Adagio Teas

I threw in a little Irish Breakfast on top of yesterday’s leftover Keemun Concerto. Yum. This tea is comforting and heavy…malty and smokey. Fantastic for a cold, rainy and generally yucky day. Taken with milk and a little Truvia. Does anyone else have an opinion on this Truvia stuff? I came across it by way of my local tea shop. They have packets out on their tables with the Splenda, raw sugar, etc. Just curious if this is the latest and greatest in the world of sweeteners.

So, this is one of Adagio’s highest ranked teas. I didn’t end that sentence with a question mark…I’m still forming an opinion as I type this.

For my 1st cup I added milk and sugar. It was a highly enjoyable cup…much stronger than English Breakfast, by far. The second cup I tried plain, nothing added. It was a little too “AHHH” in your face, so I added sugar. It has a bold taste. Very malty, a tad smokey, maybe a bit earthy? The smell is not that great.
It seems to me that if you can drink this tea plain, or even with sugar only, that you would like plain rooibos. I know there are some rooibos haters out there. For some reason these two strike me as similar…minus the malty taste in Irish Breakfast. Where rooibos lacks “malty” it makes up in “earthy”. I don’t know…I’m rambling.

Ok, with milk and sugar, I can see why this tea would rank so high. I’m a fan. Off to make another cup.

Not sure how I feel about this tea. It wasn’t what I expected at all but then, I’m not a big candy cane girl so I wasn’t expecting much. But I was expecting some mint. Sadly, my lip gloss with a mint tingle has a more easily identifiable mint than this tea. The mint here is pretty much limited to a fresh mouth feeling after a sip – just a little tingle (again, even my lip gloss is stronger). But that fresh minty feeling is quickly covered by something… musty? Not like attic musty but like wild musk musty. It is the taste that makes a muscadine differ from a white grape. That’s not to say this tasted like grape or muscadine, of course. It’s just that was the musky/musty flavor I was getting. Almost like a vanilla flavor but not quite. Vanilla bean maybe? Cream? I’m not sure. But it made for a much darker, heartier flavor than I expected from something named after a candy.

This tea sure is hazelnutty! I love hazelnut and this tea has no lack of that flavor here, but it still lets the black tea flavor through. Good for when you want to feel like a coffee drinker…

This is my first time trying Mambo, but I generally like Chinese black teas (but not others- typically). I was expecting a more complex flavor. Nonetheless, it is a nice tea. It is a little smoky, fairly robust, and somewhat earthy. Not smoky like lapsang souchong, or earthy like a puerh. The flavors are much less overt than that. I will enjoy my sample tin, but will probably skip this and re-order a keemun instead.

With nothing added to it the flavor seemed plain and a little astringent. The vanilla blends into the background tea base and is unimpressive.
Add milk and sugar and the vanilla pops out along with a rounded flavor profile from the tea base.
This is a crave worthy but just O.K. tea.

If I could marry a tea, it would be this one. My friend ordered some tea, at my incessant nagging, and this was one of her choices. I’ve never been more proud!
She of course got the first steep, but as it was my tea-ball, I kept the leaves. On steep 4, and this is still amazing.
Very light and elegant. The jasmine dominates, as it should, and it taste so fresh and floral and real. The white is playing an divine violin to it with its soft, rounded grassy tones. This is the sort of thing I been looking for since I became interested in tea.
This fair lady has won me over, and I will most certainly court her till I die.

This was a great tea with a pleasant lemon-y taste that had just a bit of bite to it. Very smooth on the palate with a great aroma and not too grassy, but with just enough to keep it earthy tasting.

I am Aries hear me roar! I like my Irish breakfast and I like my chai. Not really much to report other than it tastes like a mix of both. Still good and warming.

Well hello White Peach! We are gonna be friends.

Refreshing is the key word. Light, clean and naturally peachy. The flavor is delicate and the peach taste is not artificial tasting at all. Maybe it’s just me, but I love flavored white teas iced more than hot. I’m positive that this white peach will be the bee’s knees when iced. Mmmm…can’t wait.

