sophistre

I bought this tea when it was featured as the Select. The first time I tried it, it was not at all what I was wanting, and I didn’t finish the cup — not the tea’s fault, mind you, but mine for having chosen something I was really, really not in the mood for. Today finds me sitting down to write and unable to get my brain to turn over like the engine I need it to be, and what I need is an elegant kick in the backside.

This is working for me today. It brews to a very pretty reddish-orange hue and it smells like sweet potato. The flavor is pure assam — malty black tea with a touch of sweet potato sweetness that reminds me post-sip of molasses, but very faint, meaning this would be a perfect pairing with some sugar in the raw and a touch of cream, though I’ll be drinking it with neither today — it’s smooth enough to get by without additives, despite the mild astringency. It has more astringency than I usually prefer, but not so much as I seem to remember it having had that first time…just more than I get from my current black tea staple, Adagio’s Golden Spring (re: none).

I feel as though I should be waiting for the cup to cool slightly before I post this tasting note, but I’m really enjoying the almost-too-hot burn in the belly. Maybe it’ll be enough to scorch away this head full of cottonballs I seem to be cursed with today.

Crappy weather, check.

Weekend inside, check.

Too much sugar consumed already in the form of homemade hot chocolate, check.

Time for some campfire tea (I think I saw someone else call it ‘lumberjack tea’ at some point — Robert, maybe? — and it made me snicker).

I definitely prefer the sweetness in this to the extremely acrid Samovar version, though I think the Samovar lapstang souchong is better with milk or creamer. Either way…this is the closest I can get to the scent of pine logs full of sweet sap burning in a woodstove in my 18th floor apartment.

(And you know…it actually goes pretty well with spending time revisiting Orzammar…okay, maybe that’s an overdose of nerd even for me.)

The cup of this that I am sipping right now is so good and so full of chocolate flavor that I would, if blindfolded, assume I was drinking hot chocolate. Not even exaggerating.

I went heavy on the blend since I’m nearing the end of the bag — 4 teaspoons in 1 cup of boiling water in a pot on the stove — and I threw in a small (read: very small — one ‘triangle’) piece of actual chocolate (Scharffen Berger 70% dark) once the water was hot enough, along with some turbinado sugar. I topped this with two cups of 2% milk and brought the whole mess back up to steaming-hot, then strained and poured. The result is phenomenal. I definitely like my hot chocolate…I’ve got gourmet and artisan tins of that on the shelf above my tea…but I don’t really care for how drowsy the sugar-bomb of it makes me. The fact that I was able to get pretty close to that kind of indulgence with this tea makes me pretty happy.

Also, on that note, I’m looking for dessert tea recommendations. It seems I’m more prone to getting a sweet tooth when the sky is grey and everything is cold, and since I live in Boston…well, you do the math. ;) Need some alternatives to actually pigging out on junk food!

I’m not really sure how good this particular darjeeling is as compares to other darjeelings, but it was basically exactly what I wanted right now, and it’s really hitting the spot.

So much of the nose of this tea reminds me of the Royal Garland I have from Samovar, despite the fact that I’ve been brewing the latter at 175. I probably would’ve made more mention of that in my Royal Garland note had I more experience with plain darjeeling tea, but there you go…always learning. They both seem to have the same ‘high’ notes, and the differences are largely in the foundation on which those notes rest; in Garland they’re obviously the buttery floral roundness of oolong; here in this cup, they’re less complex, black tea touched by a very subtle reminder of raisins, as with many black teas.

I fully expect that the sweet muscat-y fruity tang that’s foremost when very hot will mellow down to something less tangy and more bready as the cup cools, in just the same way as it did with the garland, but I actually picked this out of the cabinet feeling like I wanted some of that tangy grapeskin taste, so it may not survive quite long enough for the tea’s edges to round themselves off.

There’s a thickness to the tea mid-tongue that reminds that this is assuredly a black tea, and which melts at the end of the sip to whole-mouth shining sweetness.

