Golden Imperial Lotus

I just got back from the dentist. The whole time I was there I managed not to jump out of the chair by thinking of tea. :)
When I got home half of my mouth was and still is numb. I am having to sip this out of only one side of my mouth and yes I have spilled a little on myself.
The first flavor I am getting is malty. I love a malty tea!
I steeped one tarantula as Dylan calls them in about 12 ounces of water for 3 minutes at a boiling temp water.
Its a very smooth, non astringent, non bitter black tea.
I guess it does not matter much about the rating or my feelings on it since I guess they are not being sold anymore on the Teavana site which is a shame.
I will add more tasting notes another time when my palate is fully functioning and I can actually take real sips but so far loving it!
Thank you Missy and Dylan for sending me some!

Backlog #4
Wow, $40 for a tin of this tea?! sheesh.
It was on clearance, for 75% off so I indulged… and I was not disappointed. Much.
I guess I expected it to blow my socks off, maybe even my toenail polish- for that price anyhow! but it was just your regular high quality tasty Asian black tea. Hey I can’t help it if they set the bar sky-high with the price tag! I mean, if I’d spent FORTY buckaroos on this brew, well you can bet I’d be plotting ways to get my monies back.
Either way, it was still pretty decent. Chocolatey, rich, lovely. I made it through for steepings and they were all yummy. The last one was a touch scratchy, which I expected.
I need to give it proper attention next time… maybe suss out some more deets!
Oh did I mention the beautiful rosette it comes in? Definitely a selling feature. However it does make the tin less full than I had anticipated. Not a problem for me, since I will never finish it all before the tin goes stale… knowing me!

Sebastian is acting like a fool this morning, I have no idea what his deal is but he was even chirping like a crazy bird before I uncovered his cage. Now he’s quiet. Whatever bird.

I did not realize how big these rosettes are. They look like sea anemones. I dropped one into an infuser basket and let it infuse for 3 minutes on the first steep, four minutes on the second.

It’s a pretty smooth, malty tea. Kind of sweet like honey.

I don’t really find it remarkable, it’s just like pretty simple, nothing really super flavorful about it. I prefer other black teas. I think this might be more suitable for me in the morning, but it clearly has the ability to be resteeped without really changing its flavor.

I’ve got a little tin full thanks to Autumn Hearth so maybe when I have time to just sit around all morning with a tea (week of the 17th? :D) I can just have it all morning.

Thanks again to Autumn for a sample of this! I feel as though I’m going to be thanking her in every tasting note for a long while now :)

I very nearly bought a tin of this last December, and when she said she had some, I asked if she would send a bloom or two. She graciously sent a mini tin full of these beautiful little discs.

The tea is flat and sewn together, like a pressed flower. When it’s put into water, however, it becomes a spiky ball like a sea urchin or a dandelion. It’s beautiful.

The liquor is a deep reddish brown. It’s certainly in the mahogany/walnut color family.

Oh, the taste! At first, when it was too hot to really taste, I thought it was just another malty, chocolaty black tea. Good, but not remarkable.

Was I wrong!

There’s that, sure, but there’s something new here! I’m struggling to describe it. It’s very creamy. I first went to some sort of ice cream – mint chocolate? No… vanilla? Not quite… now I’m thinking of creme brulee. I’ve never actually had creme brulee. So I’m not entirely sure if it’s accurate. But the flavor profile here seems to match what I’ve heard of that dessert.

There’s something creamy and heavy and sweet here, as though I’m not just drinking what is effectively flavored water. It’s almost a little bit banana, or dulce de leche. It’s not quite caramel, though. It has that sort of feeling on the tip of your tongue when you’ve just eaten a spoonful of melted ice cream.

Ohh, I do look forward to puzzling this one out.

Thank you to IndigoBloom for these sample Blooms of tea!

Steepster has been misbehavin’ again and it took hours to find this tea and bring up the screen to do a review. I hope whatever the issues are will be for the benefit of all of us tea-freaks in the future. I do understand that maintinence does have to occur now and then. Oh, am I the ONLY tea freak? I think not!

