mlc

First: this tea is green. If Gatorade made a drink this color, I would refuse to drink it on the grounds that nothing in nature could possibly be that shade of neon green. But, apparently, I’d be wrong. Here’s a photo: http://flic.kr/p/9uqpuL

It tastes perfectly natural, though. Compared to other genmaichas I’ve tried, it perhaps tastes a bit more like green tea than toasted rice. And I can definitely feel the extra caffeine from the matcha. But, while it’s nice, honestly I don’t know if it’s different enough from any other genmaicha to justify the rather-high price.

A friend of mine, visiting town from Switzerland, brought me a box of this tisane. I guess all the herbs in it are Swiss? And organic? I mean, it says so, right on the package, in English (and also German and French), but it is foreign and so it would be so much more exotic if I could manage to be confused.

Anyway, it’s a nice herbal tea to drink at night in this alpine (DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) weather we’ve been having which just won’t go away. It’s warming and comforting without trying to either wake me up or put me to sleep. The taste is sort of vaguely citrusy, but there is no actual citrus in it. Every time I drink it, I expect it to have mint in it, but of course it doesn’t and you would think I could figure that out already.

Today I am in the right mood to like this tea, but usually I am not.

Let’s first be clear about one thing: the dry tea smells awful. The last ingredients here are “genuine bourbon vanilla” and “artificial flavor,” and at least one of those is dissolved in some kind of unpleasant solvent. Seriously, I imagine that there are teenagers huffing this stuff somewhere in a (presumably vain) attempt to get high.

When it’s actually brewed, though, things are much more pleasant. The vanilla flavor actually mostly fades away, leaving a reasonable (if unexceptional) fruit tea, nice for chilly autumn/winter evenings.

Yes: a lovely autumn/winter morning drink. But I’m honestly not even sure what I’m doing reviewing it on Steepster, a tea site.

I prepared this on the stove, boiling the chai in 1 part water : 1 part whole milk for 5 minutes and adding a fairly large amount of sugar at the end. It’s really sort of nonsensical to compare the result to regular brewed tea: the spices (coconut! lemongrass! cinnamon! etc!), milk, and sugar actually dominate the black tea itself. I can certainly feel the caffeine, though.

If you like the spice mixture, you’ll like the drink. As I said above, though, it’s almost unreasonable to call it a “tea,” even though of course it really is one.

I’m really not sure what to make of this.

It’s green tea, so I should prepare it carefully at a relatively low temperature. But also it’s chai, so I should make sure to boil it extract all the flavor of the spices. Do I add milk? Never for green tea, but often yes for chai.

And so on.

I haven’t yet found a way to prepare this which makes me like it. But I’ll give it another try or two to see if I can figure it out.

Hello again autumn, hello again hot tea drinking, and hello again steepster.

It’s cold enough that I actually want to drink something hot. But at night, I do not want any caffeine. So I’ve been drinking this tea, and it’s quite nice. The taste is fruity and a bit floral. Even without any sugar, it’s somehow a bit sweet. There’s nothing spectacularly “wow” about it, but it’s very drinkable, and I’ve had several mugs of it over the past couple of weeks.

Also, the brewed tea is very red.

No notes yet.

How to survive summer:

Place about 3 Tbsp peppermint tea in 1 L hot water (80⁰C or so). Brew for, say, 10 minutes, or until you remember to take the tea out. Then add another liter of ice and/or cold water. Drink. Repeat until autumn.

The calendar may not yet quite agree, but it’s summer. Today it’s ‘only’ 23⁰C, but it has been upwards of 30⁰C for the past week and the last thing in the world I’ve wanted has been hot tea.

There are, however, remarkably few unsweetened drinks in the refrigerator at the health food store. But what’s this? Unsweetened green tea, claiming to be “Japan’s #1 Green Tea”, whatever that means. Suitable not just for drinking but also for logging to Steepster!

I don’t want to insult Japan or anything, but this is not the #1 Green Tea I’ve ever had. But it is reasonably decent and somewhat complex, especially given that I didn’t even have to think about hot or boiling water in order to drink it. If I’m again in the mood to pay $2 for 20¢ worth of tea and the convenience of having it already brewed and already cold, then I’ll pick up another bottle.

Hello again Steepster,

I haven’t been logging many teas of late because as the weather warms up, I’ve been drinking less tea, and because most of what I have been drinking has been stuff I’ve already logged.

But apparently I haven’t logged this tea yet. Which is sort of a shame, because it’s a nice tea. It tastes pretty much exactly like an archetypical jasmine green tea. Are you familiar with jasmine teas? If so, imagine a nice jasmine tea in general without imagining any specific jasmine tea. Then add a little bit of extra jasmine flavor. You will then be imagining this tea.

Normally I like green teas better than black. But this is seriously good enough to override that. It’s smoky and warm and lovely and says “WAKE UP!” when I drink it.

The dry leaves smell like nothing so much as genmaicha. The wet leaves post-steep smell like seaweed. The brewed tea itself is like neither of those things.

I bought a bunch of samples from Upton, and this certainly seemed intriguing. I used about half the 6g sample packet in a mug of 100°C water, steeping for 8 minutes.

