Steven Smith Teamaker

I sampled this in a Seattle coffee shop and immediately ordered it! I am not the biggest fan of Chamomile/floral teas but I enjoy this tea nonetheless. Very delicate and refreshing.

Surprising leaf quality, light green to grey dried. Vegetal aroma with a mildly forward jasmine scent. Soup came out a nice shade of yellow-green on first steep, slightly more yellow on second. Delicate flavor profile. Low bitterness, with a slight hint of acidity. The jasmine was a little more muted than I would have expected. The overall profile is very ‘clean’, if not slightly boring. A good mass market option for a quick brew, not a personal favorite.

My current top favorite (Jan 2026). I love how heavy in lavender it is. I drink it with vanilla and cream (London Fog style) and this really stands up. If I could get the slider to go any further its rating would be 100. I adore this tea.

The aroma before even trying it was wonderful. So floral and fragrant! the initial taste was a bit overpowering with the combination of all the ingredients plus black tea but as I settled into it, the strong notes was mostly lavender. I’m a huge fan of floral flavors but lavender may be my least favorite so for me it was a bit much.

I found this at Costco. I cold brewed it with two bags in my pitcher.

Oooh, that is tasty. It’s very tart and hibiscus-forward. The orange and mango make themselves known at the end of the sip. The orange flavor reminds me a little of Tang. There’s a bit of grape flavor at the end too. This would be great for sitting on the back porch on a summer evening, watching the dog run around.

I received this as a gift from Todd back in 2020, and I’m working on sipping it down by enjoying it in the mornings. The hojicha is lightly woody/nutty, and I like how it compliments the spices — in particular, the citrusy notes of the cardamom really pops. In some sips the woodiness of the hojicha mixed with the cardamom create an almost piney sort of flavor. It is the strongest spice I’m getting, though I do taste a bit of the ginger and the cloves and the cloves in particular leave a strong aftertaste. Apparently this tea is supposed to have chocolate flavoring and cocoa nibs according to the ingredients? I don’t taste even a hint of chocolate. (I know it’s old, but it has been kept factory-sealed in the tin since I received it, so I thought at least some of the flavoring notes would survive…)

This is very enjoyable… definitely a cozy-feeling tea.

Single bag from a TTB. Normally, I love chamomile, but this one was strangely bitter? I even steeped it for less time than usual, so I’m not sure what the problem was. This has other ingredients, so maybe one of those didn’t align with my tastes. Still drinkable with almond milk and sugar.

This mug of tea really freaked me out because the dry leaf smelled so much like powdered peanut butter and chocolate that I actually pulled up Steven Smith’s website to double check the ingredients. It even smelled like peanut butter once it was steep up. Thankfully, the taste was exactly the smooth cocoa and cooling peppermint profile that it should have been without any of the unexpected nuttiness I was getting aroma wise.

Made this last night and was a little surprised by how sweet tasting it was! Definitely strong but fairly well balanced notes of cinnamon (like cinnamon hearts candy), peppermint, and a more woody/nutty leaning red rooibos – but then it finishes was a slicky sarsaparilla or licorice root type of throat coating sweetness. Caught me off guard with the first few sips, but then I actually started to enjoy it. It seemed especially complimentary to the cinnamon notes of the blend.

Had this a few nights ago!

There’s something so intensely familiar tasting about this tea, but I just genuinely couldn’t put my hand on what it was. Definitely mint forward but with a pretty lingering and coating sweet finish and aftertaste. I taste a lot of sarsaparilla which I know isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed it – especially with the cooling menthol of the mint. I felt the licorice root in texture more than I got it in taste, and for that I was thankful.

The cinnamon comes through too, but with everything else going on I actually felt like it pretty seamlessly slipped into the background.

Sipdown 52 – 2024

Finished my last teabag- sad. Really lovely creamy turmeric blend. Will likely re-purchase at some point.

My favorite turmeric tea. The sarsaparilla adds such an interesting element, and really smooths out the turmeric. I’m still really trying to drink through my stash, so decided to not make any Black Friday tea purchases…but resisting stocking up on this was a challenge!

Cold Brew!

Like I said in a tasting note for Steven Smith’s Agave Sunrise, I basically had non-stop cold brew “on top” in my mom’s airbnb while she was visiting. This was what I had steeped up for the second half of their trip. Light and refreshing like a coconut water mixed with a bit of tropcial-feeling lemongrass. Also just a bit floral in the undertones? Very mellow and fresh, with an overall delicate and summery profile.

Cold Brew!

I really wanted to like this one, but the flavour composition just disagreed with me. It did have a nice rum note that I thought worked well with the coconut, but the mix of coconut and lemongrass was giving me strong sun screen lotion type vibes. Not from it being sour/rancid or anything like that, but just that kind of weird and fake-y coconut and citrus scent those lotions sometimes have. It was also a little strange since the mouthfeel was so buttery and creamy from the fat in the coconut shreds. I did finish it, but it certainly took a while and I just wasn’t an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Side note – I definitely expected a much greater presence of oolong in the blend. Especially for a company like Steven Smith Teamaker, the fact this was majority lemongrass was pretty unexpected. I feel like they might as well have just skipped the oolong and just went for an herbal blend.