This tea was like a sea urchin. Indigo-B sent me 2 whole creatures. Brown, spiny, golden tipped, silver dollar sized, sleeping beings needing water to revive them. I am an obliging woman…a nurturer always ready for doing what needs to get done. (I was ready for drinking the life out of the little critters… really… ya ha ha!)
Teavana doesn’t list this tea anymore and Indigo-B had no instructions on the packet, (she has a life apart from tea) so I guessed on the steeping time and temp. at 4 min. and 195f.
The liquor was medium brown, fragrant, tasting like chocolate malted black tea. Rich and pleasing flavors! For those who hate astringency, this is a winner because this is a tame acid free brew. I’d choose this tea as a mild, uncomplicated tea fully capable of handling both sugar and cream in the morning without losing the malty chocolate, wheat bread goodness one wishes for at that time of day. While I prefer a more malty (manly) robust tea myself, and as I read Indigoblooms comments that this was originally $40 for 4 oz. (ouch!) I know that there are better tea’s for far less money. The comment from Teavana about “you don’t need a brew basket, the tea is portable” is bunk. The tied tea bundles fall apart during the first steeping.

But, this was a good enough cup of tea.

And it continues… thanks to Indigobloom for yet another sample!

I wasn’t really sure what to expect with this one, but it seems to be a tasty, slightly sweet and malty black. With a hint of smoke, but I’m not sure if that’s contamination from the Gunpowder it sat with for ages, or if that’s part of the tea. Either way, this is pretty delicious and smooth, and I’d definitely drink it again, though likely not buy it (especially as I read that it cost $40 for a tin!!! $40!!!!)

ETA: Second infusion, also for 3 minutes, is still pretty tasty. This is quite a good black for those times when something like Laoshan Black would be a bit too bready and heavy; this tea is lighter and caramelly and I imagine it would go quite nicely with a meal. Mmm.

Thanks to The DJBooth for sending some of this my way. I was also tempted to pick this up at the end of year Teavana fire sale but didn’t.

No doubt one of the reasons this one was initally very pricey is the beautiful flower like formations that are all tied by hand. And the tin looked pretty cool as well. ;-) I wasn’t sure how much tea to steep in my cup but I ended up using two rosettes at 212F for around 3 minutes.

This is a very nice dark red color in the cup. It’s a bit malty, chocolatey and dark, pretty smooth. I think perhaps Teavana should tell more plain teas for those of us who want them. No doubt they are hanging onto my every word (hee hee). I enjoyed this one!

I received this tea in a swap from Missy and Dylan. (You have no idea how excited I was to find out how to make bold print. It is ridiculous how “techie” I feel.)

I have reached that very special age where things with small print have to get further and further from the face to be read. I thought my eyes were worse than I knew as I puzzled over the label on this one. Finally I called my youngest over and asked her to help me with the label. Yes, it said Golden Imperial Lotus. Yes, it said Teavana. But did it really say, “OMG! Tarantulas!”? LOL! She confirmed that indeed it did!

Opening the package, I get it! These are little hand-tied bundles of gold and brown tea leaves like Golden Mudan which used to be sob! carried by Harney and Sons. Cute! They said you don’t have to use a strainer but I did. I may try it without next time.

I tossed three spiders in my pot, poured boiling water over, and steeped for four minutes. The aroma is one of the greatest strengths of this tea. It is rich and thick and molasses-y. :) The taste is so smooth. There is no astringency or bitterness. It has medium body and could really have been steeped longer I think without doing any harm to the taste. The liquor itself is orange/ amber and mine was the tiniest bit cloudy like an Assam, and there is a light malty note as well though this certainly doesn’t taste like an Assam.

I think this is probably the same thing as Golden Mudan which I loved. Too bad I missed out on the sale! A big thank you to Missy and Dylan. I will definitely be resteeping this!

