sophistre

Bring on the carcinogens!

I love smoky tea. I really do. I love its moodiness and atmosphere.

When Auggy — through whose generosity I’m able to have this tea today — mentioned that she thought she might’ve zealously overpacked the tea in an effort to keep everything from smelling like Bohea, I was surprised; the only Bohea I have in my cabinet is certainly a very mildly smoky tea. I would debate its ability to contaminate other leaves too badly. Since I’d only just had my Bohea yesterday, I thought this would be a good place to start, since I’d be fresh for comparing the two.

I unwrapped the foil packet enclosing the plastic baggie and was hit with a wave of that familiar lapsang scent. The smell is quite strong! Not daunting for me, because…well, I love lapsang — as long as it avoids becoming acrid and tarry.

This one assuredly does. Freshly steeped, you can tell that the tea will be more mild than the scent of the dry leaves might suggest, but the tea doesn’t get ‘watery’ underneath the smoke, which is lovely. It brewed to a pretty golden-amber color. There is no astringency, but the tea feels rich and a little bit sweet when it sits on your tongue. After you swallow, the richness comes forward with the definite taste of wood — I assume that this is the oak mentioned in the description, as it’s more shadowy and less sap-like than some of the distinctly pine-like lapsangs I’ve tasted previously. It reminds me very much of visits to various reenactment villages along the New England coast on summer vacations with my family — Williamsburg particularly. There is something of the antique Colonial kitchen to the taste and the smell that makes me crave cured ham and apple cider.

Unrelated note, I think my ratings need overhauling again. Alas!

Also: I think I may have missed several HUNDRED tasting notes since my stepsis and mom came up to visit me a week ago. I will try to go through them, but am bound to miss a few. Apologies in advance!

Hello, steepsterites!

I’m just getting back into the swing of things after a week of playing around town with my mother and stepsister, who were visiting. It was a wonderful, busy, walking-intensive, eating-intensive time, but it completely prevented me from drinking tea, so I am returning to this weird little hobby of mine with glee…and on a crazy note!

This morning, I was SURE that I had found another distributor for Dawn.

I got an order from Tao of Tea a few days ago that I hadn’t been able to tap into. There were teas in there that I was more interested in than this one (I couldn’t even really remember what this one was when I saw the name) but when I opened the package to sniff it and was hit with an intense whiff of dark cocoa, I had to switch things up.

In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I may (and almost definitely have), in my excitement, have screwed this cup up. I was so convinced from the smell that this was a black tea that I dumped 205 degree water on it without hesitation, only to discover in looking it up again that it’s an oolong…180-200 by their recommendations, yerk. An oolong from a spot twenty miles from Darjeeling, or so it would seem.

Once brewed, the notes that I associate with darker oolongs are more present. There’s a muted and slightly earthy cedar smell mixed in with the cocoa, along with the hash-like scent that I remember picking up in such profusion from Dawn. It all blends together to create something like a very good, sweet cup of black coffee — not the Maxwell House stuff, not the Starbucks stuff, but more like the little single-estate South American coffees I remember grabbing at Whole Foods and grinding myself (names sadly forgotten; it has been ages since I had coffee last).

It produces a lighter, brighter cup than Dawn — no surprises there — but the flavors involved are so very similar that I think anybody grieving the disappearance of The Simple Leaf could do worse than to secure themselves a cup of this oolong. To me, it waffles between being very obviously a darker oolong with all of those rich, complex flavors, and my memory of Dawn, with its intense cocoa personality.

Might have to make a cup of Dawn after this to compare.

Trying this one again. In the mood for a yunnan, and I’m all out of my Emperor’s Gold, which makes me sad.

I upped the leaf by a bit, decreased the steeping time, and it seems to have helped, but won’t turn this one into a re-order. It’s still watery underneath, and lacks the sweet-potato-honey sweetness that I associate with my favorite yunnans. That means the peppery taste is foremost, and while that wouldn’t be bad if the tea had depth, it lacks some depth, and the tea seems very shallow. With more leaf it’s a little bit more dynamic and definitely drinkable (easily so, as it isn’t very rich), but not by enough to make this a go-to yunnan for me. Bumping the rating accordingly.

