Popular Tasting Notes

Wonderful, wonderful tea for the mornings before a test! I bought 2 ounces of samurai chai mate to taste during Teavana’s winter sale and fell in love at first brew. I asked for something that was fruity and would give a similar kick like coffee and voila, this did the trick. It has become like a exam ritual for me to drink this and I will definitely go back and buy more.

This is the other green tea available at Aldi. I like it, and at $1.19 for a box of 20, that’s an achievement. Unlike the regular green tea, this one is a lot more sensitive to steep time. I would not recommend going past 1-2 minutes, the lemon peel tends to get a bit bitter beyond that point. High marks for value. If you’re looking for value, this is a good pick. I drink this at work daily.

I can’t actually taste the oolong in this, but it’s like drinking sunshine. It’s like eating sweet, golden, fuzzy apricots and peach blossoms. Fruity-floral and cheery.

My first African tea. Tastes rich, vegetal, and maybe a little floral as well perhaps. I’ve been drinking a lot of Japanese green teas lately, so this is a nice change to something a little different. At about 165F for just over two minutes I didn’t find it bitter at all.

I loooove my Jasmine Dragon Pearls!
I doesn’t really matter what kind of Jasmine but… oh the Harney Dragon Pearls smell AMAZING right from the tin.
Smells good, tastes great, and it comes in a really cute tin :)

A longtime perennial in my tea cabinet, and one of my favorite Lupicia teas, despite my general dislike for puer. There seem to be real dried strawberries and cocoa nibs blended in there, which is amazing! It’s worth brewing for a full three minutes to really bring out the smoky-bitter chocolate and puer flavors.

Taken straight, this tea is as dark as coffee, and the bitter cocoa flavor comes through strongly. It combines with the smokiness of the puer for an almost coffeelike experience, although milder and (to this non-coffee-drinker) much more palatable. The strawberry just floats around subtly as a warm, pleasant aftertaste in the mouth.

Add a dash of sugar and cream, however, and the whole character of the drink is transformed. The sweet strawberry flavor leaps to the fore, and the cocoa notes combine with milk to create a texture and flavor almost like fruity hot chocolate. The puer recedes to a background hint, just enough to give it a little personality.

I enjoy it either way, but drunk as a latte, it’s my go-to dessert tea for relaxing and playing video games on a chilly evening.

I feel a bit fluish today (or maybe it was the food/wine yesterday). All that sounded good was this minty green tea. It helped a little. I foresee drinking a lot of tea today.

Brewed in my new mouse teapot I got from Teavana last weekend. Yeah, I know, Teavana. But I love mice and rats, so I couldn’t resist.

I decided that I wanted to dedicate that pot to Keemun, and was planning on buying some from Adagio since I am out. But then I remembered this morning that I had this from a little shop in OKC.

I brewed it gongfu style in the new pot, combining the first and second brew (not counting a rinse) in a small pitcher. I drank a bit straight, which was all right, but I little less soothing than what I want this morning, so I whipped up some splenda and half and half and combined it with the tea in a nice western-style mug. The half and half bring out the maltyness and smooths the rough edges off the hint of tobacco. I can’t detect any smokiness in it, which I like in my Keemuns.

I’ve got quite a bit of this left, and it’s nice enough, I will definitely drink it, but I’ll probably try something different if I get back to T, and just order my Keemun from Adagio.

I love this tea! It is my all time absolute favorite!

One of my favorite herbal teas. the mint really blends everything together. I love having a cup before bed, it’s a sweeter tea but not so much that I couldn’t drink several cups of it. A great full bodied herbal I like it a lot.

These were given to me by a friend after I mentioned I am a cardamom nut.

I cold-steeped three bags in 1L overnight and got a very dark amber tea. It was barely cloudy, despite being fannings.

The taste is overwhelming cardamom, too much so. It is perfumy to the point of not being aware of anything but that. Despite my love of cardamom, this is not something I would drink again, or recommend. Perhaps I’ll use the remainder for baking into a chocolate cake.

Filled up the bottom of the gai wan with leaf. Delicious roasted, toasted aromatics.

First steep without a wash is very soft and sweet, a little floral but also bread-like. Delicate, and yet decadent.

Second steep changed to a more toasted rice kind of quality. Also something else in there, like a sweet seaweed quality. Interesting and good.

Third steep: darker, more pungent (stronger tasting), toasted kind of quality, though still soft in the mouth. It’s a curious starchy, salty, toasted kind of taste. Slight astringency in the background, too. No bitterness at all.

