Oolong Owl select Send Message

While my family came to visit from Canada, they all brought DAVIDsTea goodies (in 20g sizes) for me to sample, after hearing too much of my rantings of missing having a DT store. Interestingly, I got all blacks and herbals. Weird. This one came from my sis in Victoria!

DRY: smells sweet and nutty. Good combo! Annoyingly, my first scoop of tea gave me 70% raisins. I counted 6 squashed raisins. I unstuck them and got a better mix for this steeping.

STEEPED: Amber brown tea, bit of clear residue on the top. Smells very smooth nutty.

TASTE: Nutty, rich brazil nut flavor, rounded out by smooth coconut. Slightly sweet. The black tea hums along with the flavors, no astringency or bitterness.
Sweetened, the raisin and coconut taste pops out more with a nutty aftertaste.

COMMENTS: I can see why back around Father’s Day they marketed this as a gift, unsweetened I can see this tea as “manly” with the rich nutty taste. Sweetened however, it’s a desserty flavor.
I see others comment this tastes like “Toasted Walnut”, I find this tea is a more nutty, rich alternative for “Checkmate”. Either way, all those teas are nutty.

Overall, pretty good. I love the brazil nut flavor – I think there should be more teas out there using brazil nuts. I may buy more of this, but I have other DT blacks I like more.

EDIT, pics with this review at my blog http://oolongowl.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/brazillionaire-from-davidstea-tea-review/

Thank you out to NaturesTeaLeaf for a sample of this for review! Very generous amount too, so I made a pot’s worth for this tasting!

Silver Needle white tea, hmmm. I don’t drink too many unflavored white teas, but I have a couple in my tea stash. Ones I do have I find kinda flat with not much flavor. Let’s see how this tea does.

DRY LEAF: Fresh earthy smell. Very light weight tea. The leaves were kinda fuzzy /petpet

STEEPED: Smells slightly sweet and fruity with a hint of earthyness. Nice pale yellow gold tea.

TASTE: Sweet and rich! The sweetness flavoring reminds me of golden raisins almost as it has a warm, fruity, gold sweetness to it. This tea is full of flavor but light. Very refreshing and pure tasting.

COMMENTS: Very good, I enjoyed how much flavor is in this tea – I didn’t know white tea packed this much taste on its own! I should really explore into the unflavored white teas some more.

I bought this tea back in Canada as it came in a nice tin and it was on sale.

This tea comes in those meshy clear triangle tea bags.

Flavor wise, fairly light and mostly floral. I get a hit of jasmine and a little earl grey essence as an aftertaste. The green tea base is fair, but really background to the floral.

Okay tea for bagged stuff from a grocery store – more excited for the tin once I’m done this tea! LOL

Hey Pekko Teas, TY for a generous sample of this tea! My dad stole the stamps off the package btw. Pretty cool this came all the way from London!

DRY: Fruity? Smells familiar to me though. After awhile sniffing, I realized this tea smells just like my favorite blueberry jam! Hmmm.. weird.

STEEPED: Peachy coppery brown tea – I love this colour! Still smells like blueberries. Annoying to me, I could not find steeping instructions. I did a 200f for 3 minutes, hopefully that is good enough.

TASTE: Bright and light black tea, bit of citrus tossed in. Very clean taste. The aroma of fruityness is lovely. At the end of my sip, a light astringency lightly sweeps in and quickly passes as the tea is gone.

WHO SHOULD TRY IT: Someone looking for a light black tea.

COMMENTS: Very nice ceylon tea, I haven’t had this kind of tea in awhile – probably the last time was in a coffee shop. This tea has a very sophisticated experience of good smells, pretty colour and nice light flavor. The astringency isn’t bad here as it’s a quick experience.

Maybe blueberry jam smells like black tea? I dunno.

I do like dates. Back in my vegan days I got into snacking on mejool dates, which I still do today, when they are on sale. I do like baked date goods, but not over the top sweet.

This sample comes from Kittena, ty!

DRY: oooh, a hunk of date in here!

STEEPED: sweet datey smell. Reddy brown tea.

TASTE: sweet dried fruit taste, a little walnutty skin taste and buttery flavoring up front. The buttery taste is quite different from other buttery tastes I’ve had, it’s not like a buttery green tea, but a butteryness that hits the whole mouth and top of the mouth. I dunno, it tastes like flavoring, but not awful fake popcorn flavoring.
The rooibos is pretty backburner here and I can enjoy the date muffiness with rooibos being complimentary. I’m thinking dates and rooibos = good mix.

Sweetened, it’s much closer to date taste as dates are pretty sweet. However, I like this tea unsweetened to enjoy the nutty flavor.

COMMENTS: I love the butteryness in this tea – I’m one of those awful eaters that add butter to my muffins. This is pretty good, but I’d love MOAR walnut! I like this tea, but thinking of it having more walnuts makes me disappointed, if that makes sense.

Say WHHHAT, no rating on this tea yet? Where’s the love? With that said, TY out to Stacy @ Butiki for OHMF, this is the last tea I haven’t tried out of my unflavored giveaway package. I put this tea in the wrong tin and it got lost in the shuffle.

DRY: Very spacious light green tangles of leaves. Kinda of PITA to get 2 teaspoons of because the leaves are long, light and take up so much space. I’m not sure if I used enough leaf or went overboard. And I didn’t want to smash the leaves to fit nice in the measuring spoon.

STEEPED: Very very light green tea. Could be mistaken for tap water, lol! Maybe I didn’t use enough leaf, doh! Hmm, well the pic looks close to mine, maybe it’s the lighting. Smells like artichokes. Man, I love artichokes but I hate the effort it takes to eat them.