Guessing on the temp here, since I was impatient and added a bit of cooler water to my cup, then the 190 from the Zoji, and then submerged the leaves. Awfully imprecise of me, but this isn’t the first time I’ve had this despite the utter lack of tasting notes, so I feel qualified (finally) to talk about it.

Previously, the Coconut Pouchong from Golden Moon was the only pouchong I’d had, and it rapidly became one of my very favorite teas. I’d thought that the coconut milk was lending that pouchong the occasional scent of gardenia, but I’m getting it off of this cup too, so I’m wondering if it might not be a quality of pouchong? I should really go out of my way to get an exceptional unflavored pouchong to try.

The smell of the dry leaves echoes almost exactly the aroma and taste of the tea. It’s a creamy, soft, buttery, floral vanilla citrus, a bit dreamsicle-ish, but not tart at all — more rounded. My friend’s father used to have a mandarin orange tree when I was a little girl living down south. Our family always leaned toward bigger oranges and tart tangerines (which I still love to this day) — I remember thinking that mandarin oranges were watery and weak. Getting older, I can certainly appreciate their velvety subtlety more than I did when I was a kid.

Neither ‘pouchong’ nor ‘orange’ typically make me think, ‘I want to try this with milk!’, but with this tea I almost might. Maybe it’s the dreamsicle resonance. I usually find green oolongs unable to be iced without losing a lot of their flavor…but again, grown-up dreamsicle!

Definitely digging this one. It can stay.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in quite this position with a tea before. Are you ready for this, Steepsterpeeps?

This tea is pretty good. The dry leaves smell very fruity (they’re dark and I think saturated with something, which leads me to believe it’s artificial flavoring), and the steeped tea smells wonderfully creamy in addition to smelling like blueberry. The ‘blueberry’ in question smells a lot like a blueberry cereal bar — maybe nutrigrain? — which I kind of like. It’s pretty light across the board, and just sweet enough to be satisfying.

But…

It tasted familiar to me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I don’t have any blueberry tea!

Then I realized that the blueberry quality of this tea is echoed in the Golden Spring I have and love…which is not a flavored black. Golden Spring is a normal black that just happens to be one of the most savory umami-filled teas I’ve ever had (since I don’t drink many greens, I suppose), and it may have caused this very tasty blueberry tea to get bumped down a few notches. This tea’s blueberry flavor reminds me of Golden Spring, but makes me miss the brothy, savory fullness of that other tea, and its lack of astringency. Comparing the two — as my palate inevitably must — this one tastes somewhat flat.

Just another one of those situations where a personal rating scale doesn’t really match up with an ‘overall quality’ scale. This wouldn’t jump the hurdle of 71 for the former…but I would still recommend it to anybody looking for a tasty blueberry tea.

Anybody to read my tasting notes knows that flavored teas are a pretty touch-and-go thing for me. I’m very picky about the authenticity and strength of things; it doesn’t take much to turn me off of them. 52teas.com scared the bejeebers out of me when I first saw it, but I had pretty resounding success with quite a few blends from that site, and I suppose I’m getting more adventurous, because the recent Select deal saw me taking the opportunity to order EIGHT bags from Frank on the cheap — stuff I thought I might not otherwise get, just to try it. Plus, it’s always nice to support a small business owner!

I didn’t realize zoomdweebies was such a huge site, either, until I went poking around. Gonna have to explore that more later for sure!

Reading tasting notes about Frank’s tea always makes me curious about shelf dates. Hey Frank! If you’re ever in the mood (for whatever crazy reason) to give yourself even more work, some blended-on dates might be handy.

The reason I mention this is because I think the flavor profile of these flavored, blended teas probably shifts across a spectrum the longer they sit on the shelf. Some of the tasting notes for this, people mentioned smelling butter when they opened it, or cinnamon. I got neither — the dry leaf smelled pretty much exclusively like raisins, and raisin seems pretty likely to increase its presence over time. I worried it would be like the raisin oolong (which I have, and which is actually a decent tea — it sets out to accomplish ‘raisin tea’ and achieves it with flying colors, it’s just a flavor that I, personally, tend to want only intermittently).

