Popular Tasting Notes

Does what it says on the tin! Tastes like sweet cinnamon with hints of the orange peel and cloves. Pretty darn good and surpasses Good Earth Original, hahaha, which makes it the first of this sort of cinnamon tea for me.

I love this tea. I always forget about my lonely bag in the back of my cupboard, but when I rediscover it I am inevitably right back in love again. The tart bite of apple pairs so nicely that the toastiness of the popcorn and the subtle underlying sweet of the maple. It is my one of those amazing teas that doesn’t really over brew or need sweetener. I toss a tea bag in my travel mug and just forget about it until mid morning, at which point it becomes a welcome treat!

This golden monkey is so good, especially considering the price comparative to other golden monkey teas. The dried tea smells fresh, almost like hot cornbread. the leaves are long and twisted with a lot of gold buds, and golden tea hair left behind in the tin. the brewed tea is dark gold, and smells very musky and a little chocolatey. the taste is like a good quality black tea without any bitterness, only a bold and rich taste. I was surprised by how unique it tastes, making it hard to pick words to describe it. i can say that I will keep my big tin full of this tea as long as presto carries it

Ever smelled Lush’s Twilight bath bomb? This is the tea version. It’s absolutely delicious. Really bold bergamot, balanced nicely with the lavender and subtle vanilla.

A very subtle tea, smells ever so slightly of a freshly cut farmers field. Taste is strangely creamy/buttery with a clean finish once swallowed. If you are looking for bold go somewhere else. If you want to experiment with something very subtle this tea can reward quite nicely. I find that I can vary the amount of tea on this one quite a bit and still like the results even with 4 heaping teaspoons added to my ingenuitea. Contrary to what others have said I have not been able to steep this more than twice. The third attempt at steeping seems to not work, maybe I shouldn’t be increasing the amount of time I steep past a certain amount? Only further testing will reveal!

This is one of the best, if not the best Masala Chai Teas I have ever tasted, though I wouldn’t have said that after the first sip.

It started out VERY subtle. As this is my first tea to have tasted from Arbor… I sighed, and resigned myself to a weak cup of tea. Boy was I wrong!

Each sip compounded the flavor of the tea, and I started to taste notes the cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger. What really makes this blend brilliant however is the addition and perfect quality of black pepper added to the tea blend. As I was drinking I started to notice the slight spicy after taste. At first I thought it was the ginger, but that ginger is SO beautifully subtle, it couldn’t add that sort of flavor by itself.

Checked the packaging: Black pepper. Brilliant. Not only is this tea fantastic straight out of the package, it is great with a little milk (used whole milk, and then tried some coconut milk. Both were fantastic) As well as with a little added stevia for sweetness or vanilla to give it a very latte like taste.

I imagine this would be very good mixed with a little bit of apple cider, as it already conjures apple notes (despite not having any apple in it).

Overall a great, rich tea. Lots of flavor, and a lot of adaptability and great usage for all sorts of spiced tea drinks. Loved it.

My sister went to Dublin a few months ago & bought me this tea, because she knows how much I love tea. Well I was deeply disappointed at the taste of your tea. I even put three bags in a cup and it still taste VERY weak!

This was my first experience with Bancha, and due to the fact that I thought I had ordered Sencha, I was quite taken aback by the experience.

It took me a while to figure out that it was actually a Bancha, and not some crazy tainted Sencha (as Sencha is the staple of most cafes’ green tea collections). The flavour was almost completely unlike Sencha, as it had a very…wheaty flavour? I would say it was comparable to fermented hay mixed with a curious kind of barley. There was an echo of a lemony tang towards the end of the mouthful which is characteristic of green teas, but it was outspoken by the initial…wheaty bombardment?
It was quite a buttery kind of wheatiness. If you could imagine butter on toast…it wasn’t that. It was like that idea had just broken-up and had started to go their separate ways in my mouth.

I wouldn’t say it was unpleasant – it was a very interesting tea. One that I a) wasn’t expecting and b) had never tried before, and so it was quite fun trying to figure out what I was drinking. I will say however that the wheaty/barley/yeasty flavour was teetering on unpleasant. Just a wee teeter. This could have been due to the temperature the tea was brewed at (it’s difficult to trust Coffee orientated cafes with brewing a tea correctly). Either way, it was what it was.

It had a pretty full mouth-feel to it – albeit it was full of that wheatiness I just described. The aroma was pretty well balanced with the flavour as well; it was just missing that aromatic expression of green tea (like a lemon/grassy fragrance).

Overall, quite a shock! I won’t say I loved it, but I will say that I am curious about it, and would like to try and few more different brands of Bancha to compare, and to allow my palate to habituate to the flavours. I think I could like this tea in the future.

