Teavana

Fourth steep, 64oz, considering how this experiment will go as I drink this tea with spaghetti dinner…

The caramel and chocolate flavors are starting to blend better, now… Before, they tasted more separate and distinctive, but now, it tastes like a really good bite of a less sweet Milky Way – very blended flavors, not at all overwhelming. I think the next steep may call for an extra scoop of mix, though, to keep it from getting any weaker.

Third steep, puts me at 48oz thus far.

This blend is still sweet, but now the chocolate note takes a bit of a backseat to the caramel flavoring… a surprise, since the caramel disintegrates with each brew and the cocoa and carob don’t. When a bit of salt is added, the chocolate notes change into something almost coffee-like. Each infusion is brewing darker than the last, and each has that odd oily layer on top, like the first cup.

Still enjoy the tea, but as I drink the second round, its worth noting that this tea has added sugar in the flavoring – plain sugar is listed three times in the ingredients list.

As with the last “herbal infusion” teavana tea I tried, I decided to just dump a spoonful of new mixture on top of the previously used mixture and re-steeped. That cut the amount of sweetener down pretty well and let me control it.

So, the flavor of this second steep didn’t differ much from the first. The chocolate flavor was more milky than the first, the caramel more creamy… Still tasted no salt, but enjoyed the flavor much more than the first steep! I’d love to start counting now how many good tasting oz I get out of this baggy, and right now we’re at 32. My goal is a gallon.

When I first opened the bag, the dry tea smelled very strongly of freshly cooked, just off the stove caramel, which was a shock – usually, in chocolate containing teas, the hot cocoa smell overpowers everything, and I was hopeful that this would be more of a caramel taste with an undertone of chocolate.

After brewing, the chocolate really came out – the tea and spent leaves both smelled of melted chocolate pieces, with little caramel or salt to be found! Luckily, the chocolate and caramel balance much better in the cup. This is a pretty good dessert tea – probably not worth the original asking price, but at less than $1/oz, with each oz probably giving me over a half gallon of tea, I can’t complain.

I also can’t speak to the salt in this blend. I don’t taste it, but I’m a salt hound and probably wouldn’t taste it unless it was so salty it made normal folks cough.

I think I might have to try this tea a few different ways… something just wasn’t right. I brewed it just as Teavana instructs. 4.5 tsp, 24 oz water, a tiny bit of rock sugar (just because I tend to like my tea a little on the sweet side). It’s beautiful to look at, enough so that I was a little sad that I don’t have anything clear to put it in, and smelled heavenly. I just think that when I purchased something called Raspberry Riot I expected something to really pop, and it just didn’t. It was fruity, but I didn’t get the lemon that others seem to (maybe I killed it with the rock sugar?), and the berry just wasn’t as intense as I would have liked. Maybe more tea? Less sugar? Ice it instead? I don’t know. I’ll drink what I purchased, I don’t mind it, but I’ll probably play with it a bit to see what I can do to improve what I perceived to be a rather weak tea.

A nice comforting anytime tea. No crazy flavors, just a nice warm earthy cuppa. Some nice fresh honey really brings it home.

Now that is a beautiful cup of tea. I am pretty sure that every cup of tea I have from here on out will only serve me to wish that it were a cup of Maharaja, with all of its spicy goodness. Guess I’ll have to stock up! 24 oz water, 3 scoops of tea, and 2 smaller scoops of rock sugar while steeping made it something more special than perfect.

I picked this up in Teavana’s Heavenly Sale for fantastically cheap. The minute I opened the package I just went “Yep, this is a Teavana tea alright.” It probably had something to do with the overwhelming smell of Cocoa Puffs and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to the blend. Snarking aside, it’s not bad at all. The sweetness isn’t nearly as overpowering once brewed, so it’s quite drinkable. The cocoa does overpower the delicate flowers, of course. I’m not sure why they’re even in a cocoa-mate blend except to make the dry leaf more colorful. Halfway through the cup I added a splash of cream, which complemented the mate and cocoa nicely.

Overall, not bad for a morning cuppa if not a little heavy-handed and clumsy. Recommended to chocolate tea lovers and sweet-tooths (sweet-teeth?) who want to give up coffee.

I went into Teavana looking for the Swiss Vervaine, and I managed to snag the last pound of it that my store had. Success! I’m really sad to see that one go – I can see why it might not have sold well, but it was definitely my go-to sick tea. I wanted to smell the CocoCaramel Sea Salt, because it just sounded so weird, but they were all out of that one for the holidays, so the associate asked if I wanted to smell this one instead. Sure, why not.

It smelled good, so I got 2oz of it and took it home. I finally got around to brewing it – and there’s hibiscus.