The cup as it’s steeping smells more like what I was hoping for — still mostly raisin, but there’s a nice shot of some spicy cinnamon in there to flesh things out now, too. Mmm, yes. The longer it sits the more I like the way it smells!

I’ve noticed that Frank’s black teas have a mild astringency that I might not care for in a plain leaf tea, but which really works to the benefit of the flavored teas I’ve tried. It seems to tighten up the flavors a little bit, at least for me — make them seem a bit more crisp.

Now that things have cooled off, I can state with authority that you ought to let the cup cool a bit. The flavors have come into line, everything seems to have smoothed out and gotten more balanced. Really a big fan of the smell coming out of my cup.

So glad I ordered this one. :) It’ll probably disappear fast!

On to the next one!

Hooray for my Art of Tea order coming in!

What I really want to try is the Mandarin Silk oolong (the aroma coming out of the tin is seriously to die for), but my Zojirushi was set to 208 and I’d just had two cups of tea this morning, so I thought I’m probably caffeinated enough as it is, and should probably wait a little bit. Might as well have some of this, right?

I’d wanted to try this since ages ago, when teaplz and Takgoti were ranting and raving about it…but then I ordered this Coco-Loco rooibos from SerendipiTea (it seemed so promising! Many kinds of chocolate! Mmmm!) and…well, scared myself away from rooibos. It had a faint taste of…er…bile. Seriously. :( And given that being nauseous/throwing up/being around people who are throwing up/encountering the odor of any puddles left behind by people who have thrown up/etc. may rank at the top of my very short OMG Can’t Handle It list, my response was a pretty visceral ‘no way, nope, no thanks, never in a million years, thanks for playing, peace out’.

This actually smells pretty good, so I am wary but tentatively hopeful. The scent of it is quite fruity, and actually reminds me of The Cracker Barrel for no immediately-recognizable reason. It’s something to do with the spiced-and-stewed-sweet-fruit thing, I suppose, that makes me think ‘southern country kitchen’.

It’s still VERY hot, but…first impressions are…pretty good, actually. I think I can locate the flavor of the rooibos that sent me running for the hills, but it’s different here, more nutty-woody than woody-sour, and the nice thing is that I don’t have to find it if I don’t want to. I can concentrate as I exhale and get it, but if I don’t care for it…why would I do that?

As the cup is cooling, that woody aspect is a little bit ‘rounder’ in flavor, if that makes any sense — more expansive but also softer, and pretty well tied to the pear flavor, which is strong and delicious. I keep finding myself holding the tea for a moment in my mouth, so I suppose my fear that the cup would lose its ability to cover the rooibos up as it cooled must have been needless!

I really like this. I’m not sure that I would want it every night, but I really have been remiss in seeking out caffeine-free alternatives to tea for the evening, and this one is pretty tasty. The flavor is almost totally stewed/baked pear, but after you swallow you get a tangible, almost tactile sweetness on your tongue that is definitely caramel, though it’s a very gentle sweetness, not cloying or sticky or astringent at all.

Man, I’m so relieved. I was totally not prepared for this to be bile in a can all over again! I think I can totally find a place for this in my cupboard on the reg.

Today did not get off to a good start, Steepsterites.

I set my alarm for 8am so that I could be up in time to welcome my couch, lovingly, when it was delivered ‘sometime between 10 and 2pm’. Showered. Dressed. Went downstairs to get tip money for the guys. Passing the front desk, the concierge says: “Sorry you missed your furniture delivery!”

?!?!

But they told me 10 and 2, I exclaim, flailing and looking (I am sure) generally aghast. I’m early!

“No, they were here yesterday,” he says.

Of course, yesterday I was out running errands and incommunicado, because I wanted to be sure my house was perfectly in order and prepared for my couch, for which I have been waiting for six months.

Sigh.

So instead of getting tip money at the market around the corner, I bought a chocolate toffee bar. Eff it, I tell you. Eff it all and give me candy.

