1353 Tasting Notes
Queued post, written April 18th 2014
This is chosen primarily because I keep finding it in the box and having no idea what it is. So now I’m going to try it and get it out of that box for good. Bonnie shared it with me, and when I say ‘shared’ I mean seemingly ‘sent me the rest of her sample pouch.’
I am uncertain about this blend. It has a number of things in it that I don’t even know what are, some things that are okay and some that are decidedly meh. And it rather… smells. Husband says it smells like Pears soap, but I don’t know what that smells like. I’ll give him the soapy association, though.
Things do not get better after steeping. Husband has changed his stance to ‘minty bath soap’ which… I’ll leave it up to you to tell me if this is better or not. Sceptical cat is sceptical.
I’m not sure what I think of this. It’s definitely minty and there’s something else that gives me a strong dark chocolate association. (To my relief it doesn’t actually taste like soap) As it cools a bit, though, it just becomes more and more minty. There is supposed to be oolong in here somewhere but you could have fooled me.
We found this somewhat drinkable, but not otherwise to our tastes.
Queued post, written April 18th 2014
I tried this in a cold brew, because I don’t really care for these blends that are made up of only dried fruit. I find them often rather sour and frequently somewhat bland-ish. Generally I’ve had the best experiences with them in cold brews, so that was what I went for.
Lots of the blend in a couple of filter bags in a jug over a couple of days, and the result was… a really thin vaguely apple-juicy concoction. I tried it hot as well, and that was pretty much the same story.
Unbelievably dull. I might as well have been drinking water, it just didn’t work at all. I’m not certain what to do with the rest of the bag now. It may very well find itself relocated. To the bin. As it came from the christmas calendar I have no qualms at all doing this. I didn’t pick it myself and there is a great deal of it.
A world of meh.
Where in town is this tea shop?
I’ve feel lost without access to Fru P’s vanilla and rhubarb flavours. They do them so well!
Marzipan, it’s near the Salling department store. If you come down the street from the train station, you turn right at the corner just when you get to Salling. I can’t remember the street name. I’m not very good at street names. I just walk there, I don’t generally pay attention to learning the names. :)
Courtney, I agree. Especially the vanilla. I wish I knew who her supplier was, but I can’t bring myself to ask. Strikes me as a bit rude somehow.
I know where that is, thanks!
Queued post, written April 18th 2014
Okay, I’m going to do a quick morning post of this and after that I’m going to aim for the ABTS (Apply Bottom To Seat) approach to my Camp NaNoWriMo writing. I’ve got behind while we had Husband’s parents staying, but that’s not really the biggest problem. The real problem is that I’m in re-writing phase now and this has turned out to be an awful lot more difficult than I imagined it would be. I would murder my internet for the duration, but that’s not as easy as it sounds and involves reaching into tiny corners and places where I can’t see what I’m doing, so I’m just going to have excert will-power.
HAH! As if anybody believes that. I’m already struggling with convincing myself to NOT have cake for breakfast. I am such a grown-up.
Anyway, I gave Husband the choice of tea this morning from among my three untasted JW samples, and for the second time, very surprisingly him being Cornflakes-Man and all, did not choose the LS. He picked this one, of which we used all the leaf for a large pot. And then spilled some, but there should still be enough in the pot that we can get a decent resteep.
This has a very malty aroma and it also reminds a little of honey. I’m not getting any cocoa from it, but there is something that I can’t quite put my finger on and it’s sort of in the same family as cocoa, smell-wise. (No, it’s not chocolate) It’s quite faint though, so I’m not deeming it super-important to decipher it at this point. Underneath all this there is a lot of grain and wood, so it smells like a good strong tea here. At first glance a good choice for the first tea of the morning.
Oooh, it may not smell entirely like cocoa, but it definitely has cocoa notes in the flavour. Not a lot of it, but just at the very beginning of the very first sip, there it was. It was followed with something that struck me as ever so slightly tart, ever so slightly wine-y. Interesting! That’s not a flavour I’m used to finding in tea at all.
