sophistre

Yummy.

After a few days of being away from thinking about tea (but not away from drinking it, I guess), and a few days of indulging in hot chocolate with the weather as bitter as it has been, this morning I just wanted something brisk, bracing, and unadorned in my cup. I opted for this tea, and I wasn’t sorry. I don’t usually add to my teas, I like them just fine unsweetened and unmilked unless my sweet tooth is kicking up…but this morning?

This morning I dropped one of these into my cup: http://www.gingerpeople.com/crystallized-ginger/premium-cut-crystallized-ginger.html

And it was just what I wanted. Sweet, a little spicy, and a treat at the end of the cup. Yum.

On another tea-related note of awesome, but not related in any way, shape or form to this cup of tea: http://www.escape2urbana.com/

Can I go there, please? Hey, steepster guys: new contest suggestion for you, right there. :D

Man, my rating system is a real mess now.

I really, really love the way this tea smells after it brews. It’s such a rich smell. I couldn’t stop sniffing my cup after the first brewing.

On the first brew, I didn’t really feel like the taste was particularly floral. Buttery plantlife, mellow, rich greenery…that was the taste to me. Deliciously so, and smooth to drink, but still very much a ‘green and growing things’ taste. The second steeping has surprised me…I found the smell far more floral. It hit me unexpectedly, out of the blue, and I thought…oh! That’s what they were talking about! Strangely enough, the taste of this second cup manages to combine that slightly floral taste with an even more pronounced ‘this was a plant’ taste — grassy and brighter, this time — though I wonder if that’s a result of not steeping it quite long enough to give it a fuller body, as I was wary of oversteeping.

These pretty, richly-hued bundles of leaves really make me glad that I decided to buy an infuser cup with a ton of room for them to expand…and it’s glass, so I get a free show, too. Fun.

’I’ll just start with my sampler tins, and then when I finish them, I’ll move on to the savant samplers,’ I had told myself. Hah. Guess not. I never have been the most patient of individuals, and none of the ‘regular’ tins smelled like anything I wanted.

I’m not sure this is the tea I would conjure out of the anonymous, inspecific aether for my first tea experience of the day either, but without having met my Ultimate Tea yet, it’s a pretty gosh-darned suitable alternative. The smell from the tin was delicious and sweet. The steeping tea was full-bodied and brewed more darkly than I expected, and I tried to savor it, really I did, but I couldn’t stop sipping. The aftertaste is like the ghostly impression of something sweet, with a faint hint of that raisin-sugar taste, but I can see why everyone is tossing around the word umami. This tea wouldn’t go amiss alongside some onigiri.

That said, I don’t really get the ‘meaty’ impression everyone else is getting…for me, it’s more of a savory sweetness. I suspect this is my freshman palate…it has a long way to go. Maybe that’s the full-bodied, brothy mouth-feel of the tea that I can sense but not quite taste yet?

I think my 100 tea, whenever I find it, is going to be something really indulgent. I can’t see any way that this tea could go wrong, though. I could drink this any time of day, any time of year, with any kind of food, and I think it would hold up its end of the bargain and be satisfying.

I’m pretty torn over this one. It smells good in the tin — to me, at least; I can definitely see how this flavor profile is one that people probably either love or hate — though I was worried it was going to have that weird seaweed-fish flavor that some green teas seem to have. I don’t even know enough about green tea to know which varieties produce that fishy taste, though I know they’re supposed to be Japanese.

I got distracted toward the end of the steep time and I’m not certain by how long. 30 seconds is my guess, but it could’ve been more. I guess I shouldn’t have worried though…my lack of enthusiasm isn’t that it’s too strong, but that I wanted it to taste just the way it smelled after it brewed, and it doesn’t. Maybe that’s because the water wasn’t quite hot enough (though the recommendation is 180, so the five degrees seems like it shouldn’t matter)? I’m finding that I really really like the smell…‘vegetal’ doesn’t even begin to totally cover it…but it doesn’t seem thick and chewy the way that it smells, and that’s what it made me want. The taste isn’t bad, but the rift between what it promises and what it delivers is enough to make me sort of disappointed with what I’m getting. I won’t have any trouble finishing the tin, but if there are sencha teas out there that actually follow through on how pungent they are, I’d rather look for those than reorder this one. Not knowing enough about sencha makes it hard to know that for certain, but it should be fun to look!