I needed a tea that would stand up to a Skor bar. Earl Grey was the tea that got me interested in better quality (and loose) leaf. I love it, but I’ve strayed away from the perfumey stuff in recent months. Still, it sounded capable of cutting through the candy bar, and I’ve had this tin in my cupboard, untouched, for everrrrrr.

It’s an extremely bergamot-y tea. The scent of it is high and forward, but not bitter; there are times when Earl Grey’s bergamot tastes more floral to me than citrusy, but this cup is very much in the citrus end of the spectrum — possibly more than any I can recall. For all that it’s a very smooth cup, with no astringency even after four minutes in boiling-hot water. I think I’d enjoy it with a bit of milk and sugar (which is how I usually prefer my Earl Grey — I skipped it today because I don’t like to first rate a tea with additives).

It’s also not bad with the candy bar, though I think for the other half, I might switch things up and go with some Dawn.

There is absolutely 100% no way that I should be drinking anything with caffeine in it at this time of night, but I could not help myself. I had a super-rich dinner of pasta with Lambrusco di Sorbara (I was wining and dining myself — tonight it was me, a bottle of sparkling wine, a carbohydrate overdose, and my writing!)…and…

I just wanted this.

The clean, fresh, earthy pu’erh piping hot sticky rice-ness of it sounded like the perfect counterpoint to all of that acidic bolognese and vino.

I think in my haste to sip it, I may have burned part of my tongue. >.<

But it’s still very nice. I wasn’t sure about buying the cannister of this when I got it, but I’m definitely not regretting it now. There’s really no other tea in my cupboard that can take its place (though I’d sure like to explore some — yum!).

I find that I can’t really begin to get the writing engine turned over in the morning until I’ve had a cup of black tea, with all of the brain-jolting caffeine it contains…but I’ve also found that my body is happier if I ease into my day with something gentler than that. Oolongs and whites have become my default, but oolongs particularly: they are rich enough that I often feel I’ve eaten breakfast.

Among the many kinds of oolong in all of their glorious variety, Ali Shan is one of the most rewardingly aromatic. I could sit (and have sat) for full minutes with my nose buried in the cup, inhaling the way they smell.

This one I got as a one ounce sample from Tao of Tea (somewhat expensive compared to their other teas at 7.25 an ounce! Thank goodness for their frequent buyer program). I stick pretty closely to a 1tsp/8oz. setup, and always use my 16oz cup; I got to have plenty of cups of this — it resteeps well even at that quantity of water. Obviously I am lazy — I never once wrote a tasting note.

I don’t think that this shatters the mold in terms of the type of tea that it is, but it is a very good Ali Shan. I prefer this tea to the Four Seasons I have (which is comparable as a green oolong, if not necessarily exactly the same). You have a light honey scent, with a delicious, welcoming depth of flavor (I tend to think of the smell of baked potato, but I’m not sure that’s completely accurate — still, something about it says ‘starch’ to me), and a pleasant floral high end.

I should really spend more time trying more Ali Shan.

I know I’ve had this one before, but for whatever reason, I didn’t log it. I didn’t even have it in my cupboard. Lazy sophistre!

Darjeelings are probably the type of black tea that I should focus on next in terms of training my palate. I can compare Assams and Keemuns without difficulty, Lapsangs are no trouble, but my memories of Darjeeling teas usually wind up blending together, such that I have a difficult time developing clear favorites. Given how much I’ve liked the muscat notes in some other teas, though, I think we should get along splendidly.

The cup brews to a lovely bright golden color that reminds me of hay in the sun…which is not a bad thing, as the flavor sort of makes me think of sweet hay with a very mild muscat, not strong enough to be tart the way it sometimes can be. When the cup was hotter (usually the time when the muscat tartness is strongest) it seemed almost like a citrusy note, but has since smoothed out immensely. Every now and then I get a glimpse of something almost spicy, but it’s very faint. It’s a very smooth cup, not astringent at all, and quite light. A nice way to inform my stomach that we’re awake and about to begin the Assamica assault so that we can get the caffeine bomb we need in order to write proper English sentences!