…man. Nothing like a nosebleed to ruin a good zen moment with a cup of well-chosen tea. Argh. Springtime? You can stop by anytime now, for serious.

Not going to rate this now. I’m going to sit down with a cup of it next to a cup of GM’s lapsang souchong a little bit later and see which comes out on top, because it has been long enough that I’m debating with myself here. Plus…I’m eating this alongside my lunch of Singapore street noodles, which is obviously a strong enough dish to make this more for my own reference than anything else.

The primary difference between this lapsang souchong and the GM version I have is that this one seems to be far more intense in the ‘ash’ or smoke portion of the flavor than the other. Once the cup was brewed, I was surprised at how light it was in color (keep in mind that I choose to brew Samovar’s blacks at two teaspoons for 16 oz. versus the tablespoon that they recommend, just because this is the amount to which I’ve become accustomed with most teas, and usually the saturation of flavor is more than enough for me). The scent was…strong. Strong enough that the smoke aspect was acrid and slightly sharp, and gave me a creeping sensation of scratchy throat. I won’t say that it was unbearable, but I didn’t find it particularly pleasant. The taste seemed to be more mild than GM’s, and less sweet. I enjoy the mildness, but I miss the sweetness.

The good news?

Adding a little bit of fat free half and half completely eliminated the very ashy, sharp-smoke quality from both the flavor and the smell, and resulted in a more mild, balanced, and extremely pleasant cup of campfire tea. It’s the perfect accompaniment to my noodles, and I’m looking forward to having it when my palate is more sensitive so that I can really explore the nuances, because I feel like the flavor of this one has some unlockable depth.

Up at 1am! This schedule thing is not correcting itself, but…

This is still a good morning. I’m jamming out to Passion Pit, I’ve got an idea for a book, and a pre-‘breakfast’ cup of this that seems to have turned into something slightly sweeter on the tip of the tongue than I expected, but not so sweet that it’s the coconut pouchong, which sounded like a bit too much…more a nutty sweet that seems just right for whetting the appetite and helping me feel better disposed toward the idea of cooking eggs and bacon after all.

PS: I don’t think my cats like the Passion Pit. They do not seem to like it when I dance in the kitchen. They especially do not like it when I pick them up to dance with me. Oh well. At least one of us is having a good morning!

I don’t really know where to rate this…so I’m not sure that I should yet. I know that it would be in the green spectrum of things (that’s the good news…does that count as a steepster spoiler?), but I’m not quite sure where.

What a strange, strange experience. I had no problems, you understand, leaping over the hurdle of adjustments required by my first lapsang souchong. I had no trouble diving into chais, no problem trying licorice-white tea when I have a long, long history of disliking licorice, but for whatever reason this tea, this type of tea, has scared the living daylights out of me since the moment I heard about it…and as with most things I find frightening, I’ve found myself simultaneously fascinated.

The pu-erh chai that I tried from Golden Moon did a fairly good job of reinforcing my fears, unfortunately. I knew that was true because the ‘maybe socks’ note that I was getting from the chai was easy to find here in this cup in abundance…but without spices masking the entirety of the flavor profile, and with more depth to explore, this has been easier to convince my taste buds to be mellow about.

I won’t lie — that’s a lot of what this cup has been about, for me. Convincing myself to just relax and not think about it too much. I’m not really sure what it is about pu-erh that makes me so uneasy. One could make the argument that it’s the slightly scary aging methods, but I’m one of those people who has no problem devouring blue cheese or gorgonzola crumbles on salads, so…I don’t think that’s it. I think it might be something to do with mushrooms. This is going to be a huge mental leap, but…

Okay. I love mushrooms. I do. They’re delicious. I make a shallot-sherry-tarragon-mushroom-cream soup that’s to die for. But I’m a really texture-oriented eater, and the little gills under mushroom caps sort of scare me a little. I also grew up down south, and spent a lot of time in Florida, where moist, dark, earthy places were typically filled with all sorts of things you really don’t even want to think about.

