Teavivre

I received this tea as part of an incredibly generous sample from Angel. Thank you so much!

First off, I love these little foil wrapped samples. They would be ideal for travel or for people who want to keep their tea packaged until the last minute. I know the package says not for sale, but I could see this being an item that some people would love to buy.

The dry leaf smelled familiar, a promising and complex smell that has come to mean “Yunnan” to me.

The package suggested a steep of 2 to 3 minutes. I went with 3 out of habit, but in hindsight I wish I had gone with 2. This is a very powerful tea! Strong and a bit malty, it is a perfect breakfast tea for me. It was both my first and second cup today. Usually I steep my first tea twice, but the second cup was still so strong and dark that I left it for a third steep (I haven’t done it yet).

I really enjoyed it! It’s definitely an early in the day tea for me, and I am looking forward to that next steep.

Thanks to TeaVivre for this one!

I’m not a huge oolong person, but this is very nice. Tastes like a cross between tieguanyin and milk oolong. Yum :)

SUCH a good example of the goddess of teas. The dry leaves are tightly curled and wrinkly, with a lovely combination of dark to almost fluorescent green hues. I followed Teavivre’s steeping recommendations in a gaiwan: 7 gm, 5 sec rinse, then 25/35/45/55 sec steeps. The wet leaves smelled of seaweed and the pale yellow liquor was smooth and slightly sweet (honeysuckle?) at the first steep, getting a bit sweeter for the next several steeps. It seemed to level off in flavor and sweetness after the first three steeps, which means it continued yummy all the way through. A lovely tea.

yes…yes i can cheat as much as i want! 28/28 sipdowns as i wanted to try this before giving the remainder to my friend. on the whole…while this is a lovely tea, it doesn’t sing to me like my black teas do…it’s really just toooooo soft. and quiet. :)

thank you teavivre for sharing these with me! I don’t often pick up green teas, but I most definitely would pick these up. this is a fantastic dragonwell. Fresh, spring, no bitterness and just a really refreshing taste. Sweet and slightly nutty – just a damn good cup of green tea!

27/28 sipdowns

I’m cheating a little on this one because the other half is going to my friend who is so awesome about bringing tea over the borders for me. Since she’ll be bringing me 3 little teas, i figured i should make room for those by giving her a few more teas to try. I’m not sure if i prefer this one or the other dragonwell from teavivre that i tried recently. What i’m sure if, is that i’d never drink this fast enough for it to stay fresh. I will likely look in to buying sampler though in future to be able to have a few of these around. sooooo tasty and green and delicious (don’t look at me teafairy!)

Thanks to the lovely Cameron B for sharing this tea with me!

Method: 4 balls, 6 oz, 200 degrees, 5 min, banko houhin (Eeeeee!!!!)

Aroma: smells a little malty and roasty. I catch a little hint of cocoa, too.

Flavor: I think it’s pretty solid. It has a nice weight, and a mild malty taste. It only has a bare hint of bitterness, and a slight astringent finish. The flavor lingers nicely. I think this would be a great candidate for a little maple booster, but I didn’t try that yet.

I ended up doing two steeps blended into one mug because the leaves really sucked up a lot of water. Both were 5 minutes long. To sum up – I wouldn’t kick this one out of bed. LOL

The black long dry leaves were nothing like the small green pellets I expected to see when I opened the bag. A strong sweet scent filled the canister, a promise of a good brew to come.

As the leaves are quite bulky I used 2 tsp. per cup of 210F water, and steeped at 2 minutes.

A lovely rich reddish orange liquor was the result. It was mildly fragrant, but richly flavorful. Despite the resemblance to black tea, this was all Oolong. Vegetal and sweet with a rich floral finish. It reminds me of a mild muscat tasting Darjeeling.

A good drink when something lighter than the heavy blacks (which i usually prefer) is called for. This is one rich flavorful Oolong tea.

This is a fluffy tea with long roughly wound leaves with about 50% being golden tips ranging in tone from flaxen to copper.

I used the following parameters:

50s/@90°C/1tsp/200ml.

Its scent is rich and spicy, and similar to one of my other less tippy golden monkeys, with scent of spicy fall leaves, wood smoke,sweet potato, cocoa, malt mash, and caramel.

The taste has deeper malt and bitter cocoa base notes than my similar smelling tea and comes off as very rich tasting after my first short steep of 50s. It has sweet potato, grain notes, cocoa, roasted spice notes up front. This is followed by a brief mention of burnt sugar caramel, and then the tea lightens with malt and fruit tones, which are tart like unripe plums. The aftertaste is a nice blend of all the flavour notes.

The tea resteeps quite well I did two other short steeps of 35 and 60 s, before extending my timings to 2 and 5 minutes. In later steeps the grain, yam and roasted notes faded but the Cocoa, deeper malt and fruit tones intensified and often were fairly well balanced with a hint of butter and cane sugar.

This is quite a nice and robust tea. I would consider buying it once I finish my similar tea.

Thanks to Dexter, who sent me this a while back. I’ve been sipping on it all day.

Thank you, Teavivre, for this sample!

I do like to drink tea with jasmine, but only every so often (at least a month in between) because it’s a scent and taste that I don’t want to become accustomed to it. I prefer to experience it as if I were having the first time. That said, this one heck of a jasmine green tea. The dry leaf smells freshly of jasmine and other flowers in full bloom. I felt like a honey bee enticed by nectar. The jasmine intensifies once the leaves haves steeped. There is something else in the aroma but I can’t put my finger on it. Freshly baked pastry with coconut or pineapple? Melon? The liquor is medium-bodied, the jasmine flavor light. Very pleasant.