I don’t smell it, I don’t really taste it, but in a blend that is so almondy and caramelly, it’s downright bizarre that the drink is pink. On top of that, I had a feeling that this would be best with milk, so now it looks like Pepto-Bismol. If I don’t look at the tea while I drink it, it tastes good. But I just can’t get past the pink liquor. It’s like green ketchup. I can’t do it.

Edit I was lazy and didn’t actually look at the ingredients… Turns out its not The Hib at all. It makes sense. It’s beetroot pieces. Still weirdly pink though.

Fresh air, sweet spring grass, clean earth, the ocean: this is a tea I love. It just tastes so, so good.

Backlog from last night. This is a very sweet tea and I feel like it would make a nice refreshing iced tea. I enjoyed the first steeping of it more then the few that followed after, most likely because the sugar that they obviously added to the blend was all used up the first time through. Enjoyable though, even though I prefer plain tea.

I think there might be something wrong with batch of this tea…. It looks like dirty dish water. I mean, it’s like I went to a restaurant, entered the kitchen at the end of the night, and took some of the dishwater. That or like it came from a bucket of water mop water. It tastes about the same as this too. It’s funny though, since it looked so appealing until I poured water over it. Oh, well got it as part of a gift set for 75% off regular price and my parents paid for it, so I’ll finish it.

This is one I really love for an afternoon cup. The tea can still be tasted through the creme, but the creme is certainly present.

This was one of the first teas I had purchased on the suggestion of a good friend. Although I don’t purchase it often, it’s one of my favorites. Maybe because you never forget your first?

Let me just say that I love peach! And this does not disappoint. It is my new favorite nighttime herbal. I also want to start adding it to some of my peach white and green teas to add some extra peach to them. Love this tea!

This tea has to be allowed to cool considerably to get any of the tart fruity flavors that the smell promises it will have. The bamboo is… interesting. I’ve reviewed this tea before, but there was no date mentioned on the tea’s page about when I last logged a tasting note. I’ll have to go see if I can find it later. Disappearing tea notes seems to be a common problem on this site. :/
Anyway, this tea isn’t my favorite anything, but I definitely know where to go if I’m desiring that sour cherry flavor from rosehips. LOTS of that in this tea (although you get very little of it if you don’t sweeten it. Unsweetened, this tea is just meh).

Backlogging from a couple of mornings ago. My mom got us this tea as a part of her present to my hubby (which was a cast iron tea warmer _). We tried it one evening and liked it pretty well, but I always give a tea at least two tries before I pronounce a verdict, just as a failsafe. (I probably should give it more trials than that, but I’m not sure I have the patience or perseverance.)

Anyway, I was very enticed by the smell of the tea—I love sour cherry, and this tea smells pretty much exclusively of that flavor. While I am generally, on principle, opposed to one-note-flavor teas, I was intrigued about the bamboo and decided to look for it more this time (I hadn’t known it was in there the first time we tried the tea, and so I wasn’t looking for it).

Well, I couldn’t find the bamboo. I’m not certain bamboo even has a flavor when steeped in hot water, so I couldn’t really be sure… but I know what bamboo tastes like, so I was sort of looking for that woody, mildly celery-like flavor, and I couldn’t really find it. Nor could I find any of the other fruits mentioned in the ingredients, except the cherries. Not even the hibiscus, which is a fairly familiar flavor to me, as it’s in lots of other teas I have. As far as the flavor of the tea goes, I could tell that there was a middling-quality green tea in there, but that was about as far as it went. I’m not saying this tea was a let-down, but it probably won’t turn into a favorite. It’ll get drunk, but probably not re-bought. I think I will give it another trial, since I was on the fence about it the second time around. More to come.

Yeah, no…

I don’t know if it is because I’ve been on a white tea binge for the last couple of days or what, but seriously I’m drinking a Christmas candle. Not in a good way (if it can ever be good).

Cinnamon is amped up on this tea, but it’s so jam packed with strong, conflicting flavors it’s almost confusing. I can hardly pick any of them out. It’s complex, but I say that to mean that this tea doesn’t seem to know if it’s an Oolong, Mate, Chai (in increasing order of likeness) or something in between. Chai comes out on top if I concentrate, but it’s not spicy like a traditional Chai (cinnamon, being the perpetrator, I presume), and thus, resembles the artificial scent of a Glade Plugin. I taste no Oolong or even any Mate, save for maybe the fruit in the Samurai Blend.

Also, as other people have already ranted on, the sample comes pre-packed with their rock sugar. Hey, Teavana, what if I prefer honey? What then? The sugar left a really odd aftertaste too… very chemical tasting, it was like Splenda. If I wanted that aftertaste I would drink a diet soda. I’m not. I’m drinking tea.

I feel defiled.