So, mental block, yes. Definitely mental block.

The cup of tea itself brews to a beautiful dark color, like the shade of Brazillian cherrywood, only maybe just a little bit darker than that. I didn’t get any fish smell off of the leaves, nor the rinse.

Unfortunately, something came up halfway through sipping through the cup, and I had to focus on other things. I can say for a certainty that I prefer this tea hot to lukewarm…the heat seems to bring the sweetness forward more, and I wanted that sweetness to balance out the other earthier flavors.

So, let me see.

This tea smells a lot like what I imagine it smells like on the inside of a very large, mossy branch of wood that has been lying on rich earth, absorbing rainwater and growing soft and pulpy while the sun bakes on the bark, beneath a thin blanket of damp and gently decaying leaves. It’s very much a ‘forest after a spring rain not long after a thaw’ smell, a heavily organic smell, but the sunny part of this tableau is definitely important, because it represents a mellow sweetness.

Early on in the first few sips, my first thought was, ‘mushrooms and honey’. It isn’t precisely mushrooms, and it is definitely not clearly honey, but that pair of flavors together might resemble this experience a little bit, if the mushrooms were woody enough and the honey was barely-there and of the dark, more raisin-y variety.

I can give myself another mental shift, if I try. Dusty hayloft and barn, replete with baking hay in the heat, leather tack, hot wood, and something faintly animal (which sounds awful, but horses have never smelled bad to me).

A strange cup, but I DID finish it, and I think I could even get to a point where pu-erh really only made me think of pu-erh. I’d be lying to you if I said I was wholly comfortable with it just yet, but there was nothing in this cup I would call bad…it’s just very intense. Very musty, very hoary. The flavors are so low and dark that calling it intense seems misleading, but I definitely stand by my use of the word.

Man.

Reading the lists of flavors that Samovar provided while I anxiously awaited my order’s arrival, I tried to compile some mental understanding of what those combinations would be like together and had the most difficult time. Having now had the tea, I’m still not certain that I can describe quite what it’s like, but I’m going to try.

First of all, the leaves are incredibly fuzzy. I opened my tin eager to get a whiff of the leaves and was surprised by the amount of fluff stuck to the sides of it…there’s a lot. Which makes me happy, for whatever reason. It really looks more like clippings of brown and green-silver yarn than tea leaves.

Second…

I have never had to rinse tea leaves before. I know you’re supposed to for some, and probably there’s something to be said for doing that for some oolongs no matter what, but…I never have. Needless to say, my zojirushi being set to 175 already meant that the little rinse they got was fairly low-temp, and I don’t know if that makes a difference…they recommend boiling. And such a short steep time!…but then I got to thinking…does the 3-minute steep time still hold true for the lower-temp 175 brew vs. the boiling-water brew?

And then I decided it smelled delicious while it was steeping and I didn’t care, because I could just experiment more later and find out. Hoo-ah.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I could never have expected this. To me, this is sort of like someone managed to combine together oolong and white tea, completely bypassing any of the notes I usually associate with green tea in a bizarre leap I wouldn’t have anticipated was possible. We’ve talked a little bit in TNs and comments about green oolong vs. black, but I dub this white oolong. It even has the fluffies floating around the bottom, the nutty nectary sweetness, the…mmm. Even the little bit of tang I sometimes get from whites.

Bready fruit, like plantains — easy to find. Starfruit when very hot (along with something more nutty like peach or apricot), then more bready as it cools, like plantains.

Nutty sweet floral roasted starchy tropical-fruity bliss. I cannot for the life of me find the ‘smoked chocolate’ in here unless I try very, very, very hard, and even then I’m not sure that I’m not just making it up. The cup had more strongly fruity flavors when hot, and some of the edges seem to be rounding off now that I’m at the bottom of the cup and the liquid is tepid. I haven’t tried this at a higher temperature…it sounded good this way, so this is the way I started out…but I imagine it’d be quite tart…more like the skin of a plum than the flesh of it. I’m interested in trying it to see.

