15695 Tasting Notes
Gongfu!
Sipping down one of these cute minis on this grey and rainy late afternoon!! It’s a perfect little tea session with syrupy floral notes of Spring flowers like orchid, lilacs, & peony and faintly fruity cane sugar top notes and lingering back end sweetness adding to the fresh, peaceful atmosphere of the day. I’ve got a window cracked and I can smell the petrichor of the green space across the road mixing into with the flagrant sweet notes of this session and it just makes me feel grounded!
Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CR7QctnhazC/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8G6IGlS3vU&ab_channel=Last.fm
Sipdown (1408)!
So much nope in a mug. As expected this was as awful as the rest of the matchas from this company – just a terrible stevia bomb of cloying sweetness in the most awful sort of way. It also didn’t taste like blueberry at all, which made it more disappointing because at least some of the other flavours had hints of what they were supposed to be.
Cold Brew!
Hmm – this is a drinkable cold brew but it’s much less pleasant than the hot cup. The delicious and very unique sweet clementine note is still present but there’s a substantial amount more of grassy/marine sencha coming through and it’s ruining the brew for me. Now, I know that I shouldn’t be surprised that a tea named Sencha Clementine tastes like sencha… I just wish it tasted less like sencha.
Back to drinking this one hot going forward.
Sipdown (1409)!
Finished this one last weekend as a Western steeped mug of tea – a forgotten and oversteeped one, unfortunately. It was still drinkable despite the very extended steep time. Verrrryyyy full bodied with some astringency to the sips. Taste was rich though – smoked dark chocolate, malt, leather, sweet potato, and just a bit of red fruit. I wish I’d been more careful steeping so I would have tasted the nuances a bit more, but still a pretty pleasant send off for this bad boy.
Sipdown (1410)!
Finished off this last dragonball/mini steeped Grandpa style over the course of two days. Pleasantly soft and smooth, this was a nice sipdown but probably not a shou that I’ll be jumping to reorder any time soon. Personally, I much preferred Camphornought from this cluster of releases, though I’d recommend checking this out if you’re not a fan of more woody/camphor heavy shou or want a predictable daily drinker
Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CR4v6y_Bi9Z/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-itZVX-SUkI&ab_channel=cavetown
Short tasting note – I’ll write a fuller one with a future tasting I’m sure. This pandan chai is super unique; the blend of warming spices is perfectly balanced with the silky and creamy flavour of the pandan! Pandan often reminds me of coconut or sticky rice, so a total match made in heaven for this style of Chai.
Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/CR2MljfBzCb/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F01hoI2PlTY&ab_channel=ScotchMist
A bunch of us at the office ordered bubble tea as an end of the week treat and I decided to use it as a chance to try another of Boba Boba’s new summer menu items.
Honeydew isn’t really a weird “bubble tea” flavour – most places will offer one as part of their milk tea menu, generally prepared from a sweet candy-like honeydew powder. This is really different from that style of honeydew though – it has the same almost watery sweet note of somewhat over ripe honeydew with enough of that sort of sharp and vegetal green note of the rind coming through. It’s very, very clearly actual honeydew juice that’s been used in the beverage prep and not an instant powder/syrup.
It does taste good, but it also tastes kind of weird!? Like, it’s sort of too authentic. I find it not really meshing very cohesively with the milky base of the bubble tea, and while it’s certainly more realistic/better quality than a honeydew bubble tea powder I find myself conditioned to be more used to and expecting the artificial candy honeydew taste.
I’ll finish it, and appreciate how beautifully natural the honeydew flavour is, but it’s just a bit too “uncanny valley” for me to want to order it again.
Sipped on this one as my morning cuppa – I’m actually getting much closer to a sipdown than I thought I was! It was nice and brisk with a strong malty tannic black tea note coupled with a more “candy style” strawberry flavour. I actually liked the balance; I felt like it could have easily comes off as cloying were it not for the body and faint astringency of the black tea to keep everything in check.
This was the first cup of tea I made after getting my tooth fixed last week and this was also the proper first cup of tea I had steeped in probably around four days. I will absolutely have to make it again because I don’t remember a lot of the flavour – I was very tired following that appointment and also overcome with emotion from the combination of no longer being in pain and also getting to drink hot tea for the first time in a while. Like, “tearing up as I sipped the tea” level of emotion. It tasted so, soooo good but I don’t know if that’s because it actually was that good or if it’s because I had gone so long without a nice cuppa…
Flavors: Cinnamon, Fruit Punch, Hibiscus, Lemongrass
Started my morning with a mug of this tea yesterday – it was a good pick because I got to enjoy something energizing and fruity but it was also pretty mellow and soft. Kind of a creamy coconut crossed with coconut water type of flavour, with the fresher green yerba mate and some hints of sweet pineapple. Light to medium flavour and round, coating body. Yummy!