The more I sip, the more the wine-y note seems to stand out. It’s in the realm of a slightly spicy wine here, perhaps even a tiny little bit mulled? I’m not getting too much of the grain and wood body I noticed in the aroma, although there those were fairly strong notes. I enjoy a good deal of grain in my Chinese black, so I’m missing it a little, but not to the point where it really bothers me.
This tea is very different from the Chinese black teas I’ve usually had, even the Yunnan teas I’ve usually had. It has a really interesting flavour and it’s very much worth a visit. Had I not been under certain ordering constraints (in general, but in particular with this brand) I think I could easily drink a tin of this.
It reminds me a little of the very first time I had the fabled Tan Yang Te Ji from TeaSpring. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. I wasn’t even certain whether or not I liked it. And then gradually I discovered that I did like it. I really did. I really really did! It has remained my favourite ever black in the world since then and although a few teas have come close, none have yet managed to push it off that pedestal. With enough exposure to it, this Dian Hong has the potential of growing on me in the same way. Perhaps not quite to the epic pinnacles of the TYTJ, but close.
I like this one a lot!
It sounds delicious!
Pepper, nutmeg, or cinnamon by any chance?
Not impossible. I can’t actually remember it exactly anymore. I frequently find black teas somewhat spicy, but it’s always some kind of generic spice if that makes sense. This one just gave some sort of mulled vibe in addition to it. I’m not very good at recognising my individual spices to be honest.
Queued post, written April 16th 2014
Part of my Bad Dog! order, the primary tin of which is still unopened. ETA May 17th, of course it has been opened at this point. It was the Keemun congfu in case anybody’s curious. I have finally set a date for opening it, though. Monday, because it’s my birthday and it seems a good time to have coveted tea for the first time.
This one is one I got a sample of, and the dry leaf has a lot of that raisin aroma that I always appreciate in an Assam. I can greatly enjoy a non-raisin-y one, but I do prefer them to be raisin-y, so that’s a good sign right there. After steeping it’s still mildly raisin-y, and even the flavour has an alround raisin-y touch to it.
YAY!
The peculiar thing is that on their own I don’t actually care much for raisins. In musli or in baking or what have you, they’re good, but I would never eat a handful of raisins just for the raisins. So it’s a bit of a mystery to me why they make me so happy in Assams.
Anyway, apart from the raisins, it’s rather a strong tea but it’s not too astringent. It’s a really thick and slightly sticky flavour with a fairly long aftertaste and very suitable for this morning. It has even eased my ‘I-slept-too-long-this-morning-headache’ a bit. Husband commented that he thought it was good as well, and it always says quite a lot when he does that, because it means he’s paid some attention to what he was drinking. He doesn’t usually if I haven’t told him I’ll be asking his opinion, so if a tea can grab his attention on its own it’s either really good or really weird. :p
Shame it was so difficult to procure.
This one came in the vast amounts of samples that MissB shared with me in order to take advantage of already paid for shipping weight when she supplied me with some Sleepytime Vanilla. I gave Husband a choice of two different samples and he chose this one that neither of us knew what was. I don’t speak any French and I think he’s got a little, but it didn’t suffice to translate the name of the blend further than ‘blend of dot-dot-dot’.
Turns out it’s a chai-ish thing with cardamom, cinnamon and cocoa. Probably not super-suitable for this part of the day then. Oh nevermind.
Chai and chai-ish blends are my one concession to the principle that any tea that requires additives in order to shine is not a good tea, because slightly milked is part of the very definition of chai, and so this is how we had it.
To me it tasted mostly like cardamom and with a cardboard-y Assam-y aftertaste. I couldn’t really pick up any cinnamon at all. The cocoa was also evident but in a funny way seemed to attach itself more to the milk than anything else. It felt like a cardamom blend with slightly cocoa-y milk added to it. I would not have thought that it was even possible to have such an experience, but apparently it is.