I feel as though this is a cup of tea that’s going to provide a lot of flavor revelations the longer I go on drinking it, and that’s pretty exciting. In fact, I think I might have myself some more. Gonna try to resteep first. The short steep time makes me worry that it’s not able to go a second round, but here’s hoping!

This is one seriously strong cup of tea.

The color to which it brews is a brazen reddish-bronze. Sitting on my desk in a clear glass mug, looking down into the bottom from the top, I can almost not even see through the tea…and my cup is sitting on a white napkin on top of a blonde desk.

Trying to describe this one is going to be difficult. It’s a very savory tea, but slightly bitter. I’m not talking about the sort of bitterness that comes from oversteeped black, though I’ll readily admit that after my first sip I wondered if I hadn’t overdone the amount of tea steeped or the steep time (given this one says it can go up to 5 minutes, that seemed unlikely). It’s more like the bitterness you get when you try bittersweet chocolate or high-percentage cacao dark. That bitterness connects to a very notable taste of earth and soil and, in a development that reassures me that my impending confrontation with my fear of pu-erh may not be a total disaster, I like that earthiness. It isn’t a dry earth, it’s a moist and humid and black rich earth…and fortunately, it seems to want to do little more than play foundation for the raisiny sweetness responsible for the tea’s umami deliciousness. Rolling the tea over my tongue, I’m able to get different sensations toward the back and the sides of my tongue, flashes of sweetness or bake-y malt.

There is a slight pinch at the back of the throat that hasn’t decreased as the cup has cooled, and I’m again not sure if that’s my steeping or just the briskness of the cup itself, as this is my first time sitting down with this tea, but it doesn’t seem to want to go away. Not scratchy, not completely scratchy, but pinchy. Just a bit. It’s a very strange finish to have when the flavor profile of the cup is so completely dark and smooth.

I don’t think I would have this every day, but there are certainly mornings where I want a cup of tea that seems like it could dissolve a spoon. This one qualifies. In fact, the longer I sip it, the more I feel as though…

…you know, if tea were chocolate and not tea, then this tea would be the dark chocolate to the milk chocolate of the Golden Spring that I’ve made my staple go-to black tea. They both share the raisin-sugar mouth-watering umami deliciousness, but this tea is darker, bittersweet, earthy, full-bodied, stiff and smooth and the Golden Spring is lighter, brothy, full-bodied and made for downing in mass quantities.

Not sorry that I bought this at all. Looking forward to trying it with milk and sugar for sure…something I think the Golden Spring doesn’t quite hold up to as well as this could.

Not gonna lie…I’m scared of pu-erh.

It may be that I should’ve waited to try this until after whatever uplifting, familiarizing, reassuring experience might follow the arrival of my Samovar order sometime later today, since I purchased what I understand is a very forgiving ‘starter’ kind of pu-erh, and it might’ve set me down the road to not having a mental block about the stuff…but it was exceedingly early when I sat bolt upright in bed for no good reason (3am) and I needed something cozy. I needed chai. I wasn’t completely willing to go the distance and do the yerba mate chai thing; I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll need that mega-dose of caffeine much later today. This was lingering along with a handful of other tea samples in my Golden Moon basket…so…

Here we are.

I can’t get past the idea that something about this tea smells a little bit…funky, and yet I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. It seems to hide directly behind the hint of cinnamon, just out of view, and worry me. I have a creeping feeling that it is…socks. Or something like socks. Maybe someone’s socks after they were walking around in the dirt. Or…or…not socks. Something. This is definitely not the chai experience to which I’ve become accustomed, and I am having a hard time telling whether or not this is psychosomatic or genuine.