Well, I was going to plow through the black tea sampler first, but I decided that I wanted to try something else instead. (I did actually drink a cup of yunnan jig this morning, but I just…drank it. It deserved better than that, but I had places to be! I’ll get to a tasting note later.)

This one looked really interesting in the tin. Dark, rich emerald green crumples of leaf that were a lot more solid and weighty than they seemed like they would be, once I picked one out. The smell of the dry leaves was, to me, very ‘cut grass’. Not freshly cut grass, but several-day-old cut grass, that was maybe out long enough to dry in the sun.

The actual brew…

Someone is going to think I sound crazy here, I’m sure, but to me…it smells like cooked potatoes. Baked potato maybe. I assume this is the nuttiness that everyone described, and I can see that too, but my first thought was definitely ‘baked potato’. And a side of cut grass. Given the color of the leaves, I was surprised that the tea itself didn’t brew to a darker color…it’s a very light yellow with a faintly spring-green edge. I didn’t have my eye on it while it was steeping, and was surprised when I came back to find it had unfurled into what looked like half of a plant in my glass infuser. Neat!

The taste is NOT potato, though that should surprise no one. It’s an interesting green, and it leaves a definite aftertaste of itself…strongly, but not unpleasantly. It feels very…full-bodied…and that impression has been increasing as I work my way toward the bottom of my first cup. I’m really enjoying it.

Now my uncertainty when it comes to rating teas is showing. What IS a perfect 100 for me? Does it even exist? This probably deserves a better rating than I’m giving it, but for now I’ll be conservative. There are still too many teas out there for me to try to be safely over-generous.

Pushing the rating up a bit. I think this is what lets the Masala I blend it with really shine…like a good coat of light primer to layer darker shades of paint on top of. On a related note though, I’m convinced there must be a heavenly chai out there that I haven’t tried, so I’m definitely looking for recommendations now!

Steep time only reflects the water portion of making this, and not the heating of the milk with everything afterward.

This chai is a staple of my morning routine. I combine it with Samurai Chai Mate, and together I like them better…alone, this chai can sometimes gain that bitter black tea edge, especially if you miscalculate on the water-simmering portion and the leaves have had enough before you’re through heating the milk that you add (if, like me, you find chai lattes the only way to go). The smell is heavenly, velvety-smoke and cinnamon, and the moment I open the bag my entire kitchen smells like the holidays. The aroma it releases when it’s on the stove and heating is almost as much a part of having chai as drinking it is.

Really, that’s what chai has become for me — a morning ritual. It’s certainly not the most slimming of my morning rituals, but I don’t care. Boston is cold right now…bitterly and suddenly, after such a temperate early season. Getting out from under my down comforter is always such a crisis of cold feet and lack of interest in being awake, but if I make it to the kitchen, then I’m good. I can start to simmer the chai blend, turn on a few lamps, and sit and smell the spices while I wait for the gunmetal grey blur outside of my window to turn silver and sharpen up into a proper world. Sometimes the sun throws in a few other colors gratis, too (but not often, because this is Boston and if there’s one thing Boston does well, it’s the color grey).

It’s true that there are probably better ways to wake up than this one, but probably not many.

Had this last night, but I was too tired to log it then. Lacking any other reason to sequence this sampler of six teas, I thought I would knock out the two that smelled the most alike first.

This one has a much more pungent smell when dry than the assam. The assam’s fragrance seems to be almost light, definitely not minty but sharing some of that quality in the nose. This one I opened, sniffed, and said, ‘figs’. That’s what it smelled like to me last night…dried figs. This morning I’m getting more of that barn-hayloft-horses smell I mentioned in my assam note…but where other people might find that off-putting, I really like it. It’s like hay and leather.

