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Another one from Nicole I was very eager to try and a sip down! Many of the teas Nicole sent are Earl Greys… it will be great to find new varieties of EG I like. Opening the pouch, this one smells SO strongly of bergamot! I happen to love strong bergamot… if it is an actual bergamot. No question here! I don’t even think there was a teaspoon here, but the flavor might make it one of my favorite Earl Greys! The bergamot is bright, citrusy and strong! The creaminess of the vanilla is most noticeable when the flavor lingers after drinking. It is so smooth. The texture is amazing, really, like real cream. The second steep wasn’t nearly is good, which is odd because with some EGCs I can get three steeps from the same leaves that taste exactly the same if I steep just right. I could easily use this one as an Earl Grey Cream staple! It is definitely in the top three EGCs for me! I hope this one is in the Battle of the Earl Greys…

This tasting note is #800! Wow, already?

Thank you so much for this one, Tasty Brew! I’m amazed you managed to send only one tea that I’ve tried before (Della’s Dubbele Chocolade)! I still wanted a caramel fix since the last tea I had that promised to be caramel wasn’t so caramely! This one features the mild Della Terra black tea base with caramel cubes. I steeped for a while to try to get the caramel flavor melted a bit more. (I don’t think you can oversteep Della’s black tea anyway – it never gets astringent!) The flavor is sweet, not so noticeably caramel, but maybe I let the water cool too long while picking out a tea that would pair well with my cake. Dessert tea with dessert! I hardly ever go wrong with Della Terra…

This had one teaspoon left I removed from the HH teabox! I was intrigued when I saw from the description it’s a CARAMEL chai. Wow does caramel chai sound like a nice blend! There weren’t many spices, just a lot of black tea leaves. After steeping for a few minutes, the flavor isn’t caramel or spicy, which I kind of expected. But the black tea has a nice toughness (without astringency) and very raisin-like! I know this blend would have been better if it wasn’t the last of the sample… and probably not stored in a very thin baggy.

I took the little bit of this out of the HH teabox! These teabags you can fill are so handy for rooibos blends. Much more enjoyable for me when I don’t have a billion wood chips sitting on my throat. I’m glad I bought two boxes of 100 from Red Leaf (two different sizes – but I think the big ones are easier to fill.. even with rooibos it is tough to fill the smaller ones). But I might drink so much more rooibos because of these teabags that I will go through these filter bags fast.

Anyway, this tea is lovely! A nice candy like strawberry flavor… I’m confused by the description mentioning three fruits… and none of them are at all like strawberry. I swear it’s strawberry! The rooibos is a great base for it. Nice!

Also, I should mention I’m such a Steepster geek that I can’t wait until I have time to add all the teas to my cupboard that I acquired from these tea boxes (and also remove the teas from my cupboard that I put in tea boxes!)

I had to try this one because it isn’t even in the system yet! Thanks again for the samples! I just know I’d love every tea on the site… which I didn’t even know existed until I saw the sample offer! Three minutes steeping a teaspoon and a half after waiting a few minutes after boiling, this one is so good. The quality of Kenyan teas is NOT why most Kenyan teas go through the crush-tear-curl process. I rarely see a Kenyan tea that isn’t CTC. But Kenyan teas have a flavor profile all their own that I just love… it just sometimes doesn’t need the astringency of a CTC. I had a non-CTC Kenyan tea the other day that had more malty dark chocolate notes. This one has less of that, but it is so complex! This is a medium bodied tea. Notes of plum and hay. The aftertaste is dark chocolate, more than the actual sip. One sip was even spicy! Different from the Kenyan tea I had recently, but DELICIOUS in its own way. I definitely need to have a Kenyan tea stocked in my collection at all times (and NOT a CTC)!

Thank you Nicole! Slowly trying the teas you sent! So. Many. Teas. I think I’ve had this tea before under a different name before – Tea Haus – Marzipan. But that’s fine because I love it! Now I have a little of both. You can’t say this one doesn’t have almond! The black base doesn’t overpower the flavor… but it would be hard to with this almond. Some vanilla like qualities too! Very nice!

Teaboxes are taped up and ready to go. I just need a chance to get to the post office! Sigh. Soon I hope. So between the two teaboxes, I get to try a hella more black pearls.. one of my favorite tea types! These ones are thanks to Terri Harplady! At her suggestion, I’m using five pearls. These pearls are rolled very tight… only hot water will get to them. Much like how tough it is to get a shell open to get an actual pearl.

First steep // three minutes
Oh I can tell this will be good just looking at the color in the mug. A deep reddish brown. The aroma is a nice one too. It’s like dark chocolate, as these lovely pearls tend to be.

Second steep // three minutes
This black tea is actually the one with the most wine like qualities to me somehow. Not like I ever drink wine. Tea is my wine! But maybe there is something with a hint of fruit to it, grapes or plums. The perfect amount of astringency. The second cup tastes the same as the first, even though the pearls were fairly unraveled after the first steep.

Third steep // not sure how long
This cup wasn’t as good, probably because I left it steeping too long. I still didn’t mind drinking it though!

Overall, I don’t think these pearls have a malty enough flavor to make these my favorite, but I appreciate the UNIQUE flavor that they have!

Additional notes: Sample sipdown of this lovely tea! I wanted to get to this one since I’ve read some tasting notes that say the pumpkin flavor diminishes as it ages. But it tastes just as good to me! Though it may be helped by a couple pinches of the Premium Taiwanese Assam I added to it, since it didn’t look like there was a full teaspoon of the pumpkin left. I don’t really love Ceylon bases (least favorite black tea in general) so obviously this assam did help give it a fuller flavor. It doesn’t matter if it is a delectable Butiki Ceylon, Ceylon is still so plain to me. The pumpkin flavor here is so good though! I could use more of it though. But to me, the pumpkin tastes the same to me as when I first tried this sample in Feb 2012 (I had to look at the tasting note). Yikes if it takes me that long to get through SAMPLES. Butiki is awesome!

Thank you TastyBrew for this sample! I’m always up for trying 52Teas. Sadly, this one kind of sort of disappoints. I’m just getting a plain roasted yerba mate flavor (which is kind of like BBQ to me, so I’m not sure why that would work with cake anyway.) There are cocoa nibs here but not much chocolate flavor. (Steep was boiling for two minutes.) However, there was a creaminess that I appreciated. I just wish it was cakier!

Alphakitty split some of this with be from Ovation’s closeout sale a while back. (Hope you and yours are doing well!) I’m not sure why I’m just now writing a tasting note for this one. I love the giant pineapple chunks and blueberries. My infuser had two pineapple chunks but no blueberries. I remember this one tasting fruitier last time… I hope it isn’t already aging too much! But I love the flavor anyway… it’s a nice green base. The pineapple taste is very subtle this time around… hardly any blueberry. Definitely no fake flavoring though. Unless I needed to get more pineapple and blueberries in the blend, this one lost some of its magic.

I put three fairly decent sized tea packages together for sale and added teas to TWO teaboxes and it hardly seems to have made a dent in my tea stash! Yikes! Hopefully that is just because I was parceling out most of the teas.