Rishi Tea

Picked this up from the co-op a while back. It was much cheaper per pound there than through Rishi. Yay high turnover bulk.

Gone grandpa, 1 tsp, 10oz ceramic coffee mug, 195F, 2 top-offs.

The dry leaf scent resembles a young, non-boozy cabernet. I pick up on red fruit, green bell pepper and woody vanilla. The liquor smells mostly like baked cherries and honey with a dash of cocoa.

The taste is more complex. It seems like a medley of malty dark cherry pie and a flakey apricot and blood orange pastry with large sugar crystals sprinkled on top. The most prominent notes are honey, baked cherry and rose. Other, non-dominant tastes include a swirl of wet wood, musty autumn leaves, red plum, green bell pepper, golden syrup, violet, black licorice, cacao, vanilla, black pepper without the spicy bite and mineral. Mouthfeel is pretty light and later quite drying especially at the back of the throat and uvula, making for an awkward swallow. Aftertaste lingers early on before the astringency takes over.

This is a very tasty tea. Compared to previous brews western style, I pick up more flavor complexity with grandpa style. However, due to the astringency in the throat, I think it’s better-suited for western.. In general, it does lack the fuller, thicker mouthfeel that I appreciate, though that makes it good for a light daily drinker. I’ll have to try it out in a gaiwan.

This is a very spice heavy tea. In a blind smell test, one could easily mistake this for garam masala. There are strong notes of cinnamon, star anise, clove, and cardamom. It’s the kind of potent aroma that reminds me of walking into an Indian spice shop.

I prepared this both as a chai and steeped it the normal way following Rishi-Tea’s instructions. The chai turned out to be a complete fail. It smelled and tasted like roasted gram/chickpea flour. There was some cinnamon and an odd cayenne note but I couldn’t get past the weird chickpea flour taste and ended up chucking it after a few sips.

It fared a little better when brewed on its own. The spices were tamer and I could actually taste some of the rooibos base. The dominant notes were cinnamon, star anise, and tellicherry peppercorn in the finish. I didn’t really like the sharp peppery flavor though and had to add a little sweetener to take the edge off.

I think Rishi had the right idea with this blend but bad execution. The combination of spices doesn’t really work and overwhelms rather than complementing the tea. I haven’t dabbled in blends for a long time, but this inspires me to create my own chai blend using the 1 lbs of rooibos sitting in my cupboard.

I drink this hot in the winter, iced in the summer, all of the time, always with soy milk. The chain of cafes around here that serves it makes it pretty strong and it’s beautiful. Strong and spicy and not too sweet at all. They sell this by the quart box as a liquid. Can’t get any better.

Rishi is a local company for me, so I’m lucky enough to be able to have their tea pretty frequently in cafes around town. I’m pretty sure this is the matcha they serve, and it’s delicious. I like it iced with coconut milk. One of the more grassy matchas I’ve tried, with a vegetal afternote. Just very “green” tasting. Next time I’ll review their chai – one of my favorites!

2/2 win today for Rishi! Can’t believe I never tried their delicious teas! This was so good, it literally warmed me up from the inside out on this dreary and cold Monday. What a special treat, and didn’t need to add anything to enhance it.

One of the best Earl grey teas I’ve ever had. The bergamot is nice and strong and this may very well be my favorite tea of all now.

This is a sipdown for me. I’m way behind on my sipdowns this month, so it feels nice to get through another one. This sampler was from the travelling tea box, and I really liked trying different brewing methods.

My first brew was on the stove in hot water, then sweetened with agave and soy milk.

This morning’s brew is Western style with soy milk. I think I prefer this method to avoid the bitterness than comes from stronger brewing (hotter water while boiling on the stove leads to a more bitter tea than cooler temperatures). I normally use ~75-90 deg. C water. I don’t measure it exactly, but I also don’t care about using cooler water and getting a weaker brew.

I like the spice blend here – very spicy, fresh spices, a traditional blend of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and clove. I prefer this blend over most spice blends I have tried because I find it more flavourful and pleasant then the blends with licorice root or no clove. IT could maybe use a bit more ginger, but overall it was a great chai.

Happily and surprisingly continuing my green and oolong trend. How very odd. Nonetheless, going with it for as long as it lasts.