Just guesstimating on my steep time, today. 2 teaspoons in 16oz.

A rather tasty Yunnan. The leaves are soft, long, light, and a pretty yellow color. The resulting brew is a little bit opaque, not crystal clear (but not ‘cloudy’ either), with an orange-amber color and a sweet, roasty Yunnan smell.

Someone else said ‘floral honey and apricots’, and I agree. Get the right amount of leaf and the right steep time, and it’s really very tasty…sweet after you swallow, and the sweetness lingers; the apricot flavor is separate but very, very prominent.

Another tasting note mentioned astringency on the finish, and I find that this varies for me…sometimes I have it, sometimes I don’t. More leaf and a shorter steep time tends to be helpful.

Wasn’t certain about this one when I plucked it from my cupboard at random this morning, but I’m glad I had it, now!

Yet another tea I’ve had in my cabinet and enjoyed for a while, but didn’t seem to have listed in my cupboard, or written a tasting note for. I’m so very lazy.

It brews up to a lovely reddish amber-gold, and the smell is sweet, sweet, sweet — that darker, chewy sweetness of sweet potato, with a strong backbone of malt.

In my experience, Golden Monkey is usually pretty easy to oversteep, going from bready malty sweet-potato loaf awesome to bitter and harsh in thirty seconds flat, but there isn’t a hint of that in my cup today. Just smooth, darkly sweet tea goodness.

So, so frustrated today, steepsterites.

I think I may have stress-fractured my tibia.

It’s not a horrific sort of break. It’s pretty common, actually, as I understand it…but it hurts, and if it really is a stress-fracture, it’s probably going to mean that I can’t run for the next few months…and since I’m halfway through this Couch to 5K program, that would be a huge, huge setback. I have all of this energy and motivation to run (finally!)…

…and now maybe I can’t.

ARGH

Today was a comfort tea day.

Usually chai is my comfort tea, but since I got most of a run in before realizing that, hey, my leg really was getting worse and worse and I probably ought to stop, the last thing I wanted was hot milk in my system.

I can’t believe I’m almost out of this tea. I bought a BIG bag of the coconut pouchong from Golden Moon, and I’m finally getting down to the very last of what I have. I think I ought to polish it off; it’s breaking up and the leaves are extremely dry. I heaped an extra half of a teaspoon in and was too impatient to wait for the water temp to drop to 175, and it’s still awesome. Coconut and buttery and smooth and sweet, with just a little bit of oolong greenery peeking through. The scent and flavor of this tea still waffle back and forth between straight coconut and coconut-masquerading-as-gardenia to me, and I like it.

Hadn’t had this one in a while. Going to have to order more when this is gone. It has a permanent spot in my cupboard.

Backlogging from yesterday.

A rather good ceylon. I thought I’d written a tasting note for this one before, but I can’t find one. Ahwell. It’s very much like Sinharaja — smells of berries in the dry leaf and on the steep, has a bit of the molasses malt thing going on that tends to remind me of an Assam. I suppose I prefer Ceylons that do.

Strangest thing, though…as I was steeping this, I kept smelling pepper. Black pepper, of the sort that comes in shakers. It wasn’t just a freak accident, either; I didn’t have to hunt for the smell…it kept hitting me as it wafted out of the steaming cup. Weird.

So. Good.

I really like this flavor profile.

It reminds me very much of Royal Garland, the ‘white oolong’ (okay, my term for it, but it’s actually fairly accurate, as it turns out) from Samovar that I adore. The leaves look very different, of course, as they’re not white buds processed as oolong; I assume they’re leaves…they lack the fuzzy yarn look of the Royal Garland.

It has that sweet, fruity, tropically awesome taste though, and the aroma is so juicy and inviting. Roasted pineapple and plantains, nectarines, a bit of darjeeling-esque muscatel that doesn’t seem as sharp or bitter, no astringency. I loved this assembly of flavors in the Garland, and I loved it (even faint as it was) in the Tankha I bought, and it’s no surprise that I love it here.