I tried for quite some time to finish my cup, and in the end I couldn’t…a real rarity for me. I wonder if I ruined this tea for myself by being so wary of pu-erh; I wonder if I wouldn’t have liked it better had the qualities of the pu-erh flavor not been somewhat masked by spices, so that the vague hints of them that I was receiving were immediately associated with a pu-erh experience that I enjoyed, rather than striking me as, and I stand by this assessment, a faint impression of socks.

It isn’t terrible, but it sort of unnerved me. Hopefully later today I’ll have my first cup of really good pu-erh, and this will all rectify itself.

Already rated this one, so no need to do it again, especially as I’m quite certain that was the longest tasting note I’ve ever written. It’s still delicious. What is particularly nice about this tea is that it contains a good, solid dose of caffeine that can be brewed at 175…which is not a big deal save insofar as sometimes I forget to hike my Zojirushi’s temperature back up to 208 before going to bed so that it’s ready to crank out black tea in the morning, and it’s nice to know that on those occasions that I do so, this will be waiting for me in my cabinet in the morning, ready to kick me into a slightly higher gear.

My cravings for this tea are not constant, I admit, but there are times when nothing else in my cabinet sounds quite as good as this does. Mmm.

Redhots.

That’s the first thing that you need to know about this particular chai: it tastes like redhots, those little pebble-shaped candies that are cinnamon and sweetness and altogether too easy to eat in mass quantities. If you like redhots, you’re going to probably find it difficult to dislike this chai. I love redhots, myself, so all’s well, but I still find that I prefer to take this tea blended with something else. While I wouldn’t call it one-dimensional, necessarily, I would say that the flavors in this one aren’t so complex that it makes a muddy mess of other chais when added to them (or even just other teas), so it seems pretty ideal for that purpose. Alone, the cup is not quite enough to keep me interested, and I think that eventually the sweet red-hot taste does get a little bit overpowering. As with everything, your mileage may vary! Sometime soon, I’ll have to give this a try without milk to see if I can’t pick out the fruit and herbal flavors they mention, as most of the time I think the milk crushes them utterly.

Farewell to the last of my sample tin of this. I could’ve sworn that I had written a tasting note for it, and now I can’t seem to find it…strange. A tasting note I spotted by someone else mentioned sweet grains and artichoke, and that seems to sum it up pretty adequately.

Don’t think I’ll be buying another tin of it. It’s not bad, really it isn’t, but I’d take a cup of Downy Sprout over this any day. And will be, because I put my new Samovar order in, finally. Doing so knocked off a healthy portion of my shopping list. Whee!

I got this as my sample from Teas. etc. when I ordered the assam that was the Select some time ago, and am only just now getting around to trying it. The leaves of this white tea are pretty crispy-crunchy and actually surprisingly green, which is a slight change from the silver needle and the Downy Sprout that I’ve gotten more accustomed to. There are still little white fuzzies, but they aren’t nearly so thick or prevalent here.

It still produces a very good cup of white tea. Not my favorite, but good. Once steeped, the tea feels exceptionally thick and heavy in the mouth. I’m not surprised that this white has a more ‘green’ and vegetal flavor than the other whites I have given the appearance of the leaves; I think it’s from this greenishness that the most notable quality of the tea stems. As I’ve been sipping I’ve been thinking, ‘salty’…but it’s not salty in a way that would compel me to describe the tea overall as salty…it just contains a note that seems to lean in that direction, which surprised me, as anything of the sort is notably absent in my other whites. Curious, I went and looked up their description of the tea, and it seems they’re characterizing this quality as ‘sweet cream butter’, which I think is probably reasonable…butter isn’t necessarily salty, but it does have some traces of that same aspect, and that must be what I’ve found here. The almost viscous heaviness of the tea seems to texturally underline that sweet-cream-butter description.

It’s pretty heavy for a cup of white tea. I don’t know that I would find myself craving this more than the flavor-saturated sweetness of the Downy Sprout I have. I’m glad that I have more sample left though. I think I’ll need to try it again to see whether or not it’ll grow on me or wear me out.

I swear I change my entire rating system every few days.

