Adagio Teas

First time I tried this it was little disappointing as cinnamon was the overwhelming taste. I am not sure if it aged or something, but when I next tried it a bout 3 months later it tasted more rounded, more like maple syrup. This is a tasty tea and if you notice what I did, leave it for a few months to see if that helps.

FROM A ROOIBOS AND JASMINE LOVER: I do not like this.
Rooibos is my favorite type of tea, and jasmine is my favorite flavor. I drink a LOT of rooibos herbal tea and a LOT of jasmine silver needle white tea. I obviously had to try this tea! I REALLY wanted to like it. However, I wasn’t sure about the blend, so I got this as a free sample from Adagio.

The dry tea leaves are red/orange needles, but they look shorter (broken?) than other rooibos teas I drink. The liquor is a deep orange/red.

The smell was a bit confusing. It smells mainly of rooibos, honey, and a weird jasmine-ish note (the smell is rather sharp). The taste, like the smell, is confusing (although it tastes a little bit better than the smell because the taste is more subtle). I don’t think this combo works well. The warm, honey notes of the rooibos does not fit with the floral, distinctive flavor of jasmine. Adagio says they blend this tea with natural jasmine flavor, but it could have fooled me… it smells artificial. It tastes better if you don’t inhale while drinking it. I will try to finish the mug, but….meh. UPDATE: It gets worse the more of it I drink. The smell is slightly revolting and the taste is perfumey. I won’t end up buying the full-size package.

1 heaping tsp for one mug of tea. Steep for 5 mins.
Ingredients (on the package): rooibos tea, natural jasmine flavor.

The steeped leaves smell of orange (and also cinnamon). The tea has a medium/light body with spice that is not overpowering. I did not get much in the way of vanilla, but I don’t think the vanilla would have made the tea better necessarily. The color of the tea liquor is medium golden. It was a lot better than I expected, as some OTHER vanilla chai teas taste sickly sweet, artificial, or overpoweringly spicy. This tea is well balanced. I will probably drink it more around Christmas. As with most rooibos teas, I like to add honey.
One note is that it does not do well resteeped.

Brew time: 8 mins 30 seconds. Temperature: 212*f.
Ingredients listed on sample bag: rooibos tea, ginger root, cinnamon bark, cloves, cardamom, orange peels, natural vanilla flavor

As I’m trying new blends that contain teas I’ve never drank straight (oolong in this one, pu-erh in one I tried yesterday), it’s making me realize that having a knowledge of what those teas taste like on their own would better assist me in picking up on their notes in blended teas.

Regardless, I really enjoyed this blend. It’s actually my second time trying it, but yesterday was a bust. I put it in a teabag for on-the-go and didn’t have access to temperature-controlled water, so it just wasn’t that great. Today, brewed up at proper temp, it was great. Can I say that I felt it was the tea that embodied all I am as a Taurus? Not quite, but I suppose that’s a bit much to ask of a tea. It has great peach flavor that is a bit more full-bodied than other peach whites I’ve tried, presumably due to the oolong.

This tea is much more spicy than what I was expecting from a Chai beverage, but then again, I only started drinking Chai beverages in the last year…and my introduction to Chai beverages was Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Chai Tea Latte…

I drank my first cup with just a splash of cream, and my second cup with some cream and sugar. I think I will try making a tea latte next. Whenever I take a sip, the initial taste isn’t bad, but the spices really make themselves known once I swallow.

Many thanks to Starfevre for this tea.

I was a bit worried this would be hibiscus-heavy, however I like to coldbrew jugs of herbal/fruity teas when the weather is nice. I did 3 tsp leaf, 1L cold water, 20 minutes. Luckily, this did not overbrew. It has a tartness to it that I got around by watching it brew and removing the teabag when it got light pink. There is a very strong aroma and flavour of raspberry. Not generic berry, but specifically raspberry. The hibiscus isn’t too bad. The cranberry isn’t very present. I will be trying this sweetened in the future, but I have high hopes for this as the weather warms up.

The name of this tea is a bit misleading, as it isn’t really much of a replication of actual Thai Tea. I love me some Thai iced tea and can’t recall ever having a cup with such a coconuty flavor, and think they should’ve gone with a different name. That said, for what it is, it’s a pretty enjoyable black tea. I like coconut flavored teas, so the strong coconut notes are quite enjoyable. There is a small hint of vanilla (which is really the flavor they should’ve played up if they wanted to taste more like Thai tea, in my opinion!) but it doesn’t stand out as much compared to the coconut. I’m a bit sad that none of the cardamom presented itself in the flavor. The base comes off a bit stronger than I prefer my black teas; I can tell that a lot of things were added to try to naturally sweeten this tea up (apple, honeybush), but it is still pretty astringent, at least to my tastes. So I have to take this with just a dash of vanilla coconut creamer, which helps sweeten the tea up a bit while adding a slight creaminess and emphasizing the vanilla and coconut flavors.

Honestly, this just comes across as a coconut black tea, and there are better coconut black blends out there. If you are looking for a tea that tastes like Thai tea like the name suggests, this certainly isn’t it.

enjoyable

This Ceylon based tea smells sensational. It tastes delicious. Lovely color too. This is a great tea if you want an easy to make Earl Grey with creamier notes than the more traditional types with Black Tea. This is one of my favorite teas; clean, refreshing, slightly sweet, slighty creamy and very smooth.

This is a custom blend that I tried while searching for a decent replacement for Teavana’s ginger coconut rooibos, which was one of the only teas of theirs that I really liked. Despite the fact that it’s made up of three different teas and therefore has a lot going on (including chai spice, vanilla, and apple pieces along with the coconut), the rooibos taste still overpowers the rest somehow. Not terrible, but my search for a good ginger coconut rooibos continues.

I bought this after receiving a sample of it that I enjoyed. It’s a nice light, summery white tea; the peach/apricot flavor is strong but not overpowering, offsetting the slight bitterness of the tea without masking it entirely. It’s great iced as well.

This tea is very floral; I enjoy it pretty well, but the rose and cherry combination apparently makes my SO think of soap too much. I think enjoyment of this tea is going to be heavily dependent on how much you can tolerate the perfume-y notes.