This is one of the few flavored black teas by Adagio that I just do not like at all. This tea has a strong, strong, strong vanilla flavor. It’s so strong that it tastes fake and sweet to me- all I can taste is vanilla, no tea. I have to classify this tea as undrinkable, because I simply cannot stand the fake vanilla flavor.

First off, I’m sorry for blowing up everyone’s dashboard page. Ya’ll drank a lot of tea this weekend!!! Just trying not to miss anything.

The latest order from Adagio is in…lots of new teas to try and post about. My Monday morning is starting off with a cup of Assam Melody. I’m very happy with the cup despite being unable to identify one of the smells/notes. The closest I can guess is an ever so slight pine taste? It hits my tongue right before the aftertaste kicks in. I like it. It’s probably not pine. Maybe it smells like clean tea. Like a fresh out of the shower tea? Anyone else have a guess?

I’m not blown away by this tea, but it is quite nice. A couple of seconds after swallowing (after the cup cooled down), my mouth is devoid of moisture. Is Assam known for giving a dry-mouth effect? I did not notice this when the cup was still very hot.

Saving the savory teas until I’ve tried all of my other tins…..

I’ve been a life-long Earl Grey fan, and this is probably the best Earl Grey I’ve ever had. Lots of bergamot, and the pieces of orange peel and the tiny blue-purple flowers make it a pretty steep, too.

I didn’t use anything with this tea.
This is a dark fermented oolong with a lot of toastiness but a very weak mouth. Paired with it being a fussy brew and the very hot taste being slightly astringent no matter what you do makes it not high up on my list.
The astringency goes away as the tea cools but none of the other negatives are mitigated by cooling.

I meant to drink this hot. I brewed it up, walked away and forgot. By the time I remembered, I was leaving the house, so I stuck it in the fridge to drink for later.

While I can’t comment how it was hot, this tea iced is really good! The smell of the dried leaves had a faint peach smell, but once brewed and then iced, the peach really comes out to have a very good peach taste, with some light floral-perfume sort of after taste. The actual oolong part of the tea tasted more like a black tea than what I considered to be oolong. The overall tea is excellent, and I’m tempted to just keep drinking it iced. It was most refreshing in the morning, and I can see this being a joy to drink during the summer. A really great flavored tea.

The leaves smelled great. After brewing, I like how the tea had a light flavor. I bet more leaves would have made a stronger tea, but this was just very good. I’m now interested in it as an iced tea. Don’t usually go for flavored teas, but willing to add this to a shopping list when I can stop buying every tea known to man.

Update this morning: Had a little bit leftover that I could ice. Quite tasty, though it needed to warm up just a tad to really experience the tea notes. Found that drinking it fast also exploded peach flavor. Really good.

simply a delicious tea. I love the way the pearls open up as it steeps

Yummm. This is the perfect dessert tea. The sweet/tartness of the strawberry with the richness of the chocolate is amazing. I can get two good steepings out of it. It’s a new favorite I’ve had 4 cups in the last 24 hours.

This tea is really good. It’s kind of sweet on it’s own. For a non-caffinated herbal tea Rooiboos is great.

I like blooming teas, and Adagio’s were my first introduction to them. So I do have a special sort of nostalgia for them, even though I don’t like the packaging. (It seems like such a waste of material to have each bloom individually bagged and in a box. It’d be much more environmentally friendly to chuck them all in a tin or single bag, yes?)

That said, I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the Red Bloom. It’s a very generic sort of black tea (or maybe I just don’t have enough experience with unflavored black teas to differentiate between the many varieties) and although the amber liquid looked very pretty in my glass teapot (usually busted out only for pearls and blooming teas) and the unfurling of the flower is always fun to watch, it was unspectacular in flavor.

I usually can get two-three pots (I think my glass pot holds between 23-28 oz) from each flower before the flavor’s too weak to go on. It’s a great tea for showing off to tea newbies, but for the experienced connoisseur who prefers flavor over pretty tricks, skip the show and give ’em something yummier.

Green tea with mint and chocolate yum.

Too much on the green side to me