Luthien

I was really intrigued by the description of this on the menu, so even though I’d already had six (Chinese-sized) steepings of two other teas, I had to try this one.

Sparrow’s Tongue comes from Korea. The plants themselves are descended from Japanese tea plants, acclimated to different conditions (including altitude) in Korea and processed more in the style of a Chinese tea. The result is a curious-tasting tea. It’s grassy, like a Japanese green, but it also has a sort of nuttiness and a little saltiness that’s much more like a Chinese green. I called this the lovechild of Sencha and Dragonwell, and that pretty much sums it up for me.

This tea is good for up to three steepings. I liked it enough that I bought 50g to take home with me after I’d sampled it at TeaSmith’s tea bar.

I’ve been MIA for a couple of months, mostly because I’ve been drinking very little tea shock horror. First I was travelling for nearly a month and so preparing tea was problematic, and after that I got really sick and spent nearly another month in a Spanish hospital. The closest I came to tea in Spain was some Linden flower herbal infusions (“infucion”) that the nurses brought around late in the evening.

I’ve been back in London for a couple of weeks now, staying with my brother while I wait to get the all clear from the doctor to be able to fly home to Australia, and the other day I was finally well enough to go out for a few hours, so OF COURSE I went in search of somewhere with good tea. I ended up at TeaSmith.

It’s been so long since I’ve had a really good Taiwan oolong that I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to evaluate it well, but as soon as I took the first sip I remembered exactly why I love this sort of tea so much. Of course, having the tea prepared properly in the Chinese style by someone who knew exactly what she was doing right in front of me at the fantastic tea bar certainly helped – and especially doing six steepings of it, so that I could really appreciate the evolution of this tea. It really hits its stride around the second or third steeping: beautifully sweet, silky and buttery. The sweetness is mostly gone by the final steeping, but there’s still enough flavour left to make that sixth steeping worthwhile.

This was a really wonderful return to the world of tea. If you happen to be in London sometime, TeaSmith is well worth checking out. The tea bar is a great experience for anyone who loves tea enough that they… write reviews on Steepster. ;-)

Just noticed that it’s my steepster anniversary – I created my account a year ago today. Thanks, guys. It’s been quite a ride.

This is a tea that’s a favourite now, but I didn’t know it existed when I started logging my teas here a year ago. It’s just one of the great tea discoveries I’ve made along the way.

raises favourite porcelain tea mug Cheers!

Another of my accidental purchases courtesy of the Lupicia discount coupon.

The dry leaves smell of several things: the peach isn’t central but I’m sure I can smell it, and there’s something in there that smells so green that I’m not thinking so much vegetal as vegetable. Fortunately, the eau de broccoli disappears from the brewed tea. The remaining green-ness is of the tea variety. I’m not much of a rooibos fan, but the green rooibos works well in conjunction with the green tea. Meanwhile, the peach note is more obvious than it was in the aroma; there’s a little of that silky ‘full’ sort of texture that I’ve grown to associate with some of the better stone fruit teas.

This is a much better tea than many fruit-herbal blends involving lots of different elements. Yeah, I’ll be having this one again.

So the other day I made a firm decision not to buy any more tea before I go travelling in just over a month. Mere hours later, Lupicia sent me a 20% discount coupon.

And that’s why I’m in the position to write this review today. Oops. g

Actually, after trying this, I don’t regret taking the plunge with a few more new teas. I’m pretty sure I’ve never tried a grape-flavoured tea before and I wasn’t completely sure what to expect. A little surprisingly, grape – or at least this sort of grape – works very well with sencha. The scent of the dry leaves is clearly, but not overpoweringly, grape-like, and this translates into a very similar aroma from the brewed tea. The liquor is, appropriately, pretty close to the colour of a green grape. The flavour is a little lacking, and I think I’d really love this tea if a little more of the grape from the aroma showed up in the drinking. Even so, I do like this one quite a lot. One caveat: I’ve been drinking this for the first time while also testing a quite heavy jasmine perfume and I’d like to revisit the aroma of this tea sans perfume sometime soon.