This was my to go tea this morning. A great price so I pulled the trigger. I love the artisan factor being that it is a rosette. With my previous brewing I was in awe watching it fall to the bottom of the cup. Like a blooming green. I think this is a good tea. It reminds me of nice Chinese black. Malty. I don’t know if I get chocolate out of it, but it’s definitely grainy and has that nice baked flavor. Either like bread or potatoes. See Bai Lin Gongfu tasting. I let it sit in my travel mug for the drive to work and did not get bitter. I have to agree though that 40 for the tin is a tad steep…no pun intended. However the post steep rosette does have some cocoa notes wafting up. It’s also fun to freak out my co-workers with the urchin like appeal. Some of you may remember a song from R.E.M that came out ohhhh circa 98 by the name of Lotus. I was a freshman in college and had just started getting involved with the campus radio station. WBWC still has a soft spot in heart. http://youtu.be/vu2jN3d2zzU Haven’t you noticed…I ain’t the lotus. Make it rain :)

I consider myself quite lucky to have this tea. After finishing quite a bit of the the tea from our first foray into Teavana, truly our first trip into a loose tea store, we were looking around on the website.

Lo and behold, things are on sale!

My fiancé and I look at quite a few things, and add a couple to the cart, but we can’t make a decision as to what exactly all we want to try. We were really indecisive at this point, we hadn’t quite reached our ‘MUST BUY EVERYTHING’ tea frenzy. However, compared to most of the other teas on the site, this was really quite cheap (on sale for $10 a tin). So I added two of them to my cart. But I don’t pull the trigger.

The next day, I browse around Teavana, and these are now out of stock. Bummer! But… what’s that… my shopping cart isn’t empty? I quickly hit the checkout button, and pray for the best.

I’m fairly impressed with this tea, for a number of reasons.

For one, the rosettes really are quite cute. My sister, while simultaneously enjoying and mocking my tea collection at work, referred to them as ‘little tarantulas’, and the description has kind of stuck. The variations between the gold and brown needles give an almost alive look to the beasties. That is, if you don’t notice the string around their middles!

The tea itself brews into a dark, smooth tea. The flavor is rich, but very mellow. It’s just a simple, perfect black tea. It’s a very comforting tea that can truly tie a bow around a long day.

It’s an amazing feat of alchemy to drop three tarantulas into a pot of boiling water and pull out a trio of sea anenomies. Another feature I really like about this tea is that it holds up very well to resteeping, which I don’t find to be true with most black teas. The flavor doesn’t change, the color is just as dark, and the brew is as smooth as ever.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the sale price of this tea was the majority factor in my purchase, followed by the instinctual need to hoard something that you may never see again. At $10, I consider this tin of tea to be an amazing purchase. At $20 a tin, it would have made a cute gift, or a novelty to keep around to serve to people new to loose leaf tea. Higher than that though, I can’t say the novelty would have been able to overpower my ancestral money-guilt.

I recently found out that one of my friends E. is into tea. I didn’t know this about her and she didn’t know I was a TeaGeek either. She gave me two of these little rosettes to try out.

This was my first Yunnan tea and one of the only natural teas that I have ever had. I made it in my little red two-cup teapot and steeped it for about four minutes, leaving the water in the pot to steep some more.

The first cup was a tawny brown in color and didn’t smell like much. It smelled like tea to me. The first sip was good, but I wasn’t that impressed until I kept drinking. It became smooth and rich as I adjusted to the flavor. Another four-five minutes later I poured the second cup.

This cup was a deep brown and looked like a cup of coffee. I took a sip and immediately realized that it wasn’t bitter like I had feared. The cup here had been steeping for about 8-10 minutes. I think I understand what the word “malty” means now. It is what I imagine a malted milkshake l would taste like if you removed the chocolate, the sugar, and the milk. Which leaves everything that I love about malted milkshakes. I thought I tasted something that I registered as chocolate, but I wasn’t sure.

Not wanting to leave this cup of tea since the first two cups disappeared way too quickly for my liking, I decided to try to re-steep the urchin. I wasn’t sure on the amount but I knew I boiled enough water for two teapots full. I poured another half a teapot and steeped that for about six minutes. Wow! Here is the chocolate I thought I tasted before! I am impressed. I didn’t really understand how a tea could do that when it didn’t have any chocolate flavoring added to it. The maltiness was still there but not as present as it was in the first two cups.

Overall, I think this is a very good introduction of a Yunnan to the uninitiated. Of course, I am still newer at this, but I thought it tasted really good. I am stopping at three cups tonight because I am full! I still have one more rosette, but I am going to wait to have that until I get home for spring break so I can share it with my fiance.