The taste of it was surprisingly grassy for something that smelled to me as though it would have darker raisin elements than the assam. Grassy, and then I was able to get the smoky quality the longer I sipped on it. I like both of these equally, I think. The assam might be easier to drink a great deal of, but this one was just as good for totally different reasons. I only had time to steep it once, but next time I’m going to be curious about steeping it several times, as it, like the assam melody tea, lacked bitterness on the finish.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!!!

(No, not for this tea…though it’s pretty good! This excitement is due to my Adagio order arriving today. It’s my first go-around with them (re: teanewbie), and so I decided to order a whole slew of samplers to start familiarizing myself with tea types I’ve never had before…and I’m going to work through them all. This is the first one. Whee!)

I like this. What I like most about it is that it lacks any bitterness whatsoever, which surprises me, because it seems as though it should have some. I can vouch for the mouth-dryness mentioned in some other tasting notes, though it’s not parching or intolerable.

The smell of the tea as it was brewing was wonderful, but maybe some of the wonderfulness is due in small part to memories out of my childhood. I spent a lot of time with horses (as a lot of little girls seem to) and the smell reminds me a little bit of the scent of hot bales of alfalfa hay in the sunshine…a sort of earthy hay sweetness and warmth that I have no analogue for. If I had to make another comparison, I might say raisins, but not sharply sweet raisins…more like the aftertaste of raisins.

I got a little bit distracted during the second steeping and I’m not sure how long the leaves were in the hot water, but I know the temp was down to 208 instead of 215 when I poured it in. The flavor is more black-tea this time, weaker but still tasty. I’m looking forward to steep #3, but I suspect I’ll be done with it after that.

I’m still fussing with my ratings…I’ve rated so few teas that it’s hard to know where to place this little marker. Stuff is subject to change for a while…

This tea is very sweet. You’ll expect that when you open it…you can smell the vanilla right away…and also a faint trace of something else that’s almost but not quite chocolate, even though chocolate isn’t represented anywhere in the actual flavor or scent once you brew it up.

It’s not ‘in your mouth’ sweet. Well…it IS, but the sweetness seems to linger after you swallow, in the aftertaste, rather than being picked up by your tongue when you actually have a sip of tea in your mouth. After taking another look at the ingredients I find myself unsurprised…it has honeybush and stevia leaf in it, and that seems pretty typical for both of those.

The ingredients list also includes kukicha. I confess that while I’ve had this tea multiple times in the past, I never bothered to look up what kukicha is. It seems to be bits of a green tea plant aside from the leaves? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukicha

Learn something new every day.

It brews to a very pretty golden-honey color, with much warmer and deeper smells than I’m getting out of the foil bag. Trying to suss out the individual flavors is difficult for me tonight…I blame this cold I’m still fighting…but I can get a sense of every listed ingredient on the bag save for the coconut. There’s always a creeping sweetness at the finish, climbing up the sides of my tongue to linger toward the back. Every time I cough or clear my throat, it intensifies a lot. Crazy!

When I first tried this tea, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It is very sweet, and I was accustomed to a very mellow, completely unsweetened, almost sort of bread-y cup when I thought about chamomile teas. I think I’ve finally decided that I like it, though. It’s an off-beat kind of sweet, and the way it happens mostly on the swallow is interesting enough to keep my attention.

I did cut the amount it recommended to brew by 1/3 though…I used 2 tsp. in 3c. of water. I should probably try their recommendation sometime to see how it goes (maybe I’ll find the coconut on the other side of that threshold) but in the past I’ve never had any trouble infusing a plenty-strong cup with even less than I used tonight.