The description suggests very little leaf and longer steeping times, but based on Ricky’s tasting notes for Phoenix Oolong and his experiences with finicky leaves, I decided to err on the side of caution and use more leaf at a very short steep time. Thirty seconds seems like hardly enough time to steep tea leaves to me — I’m so used to black teas — but the resulting cup doesn’t lack for flavor in the least.

I’m very much looking forward to playing with this one.

This is a very, very strange experience.

Liquid sticky rice!

Reading the other tasting notes, I decided to cut my steep time WAY down, and start off by dipping the rinsed nest in the tea for only thirty seconds before giving it a try. I did return it to the hot water for another 15 or so when the water was so colorless (which is a weird state of being for a pu’erh in my mind, since I’ve only had the dark pu’erh before).

The flavor is pretty markedly ‘rice’ from beginning to end. There’s definitely a ‘green’ flavor here, but not bitter or astringent, so I think Auggy’s right — 30 and 45 seconds are the sweet spot; the longer steep times in a few other tasting notes recorded that the tea was bitter, and I don’t have any bitterness in my cup at all.

Interestingly, the more the tea cooled, the more I was able to detect cousin flavors between this tea and a darker pu’erh. I could be making that up in my head, but…I don’t think so. It’s a flavor at the back of the tongue more than anything, but it’s pleasant and goes quite well with the rice.

When I opened the tin of this, I was intrigued by the smell. Smoke. Not as intense as a lapsang, but more obvious than most Keemuns I’ve tried. The other person to write a tasting note about it compared it to Bohea, and I think that’s a pretty apt comparison, actually.

I was a little bit concerned about the amount/quality of the smoke scent when I steeped it. It seemed vaguely ash-tray to me. I detest the smell of cigarette smoke, so making that mental connection was going to be a very, very bad thing. I had to determinedly tell myself that it wasn’t ash-tray, it was just smoky tea…

The smell is still a little bit worrisome (to me), but the taste is really lovely. It brews to a light amber, and now that it’s cooler the taste is a bit bready and easily the sweetest of any smoke-heavy tea that I’ve tried. The sweetness really blossoms on your palate after you swallow, and sticks around. It’s sort of making my mouth water, actually.

Absolutely delicious! Set the rating for this one at 87 or so, but I think the sweet flavor will merit pushing the rating upward.

Sometimes my life gets so distracted and busy that I forget I ordered tea, and when it arrives, I feel like I just got presents. Today was one of those days. Stuff from the Tao of Tea and, coincidentally, the Sticky Rice Tuo-Cha from today’s Select company. That’s probably worth investigating before the Select ends! In the meantime:

What an interesting Assam.

When I think ‘golden tips’, I think Golden Spring, those amazing, delicious, fluffy spirals of black and bright gold sitting in a can on my kitchen counter. That’s sort of what I expected when I opened this can, but alas, such was not to be the case…the processing for an Assam produces the same very dark and brittle tea-splinters as usual, though there’s no difficulty in seeing the tips, they just aren’t as dramatic as I (erroneously) anticipated.

The smell of the dry leaf reminded me a great deal of figs. Steeped, the tea has that same figgy, prune-y, raisin-y quality that most Assams have, malted but somehow lighter than the other Assams in my cabinet. I feel as though the tea is missing a ‘bottom end’, if that makes any sense, or has less of one than the extremely punchy teas I’m used to now…which may just be a factor of this tea’s lack of astringency. It has a very mild bitterness (I may need to reduce my steep time from 3 1/2 minutes), but that bitterness isn’t astringent at all — this is a very smooth cup.

As it cools, there’s more sweetness lingering at the end of the sip, which I like.

All in all, it’s a tasty Assam and a bit lighter than what I’m accustomed to drinking, but it has a nice aftertaste without the mouth-drying qualities of the stiff Assams I cling to for dear life in the morning, and I think it will make an excellent option for my afternoons.

Edit: The tepid, room-temperature tea — half an inch — left in the bottom of my cup had the most incredible scent of liquid turbinado sugar…a sweetness that was, of course, not really reflected in the tea, but…yum.

This is a very good quality jasmine green.