This one I consistently enjoy. The combination of sweetly, very subtly floral notes with the savory quality of the nutty fullness they describe yields a very pleasant cup of tea. Ending my day with this is never a bad decision, and I’m almost always able to get more than one steep out of it.

Strangely though, tonight I was getting a weird feeling of…tanginess, after my sip. Tangy sweet-sour. It wasn’t present anywhere in the actual tea, so I’m…admittedly sort of at a loss as to determine where it was coming from. Bizarre.

I’ll confess: I’ve been drinking this as a latte.

Someone else (Ricky? Cofftea, perhaps?) was posting about matcha lattes, and since drinking a cup of just plain matcha doesn’t often appeal to me (sometimes it does, but only very selectively and only every now and then, as with almost all green tea) I thought I would give it a try. I haven’t the first idea what the temp or steep time are. My method is to mix water and milk (I use 2% for almost everything) at a 1:1 ratio in a pot on the stove, heat it until it’s hot but not so hot that it seems likely to bitter the powder, then I sift the matcha through the bottom of one of my mesh basket infusers to reduce it to fine powder and clear lumps, whisk it, and pour it into a cup into which I’ve already added a tiny bit of raw honey. The results are delicious. It’s a non-standard way to drink matcha, obviously (though my Japanese friend tells me that taking matcha with milk is pretty common in Japan, so I don’t feel like an utter heretic), so I’m going to avoid trying to review this matcha as compares to other matchas (especially as I’m hardly a connoisseur)…but I do like it. It seems tolerant of the method of preparation; I have yet to make a bitter cup. The caffeine content is fair, the color of the powder is rich and bright enough to promise that whatever their processing methods or sources are, they’re (more or less) legitimate, the aftertaste is sweet and grassy. No complaints.

I’m brewing this a little bit hotter than I was last yesterday, but it isn’t suffering in the least. I’ve been experimenting with temperatures for this and for the coconut pouchong in the hopes that I can figure out what produces the best balance of steep flavor and longevity through multiple steeps. Not quite finished doing that, but I am drinking an awful lot of both of them lately.

Yesterday I think I must’ve had approximately a bucket of this while I was sitting and writing, which is interesting — of the teas I ordered when I placed my Full Size Order from Golden Moon, this was the one I was most ambivalent about. The aroma of the steeping brew is still cause for an arch of the eyebrow; it’s pungent, woody, musky and floral all at once. My original note still stands — every flavor they describe on the label is immediately discernible in the final brew. The leaves — which are gorgeous, by the way, varying in color from black to a rich chocolate brown with silvery tips — produce what strikes me as being a rather complex cup of tea. In fact, sipping on it, it seems completely bizarre to me that this tea is unflavored…the uniqueness of the taste and the very distinctive character that it has for me is the source of some small amazement. Teas like this remind me to be astonished that all ‘tea’ — as far as white, green, oolong, pu-erh, and black — is derived from the same exact species of plant.

Giving this a big rating bump retroactively. Yesterday’s binge proved it well-earned.

I don’t have too much experience with gunpowder tea. The Adagio version that I tried dried my mouth out rather unpleasantly, and I’ve been more interested by dabbling in blacks, oolongs and whites than I have been in really exploring greens.

This brewed up to a yellow color I didn’t expect. Not quite dark enough to be considered amber, but too yellow in the cup to be properly called green, either, and very slightly cloudy (in my office where the lighting is less direct and bright, it’s hard to see).

It’s slightly less astringent and drying than the gunpowder from Adagio, but significantly more mild in every other way, too. The smoke flavor is lessened, and the green seems just as shy; there are no overt grassy or vegetal notes. They say that there’s a ‘lingering sweetness’ to the tea, but I’m not really getting that. I am getting a strange salty flavor that might be ‘sweet’ where ‘sweet’ crosses over with ‘smoke’, but then again that could be some indication that 3 minutes was longer than I needed to have steeped this tea.

