Luthien

I got this with the idea of keeping it as a night time tea, and if I use that as the main criterion for judging it, yeah, it works okay. It’s not going to keep me awake and it doesn’t taste horrible. Judged in more general terms, though…

The raspberry is the element of this tea that really isn’t working for me. It takes over the tea and dominates both the initial flavour and the aftertaste. I’m not a big fan of overpowering red fruit teas, and this one is tending a bit too much in that direction as far as I’m concerned.

As other people have noted, the leaves smell just like Strawberry Quik! After smelling them, I brewed this tea with some trepidation, but the actual taste turned out to be a lot less in-your-face than I was expecting. It isn’t anything like as overpoweringly sweet and fruity as the scent of the leaves, but quite subtle and smooth and with a teensy bit of a tart/citrusy edge to it . I was a bit surprised to find how easy it was to keep drinking this tea and I’ll definitely be revisiting it. I might try it with some milk next time, in keeping with the Quik theme.

Whoa – seriously sweet! I can see why the instructions gave the number of teaspoons of tea for 75ml (about 3oz – I think?) of water. Like Turkish coffee, this stuff is strong, and it’s clearly meant to be consumed in equally small quantities.

Three teaspoons per 75ml of hot water produces a very dark brew, but it’s brown rather than black. It’s incredibly sweet but you can also clearly taste the apple, and it’s really pretty good. I’d like to try it a bit more watered down sometime, and I’m also extremely curious to see what it would be like iced. Part of me almost wants to try significantly increasing the proportion of tea to water but I can’t think of a good reason for needing apple syrup for anything. g

I’ve been awake for something like 35 hours at this point, and now I’m finally home – and reunited with my tea cupboard! So many teas to choose from, but it was actually very easy to pick this one, which is one of the silkiest, milkiest Formosa oolongs you could ever hope to meet. On top of the fabulous taste, it always makes me feel that bit better as soon as it hits my system – probably the antioxidants – and right now it’s even managing to make me feel sort of vaguely awake.

Not what I was expecting. You can smell the peach blossom in the aroma, a little, but there’s something odd and unexpected happening with the flavour. This does not taste like a white tea. I’ve been sitting here, trying to work out how to describe it, and the best that I can come up with is that this tastes like a very mild, lightly steeped black tea.

I’ve just added a little milk to the last of it, even though that’s something that I’d never normally consider with a white tea and… it sort of works. It isn’t totally awful, anyway, and it does give a bit more balance to it. I’m thinking that maybe a touch of sugar might be worth trying, too. Weird, weird, weird.

Interesting balance between the lavender and the white tea. The loose leaves have a strong lavender scent, but this is almost totally missing from the brewed tea. However, you do get a definite taste of lavender from the brewed tea, which stays with you in the aftertaste.

I can’t really get away from calling this tea floral because, well, it is. The floral taste doesn’t overpower the tea while it’s hot or warm, and I really enjoyed it prepared like this. However, the lavender does start to become too much as the tea gets colder, so I suspect this one wouldn’t work nearly as well iced as it does hot.

I was trying to find a really good Formosa Oolong for my friend to try. Alas, Teavana didn’t have anything like what I was looking for. It did have this one, which I’ve belatedly realised – thanks to the description in their printed catalogue not mentioning this – is a Ti Kuan Yin.

Vegetal is the first description that comes to mind. It’s very green, in the plant sense rather than the green tea sense. I don’t remember other Ti Kuan Yins I’ve tried having this quality, at least not to anything like this extent, though it’s been a few months since I’ve had one.

The tea is also a little floral, but nothing like as floral as, say, an Alishan oolong. Overall, it ends up less sweet than I was expecting, and also with none of that silky, buttery sort of texture that I’ve come to expect from the top drawer Formosa Oolongs.

This is not to say that I didn’t like this tea: I did. It is smooth, it is floral, and it is… green. < / star trek reference > It’s a good oolong if you’re in the mood for a Chinese oolong at the greener end of the scale – but I’ll be ordering a good Formosa Oolong from somewhere else for my friend before I go home. ;-)

I was all about the white tea a few years ago, but more recently I’ve been getting into green and oolong, and my old white tea friends got somewhat left behind. I’ve been getting back into the white tea groove this week and that’s been cool.

Although this is called a white tea it’s really a white/green/oolong blend and the white tea is actually the lesser part of it. The jasmine gives it a beautiful, not-too-overdone floral aroma and the oolong dominates the flavour. If you like the greener oolongs, you should like the flavour of this tea. Overall the taste is very… clean, so it’s no real surprise that this is a detoxifying tea. It’s also just a really good cup of tea. I liked this combination a lot.