Just finishing off the last little bit of this. Can’t order any more for the moment because I’m going travelling again fairly soon. waves it a sad goodbye for now

Continuing on with my search for a vanilla tea that actually works properly for me… I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this blend, having come to grief with several of teas.com.au’s green blends in the past, but this actually turned out to be not too bad. The quince and the vanilla mix nicely in the aroma, even if the vanilla is a tad too obviously artificial, and the flavour is quite okay, though the aftertaste really doesn’t linger. The leaves are pretty, too.

I found a little of this left in the cupboard, a little past its use by date, but it’s such a good tea I really didn’t want to just throw it out. I made it with about half as much again the usual quantity of leaves, and that seems to have worked out pretty well. The colour is much the same as usual, a pale green-ish yellow, while the flavour is perhaps not quite as strong as it is with fresher leaves. However, it’s still an excellent oolong, particularly if you’re in the mood for a tea from the “green” end of the oolong scale.

I’m failing to pick up the promised citrus notes, but since I never noticed them before, either, I don’t think that’s the fault of keeping the leaves too long. I think it’s more a case of the retailer drawing a long bow in their description. I’m really not sure quite how to describe the taste of this tea. It’s not really like anything except itself: a high-grade, very “green” oolong, smooth without being as silky or buttery as some others, and with a distinctive personality.

Time for steeping number three…

I haven’t had any dragon pearls for a while, so I was really happy to see them along with the other teas that kaiz sent to me for my birthday. The flavour is a really beautiful balance of silver needle and jasmine. I’ve been drinking these steadily for the past couple of days and I’m not sick of them yet: a love affair re-kindled!

I kept meaning to wait until after a meal to try this one, considering the name, and then I kept forgetting. So finally I just gave up and tried it in the middle of the afternoon.

Weirdly, of all the elements, the rosebuds manage to dominate the flavour – or perhaps I just ended up with a few too many rosebuds in this particular cup. This isn’t a bad thing, particularly, since it did deliver a nice, refreshing cup of tea, but the taste was a lot more herbal than I’d really expected, even allowing for the presence of the peppermint.

I think I need to try this one again and see how it works out using a second lot of leaves.

Just finishing off the last of this. It’s a bit more astringent than I like, because I vagued out when it was steeping and forgot to set the timer – steeping time given below is a total estimate! – but it’s still pretty damned good. I can’t really justify buying more right at the moment, but I’m really tempted!

There are some teas that I enjoy all year round, and then there are others that speak more of a particular season. A cold snap hit today, and put me in the mood for something warm and sweet and comforting – this tea, which I haven’t had since the beginning of summer.

I’d almost forgotten how much I like this tea. “Creamy” isn’t something that I usually want to associate with oolong, but it’s definitely an accurate description of this blend and it works really well here. It’s sweet and warm in a way that puts me in mind of something just out of the oven – maybe an almond croissant? I even like the way the dry leaves look, with their little bits of colour here and there.

I was in the mood to finish off the day with an oolong, and there was just a little bit of this one left, so it got the nod.

I think the alishan from teas.com.au might just pip this one at the post, but it’s still a bloody good cup of tea. I like the contradiction of the smoothness of the second steeping partnered with the hint of astringency lurking at the edges of this tea.

I found this lurking in the wrong place when I was digging my way through my teas yesterday – which would explain why I haven’t had it in a while.

A champagne tea seemed appropriate since it was my birthday, so I brewed it up…

This is such a distinctive tea. I’ve never had another quite like it: minty and yet not your usual mint tea at all. I love the hint of an almost spicy tingle that it leaves on your lips and it’s just an all round really fun tea. Whee!

Ahhhh, now that’s more like it!

I’m finally feeling well enough to be adventurous with tea again, so this is the first new tea I’ve tried for a while.

The liquor is a typical sort of sencha colour, maybe a little more yellowish than usual. The aroma of the dry leaves is strongly vegetal, and really put me in the mood for that distinctive sencha taste. Sadly, the brewed tea really didn’t quite deliver. I’m used to delicate teas, but this one wasn’t just delicate; it was dull. While the taste wasn’t at all astringent it also didn’t have a lot of sweetness or personality. Once it had cooled, there was a little more sharpness to it. All in all, really not a memorable tea. I liked the last sencha I tried – Ariake, also from Lupicia – a lot more.

Damn. I really wanted to like this more. I might go and dig out something else to drink to finish the evening on a less disappointed note.

When I’m as unwell as I have been for the past couple of weeks, I retreat to my comfort teas. This is the one I’ve been retreating to most often.