Fourth steep: More of the same, though also starting to flatten out a little bit. Clearer sense of astringency.

Fifth steep: a bit flat to me. Not bad per se, but just a basic ‘spent’ black tea taste.

Overall yummy tea that’s definitely worth drinking multiple times. A 100g bag will last a while when in rotation with other teas as you only need 4-5g for a good session. It’s above average to me, but not great. To me, a lot of gentle black teas start out real strong and fade pretty quickly. It may be worth doing a full teapot or hai cha worth of tea instead of gong fu. I’ll check that out next time.

It smells a lot stronger than it tastes, and there’s something artificial about it, yet I find it goes down easy first thing in the morning, I think because it smells so sweet. I use one teabag in my giant travel mug, so it’s very dilute. Brewed in a regular-sized mug, the fake flavor is way over the top.

What words come to mind when I think about Kokomo Green… poison? drain cleaner? A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B? Seriously though, this tea was undrinkable both hot and cold. I didn’t like the smell of the dry leaf (which, granted, doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like the brew… I love DT’s Secret Weapon but I never want to smell it again). Brewed, it smelt exactly like perfume meets some sort of cleaning product and it just so happened that it tasted that way too. VERY flowery, little fruit. Green tea base created this strange vegetal background flavour. I had to dump the cup after drinking about half. It took me 2 hours to get the smell away from me, my kitchen and my steeper.

It’s a shame that you can’t rate teas in the negative.

I like the black version version better which is surprising because I drink green tea more often than black. I think its the spices clashing with the green. My brother and mother loves it, but it’s only okay for me.

This is my first real experience with oolong. I know I have had this type of tea before in different Chinese restaurants and bought it bagged. But this is the first experience where I know I am having it!
I received an ample sample of this tea from wombatgirl. It’s pretty bold, caramel and fall in a cup. One of my favorite Chinese restaurants in Chicago wouldn’t tell me the brand of tea they used. Looks like I don’t need them.

The 2nd infusion is very very weak. I don’t think this tea in multiple infusions, which is a shame. Still, a nice dark brew.

This tea gives off the smell of buttery popcorn, but has a very intricate flavor that has even a hint of apples. My little brothers (ages 11 and 9) happen to be big fans of this one.

I LOVE this one! It did not start as love at first sip, but I have learned to adore it made as a matcha lemonade. It recently went on sale and I ordered 750g of it for fear of running out! I really wished that they would not retire so many teas.

I love drinking this when I feel like something sweet, minus the calories :) I brew it in a small kettle over the stove on low heat with Bonsoy and 1-2 teaspoons of honey (and a dash of condensed milk if I’m feeling naughty :D) I guess you could call this the “mocha” version of chai tea? I love how it actually uses cacao husks, cacao beans and also oolong tea as its base! A must have sweet, creamy treat :))

I work at *bux and we have this tea. Never tried it before because I’ve always been a bit of a caffeine addict so I had been slow to try the different non caffeinated tea options Tazo has. I made some and put it in Ice, it’s not that it’s bad. The taste is great. It just has this awkward apple cinnamon bite aftertaste that’s just too harsh. I couldn’t finish it. If your looking to a tea at starbuck’s go with Zen, Awake or Refresh instead if I were you. If you’re looking for a Rooibos tea, there are probably a lot better options.

Subtle notes of toasted barley, some honey, fresh hay, fresh mowed summer grass. But as expected, palate is the star. Very creamy, full, satisfying and mouth coating.

I’m just putting this note here as a place holder to remind myself that I’ve had this tea. I love Tie Guan Yins and I remember that I loved this one too, but I had it too long ago to be able to write anything specific. Sorry guys!

Most of my lovely samples from Just Organic tea have been waiting patiently for my return from travel and then a bit more for life to be sane enough to actually sit and enjoy my tea. The dry tea in its little sample bag must be scented from the other samples as it smells like incense. I’ve eaten a lot of “holy basil” in curries and like it a lot with fish but never drunk it. And after 5 minutes brewing the whole sample in 8 oz of 195 degree water the incense is gone it smells of basil and red clover. The taste also has hints of the clover sweetness. Its clearing the fumes and confusion from my mind with a gentle warm summer breeze. The flavor is a bit sweet and a bit buttery or maybe that’s me remembering the village in Nepal where they poured ghee offerings on their tulsi bush? Its also soothing to the stomach and head! I will try this one again although I often dont’ like straight herbals this one is differnet it doesn’t taste like grass!