This is a lovely smooth tea, with a stronger vanilla flavour than most other vanilla teas I’ve tried. I’ve been drinking this in the evenings the past couple of days and really liking it as the last tea of the day.

This reminds me a lot of Feisty Jade, a green chai from teas.com.au. This is a light tea that has a really spicy sort of buzz to it, and leaves a quite complex aftertaste behind.

I’m a white tea drinker much more than an Earl Grey drinker, so that’s the perspective I’m coming from with this tea. I liked it a lot. I found the bergamot flavour to be nicely balanced with the flavour of the tea, and overall a very clean sort of taste – white tea with an added zing. I’ll be having this one again.

The colour of the brew is a pale pink rather than the really strong red of some fruit teas, and this is a clue to the sort of flavour you get from this tea. The strawberry dominates the other fruits but also doesn’t overwhelm the tea. This is a really nice light fruity white tea, a good one to keep drinking throughout the day.

I’ve just had a sadly tealess week in Chicago, but now I’m with my tea-drinking friend in Boston and we’ve made a trip to Teavana, so the tea situation is greatly improved!

This is a nice tea, but just totally not what either of us were expecting from the description, or from the aroma. I was expecting something pretty sweet and smooth and maybe a bit nutty, but this tea is actually sort of spicy, with cinnamon being the overwhelming flavour of the taste and the aftertaste. Definitely a good tea to have around during the cooler weather.

I’m leaving the rest of this with my friend when I move on to the next part of my holiday tomorrow, so I thought I’d better have some more while I could. I’ve belatedly remembered that I used to really like Twinings’ chamomile and spearmint, and Foxtrot is very reminiscent of that. Just, you know, better. I hate to say it, but I think that’s because of the rooibos.

Today I got the opportunity to discover that this eases a certain degree of migraine pain nearly as well as pai mu tan. whimper

I haven’t had this particular dragonwell before but there’s no mistaking those distinctive flat, jade-green leaves, and also no mistaking that distinctive slightly malty, slightly roasted sort of flavour. I don’t have my tea thermometer with me, so I let the water cool for five minutes before steeping for three minutes, and it turned out very well.

This is a really good white tea. I wondered if it would be similar to the Green Darjeeling I have at home, but it’s turned out to be very much a white tea in taste without any of the malty edge of the Green Darjeeling. It has good flavour and is significantly less delicate than Silver Needle, but not quite as robust as Pai Mu Tan. This is a sweet, smooth and lovely white tea, definitely one that I’d buy more of.

Not bad. The peach taste is pretty subtle, and it mostly comes through at the end. I prefer Lupicia’s Momo (Peach) Oolong, which has a stronger peach flavour and I think balances the tea and fruit flavour a bit better, but this one is quite drinkable. Pretty tin!

My friend’s favourite tea, so this was another one on the list to try. The chocolate taste works a lot better in this than in other so-called chocolate teas I’ve tried and I love the strawberry aspect! Definitely a winner.

I’ve been seeing TeaEqualsBliss rave about this tea for a while now, so I added it to my list of teas to try while I’m over here. Just coming to the end of the first cup now, and I can see what all the fuss is about. I generally don’t go for rooibos or even rooibos blends very much, but this is a great mix. The fresh taste of the mint is present from the first sip right through to the aftertaste, but I can really feel the hit of chamomile as well. And yeah, the rooibos needs to be there, too, because it sort of brings everything together. So sad that I can’t get this at home, because I’d really like to give it a permanent place in my tea cupboard.

I had this for the first time two days ago. It was the first tea I’d had in days, and also the first that I had after my 26 hour journey from my home in Australia to my friend’s place in the United States, so it was really, REALLY welcome. I love the silky smooth almost creamy texture and sweet floral notes that you get with a really good Taiwan oolong, and this is a great example. My friend is not a big fan of oolong teas in general, but she loved this one. I think I’ve converted her. ;-)

I love that when you’re actually drinking this tea it seems so innocuous and straightforward, with the cinnamon dominating the taste – but afterwards, wow! Such a mixed array of flavours in the aftertaste. My lips are tingling from the pepper.

It’s turned out slightly more astringent than usual this time, but it’s still an excellent tea, much better than the other gyokuro I tried. Worth taking the time to savour.

Muttering curses at hairdresser, who left me with a nice new haircut that’s totally NOT the nice new haircut I asked for. So I’m drowning my sorrows in the very last of my stash of this, which might just be my favourite tea of all.