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This sounded like it had potential for a dessert option so I threw caffeine caution to the wind (I plan on staying up to watch 24 tonight anyway, so might as well). Dry leaves smell vaguely like Frango mints, and look like the black/green interspersion of mint with black tea.

The aroma of the steeped tea is odd. It’s got mint, it’s got chocolate, but they’re not mixing particularly well. There’s a sort of strange, spicy warm plastic smell to it. The liquor is a reddish orange, but the sample was pretty small so it may be a little weaker in color than it would be were it a full cup with appropriately measured leaves.

The tea tastes like a mint tea to which has been added a little bit of melted baking chocolate, which is to say the chocolate is not at all sweet. I like the taste, but I think it could be improved with a little lactose to sweeten it up. The chocolate and mint steal the show here. I was just getting the beginnings of the tea’s taste right when my cup ranneth out.

I think this shows enough promise to merit trying it again, unless I should happen to run across a chocolate mint in the interim that knocks my socks off.

Used up the last of the bags in the home stash this morning, though I still have about half a box at work. Of all the bags I’ve been experimenting with, this is one of the ones I will remember most fondly. Miss is probably too strong a word, though. I’m grateful to this tea for making me curious enough about darjeeling to go on to broaden my experiments into loose leaf and undoubtedly better things ahead.

My sample is called “French Verveine” on its very elegant black and dark gold jacket, but in double checking my order detail and the web site it appears there is really only one Harney product called Verveine, so this must be it!

It’s hard to imagine how I have thus far managed to escape experiencing lemon verbena in the flesh, so to speak. But as far as I know or can remember, I have. I was expecting an alternative to other lemon flavored tisanes, but it soon became apparent that this is something entirely different.

The leaves are humongous, light green, and curl inward along their main vein/vertical axis, and apparently, they are weightless. I put the entire packet on the scale and only came out with enough for half a cup? (Perhaps I am going to regret this?)

Dry, they smell nothing at all like lemon; they smell like a savory spice of some kind. Dried thyme or dried sage, I think. Or maybe even dried basil. Or notes suggestive of all three.

Steeped, it’s a very dark yellow color, and the aroma still has nothing that is smelling to me like the lemon I expected to smell. There is a hint of lemon, but it is more along the lines of the juice from a roasted herbed lemon chicken. Savory and brothy.

And that is pretty much how it tastes as well. This doesn’t taste like a lemon tisane, it tastes like a savory spice tisane with a subtle lemon note to it. It’s tasty, but in the sense of the spicy taste of a very well-spiced poultry stuffing with some lemon squeezed into it.

I am wondering if the scale lied to me and I should not have used the full packet? I’m going to resteep with more water to see what that’s like. I am making this as a full cup (approx. 8 oz) this time instead of half of that.

Indeed, more water lessens the brothiness considerably, or perhaps it’s the second steep effect. It’s still a very savory taste, though.

Hmm. I’m not going to rate this as I’m not sure I prepared it correctly, and because I have nothing to compare it to. In reading about verbena on the web, it seems this is supposed to have a “bright lemon taste” which I’m not getting. Mine is definitely full-bodied, but the lemon is not the main flavor I’m getting, nor is it bright. I’d describe it as sultry.

Finished up the last of this tonight and am de-cupboarding. (Why do I feel compelled to say “ta da!”?)

Golden Moon sample No. 12 of 31.

Fate apparently wanted me to drink this one, too, right away — because I drew it out of the basket on the heels of another green and so happened to have the water in the Zo still at 175. (The next one to come out after this was Irish Breakfast, so we’ll be waiting a while to drink that one…)

I’m sure this is the first Ceylon green tea I’ve had, which is interesting in and of itself.

The dry leaves aren’t as deep green as other greens I’ve had. They’re a little browner, with some that almost reach yellow, even. They smell a little toasty. They seem to have some oolong-like characteristics, except in shape where they are long and for the most part not curly though some are almost balled up.

Liquor is a very pale yellow green and has a sweet, vegetal aroma that is similar to that of Chinese greens I have had, but less. By which I mean it suggests a light-bodied tea. Which is, in fact, borne out by the drinking.

