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Another one from that sampler box. Apple and lemon. Slightly odd combination if you ask me, but on the other hand I was also surprised at how well vanilla and mint went together so you never know.

The bag didn’t smell of anything at all, really, but when I poured the water on, I get a strong scent of lemon and underneath it apple. So that bit checks out. (Can you tell I’m biased?) It’s just that it’s so perfumed. It smells more like something you might dab behind your ears rather than something you would drink.

I’ve tried their green lemon tea before and found it wildly synthetic in flavour so I’m not getting my hopes up about this one. I was right. It is indeed the same perfumed lemon that they’ve used for this one. I can barely find the apple underneath.

I’ve been through three out of five varieties in this box now, and I’m reaching the conclusion that I kinda already new. This sort of thing is NOT the way to introduce yourself to the world of white teas.

I’m saving the pai mu tan I got the other day for a special occasion (and I’ve got one in mind) and this sampler box is seriously making me look forward to it.

This is another one of the bags I got today, although it’s not from the white sampler box. (There was a special offer on two boxes and I couldn’t not get two! Shh!) This is just ordinary black with fruit.

The smell of the dry bag is overwhelmingly melony. You are not in doubt for a moment what sort of additive we are talking about here. It’s the same thing while it’s steeping although it does turn a little more synthetic in nature.

The brew is dark and it immediately gets that oily layer on the surface. Any good quality loose leaf tea gets it too after it’s been standing around for a good while but in this one it’s instant. I assume it must have something to do with leaf size.

The melon is very pronounced in flavour, but it’s not sweet. It tastes rather more like the skin of a melon rather than the actual flesh. Or a melon that isn’t quite ripe yet. Not sure what the drawing on the box is supposed to be, but I’m assuming when we say ‘melon’ here we’re talking about cantaloupes.

The tea at the base is completely uninteresting, and really it’s not actually meant to be interesting at all because all you’re ment to get is the melon. And that really is all you get.

All that aside though, I’ll inflate my opinion of it a bit in rating, mostly because I do find it an interesting flavour in tea, and one I wouldn’t mind trying on for size in a better quality loose leaf.

I shall try my hardest not to prattle on pretentiously about everything else but the tea I’m drinking with this one. Promise.

When I tried the Soft Fruitea, I mentioned that it had been contaminated rather a lot by the jasmine of this one what with the bags not being air tightly individually packed. I also mentioned that I expected this one to be better, so let’s see if it is.

It smells pretty floral and mostly of jasmine, and that really seriously comes out when pouring the water on it. Like with the Soft Fruitea, it does get extremely dark for a white. Really it’s like a light black tea.

I can taste blossoms of both kinds, especially and not surprisingly especially jasmine, and very little tea. It’s not as cloying as the other one was and while it’s not by any measure great, I was definitely right that this one was better.

It’s an addiction, buying tea, is. I can quit any time! wild eyes
I have my prejudices and snobby opinions about the sort of tea you buy at the supermarket. The cheap mass produced teabags containing second grade tea at best. It’s very rare that I actually get some, but every once in a while I find myself in front of that shelf in the supermarket just to see if there’s anything new. A flavour or a combination there of that I haven’t seen before and I suppose it’s an okay way of checking if it’s worth trying it out at a better quality. I don’t know where in the world this brand is available, but it and Lipton are probably the biggest supermarket brands here in Denmark, and not one I’m usually all that impressed by but good enough in a tight spot. My main peeve with them is that if you read the brewing instructions on the box they insist on boiling water regardless of the type of tea. I don’t care what they say, I absolutely refuse to pour boiling water on green or white, the end.

Anyway, they had this sampler box of whites. And curiosity overwhelmed me. How much of a mess have they managed to make out of the delicate, valuable white tea? I figure if it’s awful, it’ll be good enough for the travel mug in the morning (and easier to prepare in a hurry) than my more expensive but better quality whites and greens.

It smells heavily perfumed and a lot like jasmine actually, which prompts me to see if there is a jasmine variety in the box. Guess what, there is.
Dear teabag producers. Jasmine scented tea is NOT a good choice to put in a sampler box, as it will turn everything in the box into a jasmine scented tea. -Me.
I can find the smell of grapes and pear, but it seems sort of synthetic.