I looked for this at the Teavana website to see how much it would normally be but I don’t think they have it anymore. I would like to see about saving up some money and picking up a tin from somewhere over spring break. Would anyone care to share any good Yunnans that they like that aren’t that stupidly expensive?

Seems everyone here got this tea during the end of year Teavana clearance sale, and who wouldn’t? I got this tea mainly because of the cheap price, I didn’t know what to expect, had never read reviews about this tea or anything. A pure impulse buy.

The tea comes in a nice black tin and the rosettes inside a foil bag. The dry leaf gives a nice spicy aroma and each rosette is made of a mix of golden and black fuzzy tips, they almost look like small tarantulas.

I brewed this tea in a small teapot using only one rosette and following the suggested brewing guidelines from the tin (2-3 min steep time and 185-200F water).

The tea brews a nice dark brown liquor with a smooth malty flavor and chocolaty hints. It wasn’t strong or bitter, even after the first cup, where I left the rosette in the water for maybe another 4-5 mins, the tea just became slightly stronger in taste but not bitter at all.

The leaves after being infused, loose their golden and black colors and become a nice dark brown-red (almost red clay colored) rosette. The rosette also “blooms” like those art teas expanding itself in to a little dark red flower. Great for displaying in a glass tea pot.

Overall, this tea is a great, easy to brew, tea that pairs well with breakfast in the mornings. I enjoyed the flavor but it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. The rosettes look like they were made from tying up Yunnan Gold tea and they taste pretty similar. So while I paid a cheap price for this tea, I would’ve never gotten it for the full price Teavana was asking for ($40), especially since you can get loose Yunnan black/gold/pure gold for a much affordable price from other vendors. Still, it is a nice looking tea (dry and wet rosettes are lovely to look at) with a great taste and packed in a nice tin. If you are still able to find this tea on sale, I’d say go for it, as it seems Teavana has already discontinued it.

This one is good to me, i nace dark black tea, malty. Thanks DJBooth!

One of my favorit black teas, though I only bought it when it was on sale for $5. It has a very earthy sort of taste with very little astringency. I am usually able to get at least 3 quality steep’s out of each bundle without loosing much taste.

After the Nine Dragon this morning I had a desire for another black. I thought about the two from the prosperity set, but then glanced over at the two tins of this I picked up the Heavenly Sale. I had bought a tin for my husband for Father’s Day at 40% off and he liked it so I couldn’t pass up the 75% off after the holidays, however he told me he doesn’t drink it often enough. I may give the third bag to my brother-in-law when he runs out as I bought him one after Christmas, he loved it and bought a second, but you can bet I’m keeping the tins.

On to the tea, I’ve tried it before, but I don’t think I’ve had a full cup. I always had the impression that you could leave it at the bottom of the cup, but the directions are a bit unclear, yes it says you don’t need a strainer and that it steeps for 2 to 3 mins and you can reuse it but it doesn’t say keep adding water or remove, so I removed on the first steep and left it in on the second. The first was much better, richer, more chocolaty, a really good black tea. The second was more like Nine Dragon, more honey and dry. May try a third steep as I usually don’t like second steeps in general.

I pulled this one out tonight just for some thing different than the flavored teas we’ve been drinking. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it.
For a black tea, I find it incredibly light and crisp. There is a floral hint in there. To my surprise, I find it very relaxing.

I’m on the first steep and it really is a lovely black tea that I can immediately recognize as high quality. Watching the rosette bloom was a lovely little perk as well. Luckily this was on clearance though because honestly I’d never pay full price.

Don’t follow the directions on the tin unless you want a dull flavourless cup of tea. I use just bellow boiling water and let the rosettes sit for about 4 to 5 minutes for a nice brisk flavourful cup. An overall good tasting tea but is it really worth $40 for about 4oz of tea? The high price must come from the very chic and re-usable tin and for the fact that the tea is all tied by hand and can be re-steeped several times. This would be a great gift to give to someone who enjoys tea.

very good and tasty. very earthy and malty. i had heard other people resteeped their “urchins” for up to 3 times but i couldnt even get a second one out of mine :((

Drinking this tea for the first time this morning. It’s good, but not sure if it is worth the price. Will finish what I bought, not sure I would buy it again.