I thought it was quite nice. A chai light, nearly, since it didn’t have the large selection of spice in it that most chais have. I believe this is part of why it’s difficult for me to be interested in chai. There is too much going on and it sometimes testes like something that should be in food rather than drink. The fact that this had just a couple made it easier for me to fully enjoy it.
Husband is also not super-keen on chai in general, but he reported that he thought this one was very delicious and seemed to be a little disappointed that we only had a sample. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly why this one appealed to him so much though.
I’m thinking it should be worth a try to add a few cardamom pods (we always have some of those) next time I’m steeping an Assam for him and see how he takes to that.
Queued post, written April 9th 2014
This one came out of the EU Travelling Teabox round 2.
It smells wonderfully of cocoa, but not really chocolate unless you consider that really high cocoa content chocolate which is so dry as to be almost inedible. I had an 98% one once. It was good for baking, but I tried eating a small piece and it was like a spoonful of cocoa powder. Just because it contains just enough cocoa butter to make it form into a chocolate shape doesn’t make it chocolate, I learned. It can’t have sold well, because I’ve never seen it again since. Anyway, that’s what this smells like. I’m not picking up anything at all in the citrus family or from the base, but I believe it’s simply the very strong cocoa covering it up.
Flavourwise… My mouth is not happy. It’s not outright nasty, but my mouth is definitely not happy.
It doesn’t taste like chocolate and it doesn’t really taste like orange. It just nearly tastes like these two things, but that’s not the same thing at all. As it cools the chocolate bit becomes a little more like chocolate but the orange bit becomes simultanously a little less like orange.
No, my mouth is not happy at all.
Queued post, written April 9th 2014
Perhaps I’m a little bad, taking things out of a travelling teabox that I’ve already tried before, but I did it anyway. This one was from the EU TTB round 2, and I stole it. I feel no shame.
Now the first time I had it I thought that it was good, but not quite on par with the hype surrounding the blend at the time. This hype has died down in recent time, so that the blend has now reached a sort of legendary status and is drawn out on occasion to bask in the glory of it. That’s the sort of vibe I get from people who occasionally post about it.
It smells lovely. It’s quite wood-y and a bit malty. I’m also finding a note of grain down there, which is strong, but not at the forefront. There’s a hint of cocoa, but not very much. I can’t remember what goes into this at all, but I suspect something to do with Keemun and Assam.
Flavourwise, I think I get it now. I think I get the hype. This is a strong tea and it’s very heavy on the Assam. I think I tried it the first time during a period of not much Assam appreciation (Assampreciation, hur hur!) and that put me off. This is very Assam-y, complete with smidge of cardboard and touch of raisin. There is also something in there that gives off a grainy note and a little bit of a smoky one as well. It brings me back to my earlier thought of something to do with Assam and Keemun, but I don’t think that all there is to it. There’s an almost toasty flavour as well and something that makes me think ‘Keemun, but stronger’. Perhaps there’s some low-grown Ceylon in there as well. I had one which, when brewed just so, gave me that same ‘Keemun, but stronger’ impression. Which is pretty good going, because in my opinion Keemun is a pretty strong tea all by itself. I’m a little uncertain here if this means I think there’s a low-grown Ceylon in combination with Keemun or if it’s only the Ceylon masquerading as Keemun. Either way there are those grain-y notes and a wee bit of almost-smoke on the swallow, so much definitely be in that territory.
Have you noticed, Steepsterites, that as soon as I sit down to write about a black blend I seem incapable of describing what it tastes like and almost invariably end up trying to decipher what it’s made of instead? Curious! It’s a bit like a puzzle. Having looked up the solution I find that it’s actually neither Assam nor Ceylon at all, but a pure Chinese blend. Three teas have gone into it, and I feel absolutely certain at this point that one of them must be a Keemun. I’m uncertain about the two others, though. Perhaps a not-too-hay-y Yunnan? The third one eludes me.