The leaf is quite pretty. The tea leaves are long flat and slender, fatter than needles, and the raspberry is plentiful.

Steeped, the raspberry comes through supported by the earthy vegetal of the green base . There is also a sweetness here akin to a glaze drizzle on a raspberry pound cake. The hibiscus comes in as a slight tartness, but in a barely there kind of way.

I am enjoying the clean clear flavours present here.

Mmmmmmno, not impressed. Followed steeping instructions, but didn’t get that great of a cup. It smells like peach, but there is a little hint of a hibiscus bite and a flatness to the flavor. I swear I can taste the bag in the finish. After having teas with such bright and full peach flavor, this one really underwhelms.

Love You Oolong Time! This oolong is quickly proving to be a favorite. The first time I ever attempted gongfu brewing it was with this tea, and when I had a friend over, we had a gongfu session together with it as well, and really enjoyed picking out the flavor notes from each infusion together. I have the spring 2017 harvest of this tea.

I brewed five grams of this tea gongfu style in approximately 75ml of 200 F water. I got ten infusions from the tea, before it started losing flavor. The steeping times were as follows: 10 sec, 15 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 40 sec, 50 sec, 1 min, 1 min 30 sec. The tea brews up a very bright, clear, golden yellow color.

The first infusion of the tea had a very strong, astringent vegetal note, tasting of spinach and brocolli, with a slight, floral note lingering beneath the surface. The second infusion brought out the vegetal notes even more strongly, with that astringent, bitter spinach bite really filling the mouth, and the lingering floral notes becoming even more subdued.

By the third infusion, the leaves were really starting to open up, and a pleasant perfumey aroma was making itself present in the tea. The flavor of the tea was starting to sweeten out a bit, and taste more of orchids. The next infusion is when it really started to mellow out, becoming very sweet, creamy, and floral, tasting very much of orchids and lilacs! The next few infusions were probably the best, tasting extremely sweet, and entirely of floral notes… any lingering presense of the vegetal notes had disappeared! There was a slightly buttery mouthfeel, the tea was very smooth, it was filled with lovely floral notes, and it was hard to believe that it had such an astringent start. Subsequent infusions continued to have a very sweet taste of orchids and lilacs, though a slight vegetal aftertaste reappeared on my tongue.

The tea had very good staying power, and I felt very tea-full, satisfied, and had that nice aware-and-relaxed feeling from the session. I think fans of green teas or light floral notes would find this a very satisfying oolong.

Full Review: https://teatimetuesdayreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/tea60/

I don’t think I’ve ever met a Yunnan I didn’t like. I cracked this one open because I’d forgotten I had it and I seem to be on a bit of a Rishi kick lately.

This one has small, dark (almost black) twisty leaves, with golden ones for highlight and contrast. It smells sweet and bready in the packet.

It smells wonderful. It has that rich, dark (smoldering, really), malty, chocolatey, baked bread, peppery thing going on that gets me every time. The smell is the same smell that gives the ATR and Samovar breakfast and Earl Grey blends their depth and complexity over that of others.

It’s not quite as chewy in the taste as those, but it’s smooth and sweet with a bit of molasses and pepper.

It’s a sexy tea. :-)

Sipdown no. 34 of 2018 (no. 390 total).

I tossed the rest of this into a cold brew but it was only enough for half a pitcher, so I supplemented with Teafrog English Breakfast. It’s steeping in the fridge now. I can already tell it’s going to be a tasty iced tea.

Steeped according to directions on the outside of the packet.

The tea in the packet smells like the very definition of a second flush darjeeling — winey, grapey, earthy, with a sharp note.

With Muscatel in the name, I’d expect winey and grapey, and that’s pretty much what I’m getting in the aroma with the pleasant happenstance that the sharp note has smoothed out and become almost sweet and sugary. The tea is clear, and a medium-dark amber color.

The flavor is a bit more complex than the aroma. The tea isn’t sour, but it isn’t particularly sweet either, and it has just a tinge of something that isn’t quite bitterness in the finish. Oddly, there’s something reminiscent of coffee about it.

It’s got an every day tea sort of quality about it — a solid tea that reflects the characteristics of its type but without anything either horrible or spectacular about it. If I drank darjeeling more than I do, I could see making this a sort of default.