I’m finding I’m not an enormous fan of the smell of it, either. Again, that could be because I brewed it (accidentally) toward the outside of the recommended brewing time, so potentially a matter of my preferences versus the tea. Alas, I will not likely find out for certain either way, as my sample of this was consumed by this cup (and the hideousness of my experience attempting to steep the other gunpowder I have a second time — producing that ashy taste, gross — will prohibit me from attempting the same thing here).

Not horrid, but not on my list to buy. Inoffensive, but unexciting (and slightly unappetizing due to the salty note). I know there are better greens out there.

Neither the best chai I’ve ever had, nor the best chocolate-flavored tea. With those statements in mind, it’s not terrible as either one of those things, though I confess that I spent a good deal of time with my face practically inside of the pot as it sat on the stove, just trying to find and lock down any smell of chocolate whatsoever. Adding milk helped.

The flavor is pretty subtle, though. What you’re going to get, mostly, is cinnamon. As chais go this is a pretty mild one; I wouldn’t mind keeping it on-hand to blend, but I’ve had too many good stand-alone chais to be particularly excited by this one…it makes me feel as though it’s missing whatever it would need to give me a good kick (and I feel as though chai has to be able to do that, if the hot milk from the latte isn’t going to put me to sleep instead).

Yeah. The more I sip on it, the more I sort of wish I’d picked something else instead…it’s drinkable but not even remotely special. Boo. I’m laughing a little about the tasting note someone else posted about the tea being like cocoa-dusted pencil wood…that’s pretty accurate, actually.

My order of the stuff I liked best out of the GM sampler (Lapsang Souchong, Sinharaja, Coconut Pouchong and the Imperial Formosa Oolong) came in today, woo! My review of the flavors in this tea still stands. Nothing new to add about it here, save that after brewing I caught the VERY distinct aroma of gardenias. That’s a heavy, cloying smell that’s hard to mistake for anything else; perhaps I can attribute it to having been too impatient to cool the water as much as I did the last time I had this tea.

Today’s weather is MISERY. It’s sleet-snowing like precipitation is going out of style, and bitterly cold. It’s the sort of weather that makes a person want to hibernate.

So, of course I’m having a dietary explosion of epic proportions. I ordered some pastries (delivery! Sinful!) and when they came in, I brewed up a big fat cup of this to sip on while I ate a napoleon. Paired together alongside the prospect of a cozy day indoors in my pajamas playing the recently-released Mass Effect 2, and I am at this moment in time almost giddily, inappropriately happy.

(Actually, some of the excessive giddy silliness might have come from being made to sit through watching Johnny Weir ice-dance to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. That is the sort of thing that definitely changes the course of one’s day, lemme tell you.)

I was feeling sort of like spoiling myself a minute ago. I’d wanted to save this to pair with some sort of dessert, but then I started putting my gym clothes on and thinking ‘I really do not want to run today’, and decided once my shoes were on that I was going to banish this morning’s overdose of Earl Grey with a cup of something indulgent. I’m a wee bit concerned that the cup is going to be too strong…it seemed like a greater quantity of leaf than the rest of the single-serving 2-cup sample packets have had in them. I assumed this was a result of the jasmine or something, so I went ahead and brewed it anyway, but now I’m not so sure.

It definitely smells like…cream soda. Cream soda with something else in there, and I’m not quite able to think of what the ‘something else’ is. …grape? That seems a little odd. Maybe that’s just something the jasmine is doing in my nose.

I have no trouble whatsoever getting jasmine out of this aroma. The vanilla is easy to find, but the pair of flavors are both so balanced that pulling them apart is something I’m finding difficult to do. I feel as though the jasmine wins, though. If this were a jasmine-vanilla cage match, it would go five rounds, probably involve a lot of grappling, and jasmine would win by virtue of just being on top the longest.

No, maybe we have to scratch that. Jasmine wins in the nose, vanilla wins on the tongue, coasting in for a surprise finish that I think must be aided along by the black tea, which shows up through the floral jasmine unexpectedly. There’s a nice sweetness on the finish.