I just went back and re-read my first post about this blend from three years ago. Ah, yes! That was the time the on-off switch had broken off the old kettle, rendering it useless and making tea required boiling water in a saucepan on the hob! I remember that, it was ever so impractical. (Quite funny in hindsight, though) I don’t know if it was the fact that I didn’t have to bother with saucepans this time or whether my standard brewing methods have evolved a bit or perhaps my own preferences have, but I definitely had a vastly different experience with this blend this time. I mentioned it reminded me of Kusmi’s Samovar blend back then, though. I’d quite forgotten that one! If I were allowed to buy anything at all at the moment (which I’m not, I’ve got a To Try Box to empty!) I would go and see if I could find that one again. Ooooh yes, that was the one I bought when we were on a weekend trip to Paris, visiting friends who lived there for a year. That was the time I planned to ask them if we could make a stop in Mariage Freres while there and then only remembered it when on the plane home, stupid girl. (I later learned that M also had that same sort of vague plan while they lived there, but never got around to it and only realised that she had passed the chance after they had come home to Denmark. She’s not a tea-drinker quite on the average Steepster-level but she does have a mild sort of on-off curiosity about it. Oh well, these things happen.)
I enjoyed this tea very much this time around and I’m nudging my original rating upwards. It was 82 previously.
Are you a native Dane? Because your English is GREAT. Even the nuances.
I bought a tin of this at H&S while in NYC this weekend after tasting it in the shop.
Marzipan, I am. English came relatively easy to me in school (unlike German, where I never got further than learning a lot of words, but not how to put them together into something that makes sense), and then having spent the last 14 years living on the internet. Livejournal, mostly. I’m not very good at punctuation though. I find commas difficult. Being married to an Englishman helps a lot as well. :) I have to admit we speak mostly English at home. Husband speaks Danish at work, and we speak Danish at home if we have company or if it’s Saturday. I suddenly lose all ability to understand English when it’s Saturday. :p It’s a left-over from when he was taking his Danish classes and was preparing for his exams. We probably ought to speak more Danish at home, but we’re so used to speaking English together, making the switch can feel a bit awkward, even for me. I mostly read books in English as well, because I find it better to read the original version rather than a translation. Sometimes things are lost in translation and the original is the version that author actually wrote. Seems silly to read a translation when I can just as easily read the original. :) Besides, I like reading fantasy, and it seems precious little of that genre gets translated into Danish.
Sorry, that was a bit of a novel. And I didn’t even say thank you for your compliment. Thank you for your compliment. :)
MzPriss, I actually caught myself having a bit of a panic last night when Husband nearly asked for a cup of it. I was having something he doesn’t like, you see, so he’s gone to choose something else from the drawer. Luckily he settled on a different one in the end. (I did not say or do anything to influence him. Just panicked quietly.)
I read a lot of second language English since half of my family is in your area. Even when my husband first moved here he made some really cute and funny mistakes. So I can usually pick up on it, but yours is really great. It’s really funny with him since he (like you) switches back and forth a lot. He is basically like a language vending machine, whatever you put in, he responds in kind. So he can be speaking English with me and the phone rings and it’s Danish all the way. I love to listen to it. His sisters say his Danish is starting to sound a little outdated.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Husband says he’s forgetting how to speak proper English. He’ll be saying something in English and wants a particular word and the first one that he thinks of is Danish. Or he’ll start a sentence in a particular way because he’s forgotten that the keyword is a Danish one that has no clear English equivalent. He’s been here for five years now.
My written English is best. I make more mistakes when speaking, mostly because I get a bit sloppy, or I get distracted by sudden uncertainty about is/are in the middle of a sentence or something. :)
I remember a couple of funny ones he said when he first lived here. He called ear muffs “Ear muffins” (so cute) and we were going on an online video game and he asked if I wanted to go to the grocery to buy “raid munchkins” (so cute!). He also used to pronounce “steak” like “steek” and “taco” like “tack-o”
I loved reading this
You sneaky Zeke,lol, I think I would have done the same thing.