I can pick up the pear in the flavour and it tastes natural. I can’t really find the grapes and the tea on which it was based does taste white, but also very bland and dull. I should like to know exactly which white tea this is supposed to be. It doesn’t help that these bags are not packed individually in an air tight way so it has picked up some of the jasmine from that other one in the box. I expect the variation with jasmine and orange blossoms will work a lot better than this one.

I have to say that it’s possible that I feel about pear the way I do about peach. I love the fruit, but I don’t much care for them in tea. Still, the tea as a whole totally lived up to my expectations.

ETA: I just added this tea and rated it 41, but on the tea’s profile it says 61. How does that work?

A blend from my local shop. And I don’t know why I initially added and put unknown as the brand, since it’s a perfectly normal shop that actually has a name. I don’t know who their wholeseller is, but that’s a detail. Anywho. It’s actually called ‘Isabella blend’ but they renamed it since. I don’t know, I preferred the first name, as I quite like Princess Isabella. She’s cute and she was born on my birthday. :)

I’m probably only borderline in on the Vanilla Vogue with this one, but I wanted something else than plain vanilla. And the description does say ‘notes of raspberry and vanilla’. Judging from the very strong raspberry aroma that it has, I would say that it has more than notes. There has definitely been raspberry aroma added to this and although I can’t immediately find any vanilla in the smell, I think it would be a relatively safe bet that it has been added too.

This is, with rose petals, jasmine, raspberries, vanilla and something called ‘pink sweethearts’, possibly the single most girly tea I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know what the sweethearts are supposed to be. I remember trying to eat one and getting zero flavour out of it, so I’m guessing maybe they’re responsible for the vanilla/raspberry aroma.

I’m on my very last bits of this. I’m making it in my smallest pot and even then I probably shouldn’t fill it all the way up. Just the one cup then. That’s kind of sad, really.

Dark in colour and with a rather odd aroma that sort of reminds me of raspberries what have been baked. And hey, the sweetness of vanilla!

The tea itself is a bit bland when it comes to the fruit and the vanilla, although it may be because, with the limited supply of leaves, it’s been brewed a wee bit on the weak side. It makes me wish I could have made it properly. It tastes mostly like a fairly bland and faded mix of the teas and then the sweetness comes through in the aftertaste.

No real vanilla coming through except in the aroma, although, with the description I’m wondering if that might actually be the way it’s supposed to be. You know, it does say ‘notes’, not ‘flavours’. So it could be that it’s supposed to be tasted as a combination of flavour and aroma. Rather complicated, but there you are.

Or maybe, it’s just old. Still I’m finding myself wishing that I had stocked up on this when I was buying the other day.

I got inspired for a vanilla tea just now so I made me a small pot. And then my head wasn’t really in it so I wasted a whole spoonful of this nice vanilla tea but going to put the leaves in the pot and failing to pour out the water that I had used to heat the pot up first. Very ARGH!-worthy when you only have a sample-size tin. I wish I had more of this to mix with. I’ve got a TON of stuff now that I’d like to blend it with, but alas.

Huh. It would appear that I’m currently following 70 Steepster accounts. 70! Looking at my dashboard page I think we can reach the conclusion that some of those must be inactive and I probably ought to clean it up a bit.

Anyway, I chose this tea during my little ‘accident’ yesterday because ever since last sunday when my boyfriend was here and we had this awesome caramel ice cream that totally tasted like childhood, I’ve been slightly obsessed with all things caramel.

The dry leaves smell heavily of caramel and it has tiny cubes of actual caramel in it. There is a very big risk that I’m going to offset the entire balance of this by uhm eating them. (I tasted one, they’re yummy!)

Strangely enough, where I found the two other black teas I bought lighter in colour than I had expected, this is just the opposite. It’s darker than I expected. A little darker than maple syrup. Granted it’s slightly oversteeped, but still.

The smell is not as sickly sweet as you might have expected. Or at least I did. It smells like caramel and not so much of tea, but still not completely overwhemingly sweet.

