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Got the four-tea sampler for Christmas. Found this pretty boring. No idea how long it was in those little tins. Not awful, but nothing I’d look for again.

This is my wife’s favorite tea, and I find it very tasty as well. I like tea sweet – even though others think it’s a little too sweet, I still add a touch of honey when I make it. The tea is robust, but not overpowering, and is good for several steeps with a lot of flavor. If you like cinnamon and orange, you owe it to yourself to try this.

The hazelnut flavor isn’t very pronounced, but this is a perfectly good chai otherwise, and the hazelnut doesn’t hurt. You don’t want to oversteep this as between the pepper and the black tea it will get bitter fast.

This tea is a little too floral-y for my preferences, but it’s perfectly drinkable. The strawberry gets a bit drowned out by the vanilla, but I like vanilla. It does not resteep well.

After my review of the straight pu’erh from Adagio (Summary: “Don’t.”) I thought I should post this to show that I don’t just hate pu’erh. :)

This is a flavorful, comforting tea with distinct notes of chocolate, hazelnut, and cream. I don’t get a lot of strawberry as such, but I suspect the berry flavor tempers the pu’erh considerably. It’s recognizeable as a pu’erh based tea as opposed to a more straightforward black tea, but the grass/dirt tones of pure pu’erh are blessedly absent. Probably wouldn’t be very good iced, but delightful warm with a blustery spring rain blowing outside.

The very nice manager at Adagio, when she heard me say I liked pu’erh teas, got excited and made me a sample of this “pure” pu’erh.

“Pure” pu’erh, let me be perfectly clear, tastes like grass clippings. Dirty grass clippings.

Now, this isn’t the first time I have failed to appreciate something that cultured people like, and it won’t be the last, I’m sure. If you enjoy it, bless you. But no. Just no. Pu’erh can provide some interesting depths of background flavor (I like the Berry Pu’erh from Tea Harbor and the Hazelberry Pu’Erh from Adagio) but straight? Ain’t happening.

This is a pressed “pearl” tea that comes in balls a little less than an inch in diameter. You only need one even for an over-sized mug of tea, and they can be reused twice as long as you don’t let it sit too long.

This is a lovely black tea with lychee flavoring. (Lychee is a sweet Asian fruit, one of my favorites, which figures since I’m from Iowa.) Very nice hot or cold, and barely any sugar required due to the sweetness of the lychee.

This is a very floral green tea with strong rose flavors.The other herbs are there, but most of what you get is green tea with rose. Oversteeping this tea will make it bitter very quickly: don’t use their recommended steeping time. Five minutes at 175 is PLENTY. It’d probably be nice on ice. If you don’t oversteep you don’t need a lot of sugar.

For some reason, this isn’t on their website, but it’s readily available at the shop in Vernon Hills, IL.

I like peach tea and I have been trying different kinds. The Adagio white peach tea I tried I didn’t care for, so I gave this a go. It is a little smoother and the peach is surprisingly not overwhelming considering the white tea isn’t as strong as a black or oolong variety. It needs a little sugar, but I have yet to run across tea I didn’t think needed a little sugar, so take that for what it’s worth. It doesn’t need much, which is unusual for me.

As noted, a pleasant black tea with solid peach flavor. I like my fruity teas really fruity, and this delivers, although it’s almost so strong it’s like drinking hot peach juice. Not quite, but almost. :) It definitely needs a bit of sugar, peachy or no, as Adagio black tea can be a bit bitter without some sweetening.