Husband once had to show me a dictionary before I would believe that ‘unpractical’ wasn’t a real word. It was quite shocking, I’d been saying that forever! (I still say it just to tease him. :p ) Mind you, he’s had some good ones in Danish as well. I usually proof read his emails in Danish before he’s comfortable sending them and he has a tendency to get overly formal sometimes. He also once sent me a postcard when he’d been travelling for his old job and wrote about a cathedral he had gone to see. He wanted to say it was impressive, but actually said it was impressed. :)
One funny one we have noticed, is that where I live (in the US south), people who say “I reckon” are like, total hicks. But to him it’s totally normal to hear British people say so he has a whole different idea of it.
‘I reckon’, yes, I’ve picked that one up as well. I don’t (think I) use ‘I figure’ very much though. It seems like an Americanism to me. I’ve been trying to weed those out of my English in recent years, because what with being influenced by films and television from both North America and from the UK, it was such a jumble. It’s quite difficult, because I don’t know that something is an Americanism until someone tells me and then I have to remember to avoid it. Sometimes that leads to further confusion, like when I learned that ‘gotten’ is an Americanism and only used in British English in a few particular dialects (can’t remember which now). It got me in such a muddle I had to go back and ask if, when I ought to say ‘got’ instead of ‘gotten’, should I also say ‘forgot’ instead of ‘forgotten’? I still find it a little weird that I’m allowed ‘forgotten’ but not ‘gotten.’ The words are so similar.
I’m also having to pay attention to how I use ‘okay’. If you ask, ‘would you like go and do such and such’ and a Danish person says ‘okay’ they actually mean ‘yes, let’s go and do that’ and not ‘we could, but I’d rather not.’ I caused no end of insecurity for Husband with that when we first met and it seemed to him like none of his suggestions were met with enthusiasm. :)
I had to get over that sort of thing with my cooking. It doesn’t matter what I make, I could only get something like, “It’s good” out of him. Over here people would go on and on about food and how it is so great, so I always felt like I couldn’t make anything that he really liked. But eventually I figured out it’s just him being Danish. I think somehow it all goes back to janteloven and keeping things low key.
I’m glad he chose something else. I have comma trouble myself. I like them too much.
Marzipan, This is true, it’s definitely a Danish thing. If I’d cooked for someone and they started gushing about how wonderful it was, I’d just start getting embarrassed and a little annoyed at them. At first because ‘yes, I heard you the first time’ and later because I’d start thinking they were just trying to hide how awful they thought it was. As a nation, we are not always very good at taking compliments. At least not the gushing kind. Janteloven is probably one of the greatest classical works that we’ve got, because it defines the Danish character very very precisely. Axel Sandemose ought to be a mandatory part of the curriculum, at least in gymnasiet (Danish equivalent to the American high school, for those following this conversation and not in the know).
MzPriss, if only you lot would use the Danish comma rules, my life would be a lot easier. :D Seems to me every single comma rule in English is followed by ‘except if such and such’
Queued post, written April 7th 2014
Here’s one from my TP order recently. I had also bought a large pouch of golden Monkey from Jenier, a tea of which Husband as very fond, so I just got a sample tin for comparison. Mind you these samples are a size that some of you lot buy when you don’t buy samples. 30ish g in each.
This one has a lovely aroma. It’s grainy and strong and I could smell it as soon as Husband came and set it down on my saucer. It also has a fair amount of hay and Yunnan-ness in it though, which makes me think it’s possibly not as closely related to the Jenier one as I initially thought.
It tastes somewhat Yunnan-y as well. A good amount of hay in the note, but not as bad as Yunnan can sometimes be for me. It also has a strongly starchy flavour and a strong note of something that reminds me of root vegetables. My initial thought was that this tastes like carrots, actually, but this may be influenced by the fact that we have a carrot flan on the menu for today, which I’m going to go and make a start on in a moment.
It doesn’t have as much in the way of grain in the flavour as there was in the aroma, but there’s a sort of cocoa note in there. If you can imagine the flavour of pure cocoa and then twisted in some way.
