch for its age and freshness, is plumb tasty! There’s just enough bergamot to add a happy, lemony little bounce to each taste. Each variety of black tea makes its presence known; maybe a little heavier on the Darjeeling, but the Ceylon and Assam keep it from getting too astringent.

Best 25 cents I’ve spent in a while.

Good morning, all. I’m about halfway through this Upton sample packet, and I like it little better than I did at first. This morning’s cup has a little sweet pastry character to it.

Or maybe it’s just a pastry craving. After 48 hours of weather-induced anxiety and halfheartedly gnawing on fast food in various basements the past couple evenings, I’m hungry! (And safe, for which I am much more grateful. Son and husband are threatening to sell our worldly goods and move to a cave.)

Do your cuppa cravings taper off some as the weather (finally!) warms up? Here, Memorial Day pretty much marks the transition to one decent cup in the morning, then use up all last winter’s mezza-mezza scraps for iced tea until there’s a nip in the air again.

This one is decidedly mezza; one-dimensional. Maybe just a hint of copper in the sip. Eh.

Last of the sample, steeped strong outside in a mason jar; little sugar. More drinkable cold than it is warm, but still not one worth repeating. (With apologies to Upton…I hate not liking a tea.)

Just needed a swig of something cool after helping mow the mud—er, lawn, since I didn’t have a jug of better quality sun tea in the fridge. (Anybody seen the sun tea jug? How can something that big disappear from a garage?) Gold Peak is my hubby’s bottled drink of choice and the only commercially bottled tea I can stand these days. It’s not rank with citric acid. A good “it’ll do” in a pinch.

I bought a whole pound of this ages ago, and probably shouldn’t have; though it’s a good decaf, it’s now gone a little flat. Thanks to a suggestion from jacquelinem, I think I can salvage what’s left—a few hunks of brown rock sugar restored its depth of flavor a bit.

Still in search of the ultimate unflavored decaf black tea that has the flavor punch of its counterpart, but this one still qualifies as highly plausible.

This is one of my Adagio favorites. Sweet and creamy. Had a little steeping snafu this morning…the Hot Shot I use for quick morning out-the-doors was decidedly tepid. So I had to run water through the microwave and throw the steeping basket back in for a bit.

Reinforces the theory that this does better with cooler water.

I always approach floral teas cautiously; I’m not a perfume-y person and so many of them taste like cheap cologne (sorry, flower lovers). But this, a tastelet from a work friend who ran to our favorite little shop in NW Arkansas, is nothing to be afraid of.

The flavors run as advertised. Black tea—mild; lavender—plenty; jasmine—mild to minor, but that’s OK by me; natural flavors—I’m catching some vanilla behind it all.

One for milk and sugar and china cups and big hats and feather boas and stuffed animals.

If you haven’t, today you might say a prayer for the little girls in Moore, Oklahoma, who are without a “lovey” to hug. When I think where we were—physically and emotionally—24 hours post-storm, my heart hurts for those families.

Last full cup of the sample, managed to sneak it in before our first really hot and humid day of the season kicked in. (When you live in southwest Missouri, anything above 85 before Memorial Day spells trouble. There’s a giant National Weather Service bulls-eye over our entire corner of the state.)

But I digress. This black tea is stout enough to please heavy-duty Assam-ites, light enough to accommodate those who don’t want a black eye from the punch of the drink, and versatile enough to come out just right no matter how little care you pay to time and temp. Good, good stuff.

This is not a substitute for a box of Russell Stover cream centers. It’s tasty; you can pick up on the chocolate and coconut, but it’s still light enough your chocolate cravings know you’re trying to put one over on them.

(The only chocolatey tea I can think of that has the “heft” to be a plausible candy bar substitute is 52teas Malted ChocoMate.)

Still, a nice treat and change of pace.