Majesteas

Tea #2 from the TTBA!
Not bad not bad. A nice blend of flavour and tea. Though I can totally see where Sil got the idea to ice this and add honey. Yup, I think this would be fab that way.
But… Hot? I’m really sad to say that I like the David’s tea version of blueberry black better. Because it’s organic? a denser base? heavier flavouring? Has sweetener? (stevia)
I don’t know. Probably all of the above. Shame. I prefer to support the local single stores when I can :(
Edit: When it’s cooled? yeah, not good at all. Dusty.
Sadness.

I figured out how to drink this one today. Cold steep overnight and add a splash of honey. Not sugar or other sweetners – honey. Because man that honey + blueberry = HELLZ YA! Seriously? it’s nearly enough for me to just bump the everlovingjeebusrating out of this one haha. but i won’t because i don’t like it hot brewed as much and it’s a little too picky for me. But the rest of this? brewed like this for sure!

Not sure i like this one. I’ll have to play with the steepin parameters because while this smells delicious, it’s a little bitter. So i’ll try cooling it down next time and steeping for a shorter time to see how it goes.

smells like a divine dessert as it steeps, however if you are a puerh lover (which i am), then you want the flavour to work WITH the puerh and not banish it, which this one did. now, it could be my fault: my standard M/O with puerh is to overleaf and to oversteep… i like it strong! possibly i compounded the over strong flavour because of that. i’ll try another steep and reserve numerical rating until then (i have had A LOT of those in the last 3 days!!!)

if you want a straight up dessert tea, with pudding in your cup regardless of the base then you will enjoy this. seriously, you don’t even need dessert with this one. however, if like me you prefer a flavour that respectfully nods its head to the puerh, you will not like this tea.

atypical flavour breakdown: my wife woke up, stumbled into the kitchen and mutter/snarled (you know when you’re half asleep and everything sounds angry?) ‘what smells like vanilla?’ the smell woke her up in our bedroom 30 feet away. with the door closed.

definitely caramel. reminds me of the kraft caramels from halloween when i was a kid. very sweet. no salt flavour. also no puerh. strong flavour, strong colour… fully opaque (ahem… as opposed to verdant’s 2010 xingyang… you did NOT just hear me make that comparison though!)

i should note that what i do and do not appreciate is not necessarily on par with the goal of the tea blender. a strong dessert tea may be precisely what they were trying to accomplish, in which case ‘mazel tov! mission accomplished!’ …. i just overempathize with puerh. lol.

ARGH!!! i have my guerilla tea buddy SCRIBBLES to thank for this dessert experience. it came in my surprise package this week. THANK YOU!!!

UPDATE: got nothing at all from the resteep. so, i’ll go back to previous statement: if you’re looking for a dessert tea, but it’s not a puerh by my definition. i will continue to abstain from a numerical definition….

Thanks again to Sil for this sample.
This is an interesting tea, an earthy woody Shu puerh with the addition of caramel. The flavor is rustic & kind of wild, but as it cools it becomes very smooth & sweeter. An interesting tea to sample, a sweet & savory dessert.
Excuse me, my tea & I are headed to the bubble bath. :)

Thank you Sil! This smells awesome! I could just sit around huffing this stuff, & never drink it, & be happy. It smells wonderful! Flavorwise, it’s ok plain, with an earthy mildly sweet flavor. The addition of caramel really adds to the natural caramel-like essence of Shu. With stevia, which really brings out the caramel flavors, it’s even more delicious!

Thank you Sil for this wonderful interpretation of Eleven Pipers Piping! Scottish pipers indeed! I enjoyed this blend Christmas morning as we Skyped with the in-laws in Indiana.

My three year old son Rowan gave me a Merida doll from the Disney movie Brave, she’s beautiful! And the husband gave me a small Lord of the Rings Lego set with Gandalf arriving with his cart full of fireworks to Hobbiton and a Thorin Oakenshield action figure amongst other things. He got action figures of his own but was very excited about the tiny creamer I found him.

Anywho this tea is awesome. I love a sweet, mild Lapsang and this fits the bill even if it’s not a true Lapsang, I love the smoke. It is like sipping on scotch in the morning ;) The citrus is subtle but gives it a bright feeling. Very nice!

Thanks for sharing a tea from your local shop Sil. Set the tone for an enjoyable Christmas Day!

I should like this tea. When I saw it in the AMAZING swap box that scribbles sent me, I was really excited.
I’m not getting much pu’erh, there is some dark base under the sweet caramel, but I wouldn’t have been able to say that it was pu’erh. I don’t think think this is sweet enough. There is a little astringency to it, I find that odd in a dessert tea. Maybe it needs a touch of sugar to bring out the flavors. I’m not sure, what I want to say it that it’s “flat”. one dimensional.
Thank you so much scribbles for sending this to me. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for it tonight. Will try again another night, but my initial impressions of this is just ok.