Full rolling boil with just a minute or two steep, AKA my usual “trick” for getting more roast out of a genmaicha and less of the green tea. I was curious how that would work with this tea given the rose in the blend. The rose still hangs on and isn’t totally lost, but this definitely ups the toastiness and makes it a bit harder to taste it. Still yummy, but maybe a trick better left for other genmaicha since part of what makes this one so nice is that rose inclusion.

Brewed this up over the weekend and it was fine. I think the real issue here was that I was so clearly craving the toastier brown rice notes of the genmaicha but I wasn’t really as in the mood for florals as I thought when I’d started steeping the mug. So, I had a very split experience sipping on this. No fault of the blend, though! I probably just should have gone with a plain genmaicha instead on this particular instance.

I know I was a little bit less than enthused about this tea the last time I had it, but I think something must have subconsciously resonated with me because I have not been able to get it out of my head. I ended up making another mug of it while working from home yesterday and it really resonated with me. Gently toasty with a light and almost citrusy freshness to accompany a very aromatic, delicate rose note. I was just really impressed, and the bergamot didn’t bother me at all this time around.

Tea Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cz4fs9mOA2Y/?img_index=2 (2nd Pic)

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAQNnd7QIkk

I love the idea of this tea… minus maybe the bergamot.

Steeped up I had such an enjoyable time drinking this cup. It was the perfect amount of deeper, toasty brown rice notes with a very fresh, fragrant taste and aroma of roses. It made me feel a little like I was walking through a rose garden at sundown. Weirdly romantic and poetic feeling.

I did, however, feel like the entire time I had this back of my head feeling that I was enjoying this tea in spite of the bergamot and not because of it. I’m for sure going to need future cups of this tea to really process how I feel about that ingredient inclusion.

Cold Brew!

I brought a pitcher and some pitcher packs over to my mom’s AirBnB for her stay here, and this was the first one we brewed up. We’ll probably have a STEADY rotation of cold brew going the whole trip – between all three of us we can CRUSH a pitcher in a day, and having something cold and refreshing to immediately drink after a day out around the city is a game changer.

This is great, though! Just very classic feeling steeped black tea with a crisp, clean and malty flavour with some floral and citrusy undertones. Of course, there’s fruitiness too. A bit of stonefruit but in a super mellow and gentle way. It’s really giving American-style sweet tea, but without the “sweet” so much!? I know that’s kind of a non-sensical thing to say, but it’s just sort of what we all felt as a collective. Definitely meant as a positive, though!

Cold Brew!

Brisk, tannic black tea with notes of pithy fresh squeezed lemon and a hint of stonefruit all with a very distinct, boozier tequila flavour. As I’ve said before in a past tasting note, I don’t particularly love tequila and I’m not a HUGE fan of this tea (though I think it’s very well executed). However, I ended up drinking the last half of this brew with my supper and I have to say that something about pairing it with food actually made it much more enjoyable. It was just flavourful enough with that sort of “sweet tea” vibe from the bold black tea and citrus to feel… I don’t know… correct?

Cold Brew!

I keep wanting to call this tea Agave Sunrise as if it was named after a Tequila Sunrise cocktail. Except that’s not the name, even though it’s clearly loosely the inspiration. Missed naming opportunity, IMO.

The tea itself was really interesting. It’s made with tequila infused Darjeeling, in addition to a few other ingredients like citrus and nectarine flavouring. Tequila is one of my least favourite spirits, but I still needed to see what this was like. It does, both surprisingly and unsuprisingly, taste very alcoholic. Strong tequila flavour but without the burn of real alcohol. It’s one of the strongest notes in the brew, alongside a hint of stonefruit and citrus and the more floral leaning black tea. It felt very much like I was drinking a cocktail made using tea, which is definitely the intention Steven Smith was going for so we’re basically looking at a 10/10 for nailing the concept.

Still a little on the fence about whether I enjoyed it. I didn’t dislike it but, as I said, I don’t love Tequila. It feels like it would nice in a giant pitcher during the heat of Summer at, like, a pool party or BBQ. More of a situational tea.

#mugtober

Do you consider ice cream a picnic food? I know that, practically speaking, it’s challenging to bring ice cream on a picnic but I’ve always thought it’s a really nice way to cap off a picnic at the park – whether it’s grabbing something from a passing by ice cream van or stopping by a local store on the walk home.

Anyway, that was my logic when I chose this tea for the picnic theme this month. As I’ve said in the past, this is more a very milky and buttery tasting milk oolong with just a hint of vanilla than a true ice cream flavour, but as the liquor cooled some more sweetness came out and it did feel a little closer to the namesake. Regardless, it’s a tea I’m enjoying more and more each time I steep it up.

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN5bqIkWYR8