Also, also:
To add insult to injury, I guess Teavana was trying to get rid of these sample packets because I got two of them… I’ll make a nice potpourri with the other, I suppose.

I got this in the big online sale and I am pleased that I did.

I had been drinking various sheng puer teas for the last month so this was a nice change of pace.

For all the choco-notes in this while it is dry I really did not get that as the over riding taste. Instead, I was treated to notes of a nice blend of teas that were predominately nutty. The hazelnut really shines in this to me.

It may be heresy but I drink coffee as well as tea. This to me would only be a coffee killer to someone who hasn’t had a good cuppa in a very long while.

I received this tea as a gift. I don’t think I would have picked it out for myself, but I still enjoyed it.

The leaves have a very sweet smell, almost like bubblegum. I was a bit worried because I generally do not like to drink overly sweet teas.

After the first brewing, the tea had a sweet smell that was more fruity than bubblegum-like. The flavors I picked out most were vanilla and papaya, but the flavor of the tea does not really come through. I found the taste to be rather pleasant, but my boyfriend (who is also a tea-drinker) thought it tasted and smelled like cold medicine.

The second steeping smelled mostly of vanilla with a slight fruitiness that was unidentifiable. I could taste the tea a bit more this time around, but overall it was a bit too weak for my tastes. I don’t think I’ll steep it a third time without adding a little bit of fresh leaves.

When I run out of this tea, I will not be restocking it.

Number one, the hard drive on my home computer is apparently worn out (I’m using my mother’s laptop to post this currently), so I may not be around for a bit until we get a new computer, or I get onto the computers at school; whichever comes first. (And yes, I realize I have not been around much lately anyway, but I expected my posts to increase a bit now that I will be at school more. Plus I always feel it fair to post when I know I’m going to be absent.)

In the meantime, if anyone knows a way to transfer the data from the busted hard drive to a new one, I’d appreciate hearing it. We stupidly haven’t backed it up since the last computer switch (cats kept unplugging the external hard drive, so we lazily gave up) and we stand to lose 15 years worth of saved data. Boo.

Secondly, I stopped posting much about Christmas teas…partially because I was so busy, and partially because my Christmas kinda sucked. It’s very First-World-Problems to complain about your gifts, and I did get nice gifts – some nice sweaters and stuff, some school money. I know that I am normally hard to buy for, and I normally never make a list. But this year I actually made a list – mostly tea stuff, like a matcha bowl – and pretty much no one got me a damned thing on it. The only person who got me anything tea-related was my father, by some sheer luck – he doesn’t even live with me, but he knows I like Doctor Who and he got me a TARDIS bathrobe (which is awesome) and a TARDIS teapot (which is AMAZING and which I have wanted forever), and then my family managed to chip the latter by the end of Christmas Day shuffling it carelessly around the kitchen. Oh, and my sister got a copy of a PS3 reboot of a game series that I mostly play – not her – which she is spitefully hoarding in her room even though the console she is also hoarding in her room is a PS2 and won’t play that disc, and even though I let her play several hundred dollars worth of games I buy. So I had to buy my own copy. The overall feeling is just…no one really cares what I actually wanted, have a sweater.

Oh, and I was sick Christmas, and spent it eating chicken noodle soup.

So yeah. F-ck Christmas, and all associated tea flavours. I think I will opt out next year. I do better job getting myself what I want, and I’m sure some of my family members feel the same way. Maybe next year we can give each other money.

Finally…since this tea is discontinued and presumably not coming back, can I review it now?

Because I actually really, really like it…if made properly. Which is good, because I was never installed with a resist-sales feature, so I ended up with a ridiculous amount of this – probably more than a pound.

It smells so amazing, see, so that every time I smell it I have this odd desire to acquire more of it. It smells like…lemon candies, or something. Just yum.

Steeped, it is not anywhere near as strong as you would think from the smell, which is where my steeping preferences for this come in. I do this one at least double-strong, and I steep it for at least a half-hour in an iced-tea pitcher before I put the pitcher in the fridge. Generally, I also leave the leaves in to continue cold-steeping.

And it’s great! Really crisp and refreshing, a bit like lime Kool-Aid, but less sweet and more rejuvenating. If you have any lime mojito pre-mixed stuff around, it’s also nice to pour a splash of that into this tea to pump it up.

Unfortunately, the above described method is not a terribly cost-efficient use of tea leaves – even rooibos. Still, if you have some of this around that you’d like to use up, try that.

I hope at some point that Teavana tries for another tea with a similar taste profile, but stronger flavour. A lemon-lime theme shouldn’t be a bust, but the flavour needs more punch.

Oddly, I loved this better then most other Jasmine scented teas. The smell is very intense, which could be off putting, but with this one I just didn’t mind. The taste is fantastic to me. You taste the Jasamine yet you can still taste the green tea underneath.