Micah

Writing a paper about Shakespeare’s sonnets with this tea as my companion. First steep is as good as ever. On the second steep I notice some very nice floral notes and a faint buttery taste/feel in the aftertaste.

Lovely.

First off, Den’s Tea is a wonderful company. If you’re considering ordering from them, I say “Do it!” Timely delivery and they included their catalog, a pamphlet about the health benefits of green tea, and a magazine about Japanese cuisine and culture. It’s the small things, yes?

Of course, all of this would be nothing if they didn’t sell high quality tea.

I’ve tried all four teas I bought from Den’s and they’re all absolutely delicious. (More reviews coming soon!) Today me and my housemates celebrated Christmas. It was wonderful. We all went to church, had breakfast together, opened presents, ate a fantastic homemade dinner (each person made one part of it), and, finally, played cards together. No homework, no stress. Just quality time. And I don’t have school tomorrow! (That’s the cherry on top, my friends.) In any case, my housemate Shane got me an awesome elephant teapot. The tea comes out of its trunk! Love it! In fact, I just finished an elephant of Fukamushi Sencha Special.

According to the Den’s Tea webpage fukamushi sencha is steamed at least two times longer than regular sencha. I believe this is the first deep steamed sencha I’ve had. The dry leaf smells full and fresh with light fruity notes. The flavor is deep and complex. Pleasantly grassy with hints of ripe fruits and brine rounded out by a wonderful taste of milk at the back. The aftertaste is milk then fruit.

I think I’m starting to get a hint of what good sencha can be.

I really wanted to like this. I really did. After reading several reviews of it I thought it would be nice. I like honey, I like pears, I like black tea. Honey pear black tea? That’s a no brainer, right?

Wrong.

The dry leaf smelled weird. Extremely vegetal with a sweetness that just seemed not to belong. A tragic foreshadowing….

The smell of the liquor was nauseating. I don’t know what it was. It smelled bitter, flatly sweet, like it had splenda or sweet and low in it. And it had that bad vegetal smell to it. Like boiled weeds.

I sipped it twice before dumping it in the sink. Tasted like sweetened bitter greens. The Flavor was muddy and disjointed with a slight whisper of pear dropped in there somewhere.

I wish this tea would have been good. I really do. I don’t know what happened but it was just awful…

Ratings bump! I drank this last night while doing homework and I was very impressed by the floral notes in this tea. Fruity and flowery with the occasional and very welcome milkiness.

Good for at least five steeps!

Life is starting to become busy again but I’m not sure I’m ready for it! Winter session Shakespeare class for one more week and then the regular semester starts. And I finally have a job. At a coffee shop that sells Rishi tea! I’m kind of excited about that. Maybe I can get a discount or something.

In any case, I’m fully stocked up on tea for at least the next couple of weeks. Orders came in from Red Blossom Tea Co, Den’s Tea, and the famed Golden Moon sampler (so I can finally ship my swap box to you, takgoti! Sorry for the wait, it’ll be shipped tomorrow!). There’s almost too much to take it all in and I’m enjoying it very much.

Last night I pored over The Merchant of Venice and drank somewhere in the neighborhood of half a gallon of tea while doing so. I haven’t done the homework & tea thing since high school! It was great.

Anyway, I’m slowly making my way through the Golden Moon sampler and it was either Vanilla Jasmine or Tippy Earl Grey tonight and my housemate chose Vanilla Jasmine so here we are. The dry leaf has a very warm vanilla scent to it. Not too sweet but just nice and rich vanilla. While brewing the scent was lovely. Light jasmine robed in vanilla, not competing but complimenting nicely.

The flavor is full and robust. It’s dominated by vanilla but with nice floral jasmine notes throughout. The vanilla flavor is wonderful. Rich and creamy and the overall flavor of the tea is perfectly balanced. My housemate loved it too.

Absolutely wonderful.

That is what I have to say about this tea.

The leaves are beautiful. Long and twisted, downy in spots. They brew a very pale tea with a heavier scent than its taste. It smells almost like sweetgrass. The flavor develops beautifully as the tea cools. It starts out like a very light pi lo chun. I don’t really know how to describe that flavor but its definitely akin to that class of teas. It tastes like a light chinese green, I guess. I don’t pick up on many other notes until it starts to cool and then it comes alive. This tea doesn’t relax me like a pi lo chun does. Instead, it refreshes. The flavor is delicate but lively. It has a faint grassy note but not like japanese teas. It’s more like sweetgrass. This tea is just so revitalizing. I couldn’t stop smiling while I drank it.