Courtesy of the travelling teabox, I steeped one of these fancy Earl Grey sachets in hot water for about 1 minute and then added milk. I then resteeped it and made a latte for my mother. This is a very strong bergamot-y Earl Grey. I liked it as a latte, but found it too brisk and a bit strong plain. These are traits most people look for in an Earl Grey, but I’m more of a smooth and malty EG fan.

This was a very pleasant cup. The green tea tasted smooth but flavourful. The peppermint was fresh but not too overpowering. This green tea/mint blend is well balanced.

Thanks to the travelling teabox, I got to try this jasmine green that comes in fancy (and giant) sachet. The green base is slightly sweet, but overall fairly mild. It is very fresh (thank you, indivigually sealed wrappers!), a little bit herbaceous, highly floral (duh). The jasmine is flavourful and pleasant. Overall, this is a really good jasmine green. It is one of the better blends I have tried because the green base is of high quality. Tbe jasmine is strong but not bitter.

This is a nice peach tea for coldbrewing, however I wouldn’t drink it again hot. There is an acidity here that doesn’t work for me. Also, there is a weird aftertaste of something similar to baking soda. The peach is nice, as is the honeybush. This would have been a stronger tea using more honeybush in place of the white tea. There isn’t enough honeybush for it to really shine through, and the white tea is drowned out by the powerful rose hips and peach flavour.

Sipdown no. 26 of 2018 (no. 382 total).

Sigh. I really wanted to like this. And yet, I’m an outlier in the community when it comes to this tea.

I tried it a number of different ways — hotter water, cooler water, more leaf (including double by weight what I’d ordinarily use), longer steep time, shorter steep time. And I couldn’t get much flavor out of it.

Perhaps I’m just not able to appreciate the subtlety of this. It’s not like there’s no flavor at all. I can smell a definite smell in my empty Timolino when I rinse it out at night. But it doesn’t do anything for me.

So I fear I must own up to my outlier status and lower the rating.

Why do I feel bad about this? Really, do I owe this tea anything? Geez, it’s like that commercial where the person feels sorry for the lamp that’s left out in the rain…

I steeped twice again as much tea at a slightly higher temperature in an effort to get the flavor that everyone seems so enchanted by in the other notes on Steepster about this tea.

7.5 grams of tea for 500 ml water at 190 for 2 minutes.

It didn’t make a difference. Tomorrow I’ll try doubling it.

I steeped this according to package directions — a bit hotter and a bit longer than I would for a green tea. The package says this is a green tea in one place and a yellow tea in another, but the consensus online seems to be this is a yellow tea.

I haven’t had that many yellow teas, but the ones I’ve had seem more like green teas than anything else.

This one, though, looks like a white tea — like a silver needle. The leaves are long and twisty when dry, and take up so much room in the spoon (with a lot of air in between) that I decided to weigh rather than rely on a spoon measurement.

This tea has received a lot of love on Steepster in the past so I’m excited to try it.

In the packet, the leaves have a smell that sometimes comes across to me as rice, and sometimes as nutty, but in both cases with a tinge of sweetness.

The tea is basically colorless and clear. If I look really hard, I can make out a rose-yellow tint. I get very little aroma from the steeped tea which is puzzling given that a lot of other notes seem to get a honey, or butter, or sweet rich nectar. I get, weirdly, some sweetness and something that reminds me of vanilla. This might be the honey/nectar others smell.

Sadly, I also don’t get a lot of flavor out of this tea. Maybe for the same reason I have a hard time with white teas — I often feel cheated. Where others taste all kinds of miraculous things, I taste faintly sweet or vegetal hot water. Perhaps my palate requires a more in your face flavor? Or perhaps I’m steeping this wrong.

I’m tempted to amp up everything next time (leaf, water temp, and steeping time) and see if it makes a difference.

But right now this tea is making me sad because everyone loves it and it’s doing nothing for me.

Sob.

This is the first tie guan yin I’m trying. Used a gaiwan.

I was very excited to taste the baked goods quality to this tea. It tasted like a spice cookie to me early on, although I can see how that may be vanilla or apricot instead. I by no means have a refined Oolong palate.

Later on it gets a more vegetal taste and some astringency. Pretty good especially for something I can buy in bulk at a grocery store! Part of me wonders if ordering directly from Rishi would be more fresh. Not that freshness was a problem.