Finally as I swallow there’s a good amount of smoke in the flavour as well. The same sort of smoky note that I get from yunnan blacks, actually, the sort where I think it’s like smoke but I can see how some people would think it was more like pepper.
This is a very strong tea. Much stronger than the Jenier one, which I believe is Fujian. I think this one must be Yunnan. I shall have to look it up. I have to say that while this is good, I do prefer the one from Jenier.
Hm. Having looked it up, apparently this one is Fujian too. I wonder how they made it so Yunnan-y. I shall send some of it to Auggy for a second opinion, I think.
Queued post, written April 6th 2014
I got this out of the second round of the EU TTB, mostly attracted to the coconut, which is odd because it’s not usually a flavour in my attention sphere. If I had seen it, I would have been far more attracted to the almond, but I didn’t actually discover that it had almond until just now when I’ve made it. In spite of it being right there in the name. With big letters. I expect I just read ‘coconut’ and my brain stopped there.
I have to admit, it doesn’t smell very nice. I can smell the almond in the shape of warm marcipan and then a great deal of something chemical that reminds me most of all of the smell of acetone… NOT a smell I enjoy finding in my tea! I think it’s the coconut behaving this way.
It doesn’t taste like something that ought not be drunk though. For obvious reasons I don’t know what acetone tastes like, but I shouldn’t think it would taste like this. I can easily pick up the base green and the coconut, but the almond is more elusive.
Seems fairly cream-y, probably again the coconut, and sweet from both coconut and almond. I can sort of taste what the almond is doing here rather than the almond itself.
The flavour is quite nice, actually. The aroma is just very much ruining it for me and is the biggest reason for the rating being as low as it is.
Queued post, written April 6th 2014
This came from my recent Jenier order. I’m not sure why I bought it because Yunnan is a little unpredictable to me. Sometimes they’re good, other times they’re a mouthful of hay. Sometimes the same tea can swing between these two in the space of a few days. So I never quite know what I’m getting. I have learned though that Dian Hong and pearls are usually safe choices. So why this one? I suspect merely because I couldn’t remember seeing this particular name before and I was in a situation where I was looking for just one more sample. When shopping I like to set myself a maximum amount if it’s a place with a lot of things to choose from. Either a maximum amount of money or a maximum of kinds of tea. This varies. So it’s very likely I was merely looking to see if I couldn’t find just the one more thing I was allowed to have.
Anyway, it has always bothered me a little that I can’t seem to enjoy Yunnan blacks as much as other people do. I’ve tried some samples of teas that other people were positively swooning over, that Golden Fleece one from Verdant for example, and when I finally had the chance to see what the fuss was about I was left with an impression of, “well, this is nice, but… meh.” I feel like I’m missing out in a big way with this. The odd thing is, it never bothers me this way that I don’t drink Darjeeling if I can avoid it. Perhaps it something to do with the difference between ranging from ‘meh’ to ‘okay’ and ranging from ‘ugh’ to ‘meh’…
This one smells a little chocolate-y and a little caramel-y and a lot bread-y. Freshly baked, still a bit warm. We’re off to a good start here. The aroma isn’t really very strong, but it’s possible that the cup, cooling to a drinkable temperature as it is, has cooled past the point where you get a lot of aroma. I also think my cup isn’t the best at containing the aroma so that it doesn’t just fly away, largely because I have a tendency to fill them so close to the rim.
There is a certain amount of hay in this. I need to get that out there right away. There is also a good deal of caramel-y sweetness, though. I wonder if that hay-y note is simply a matter of acquired taste? I really wouldn’t mind drinking this caramel-y tea more regularly without stopping to think ‘hay loft’ all the time.
Swallowing I get a smoky aftertaste. Some people find this note more like pepper, I’ve noticed, but for me Yunnans are usually largely smoky teas. This is no exception. It’s not there until I swallow, but then it does come in vast amounts. Lots of smoke. I quite like this balance.
I think we’re closer to ‘okay’ than ‘meh’ with this one.