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Fairly robust. Lots of good vanilla flavor. Delicious with cream and a little sugar.

I wish it had more body, though. And a heftier mouthfeel. (A vanilla scented yunnan would be so good!) Maybe I didn’t steep it long enough?

Smells like… alcohol. Well, at least the dry leaf does. Add water and it smells sweeter. Not nearly as caustic. I really did not enjoy the smell of the dry leaf and I’m anxious to see how this one plays out.

At first sip I definitely taste the melon. Honeydew and cantaloupe. Lovely. After that the taste kind of diminished and takes a background part to the white tea which is soothing and quiet. A very pleasant tea. I wish there was a bit more melon flavor but it’s good. My first few sips were without any sweetener. I added some unrefined sugar after that but I wouldn’t recommend doing so. The tea took on a sort of “diet” flavor which I did not understand but it became decidedly less pleasant.

I might someday purchase more of this. It’s definitely the better of the two flavored whites I’ve had – the other being Adagio’s tangerine white.

Another one of my recently acquired teas from Red Blossom and I have mixed feelings about this.

Following Red Blossom’s instructions to brew this for a minute yielded a cup of something that didn’t taste much different than hot water. There was a whisper of flavor but… that was about it. The next steep was for two minutes and this cup was a little more flavorful. The tea is delicate and sweet and tastes kind of like a weak dragonwell or pi lo chun. I’m not sure what bamboo tastes like but I don’t think I’m getting that flavor from this tea despite Red Blossom’s claims.

It’s a nice tea but nothing special. Maybe it’s just not my taste or maybe my palette isn’t sensitive enough to pick up the subtleties of this particular chinese green. I like my teas flavorful and complex. This is simple and subtle. It’s a tea I could gulp down not one I can savor. I much prefer dragonwell and pi lo chun over this.

Joy of joys! My order from Red Blossom Tea Co. arrived today. My first shipment of new tea since joining Steepster… almost makes me a little misty-eyed.

New teas: Silk Oolong Formosa, Organic White Monkey, Pi Lo Chun, Ming Qian Lu Jian, Jing Xuan, Silver Needle. Plus I got a very pretty little gaiwan and samples of Phoenix Eye Jasmine and Jade Kuan Yin. Yay!

I was very excited to try this tea. Steepster was how I discovered silk/milk oolongs and the idea was wonderfully new and exciting to me. I think I fell in love with milk oolongs before I even tried one. So it’s fair to say that I had very high expectations for this Silk Oolong Formosa.

The dry leaf smells like caramel or maybe those White Rabbit chinese milk candies (love those!). It smells sweet and creamy – like no tea I’ve smelled before.

The first steep: 2 teaspoons, 6oz water at 195, 2 minutes. The rinsed leaves smell like peach ice cream. That was the first thought that came to mind. Fresh fruit and cream. Such a wonderful aroma. I can’t wait to taste this. The liquor from this first steeping had a light cream flavor but that was kind of… it. I steeped it for another minute and it developed a somewhat thicker mouth feel. The tastes I got were all over the map. At times it had no creaminess, at times I got a very lovely milk flavor at the back of my mouth. For the most part it tasted like a fine tung ting oolong with nice fruity notes. Not bad but also not what I built this tea up into. I can’t really blame the tea for that. The second steep (195, 4 minutes) tasted like a nice oolong. Sometimes like a nice oolong with a little milk added. This tea, on both steeps, leaves a nice, sweet, fruity taste behind. Occasionally there’s a caramel taste.

It’s a very nice oolong. It’s exciting to drink since you never really know what taste you’ll get. I’m definitely a fan. The description leads me to believe that this is an oolong scented to taste like a jing xuan which, based on my research, has the milk flavor naturally. Although the information about milk oolongs on the web is sparse and varied… what I’ve gathered is that jing xuan teas are the “real deal” and then there are milk scented teas. So I’m excited to try the jing xuan.

ETA: Also! Do you rinse the leaves between steeps? I didn’t do that but I’m wondering what the general consensus is…

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Well, I’ve learned a lesson today. Don’t review teas based on memory.

I’m in my kitchen sipping on a cup of this lychee black and I’m unimpressed. This doesn’t seem the same tea I first reviewed. Bad batch, maybe? Recessionary loss in quality!? Agh!!

The fragrance of the dry leaf is still good. However… dusty, watery flavor with a slight lychee taste at the front and a weak flavor of whatever kind of black tea was used at the back. Maybe a longer brew would help it out but not enough to make it worth purchasing again.