TASTE: POW this tea is full of flavor, despite the weak colour appearance! I taste an explosion of raw sweet white corn flavor, like chomping into raw corn and pops oozing with milky buttery taste. Also with that bite getting a bit of the green corn stalk, getting a little veg taste. Quite sweet and refreshing taste that hangs out in my mouth for awhile after each sip. No bitterness.

COMMENTS: Seriously. I poured the tea into my cup and looked at it and thought I messed up. I took a sip and went “What the?” in surprise with the full flavor of this tea.

Arrrgg, I gave 95/100 for Dragon Feelers, Spring Twist – all Butiki greens. Darn it, I’m giving this one a 95 too. They are all very good and different and I can’t choose which one I like more. DURRRRRRR. I dunno. I’m just going to drink more tea.

I believe this tea came from Rachel Sincere, TY!

Still in PU’REH MODE! GO GO GO PU’REH!

While I was doing a rinse on this tea my roommate ran out of the room saying it was smelling fishy. Pfffft!

First steeping: super bold earthy – very harsh on the first sip, so I might of oversteeped it. There’s a a hum of another flavor making me think back to drinking tea in Vancouver Canada Chinatown as a little girl in a noodle house. I recall they had the best shrimp wonton soup, and the chefs worked in a teeny glass booth tossing noodles around with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. The dark tea was served in regular water glasses and would burn my hands but was very good. The flavor hum I can’t explain, like sweet woodsy and smells of chinatown.

Second steeping. Much better and mellower. That sweet woodsy flavor is still there! Soft and delicious as the tea cools! Best steeping!

Third steeping. Interestingly this tea got a rosy pink each pour, but sits in my cup a dark brown. Second best steeping! Very close to the second steeping but milder.

And I ran out of time for more steepings. Maybe later.

I know I’m totally weird, but I dreamt of drinking pu’reh all night last night. It was great. Must of been from randon tea videos I was watching on youtube yesterday. With that said, when I woke up and dying for some pu’reh!

DRY: Very pretty tea, colourful rose bits, fruit and adorable little pearly sugar balls. I hate those balls in cookies, always hurt my teeth, but I’m thinking that they would be better in tea!

STEEPED: Dark brown peachy coloured tea, smells almost chocolatey with a hint of peach.

TASTE: Smokey deep pu’reh hit first, with mango and peach flavors slowly spreading through. Slight sweetness at the end of my sip.
Sweetened, MOP peachy mango steps up with the pu’reh being an earthy smokey background. I prefer this tea sweetened.

COMMENTS: Hmmm, I’m thinking you really gotta like pu’reh for this tea, the smokeyness is quite strong unless you sweeten it.

I recently had Della Terra’s Mellow Mango Peach – very different tea because of the different bases. I like MOP a little more for its complexity.

WARRAGGHGHHGGHHH! Back from brazilian jiu jitsu friday class, aka get beaten up class. Very tired out, I’ve been staring at Knitpicks.com and dream of knitting pretty socks, a low injury hobby. What the.. last time I drank this tea, it was after a friday jiu jitsu class of getting beaten up. Interesting.

DRY: citrusy mango, yum! Very strong scented with some nice thin slices of fruit.

STEEPED: Light rooibos scent, but nice and fruity coming from a reddy brown tea.

TASTE: Hint of spice with natural mango flavor sweeping my mouth. A little creamy as well. The mango is pretty nice here, great flavor without the mango pit strings in your teeth. The roobios works on the same vibe as the mango, which is great for a non rooibos lover like me.

COMMENTS: There’s cardamon in this? My flavor ENEMY! I’m too tired to fight back, but the cardamon is used very well and lightly here, horrible awful. (I had a horrible experience with cardamon and try and avoid it).

Is this going to be my official post jiu jitsu recovery tea? I’m going back to sipping tea and dreaming of purple sock knitting. Maybe knee highs. Lots of lace.

I didn’t jump on the acai fruity craze, but I see quite a few of my other brazilian jiu jitsu peeps always drinking something with either acai or just coconut water. I’m the only one who runs around with matcha looking weird. Pffff, they need to learn from me. Either way, I decided to give this matcha a shot, show up those others at class.

Specs on this matcha:

Brazilian Acai matcha
From http://www.redleaftea.com/matcha-tea/acai-matcha.html
Matcha Quality: Classic Basic Grade
Flavor: Distinctive

Out of the gold foil package, this matcha smells amazingly fruity. Super fruit amazing! The smell reminds me of really tarty berry yogurt. Brazilian Acai matcha appears slightly darker in powder form.

I prepared this as a traditional hot cup, getting me pumped up before my brazilian jiu jitsu practice (I seriously need the energy for class today)! This matcha didn’t froth up very well nor maintain froth, but I didn’t really care. Interestingly, this matcha prepared has a different colour than normal, a dark forest green, probably from the acai berry powder. By the way, I used 1/4tsp plus 175f water.

The taste of Brazilian Acai matcha is quite fruity. A mix between a tropical flavor and blackberries or blueberries. There is also a natural sweetness to this matcha – adding any additional sweetener would be overkill I think. With the fruityness and natural sweetness, this hot cup is very refreshing! There is no tart or bitterness to this matcha! I honestly was expected this to taste tart or puckery.

In the end, this was surprisingly good! I’m thinking this would be great iced, in my waterbottle, nearby to me while I do jiu jitsu. Or is that totally cheating getting a doubly whammy of heathly energizing matcha and acai? Don’t pass up this matcha – I’m thinking this is up there on being one of my fav flavors from Red Leaf Teas!