Strangely enough, this tastes more like tea than it does of caramel. I was expecting something sweet and smooth and instead I got something lightly astringent and with a rough sort of flavour that makes me wonder what it’s based on. It just say chinese and ceylon tea, so it could be anything. The caramel is there, but it’s like it’s caramel without sugar. It’s good enough, but it’s not really what I was expecting. I’m thinking a bit of sugar might bring out the caramel more but even as I’m missing the sweetness, I’m strangely reluctant to test it.

As mentioned, though, it was a bit oversteeped, so not doing that might make a difference. I’ll try that the next time and possibly adjust my rating accordingly

Second steep is very similar to the longer one of the first round. Bit more spicy though. And it goes quite nicely with this pear I’m having for breakfast.

Okay, first of all, WTF? I could have sworn that Chun Mee was a chinese tea. This prompted me to look through my books on the subject and it would appear that Chun Mee originally came from the Jiangxi province and has since spread to the rest of China. It’s produced in Yunnan now, for example. So why shouldn’t it have spread to Taiwan as well, just like Gunpowder? But it just still feels weird to me that it’s not chinese.

The name means ‘precious eyebrow’, and apparently refers to the way the leaves are twisted. I don’t know, they don’t look very eyebrowish to me, but there you are. They have a nice dusty green colour and the aroma is sweet but not very strong.

In the cup it gets a nice yellow colour. The shop recommended an 8-10 minutes steeping time which I just couldn’t make myself do, especially since my literature warned me that if oversteeped this is a tea that can get devilishly bitter, so I took the first cup after about the usual 4-5 minutes and let the rest continue to stew. It had the same sweet but vague smell that was kind of difficult to find, like the harder you breathed in the more it just sort of slipped around your nose. This did not change significantly with increased steeping time.

I have to say that the first cup did have a relatively weak feel to it, but it was still a full bodies sort of flavour. It was a bit astringent and it had that prickly sort of taste that I personally think of as what they mean with ‘spicyness’ in tea. With increased steeping time it turned a bit more astringent and developed a more sour sort of after taste which went on forever and ever. Not sour like in a lemon, more like sour like in a cup of coffee that has gone cold.

The Gunpowder Blend that I had yesterday had that same sort of aftertaste to it, and I’m nearly certain that they must have used Chun Mee for that blend. And seriously proud of my self for having figured this out too.

I think I definitely preferred the slightly weaker one of the two cups I had, and I think it must also have a couple more steeps left in it.

First of all, this is NOT to be confused with Gunpowder as we know it, as in the green tea. While it does contain green tea and the green leaves are easily recognisable, they don’t look like Gunpowder to me. The name has more to do with the nature and taste of the blend. (Also, I’ve translated the name from danish, in which the tea Gunpowder is never mentioned)

This is supposedly a secret blend. I suppose that’s why on the shop’s website it says what it contains. English breakfast, a green tea and lapsang souchong. So apparently it’s only the identity of the green tea that is so sooper seekrit. My wild guess would be Chun Mee since that’s a strong enough green to do well in blends and the green leaves definitely look like they’ve been twisted.

Since it has green tea in it, I thought it best to let the water breathe for a couple of minutes before pouring it on. In the meantime, all you can smell on the dry leaves is the lapsang souchong, but it’s got a milder sort of smell with something sweet too, which I expect must be the seeeeeekrit green tea.

Considering that two thirds of this, at LEAST, is black tea and one of those is lapsang souchong, this has a very light colour. It smells really good though! The lapsang souchong isn’t at all as overpowering in the brew as it is in the dry leaves. It sort of reminds me of a wet cat who has just come in from the rain, and I’m showing my colours as a cat person when I say that I kind of like that smell. It was just the first thing that popped into my head when I smelled it. A normal person would probably describe it as a full sweet smell with a note of smoke.

This is really great! I could definitely get used to this. It’s like a very mild lapsang souchong that has been given just a little bit of sugar. At first you think you might as well have been drinking a weak lapsang souchong, but then the rest of the flavour comes out. The sweetness of the green tea and the fullness of the english breakfast and then the sharpness on top of it all.

If you don’t like lapsang souchong’s smokey flavour, I would suggest trying a blend of just the english breakfast and a green tea.