I maintain that it would make an above average iced tea, though. I’m not picky about iced tea.

I still intend to send you some, takgoti! You’ll probably be able to blast it more thoroughly since I think you have more sophisticated taste bud than I do. Haha.

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New years day! My mom made quiche this morning and I made this chai. Breakfast in the kitchen nook. A quiet, overcast day and snow on the ground. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m really warming up to this chai. I gave it a long steep and added a tablespoon of raw sugar and probably a tablespoon and a half of heavy cream. It’s sweet, silky, and the spices come through near the end of a sip. The tea flavor isn’t quite as strong as I’d like – a little watery I suppose – but, I think if I used two tea bags next time it would be perfect. Nevertheless! Chai Spice gets a bit of a ratings bump.

Happy new years, everyone! I hope it’s a good morning for you, too.

This stuff is so refreshing on a hot day. Definitely my favorite Tea’s Tea product and I’m so happy they sell at the campus convenience store!

I was tired yesterday. So tired, in fact, that I slept from 5pm yesterday until 6am this morning. I guess that’s the nice thing about Christmas break for college students like me. If I need to sleep for 13 hours, I can. I don’t normally do this. I usually sleep for no more than nine hours but I guess my body clock is just that messed up right now. I start school again this coming monday so hopefully I get it righted in the few days ahead of me.

So I woke up at 6am this morning and then I laid in bed for about 45 minutes listening to music on my wonderful KOSS PRO4AA headphones. They’re big, heavy, and churn out a beautiful sound. I need to get alone with these headphones and my music more often. In any case, after that I kind of stumbled downstairs in the darkness of a winter morning and flicked on the kitchen light. A flash of pain… and a bright turquoise box! Stash Jasmine Blossom tea. Good morning!! I didn’t even know my parents had this but it was on the counter and I wasn’t about to say no to this and yes to my mother’s Red Rose tea bags.

The dry leaf smells… well, like jasmine. And that’s about it. The first sip was… subtly swell, fragrant, the taste a little murky and dusty but not bad. As I progress through the cup there’s more and more of a slightly bitter aftertaste. Perhaps I’ve over steeped it. Oh well. I’m groggy.

This has been my morning staple for about three years. The first time I had Yunnan tea it was a Yunnan Gold from Tea Source, I think. My friend thought it smelled like a horse. I was a little more optimistic. I have very faint memories of that tea but I remember it having a bold, deep, earthy flavor.

My next venture into Yunnan territory was another Yunnan Gold from Adagio and, after that, I was hooked. I went to what was, at that time, my local tea shop in Minnesota and picked up a bag of this Yunnan. I’ve been drinking it ever since. It’s the best coffee substitute I’ve come across so far. Strong, deep flavor. Nothing fancy like a Yunnan Gold. Definitely not as complex or rewarding but, for early mornings, it’s perfect. I go through way to much of this stuff to make upgrading to a Gold feasible, anyway.

Stands up wonderfully to cream and sugar.

Lychees are definitely one of my favorite fruits. They remind me of summer days in the back yard of the house where I used to live in Minnesota. They’re like little presents with thin wrapping. You peel them and take in the fresh, deep scent of lychee. There’s nothing quite like that smell.

So when I first discovered lychee tea when I was just getting into loose leaf teas I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some. This lychee black tea by Indigo Tea Company is the first and only lychee tea I’ve ever had. I don’t have other lychee tea to compare it to but I think I have the idea.

The dry leaf smells unmistakable like lychees – fresh and fruity. It’s a great thing to have a tin of this tea on a winter day like today in Great Falls, Montana where one would be hard pressed to find fresh lychees. The tea itself has a good black tea flavor with enough depth and body to balance the sweet flavor of lychee juice. Like most flavored teas like this, the added flavor doesn’t stand up to a second steeping well but it’s worth brewing a second time if you’d like.

As the description from Indigo Tea’s web page says, it’s wonderful iced with a little raw sugar. Absolutley perfect for hot days!

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One of my favorite oolongs. The description of honey notes is spot on and I actually notice the honey flavor more when it’s iced.

The leaves are big and beautiful and give two good infusions. I usually add half a teaspoon fresh leaves for a third.

I always have some of this tea on hand and drink it almost every day.

Good quality mint tea. Although I never seem to be able to taste the green tea or the lemongrass. Maybe it’s me? Anyway. My housemates love it. So that’s definitely worth something.