In taste, this tea has less depth of flavor than the Teavana Three Kingdoms Mao Feng, which I found lacking in depth. Less vegetal, and not particularly buttery, though it does have some sweetness. I was looking for the subtle candied pineapple and didn’t find it. Candied pineapple in my experience is extremely sugary and that is not this tea. I did, however, taste something that if I stretched (reach out with your feelings, Luke) suggested fresh pineapple, but ratcheted down several major increments from the best fresh, juicy, sweet, pineapple.

I’m glad I got a chance to try something other than a Chinese or Japanese green tea. I probably would not have sought out a Ceylon green. I don’t like this well enough to order more, though.

Golden Moon sample No. 11 of 31. Plucked from the basket at random.

I may have used too much water in steeping these leaves. I had about enough for .9 cups in the sample. I played a little with water levels over the course of several steeps.

The dry leaves are long, and silvery green. Snow seems an apt description; it’s like you’re seeing the green of the leaves through a light dusting of white. I didn’t notice any fuzziness to them but I was a little rushed as it was right before dinner so I didn’t get to do a relaxed examination of the leaves. For me it wasn’t an obvious snow, certainly nothing near Christmas tree flocking. Rather, it was all in gradations of color.

When I first started with this one, I thought this was going to be the story of the tea that wasn’t there. The dry leaves don’t have a strong nose. It took a while to get my olfactory muscle memory working enough to detect something describable. When I finally could smell something I could put into words, the words that came were “salty green.” Like the plants in a marsh leading into an ocean. The saltiness also had a sharpness. I know this will sound weird, but it reminded me of the smell of the brown powder in Lipton Onion Soup Mix.

The liquor was virtually clear. It was only a slight green tinge that kept this from being the invisible tea. Aroma-wise, also nothing very strong. Dew, maybe pollen. The borderline between green and floral.

The taste was similarly subtle but surprisingly complex. It took several steeps for me to get a handle on and appreciate the taste. I took it through four steeps. The complexity gradually started to show itself; at the end of four steeps, I wished I had more of this so I could follow where it led.

Here is what I tasted, in no particular order: a light film of butter, a grainy nuttiness (like the kind you find in “Grape Nuts”), a little whiff of salt, a sweet spicy/salty flavor that reminded me of sauteed leeks at times and at others of sauteed scallions. Then I read the notes here and saw macademia nuts. Yeah, I can see that too; it’s a sweet, mild, buttery, salty nuttiness that I associate with those.

After steeping, the leaves looked the color of overcooked asparagus or green beans, a faded olive green. The silver was gone, but they were still pretty.

So yeah, I want to give this another try. It’s surprisingly interesting and even a little challenging, and like good literature, I think there is a lot more there than I found on a first “read.”

This is the end, beautiful friend[s]. The last of the teabag notes from the initial round of overbuying when some mysterious force moved me to become a tea drinker and appreciatrix. Yay!

The only other honeybush I have had thus far is the Tazo bagged version, which I appreciate for its versatility. It’s a pretty good all purpose sweetener for too-tart fruit blends. It’s also fairly smooth and flavorful on its own.

The Numi bags smell greener and woodier than the Tazo, which smelled like apricots to me. I don’t get an apricot smell here so much as — honey! And that repeats in the aroma after steeping, with a reedy note similar to what I recall was present in the Numi Green Rooibos. This brews slightly darker than the Tazo.

It’s a greener, reedier, less sweet taste as well, which makes me wonder whether this is less oxidized than what Tazo used. But there’s no information on the Numi web site that would help determine this. The honey note is present, but it seems to move around some rather than being continuously present. Sometimes it pops with a little burst of flavor on a particular taste bud, but the overall impression is that it is less pervasive and less sweet than the Tazo.

This could make it more appealing for someone who really likes drinking honeybush plain. This describes me only very occasionally, and when I am moved to drink it plain I think I’d be likely to go for the sweeter alternative. In any case, as I’m mostly using honeybush as a natural flavor enhancer to bring out sweetness in tart fruit blends, I’d be likely to choose the Tazo for that purpose as well.

Second to last of the original bagged tea splurge left to write about. Woo hoo!

I wanted to drink this after the White Nectar Osmanthus Spring because the Moonlight Spice is, as the name suggests, heavily spiced and I feared it would influence my palate if I tasted in the other direction.

The white tea in this one is identified on the packaging as Pai Mu Tan (aka white peony). In my admittedly v. limited knowledge obtained from reading books about tea, I would suspect this is the base for the White Nectar as well as it seems to be less costly than other white teas that contain only buds.