I feel churlish giving it a score that doesn’t reflect the score I think someone who enjoys both jasmine and green teas might give it, but the fact remains that green teas are a sporadic indulgence for me at best, and floral teas are equally a matter of mood and whim, and the combination of the two together will never be a staple in my cupboard.

This is among the stronger jasmine teas I’ve tried. The tea that it produces is slightly cloudy (or at least not crystal clear); there’s a pleasant sweetness there, but also the sort of vegetal astringency that tends to be one of the reasons I lean toward green oolongs rather than purely green teas for a lighter cup. The jasmine flavor doesn’t seem to be in the least bit artificial, and the smell of the dry tea leaves is absolutely lovely.

To me, though, it’s like having a mouth full of perfume. This is absolutely in no way a drawback in terms of what the tea sets out to accomplish…but one really ought to enjoy jasmine to drink this tea. It is unrelentingly jasmine-y.

The very last thing that I should be doing right now is drinking tea. I have had a tremendously difficult time sleeping the last few nights, and this is not going to help. It wouldn’t be so bad for me if I were capable of writing creatively when my schedule gets bent out of joint, but it seems to knock the rest of me from kilter as well…but it’s late, I’m sore and headache-ridden, malcontent about another late night. I need to snuggle some tea, and this has been lying around and tempting me.

What a very strange oolong.

First, the leaves.

They don’t look like any oolong leaves I have ever seen before. I will grant you that I am not the most experienced tea-drinker in the world and that there are probably many varieties of oolong that I have yet to try, but these leaves look — I am being entirely literal in my description — like something I might have raked up in the yard in autumn. Not dirty or grungy, mind you — like clean, glossy, well-dried autumn leaves – - but nevertheless very much like that, in many shades of brown, a bit broken, not particularly curled or rolled. They smell wonderful and distinctly oolong-y, more on the green end of the spectrum than otherwise.

The package recommends brewing at 208 for 3 minutes. I don’t usually brew my oolongs with water this hot, but I imagine that Eva knows best, so I followed the instructions. The resulting cup of tea is not, in fact, a light yellow-green as described above, but an amber that could easily have resulted from a very timid Ceylon. As it was initially brewing it smelled very much like a green, floral oolong; those scents have deepened quite a bit to something more earthy, as though the tea is actually really somewhere between a dark oolong and a green one.

The other tasting note’s reference to balsam seems appropos. I’m not sure if it’s balsam or cedar, or the pine in the description, but there’s definitely a forest-y element here. The end of the sip is sweet on the edges of my tongue, and astringent in the center, but the astringency isn’t lingering. It seems almost tart, but I’m not sure that it is. The mouthfeel is full-bodied.

My description is completely inadequate. The tea does not push an overwhelming amount of flavor onto you — I was afraid it was a bit underwhelming — but what flavors are there to be sensed are many and varied, and trying to pin down the elements individually is proving very difficult for me. A complex, unusual oolong for me. Citrus! No, floral! No, pine! No, it smells like butter!

Weird.

I would like to try it at 175 in order to see if that changes things, but I’m pretty sure that I would be reckless if I had another 16oz cup of tea this late (alright, more reckless), so that is an experiment that will probably have to wait for the morning. Leaving the rating off for now, but it would be set somewhere in green-happy territory, I think.

I’ve been SO EXCITED to get this order in.

The recommendations have been so glowing around here that it has been hard not to be curious. What held me back for so long, you ask? Not my overflowing tea cupboard (I will let it take over my counter, and don’t care in the least), but my lack of a check book. By the time I finally wrote Eva Lee to inquire as to whether or not her company could take a debit card (they can!), she was sold clean out of the Makai Black in the Assamica varietal, which is (she told me) the tea that all of you lovely steepsterites have been giving such high marks of late. They won’t be harvesting more of that until the fall.

She informed me that she did have the Sinensis varietal on hand, however, and could send it out immediately. How could I not take her up on that? I ordered a few bags of that and one of the Mauka Oolong to try, and spent the last week buzzing around wishing my tea could be teleported here instantly.