Sipdown!! Another sample from sil in my tummy! Ok, well this one is in process of being in my tummy. ;)

It seems that caramel and chocolate make very good companions to pu erh teas. The flavours really stand up to and enhance the rich deep pu erh tones. I don’t really know what difference between toffee and caramel is, except that maybe toffee is more buttery? I dunno.

Just like yesterday, I feel the need to have a caramel or toffee black tea in my permanent collection now, but I don’t know if this is it. I want to look around locally first, before venturing out to thr Internet.

This is pretty good, and pretty close to David’s Coffee Pu Erh (minus the coffee).

I had a tea very much like this one before, and I remember thinking that this tasted a bit like Coffee Pu Erh frm Davids, sans the coffee beans.

This one did have a little more coffee-ish notes than the last one, but not much really. I noticed the pu erh base in this one fairly prominently. It is more of an earthy pu erh than fishy, but straddled that line a bit,

I think that caramel and pu erh are a great mix. I love starting my day with a bold pu erh with some sweet tones like this. It’s a little like a coffee, but not. I might do a rinse next time, just out of curiosity, as this is a strong blend.

Many thanks to sil for satisfying a sweet tooth with this sample.

Sipdown 2020! 22/365

Thanks to Sil for this generous sample! I think I brewed it up too strong, because it was just too much pu’erh for me. DavidsTea’s similar blend has more toffee and less pu’erh, so I prefer it.

Thanks for this one, Sil!

Naturally, I didn’t save my sample of this one from the English Tea Store to compare… but they’re totally the same tea. So, I love the caramelly flavours and wish it was a bit lighter on the pu’erh, but would definitely drink this again (but not keep a great deal on hand as I’d prefer a black blend).

Once upon a time when I had only just discovered flavoured pu-erh someone told me that sweet flavours tends to go very well with that type of tea. It was the first time I had my orange flavoured pu-erh and I can’t remember who it was, but I definitely remember thinking at the time that they were somebody who ought to know what they were talking about.

Since then a long time has passed and the number of flavoured pu-erhs that I have seen have been very limited indeed. And I’ve never seen one of these sweet flavoured ones.

Not until Sil asked me, “what would you like to try?” and I saw this in her cupboard. I’m afraid my reaction might have been ever so slightly undignified. It involved gasping and flailing. I may even have begged a little bit. So yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this one a lot and I’m ever so glad that Sil was willing to share with me.

The aroma of the leaf reminds me of that toffee flavoured black from Le Palais des Thes. It’s obviously not the same base at all, but they both have that smell that reminds me of fudge. I’m not really picking up any notes of the base tea in this one at all. Just fudge. (Actually, that’s quite inspiring. I’d like to try and make my own. How hard can it be? I’d like to try and make my own caramel sweeties as well. We did that in school once, and it was totally easy)

After steeping the pu-erh comes through and mixes well with the toffee notes. I can see already now that whoever it was told me that about pu-erhs and sweet flavours really did know their business. These notes mix so well, it doesn’t feel like it’s added flavouring at all. A bit too much on the sweet side to be entirely natural, of course, but it smells like it could have been if it had wanted to.

If this stuff tastes as awesome as it smells, I’m going to be in deep trouble because I know of no way to source some for myself. I’m suddenly faced with the possibility of my perfect caramel/toffee flavoured tea not being a regular black at all. I mean I thought I’d already found my perfect one. Now I’m concerned that I’m in for a bit of a shock. O.o

So I took a couple of sips and have suddenly found myself at a loss for words. I don’t know how to continue. This has never happened to me before.

Either I’ve actually discovered a new perfect caramel-y/toffee tea, or it has an enormous flaw in order to be a candidate for perfection. And I don’t know which of these statements is true.

This is my very first impression of this tea. Complete ambivalence. How the plock am I supposed to even begin to determine the score??? O.o

I’m going to try and describe my experience of it here. Perhaps that’s going to help me.

I’m getting a lot of pu-erh flavour here. It’s a wood-y, kind of dry flavour without much in the way of earthy notes. It’s not the smoothest tea in the world at all and it feels a bit rough around the edges. I’m even getting something which, under other circumstances, I would describe as borderline pseudo-smoky.

Then the toffee flavour gradually takes over, and we are talking about a very seamless transition here. I really couldn’t say where one notes stops and the other begins. It’s vanilla-y and cocoa-y and it really suits the base flavour. It sort of feels like they’re the same ‘family’ of flavours, if you know what I mean. A bit like how various citrus fruits have very different flavours, but they are still all taste citrus-y.

The flavouring in this one is fantastic, but I’m not completely sold on the base. I would have liked a smoother base, I think, and that is at the root of my ambivalence. I should dearly love to see this exact flavouring on a super-smooth Chinese base, or a friendly Assam, perhaps.