Now, to spend 20 minutes in the kitchen trying to get this stuff out of my infuser. I think I need to invest in some silk pyramid bags or something for a few of my pesky Particle Teas. :|

Bought this one during my recent splurge at Teavana, somewhat against my better judgement. I’m not really a huge fan of heavily flavored, heavily sweet teas unless they’re strictly intended to be served over ice, and even then I don’t like them too sweet…fruity and sweet are not mutually inclusive qualities. The guy who works at my ‘local’ Teavana is friendly and helpful, but I think our tastes differ. Most of the tins he opened for me made me feel as though I was being bludgeoned to death by a hammer made of fruit-sugar…and not necessarily natural fruit (or sugar) either. All of this while I was sick and congested! It may be that some of those don’t taste as strongly as they smell, certainly, but I was too wary to find out.

I caved on this one. He seemed to believe it wasn’t as intensely fruity as it smelled, and I wanted a white tea…pears, I thought, would surely not be that strongly represented after brewing. They, like blueberries, can usually be counted on to be subtle when used in foods and the like, right?

Ehhhh. I’ve been avoiding it because of the smell since I bought it — never a good sign — and finally decided to give it a try tonight while waiting for something in the oven to finish up. It tastes more or less like it smells — less strongly, though, which is a blessing — with a stronger sense of the white tea. If you go crazy for the smell of it, then you’ll probably go crazy for it in your cup. I can see adding this to some sort of pitcher concoction destined to be served over ice, but by itself it might be a little bit boring iced, and I can think of a bunch of other iced teas I’d rather be drinking.

For the cost per cup and how utterly ‘meh’ I am about it, I should probably be rating it lower than I am…but I think in this case much of the lack of appeal has to do with what I like in a cup of tea, and not necessarily how offensive the tea itself is. Now I have to figure out what to do with the amount I have left.

So, I order from these guys periodically. They started here in the town I’m living in, after all (Boston) and I’m pretty sure their base of operations is still out of this state, so it’d be regional loyalty on my part if nothing else! Fortunately, some of their tea blends are so lovely that it’s hardly twisting my arm to browse their catalogue.

They really focus on flavored teas, as one glance at their catalogue can tell you. This is always tricky for me, because so many flavored blends (from any and all companies) try MUCH too hard.

I AM A STRAWBERRY TEA, it will scream at your nose where you stand, easily five feet away from the cannister. I KNOW THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO TASTE MY STRAWBERRIES ON YOUR UNCOMPLICATED AMERICAN PALATE!

Anyway, this is not a strawberry tea. This one is chocolate. Of note, I didn’t order this tea…they tossed it in with another of my orders (for the Earl Grey Cream, which I love) in a sample pack for free. The sample isn’t a bad size, either…good for a few cups at 9g, and this is hardly the first sample they’ve sent me.

I don’t often feel the burning desire to consume chocolate, but every now and then I want some. The fact that I’ve had this opened (I must have tried a cup before? I don’t remember doing so) in my cupboard for months is testament to that fact, and perhaps worth remembering in my review…I rolled the top of the foil but didn’t seal it.

The blurb up top is different from the blurb on the back of my sample…it says ‘cocoa beans, vanilla, barley and yogurt bits’, just as a heads-up.

Either way, I’m finding I really like it. I wanted something other than chai today (expected the world to end, there) but needed the caffeine and some kind of perk to my mood. Usually for my chocolate fix I go straight to the hard stuff — Dagoba’s organic Xocolatl hot cocoa with spicy chili and cinnamon, yum yum yum — but I’m clean out of the stuff, and I spotted this while I was rummaging around unsatisfied through my other options…so I decided to give it a go.

The smell of the tea is fantastic, if you like the smell of nutty cocoa. They recommend preparing it as a latte, which is what I did. I simmered approximately 3 teaspoons of it in a cup of water as per the recommendation on the packet, but instead of adding 1/2 cup (1%) milk when that was done with, I added the full cup to stretch it a little, and heated it again. The smell while it was simmering in the water was very tea-strong, probably unsurprisingly. Once I added the milk, though, it smelled lightly like baking, tea-infused chocolate-chip cookies. That sounds almost gross to me to write, but was actually sort of nice. A little bit of german rock sugar finished it off. In the end, it wasn’t quite as dark as a chai, but still had that pretty caramel-like color.