The leaves are unusual. They’re long, but not quite as wide as the ones in the picture (to be expected, given the difference in the size of the leaves between the varietals) and much more…squiggly. I have no other word for it. The liquor produced is much lighter (at three minutes)…but because the leaves are so…squiggly…and because I have no scale, I hesitate to say that this is absolute fact, since my estimates could have been off on the quantity of leaf.

How should I describe what I’m tasting? It’s difficult to sort out. I don’t know that I can recall what barley on its own is like, which may be an obstacle to writing a proper review. The comparison to roasted sweet potatoes is instantly identifiable, but there’s something in the aroma that is…more than that. I thought about it for a long time before deciding that it reminds me a little of the smell of miso soup…

Or maybe it’s soba…

Or maybe it’s both.

My second steep — something I don’t usually try with blacks save for the first time I have them, just to see if it works — the leaves literally inflated to fill my little wire basket infuser (because, yes, I broke my glass one, sadface). They fattened up, saturated, unfolded to fill every last bit of space like they had pretensions toward being oolong leaves. I have to think that a longer steep time than 3 minutes for the first infusion would produce a different cup than the one I had, therefore, and am eager to try it…or upping the leaf quantity, one or the other, though I’m not sure where I would expect them to fit had I added any more.

This cup is darker than the first. I’m not sure on my steep time, because I was too fascinated by the leaf expansion to pay proper attention, but it smells delicious. The ‘roasted’ part of ‘roasted sweet potatoes’ is much more prevalent now.

Anybody who has the assam varietal who feels like parting with some of it in exchange for some of mine, lemme know. I’m eager to try more of what they have to offer!

Rating is soft for now, cos I left this review sitting all day after getting distracted by other things.

What came over me, that I felt compelled to bump this tea down below the 90 bracket? I think what may have happened is that, in the course of my adventures in the land of sophisticated, complex teas — rare teas; teas with character; teas that cost as much as a nice-but-not-quite-fantastic-pair-of-cute-shoes — I may have begun to feel as though my enjoyment of this tea was merely the lack of a proper tea education. That I had been young, naive and innocent, with stars in my eyes for any teaspoon of leaves that didn’t make me cringe, inexperienced and far too ready to fall for whatever tasty morsel happened to be floating in my infuser.

Well, that’s stupid.

This is good tea.

Honestly I tend to forget that I have it, which may seem to indicate that it isn’t all that good…but when I remember that I have it and open the gigantic tin from Teavana that I dedicated to this tea, the aroma that comes drifting out practically makes my mouth water.

At this point, I have had a ton of black teas. Black tea is my every-single-day-without-fail tea, in its many varieties and iterations, and I think that I can say that I’m well armed to make the assessment that this one is kind of special, infinitely more savory than so many other black teas I’ve tried, with a sugary, raisiny profile and a subtle malt for a bready note. Sipping it right now as I nibble a slice of dried cantaloupe, the world is a blissful place.

The official information up top says that the batches capture the season, which makes me nervous. Would a re-order be as good as what I’ve got in my cabinet?

I think I may have decided that I just can’t rate pu’erh. This is one of those situations in which my rating system just does not hold up to practical use, because pu’erh still freaks me out enough that I can’t give it the rating that it deserves, and yet I like it enough to crave it on occasion, so I know that it’s good.

Strange, yes. Nonsensical, yes. It’s still true.

This is only the second pu’erh I have ever had. The other one in my cabinet (which is nearly gone now, astonishingly) is Samovar’s Maiden’s Ecstasy. I’d call this one — the Tuo-Cha — the milder of the two by far, though I’m not certain as to why that is. I think it seems to lack the degree of depth that the ME has, but it still produces a pitch-black cup of earthy, woody tea.

It’s important to note that it gave me one cup of earthy, woody tea. I admit I’m not certain how long I was supposed to be steeping the nest, but one four-minute steep in my 16oz cup sapped almost all of the color out of the leaves, and a subsequent cup at a longer steep time was so limp and watery that I just poured it out. I suppose with my other little nest I’ll probably cut back on the steep time of the first cup to see if I can stretch the leaves more for another punchy infusion.

The nests are adorable, too. So very very cute.