On the plus side, It did get me curious about the different kinds of Green tea in Japan, and I managed to learn some interesting facts:
- Bancha is the product of the 3rd and 4th harvest (Sencha is the 1st and 2nd)
- Kabusencha and Gyokuro differ only in the length of time before harvesting that they are deprived on sunlight (~1 Week and ~3 Weeks respectively)
- Genmaicha is said to have been derived from an attempt to flesh-out what little quantity of tea poor Japanese people possessed. It is said the roasted brown rice was usually added to Bancha leaves.

This smells so good! Made it to work and decided that this would be the tea to start the day off in the office. My cube smells like pumpkin pie and even plain this tea is delightful. I usually enjoy it hot, with a little honey. If you add a splash of cream you end up with pumpkin pie with fresh creme!

Great green for drinking in the morning or throughout the day. Fun to watch the leaves expand with brewing.

This tea is mediocre. It has an artificial berry/fruity scent. It’s difficult to taste any of the flavoring, but the tea base is pretty good tasting. It has a sharp, clean taste that isn’t too heavy. I’m not going to buy this again, as Upton has many flavored black teas that are way better.

I was afraid that this tea would be too artificial tasting like so many of David’s Teas. But, at first taste, it doesn’t seem to be artificial tasting at all, and it is actually quite tasty.

This has been tempting me for a while, even if I really do not trust this brand – it´s actually a supermarket´s own brand, which is not a problem except I do not usually like this supermarket´s own brands. But almond rooibos, pretty packaging and quite affordable I had to try it.

Sadly it´s a no-go for me. The almonds were there, visible but the taste is not noticeable. It tastes mostly of orange peel , too much of orange peel to my taste, and cardamom. Perhaps because so much of this tea is flavourings and other ingredients, the rooibos is not intense and hardy noticeable. But at the dosage i used the cardamom is piquant and almost overpowering, not sure I could dose this differently to bring out the rooibos.

Way too much wrong stuff going on this. For a rooibos with some almond done right (even if it does have hibiscus, in a miraculously subtle ammount) try Yumchaa´s Adventure.

This tea actually tastes a lot like a bellini! You can taste mango and peach which gives it a bit of sweetness, but there is also an acidic hibiscus or rose hip flavour. When steeps it is tangy like a fruit juice, but not sour or bitter. It is AMAZING iced. I like to steep it then freeze it in an ice cube tray. You can put the ice cubes in a strong blender and make a slushy on a hot day.

I remember this being delicious the first few times I tried it. Since I was new to the realm of black tea, I steeped it lightly. Over the years, I’ve moved on to loose leaf teas, so I don’t think I’d go back to this one.

Thursday May 19, 2011
1st Steep of The Day
Took a Canister of this to Work.
So its Going to be My “Boring” Daily Work Tea Post
I Like the Flavor of this Herbal Tea.
Very Fruity and Rosey it Steeps a Deep PINKISH Liquor.
That Doesn’t Last Long in My Cup “or Jar”
Keep On Steepin

So I’m smelling it while it cools, it smells lemon, definitively. Also, bergamot smells lightly too. Very pleasant smell, I could smell this for hours. There is also something else in smell, isn’t it orange? Yes, its orange. Interesting combination of lemon, bergamot and orange.

Taste is very pleasant too, I wouldn’t say Earl Grey, but this is something different. Good, this isn’t bitter. I don’t taste any Chinese tea in this, but this feels like it. Word I’m searching for is…

…Velvety! Very smooth, I like this, no bitterness at all.

From a 25g sample. The tea started out with a fairly upfront bitterness and really dried my mouth out. There was some woody/grassy/hay flavors that hid under the bitter note. After 3 to 5 steepings, the bitterness started to fade, but there was no underlying flavor that was revealed. After around 7 to 9 steepings, it just tasted like a weaker version of the start.

Too much of a toothpaste aftertaste for me.

Ahhh.. can’t go wrong with this one in the mornings.. I recently (as in 2 days ago) received a tin from two different people (!) for my birthday.. I know. Weird. This is the official drink between coffee and tea for those of you who are interested to know what that would be, and its pretty much fantastic! Anyway, thanks guys, love it!

Lack of flavor isn’t something I’ve experienced in American Tea Room products. Usually, I open the package, and scarcely have to inhale for the aroma of any one of their teas to gloriously fill my senses. Their teas are characteristically extremely fresh, I’ve found. However, either this tea is extremely subtle, or simpy not as fresh as the others. It didn’t smell stale, but it had little nose, little flavor. Their basic rooibos has a wonderful flavor, so it seems to me that any of their rooibos based teas would at least have something to ponder. And green teas are usually at least, well, green if nothing else. This one—almost nothing. However, I’ve had such excellent experiences with American Tea Room products, I’m not going to give this tea a rating until I’ve had a chance to order another sample that will hopefully be from another batch. and then I’ll try again.

I love this tea. Just the right balance between wonderful tea taste with a hint of blueberry aroma.