Visiting another comfort tea to help get over a week of painkillers and ick. This one starts with a great, peachy aroma, and then follows through with the taste. Time for some more…

The weather in February usually makes me unwell, and this week has been one of those weeks, so I’ve been visiting this old friend. It always makes me feel a little better.

My OH got me some great pull-out wooden boxes and re-organised the tea cupboard for me. It works really well and looks really good. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise until I went looking for it the other day that the small packet of this tea had ended up under one of the boxes. Eek! Not only one of my favourite teas, but also one of the most expensive.

Fortunately, it seems to have survived this potentially crushing experience safely. I celebrated by brewing up a pot of it.

There isn’t much to say about this tea that I haven’t already said. One of my top favourite teas that stands out way ahead of almost all the others, and always has a place in my cupboard (so long as that place is not under a box.)

Backlogging.

I’ve been wearing perfumes featuring quite prominent vanilla notes lately. (Reviewing perfumes is not unlike reviewing teas, weirdly enough, though I still find it easier to write multiple paragraphs about tea. ;-) The best of these makes me want to drink something with that same quality of lovely, smooth vanilla, which led me to finally trying out this tea.

sigh What a let-down. I’ve never yet found a vanilla-flavoured tea that remotely touches the places that I want it to go – a place that the perfumes seem to find with ease – and this one is probably the most disappointing of all. I really expected this to at least smell something like vanilla even if the taste wasn’t there. Nup. The vanilla was barely present in either the taste or the aroma.

The tea used for the base was a very uninspiring, second-rate green: one of those teas that you wish was overpowered by the flavouring so that you don’t have to endure the taste of the tea itself.

I’m beginning to think that the sort of vanilla tea I want just doesn’t exist. I really hope I’m wrong, because I still have a bunch of vanilla-based perfume samples to get through and they keep making my mouth water!

Was in the mood for something Japanese tonight, and this was sitting there still unopened, so… I got out my kyusu and got to it.

This is really a pretty good sencha. The first steeping is delicate, and the colour is closer to eau de nil than I usually expect even with a Japanese green. The packet’s claim that it tastes like sweet potato is… hmmn, fanciful is probably the kindest way of putting it. But it is sweet, and, of course vegetal/grassy.

I left the second steeping a fraction longer, for just over a minute, and allowed a little astringency to creep in, just to add a little more depth to the flavour.

Yeah, really not bad. I’ll be having this one again.

I’ve been meaning to try this one for weeks, and tonight I finally got around to it.

The scent of the dry leaves and the aroma of the brewed tea are both really sweet. The smell evokes a childhood memory of the extreme sugary sweetness of fairy floss on a stick.

But before you throw up your hands in horror, I’ll add that the taste of the tea itself is not impossibly sweet. It’s not bitter, but the flavour of the tea – looks like sencha to me – really comes through. As with my favourite fruit flavoured teas from Lupicia, there’s an excellent balance at work in which the aroma plays an important part.

The sweetness dissipates a bit as the tea cools, but it’s still a really good cup of tea all the way to the end.

I approached this tea with a mixture of hope and trepidation: my favourite fruit flavoured teas are all from Lupicia, but so is the Sakura Vert (a similar tea made with cherry leaves) that is close to the top of the list of the most undrinkable teas I’ve ever tried. The Sakura Vert was so awful that I only got through a few sips and then had to pour the rest down the sink.

But yay, this tea has a lot more in common with some of Lupicia’s other fruit teas. Clearly, they do much better with cherry fruit rather than cherry leaves!

The leaves brew up into a nice warm light yellow liquor. The cherry is particularly noticeable in the scent, so you breathe it in with each sip, but that’s not to say it’s absent from the flavour of the tea itself. As with some of Lupicia’s other fruit teas, the balance between the fruit flavour and the flavour of the tea is really, really well done. It’s neither too much nor too little, and you’re left with an aftertaste that isn’t astringent but more pleasantly sour – more than a little reminiscent of sour cherries, so that’s definitely a plus.

Of all Lupicia’s fruit teas that I’ve tried, this tea reminds me more of their Kotobuki than any other. This tea doesn’t have quite that “full” sort of texture in the mouth that the Kotobuki has, but there’s still quite a lot of similarity in the way in which the fruit flavour makes its presence felt in the overall taste.