As it cools, the jasmine is making an effort to reclaim the title. I suspect if I let it cool even further there would be more upsets in store, but as with most long bouts involving lots of grappling, I feel compelled to chalk it up on the board as an even match and change the channel.

As with most sweet teas, I’d be curious enough to try it iced. I could definitely drink this more often than I think I want to drink plain jasmine tea; the vanilla brings a fuzzy warmth that the jasmine — which I find can be a bit cloying, at times — benefits from.

Again, the steep time is soft. I’m not sure, exactly, that it’s correct.

Ready for the least-inspired tasting note I may ever write?

Here it is:

‘Mreh.’

It’s drinkable. The tea base tastes brighter than the last two Earl Greys I sipped on today. Ceylon, perhaps? The result is a pretty one-dimensional cup with a brighter, definitely more citrus-y flavor than the other two had — there was an actual chunk of dried citrus in the leaves, so that explains that.

I do appreciate that the tea taste in this has a stronger presence than in the Tea Guys cream blend, but the rest of what’s going on is pretty underwhelming, so while it moves in the right direction, it’s still very heavy on the bergamot with the vanilla taking a far backseat, with the result that it tastes to me a little bit like some sort of…cleaner.

A nice cleaner, mind you. Some kind of cleaner I wouldn’t mind using in my kitchen because it would smell good. But even so…

I should probably admit that at this point today I’m sick to death of Earl Grey. Take this with a grain of salt. ;) As a matter of fact, if anybody has been curious about trying this (I understand it’s relatively new as an offering), let me know. I have a tiny sampler tin, but I’m willing to just send it elsewhere; I have more of the Tea Guys blend than I’m likely to be able to drink while it’s fresh, anyway, and I can’t see myself wanting a whole bunch of this.

Not entirely sure on the steep time of this, as I was finishing making lunch at the time. Could have been 30 seconds in either direction.

That doesn’t really matter, though, because this tea tastes virtually the same no matter what I do to it, as long as it doesn’t wind up oversteeped by some ridiculous margin. The aroma of the dry leaves is still fantastic. I love the smell. I still prefer this Earl Grey to the one I tried earlier from Golden Moon, but I suspect that it’s the additional cream element that draws me and not so much anything else. This one has the sweetly aromatic fullness of an Earl Grey cream tea that I love, but the more tea I expose myself to the more I’m forced to come to terms with the fact that Tea Guys teas are always going to be somewhat limited by the quality of the tea leaf they’re using. It’s not of such quality that it could stand alone and compete with most other plain, unadorned teas I’ve been drinking, and no matter how decent the blend is, that’s always going to make a difference.

I can’t help but feel that I’m still searching for the perfect cup of Earl Grey. What I really need is a delicious black paired with the sweet, buttery richness of actual Madagascar vanilla and just enough bergamot to lighten the flavor of the brew. That is what I want. Someday, I will find it.

It’s still one of the most fragrantly pleasing teas in my cabinet. Or maybe that’s just my pre-existing bias; this is a holdover from the very earliest days of my digging into tea, generally, and for a long time it was my go-to morning tea.

It’s a very passable Earl Grey.

It’s also just a very basic one. There are no surprises here. The flavors are very forward; behind them there’s a little bit of something like honey that I wish had a greater presence in the overall taste. I could drink this over sandwiches at lunch or brunch with milk/cream and sweetener (which is really the only way I ever drink Earl Grey, for whatever reason) and be satisfied with it, but I don’t think I’ll be ordering any more of it. There just isn’t anything about it that lifts it up above the endless heads and shoulders of other Earl Grey teas, and I think I’ve grown pretty fond of the added vanilla element in Earl Grey cream teas.

It smells good though. Mmm, lavender.

Thinking I’m going to brew my other two Earl Greys (both of which are of the aforementioned cream variety) and see how they compare.