Given that this is just an unblended single herb, the aroma is incredibly complex. There are notes of mint, cinnamon, and other spices. Brewing the tea mellows it out somewhat, melding these different notes. It’s an okay evening brew, but it won’t be replacing peppermint tea in my cabinet anytime soon.

I’m going to try the other half of the sample with some sugar to see how that works out.

First time trying yellow tea. It was sufficiently different from other teas that the sample wasn’t big enough for me to form an entire opinion.

I was right: to extract any flavor from this, you have to use a lot of leaves. I’m at 1 Tbsp per 12oz cup. This is sort of sensible: because the leaves are so big and fluffy and loosely packed, maybe this is actually less tea by weight than I use with other teas. I don’t know.

So the most amazing thing about this tea is still the smell of the dried leaves. It’s all vanilla-y and some citrus and wow. The tea, once brewed, tastes pretty much the same, albeit less so.

Maybe I’m still being unfair because the dried leaves smell of such promise: if someone just gave me a prepared cup of this tea, perhaps I would be more impressed, but as it is I’m still not loving this as much as some of the other folks here. Still, it’s not like it’s undrinkable or anything.

So, yeah, I’ve been drinking this, and I think I like it best when it is steeped for just a minute or so. Steep it longer and the tea starts to compete with and overpower the rice, which maybe some people would prefer but for me defeats the whole purpose of drinking tea with toasted grains in it.

It’s good on resteeps as well.

I’d been meaning to drop into Porto Rico and check out their teas for a while, but as I was passing by today I saw a sign in the window that said “Tea Sale.” Apparently the sale has been going on for a couple of weeks but ends tomorrow.

I managed to escape only a few dollars poorer with just a few ounces of the Genmaicha. I’ve been craving genmaicha for a little while, so it was an opportune purchase.

What to say about it? It’s good. It tastes like green tea with toasted rice. There’s also some corn in here, but although it’s pretty, I don’t know how much it affects the flavor.

I think two minutes might have been a bit long for this tea. The woman in the store told me she steeps for up to seven minutes (!) but that seems crazy.

It’d probably be expected here to write something about how this tea is keeping me warm in the great big snowstorm we’re currently having here in New York. But let me be honest: I’m working from home and the heat works just fine. So let’s talk about the tea instead.

The best way I can think of to describe the tea is to say that it tastes like Earl Grey tea, only more so. They obviously put more than the normal amount of bergamot. (Also, has anyone ever seen an actual bergamot fruit? Do they have any uses other than flavoring tea? Why does the Firefox spellchecker insist that bergamot is not even a word?)

The vanilla, while present, is definitely secondary to the bergamot and the tea itself. It serves more to enhance these other flavors than to stand on its own.

Other posters here have suggested that this tea is especially nice with milk. I don’t usually like milk in my tea, but I suppose if I have some milk in the house then it might be worth trying.

Overall a nice, easy-to-drink black tea. I’ll certainly be drinking this a bunch in mornings when I need help waking up.

This smells so good. But it hardly tastes like anything (or, more accurately, it does not taste anywhere nearly as strongly as it smells). I used about 1.5 tsp for about 12oz water, but the tea is kind of loosely packed, so maybe this is not enough. I’m going to try it again with more tea and see what happens..

I understand that wearing a decent shirt and meeting someone at 9am is not exactly abnormal for much of the world. But as I’m a software developer who normally works from home, these are both atypical experiences for me.

So! I need something with caffeine in it and which is easy to drink. And the vanilla jasmine tea has been my go-to tea for such circumstances lately, but apparently for some reason I haven’t reviewed it yet here.

Unlike most jasmine teas, this is a black tea blend. The vanilla is more noticeable than the jasmine. The jasmine is definitely still there, though, and I suppose it’d be more obvious if I had more experience drinking vanilla teas without jasmine in them.

All in all, a very drinkable black tea, especially with a bit of sugar in it.

But: as I was finishing the tea, my client called me to move our meeting to 10:30. So I could’ve substituted getting enough sleep for the caffeine. But it’s too late now, and so I’ve been able to spend the past hour writing this not-particularly-long review.

So I was in a fancy grocery store earlier today and for some reason started looking at the teas. I know that I don’t need to buy any more tea, and I know that if I did need to buy tea, there are better places to get it than a grocery store, even (especially?) a fancy one.

But despite this, I walked out with a box of Revolution White Tangerine tea.

The box suggests 3-5 minutes at “just under boiling,” which seems a bit aggressive for white tea. So I compromised and did 80°C for 3 minutes. I think this is about right: there is just the tiniest hint of bitterness which would probably get to be a problem if I’d left it steeping much longer.

It’s a decent white tea. I can barely taste the tangerine, though. I wonder if adding some sugar would bring the tangerine out? I will try doing so next time.

No notes yet.

So I’ve been drinking a fair amount of this over the past couple of weeks but haven’t got around to writing it up yet. But as it’s today’s Select, I suppose I should delay no longer.

The coconut (which, as others have said, is more like a toasted coconut) is definitely more noticeable than the tea when you open up the canister and smell it. This mellows somewhat as you steep the tea: no one would mistake this for tea-less coconut water, but no one would fail to notice the coconut either.

Anyhow, I like it and have been drinking it with some regularity.