216 Tasting Notes
I feel a little bad about logging all of these tasting notes when I can’t really taste the tea, but it’s kind of useful for me to remind myself that this tea is really good with a great big dollop of honey: it’s very smooth and sweet, and the sour berry scent from the dry leaves is completely gone leaving only an interesting tang.
(As you may have gathered by now, I got myself the Art of Tea Dessert Sampler off of the steepster select a while ago and am working my way through it!)
Preparation
Agreed! I hate it when I drink sometime and I have no words for it either because it was so bland or it was really plain / ordinary. I just leave a rating for those, but I wish there was a way to do private notes. I’m guess it’s good that there are no options to make notes private, otherwise I’d be too lazy to type anything.
I will reserve full judgement until my head cold clears up and my taste buds are my own again, but I liked this so far. What I can get out of it is a strong, rough rooibos with a chocolate sweetness, no mint or vanilla. I do like rooibos for itself as well as for being a good flavoring base, so that’s a reasonable first tasting.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to open a new kleenex box….
Preparation
Normally I don’t sweeten green tea, but I have an awful sore throat so I spooned in some honey. Bearing in mind that I am stuffed up enough to taste maybe half of this, it’s quite nice this way: sharp enough that I can tell it’s there, but smooth and comforting anyway.
Preparation
Oh my. I lump “oolong” and “green” together in my mind most of the time, but this tea may just force me to accept finer distinctions. This is an absolutely delicious tea, very sweet and flowery, and not at all what I expect when I think of green tea. Oolong, huh.
ETA: And it’s definitely getting juicer with resteeping. Interesting!
Preparation
While there are green and dark oolongs, oolongs are definitely not greens no more than cooked Pu Erh is a black tea. I wish tea companies would educate themselves enough to not misinform their customers, that happens a lot w/ cooked pu erh/blacks. Now if I can just figure out what yellow tea is- I’ve seen it lumped into the white, green, and oolong categories.
Wikipedia suggests that yellow comes from a post-oxidation process, so perhaps it can be applied to a variety of teas that would otherwise be white/green/black?
Oh, cool, check this out:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Teaprocessing-small.png
Freakin sweet!
I don’t like that they don’t call pu erh by its name, but oh well.
Hmm! My tea-of-the-month subscription is supposed to be one black, one green, and one herbal each month, but last month was a black-and-green blend, a fruit tea, and this tea, so I’m not sure how that works out (maybe one black-and-green blend and one oolong are equivalent to one black and one green? grin) — unless what I have isn’t the “variety” but the “surprise me” subscription, and I can’t seem to find the “you’ve got tea!” notice that came with it to check…. On Tea Table’s website, at least, green and oolong are not conflated at all.
My first thought when I opened this packet of tea was: doesn’t my girlfriend have this lip gloss?
So it definitely smells like artificial fruit. A lot of things do; it’s pretty much impossible for anything but actual fresh strawberries to smell or taste like fresh strawberries, and I also like fruit flavoring as its own thing. I don’t smell kiwi particularly, but there’s definitely something mixed with the strawberries.
Steeped, the tea is the color of strawberry dessert topping. I find this amusing.
Sipped, it feels like fruit tea, one of those really tart (but not at all sour) ones that roughs up your mouth on the way through. It’s the sort of feel that makes it hard to taste anything, although it definitely leaves the lingering impression that actual fruit has come this way. The taste isn’t artificial at all.
You know, I don’t brew a lot of my own iced tea, but this tea does stand out as one that could be really good iced, served very cold and a bit weak with a small amount of sugar. I’m not going to try it — I don’t know if I can really express how little the weather suits iced tea right now, but go ahead and google “north american east coast blizzard 2010” if you’re curious — but I will keep it in mind!