The actual latte is pretty nice. It differs yet again from its smell by being more tea-flavored on the tongue than the smell suggests it’s going to be, but the taste of the chocolate is easily detectable. It reminds me a little bit of those chocolate-striped cookies that usually have chocolate all on the bottom…but without that much sweetness, with a little bit of nuttiness, and with a definite black tea base.

I could see myself ordering this as a way to scratch the occasional sweet-tooth itch I get, for certain, though as I say chocolate isn’t usually what tickles my fancy, so the rest of the time it’d be likely to stay on the shelf.

So, I love chai. I should get more specific than that though, and say that I love chai lattes. Presumably one could wave some soy/milk/cream and sweetener in the general direction of a cup of chai and have done with it, but I am not that person. I like the malty-foamy-cozy-creamy parts of drinking chai, so that’s almost always how it’s prepared.

Not feeling well in the last month led to a spontaneous trip to the nearby Teavana, to which I had never been for no reason other than that I never made time to go. It also led to a flurry of spending done under the auspices of needing these various purchases to feel better, which in hindsight is weak justification even for me, but there you go. This was among the things I brought home…along with the Masala.

I should say right out that I’m just not qualified to rate this as far as being a mate, since I haven’t to my knowledge ever had any mate besides this stuff right here. As chai goes…

Today is the first day I haven’t combined it with the Masala, and I’m sort of surprised. I don’t know why I was daunted by the smell of it…it smells sharp and acrid, almost fruity (some part of me thought ‘potpourri’), a much ‘brighter’ smell than the smoky, cinnamon-heavy, shadowy smell of the Masala. I’ve been mixing them half and half and enjoying it a lot, but wanted to add a tasting note for some of these before I go through them, so decided to brew it up by itself. I wasn’t sure what to expect from making this one alone. I thought it might be overpowering or tangy, or…I don’t know. It’s not, though. It’s still a little bit fruity and floral (every time I use those words I feel like they’re not quite right, but they’re as close as I can get), but the steeping brings the cinnamon out a lot. It’s a much more balanced flavor than I anticipated. My first thought is that it would make for a fantastic option for iced chai when the weather warms up, though I wonder if putting it on ice would make the cinnamon more difficult to sense again. Something to look forward to finding out, for sure.

2 tbps. in 2c. water, simmered for a few minutes, and then 2c. milk added (1c. whole, 1c. 1%), brought to simmer again, removed from heat, stirred for a few minutes before straining to keep it from scalding. Turbinado sugar to taste. Not precisely sure on the steep time though.

I haven’t been able to shake this cold. I don’t know where it goes when it leaves me, but after a brief vacation it always seems to slink back in just enough to reduce my ability to properly taste food, no more and no less, which is rather cunning…any more and I might be compelled to seek proper treatment to kick it for good.

Having been therefore naughty in my reckless consumption of things I can taste — i.e., some chai with milk that assuredly does not help my mucus situation — I am prescribing myself some tea to remedy what some of my other tea has done to me. This sounds irresponsible, but I count it as a twofer.

This was an interesting choice. I think I overdid the amount of tea that I steeped by just a hair, but it didn’t really suffer for all that. The first cup was not as good as the second…it seems like the sweetness from the vanilla accrues, and the squeaky-clean mouth sensation that it left behind seemed as though it wanted some (I can’t believe I’m saying this, because I rarely like it) very subtle mint, or some other sort of ‘cooling’ addition. That last could just be because I’m still a little bit under the weather, I don’t know. I’d like to try it iced, and can see combining it with all sorts of teas for that little extra bit of sweet. Not my first pick for an evening tea, but a nice option to have, and it seems to live up to its end of the ‘keep my pipes clear’ bargain.