So here I am. Wondering what to do about something I could rate at an absolute top score and feel I had scored it honestly, or I could rate it at 60 and still feel that I been honest. What to do? I’m going to go straight for the middle of the two with a bias towards the higher end because the flavouring is so extremely well done.

Conundrum in a cup.

Thanks SIL
This is a nicely flavored Black Tea with Blueberry! This is NOT overly astringent, it’s NOT bitter (at least at about 3 minutes infusion time it isn’t), it’s NOT soapy or artificial tasting…it’s just a nice blueberry flavored black. Not too strong but not too weak – just right!

Thanks for this one, too, SIL
I LOVE the name of this one!

It’s a tad bitter but not bad! The fruity combo is good upfront but a little wonky on the aftertaste. I’m thinking this would be better cold. I had it hot. It was ‘ok’ – smelled pretty awesome, tho!

Sipdown!

Even brewed for 2 minutes, this tea is sadly still astringent. A tasty candy-strawberry flavour, but way too much astringency, and since I’m very aware that astringency is entirely unnecessary, I’m not particularly tolerant of it. I think this tea could be pretty tasty with a better base, but unless that happens, I probably wouldn’t pick it up again. Perhaps I’ll add some milk and syrup to this cup; I can see it being pretty tasty if I can mask that astringency, but it’s a little difficult to drink otherwise.

ETA: I do like the second infusion of this one. There’s some flavour in it that I really like… I just so wish there wasn’t astringency!

Thanks for sharing this one, Sil!

The aroma of this one is really quite intoxicating. Kind of a fresh strawberry cream sort of aroma. It’s making my mouth water like crazy (and even though I’m not a big fan of scented products, I kind of wish my room smelled like this all the time!)

The flavour is pretty tasty as well, and true to the aroma (I’m picking up on that slight bit of artificialness as well) – but unfortunately, it’s also quite astringent. I only infused this for 2.5 minutes, so that’s kind of disappointing; perhaps a dash of milk and sugar would help. I still have half of my sample left, so I can try brewing this a bit differently for round 2, because I really am enjoying the flavour! One of the better strawberry/fruity black blends I’ve tried. Current rating is indicative of the astringency, which makes me all sadface :(

ETA: Astringent but otherwise tasty second infusion, that I managed to confuse with that of the raspberry oolong I also had on the go. Whoops. Strawberry and raspberry are similar…

Sipdown! Thanks for letting me grab a sample of this one, Sil!

I only took a cup of this one because I figured it would be reasonably similar to most blueberry blacks (but I was curious anyways). Turns out I am pretty much correct. It’s pretty tasty, with a definite blueberry flavour on top of a slightly astringent black base which doesn’t seem to add a great deal to the tea. Nothing overly special, but a perfectly good blueberry tea. I personally prefer the blueberry cream teas of 52teas (I seem to have a thing for cream flavour in teas), and I also think the blueberry flavour may be a touch stronger in those, but if you just want tasty blueberry, this would fit the bill well enough!

sipdown! (205) yeah..working from home day! Which means aiming for 200 teas today or a decent dent in things that i have 2-4 cups worth left so that i can get to under 200 by the time we head out on vacation!

I’ve enjoyed this one a bunch, slightly more than the english tea store version, though my memory might just be making me THINK this one is slightly better when it’s not. All that really means is that when i go back for more of my highland blend someday, i can also pick this one up :) As long as you drink it while hot, it’s a great bold, thick, rich caramel tea. More what i love drinking in winter but still one i could drink year round.

(Backlog) I had this yesterday as well – i’ve only got about a cup’s worth. The rest of it is off to share with one of the pacific sisters :) I really like this one when it’s hot. It really doesn’t taste nearly as delicious when it’s cooler.

This morning seems so long ago. I had this before heading to the office. A lot of crap is coming up in the last few days of me being here so i am NOT a happy camper. It looks like i probably wont get a chance to get out and see/explore any more of beijing at this rate. :( At least this was a tasty treat to have this morning to jump start my day. Bold tea with a bit of caramel goodness.

Soooo..let’s talk about stress..and pms and being in a foreign country when over tired and reacting to the pollution. It’s called, dinner is made up of some chips, a cheese bagel and z-up followed by chocolate and sugar donut and yes..this tea. And a bath. And god damnit that’s what’s what.

lol But let me tell you…nothing in this world is better than that donut and chocolate and tea when you’re enjoying it. I’ll pay for it later i’m sure but tonight i needed anything but noodles or rice or beef or lamb or fried anything. Also it doesn’t help that i had a bunch of work to do tonight before my evening call with toronto. So i didn’t really have a chance to go to a sit down restaurant.

And this tea? While not something i drink often in toronto, was just what the doctor ordered tonight. Maybe it bonded with the water better than back home but it was just a creamy delicious cup of toffee and dark brood-y tea. So good.