When I sniff the bags, the dominant smell is the cinnamon/orange/clove “Constant Comment” combo, followed by ginger, followed by nonspecific citrus. The liquor’s color is quite dark and orange/brown, almost like that of a standard black tea. Its aroma is mostly cinnamon and some clove. It reminds me of the smell of a spiced “tea” my mother used to make for my father when he had colds. I am fairly sure there was no tea in it at all, just cinnamon, clove and perhaps some other spices.

The tea has a slightly tart taste, probably from the combination of the citrus and hibiscus. I note that it contains dried lime, which may be the same lime from the Dry Desert Lime tisane and which is quite tart. The Moonlight Spice is much less tart than that. I can taste cinnamon and orange, and a little ginger. I can taste the tea only slightly, and I may only be able to taste it because I have the taste of the White Nectar still resident in my personal RAM from the earlier tasting.

It’s not bad, but it isn’t something I think I’d choose if I were going to choose a flavored white tea. The flavors are pretty strong for the delicacy of white tea to stand up to. And if I were going to choose tea with this spice profile, I would likely choose one with a black tea base, a tisane or chai. I wouldn’t cast that in stone, though. This could be a good medicinal choice for when a small amount of caffeine would provide a boost and when black tea is too strong or rich.

I find myself within reach of something of a milestone. I only have three kinds of tea from my original splurge left to write notes on! Wonder if I can finish tonight? If not tonight, I should definitely be able to tomorrow. Then on to the even more dubious milestone of finishing drinking them all. Sometimes I leap before I look, as was the case here. Had I looked, I would probably have skipped bags altogether and gone straight to loose leaf. But live and learn.

Before I started on this journey, I didn’t know there was such a thing as white tea. I knew about blacks and greens, certainly, and even oolong. But the sheer existence of white was a surprise. When I first read about it, I thought it sounded like something I’d like. And now that I’ve tried some, I do — though I have yet to figure out where it best fits into my day. It’s not an early morning tea (need heavily caffeinated teas for that) and it’s not an afternoon tea, really (oolong, or green fits there). It’s not really a dessert tea because I’m prefer strong flavors in those. And then I worry that by late evening it’s too late for even it’s reputedly small amount of caffeine. This may be the reason that of all the boxes of teabags I have in my cupboard still, the white tea boxes have the most left in them.

It could also be that I haven’t yet taken the time to perfect how to steep them, and so they intimidate me a little. At least, moreso than other teas. I seem to have more success with lower temperatures and longer steeps — the flavors seem to come out a little bit more that way. But one day I’ll set aside some time and do an organized test of various steeping temperatures and times for different kinds of whites, and then maybe I can overcome my feelings of intimidation.

This is one of the three types of bagged tea I have left to write a note about, and one of the others is also a Numi white tea. The type of white tea this one is is not identified on the bag’s packaging.

The bag has a dusky, nonspecific plant smell, with a jungle flower feel to it. The liquor has an apricot color. The aroma is dusky floral, too, with something I think, from what I have read, is usually referred to as stone fruit? In any case, I don’t find it easily identifiable as a specific fruit — it could be peach, apricot, nectarine, or a combination. There’s a sweetness to it.

It tastes very much like it smells. Heavy, dark floral notes with a suggestion of fruit. The aftertaste is surprisingly fresh, and a tiny bit sweet.

It will be interesting to try other Osmanthus white teas, now that I have a baseline. This one is reasonably tasty for a bagged tea.

I just had a nice nap with my youngest, and needed something to clear the cobwebs after waking up. So, another mini-sample. This one was enough for about half a cup. I made it in a small cup but even so I may have added a bit too much water. The liquor was light orange/brown and I suspect it ought to have been darker.

There wasn’t much smell to it until it was infused, and then it gave off a very nice apple/cinnamon aroma which does remind me of apple pie filling. I don’t smell crust. There’s a current of malt/sugar underneath from the tea.

The apple and cinnamon is present in the flavor (no crust there either). I don’t taste much tea, but I suspect that this would be tasty if the tea base had a stronger presence. If I had it to do over again I would have used even less water and attempted to brew this stronger. 205 is usually enough for blacks for me, but maybe a bit hotter would make the flavor come out more as well.