Thank you ANGEL for these generous samples! I have never tried this before, so I was excited to try it today. Opening the silver packet, I saw small, dark green, powdery spiral leaves. It smelled so delicious and green and fresh! WOW! It was even nutty smelling, kind of like a darker oolong.

Upon steeping, I steeped for 45 seconds and saw that the liquid was a light-medium yellow. It smelled great and seaweed-like. YUM! It tasted excellent. There was a good amount of character to the taste. Mildly nutty, dark, green, fresh, and vegetal. I love it. There is no bitterness to it at all, which is a huge plus. Overall a great tea! I will have to add this to my staple greens.

This Dian Hong sort of smells like an Earl Gray. I’m getting fruity hints similar to bergamot accompanied by warm bread and honey. The taste is a little deeper and more malty with honey and apricot notes. It’s got a nice lightness and sweetness too it, while still being rich and syrupy. The scent really is so wonderful. There’s a subtle floral quality as well.

I’m impressed. I think this tea has great depth and quality and I could drink it regularly.

I ordered this quite a while ago as part of the pu-er sampler from TeaVivre. Then it sat because I decided I wasn’t ready for it.

Today, I decided I was ready.

So I brought it to work, and I’m pseudo gongfu-ing it, following the gaiwan steeping directions from their website.

The first few infusions after rinsing were still…not quite right. Heavy, kind of earthy. Something that just wasn’t quite right for me. I couldn’t identify what that was. It was just an off flavor for me. It was just kind of bitterish. The aroma, on the other hand, really nice. I admit it, I dumped out half of the third. It just wasn’t working for me.

Starting with the 4th steeping…I started to really dig this tea. Woody, a little sweetish. Different. And it’s getting better with each infusion.

By the tenth infusion, it’s starting to really mellow out, sweeter and tasty. That woody is almost gone. I can’t stop drinking this tea. But I’m only half way there.

And yes, this is a lot of tea I’m drinking. The worst part is that it’s not actually waking me up.

And there’s some flavor here that I just don’t know how to describe. It’s interesting. Unique. I like it a lot. What it is? Gah. I hate this. It’s driving me crazy that I can’t identify it.

But I am downing cup after cup of this tea like a mad woman. It’s good. It’s really good. (Well, after the first few infusions, anyway.)

And maybe that energy is starting to come.

And I keep drinking this tea.

Nom nom nom nom nom!

All this tea nomminess is mine!

I wish I had more time (and a bigger bladder.) Unfortunately, the fifteenth infusion will have to be my last.

This beautiful sheng has kept me company at work all afternoon. It has made a crazy draggy day seem to go a little faster.

But I am officially a sheng pu-erh lover.

Let me preface this with emphasis that I am rating this tea based on what it is supposed to be. I actually discovered I don’t like Lapsang Souchong at all, but Teavivre makes a good one for what it is.

Dry: Small tightly rolled black tea leaves. The package reminds me of the stables- the dry leaf smells very leathery to me with considerable smokiness and another aroma that reminds me of dry cedar chips.

Steeped: Deep red-brown clear liquor. The smokiness is a bit less present in the steeped tea than in the dry leaf. A hint of malt plays around the edges of the mug.

Taste: Holy smoke, Batman! This one is bold on flavor. Strong smoke with a hint of sweet. Very smooth, with pine, leather, and cedar notes. If I were to taste a tea that reminded me of a campfire, this would be the one. Not for me and I honestly couldn’t even finish the pot, but nonetheless, a quality tea and definitely worth a trial if you enjoy potent smokey notes in your tea. For some weird reason, I imagine that someone that might like this tea may also like whiskey, cigars, and horse races, lol.

I’m not sure the taste of this tea is too different for me than most other Chinese greens I’ve had. It is vegetal, nutty, and mildly sweet with a bit of green bean flavor.

What does stand out to me immensely is how thick the mouthfeel is. It is very heavy and very syrupy. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I really like that. As for the flavor, however, I feel a bit non-reactive. It’s very Zen and all, but I prefer to be wowed by my teas.

Thanks to Angel and Teavivre for the generous samples!

I could smell the dry leaf from the moment I opened the sample pouch. A savoury, roast-y aroma.

Steeped, the aroma becomes a bit more vegetal. The taste is quite light, still sort of savoury with a hint of nuttiness and to my surprise, a slight hint of sweetness. There’s a lightly astringent finish.

I usually don’t drink green teas (longjing being an exception), but I could see myself drinking more of this!

This is a tea that I’ve been wanting to try for a while now and thank you tons to Sil for sending this tea my way!
Ahh busy busy life right now with Disney, but I’m glad that I’m slowly adjusting and making time for tea :)

I think it was with December’s Steepster Select box that I fell in love with golden teas so anything golden is just… gold hahah. What makes these golden tipped teas so special? Or golden oolong, or golden curls or GOLDEN EVERYTHING. That’s a thing I’ll need to research soon :)

But this has a very lovely and dark liquor to it as it steeps, and it has that rich, dark, malty smell to it. It’s been a while since I’ve had a really great, straight, black tea, and this definitely is one of my favourites. I still absolutely love the Golden Yunnan from the December box, and my Vanesheh Persian Black tea from this local tea garden back home, but this tea comes as a close third!

This tea just gets better and better as I resteep it :)

I associate every golden tea as like a separate special tea okay. So pls excuse if they’re like… different

Thank you Teavivre, from this sample!

Not using a rating because I’m inexperienced with sheng pu’erh and don’t have the proper palate. Gongfu method with 4oz gaiwan. 10 second rise. Steepings time were 10, 15, 3, 30, 45, 60…

The dry leaf aroma consists of mushrooms, smoke, sweet spices, and peppercorns. After the rinse, the aroma was savory. I picked out sauteed mushrooms, BBQ’d London broil (medium rare), honey, and honey mustard BBQ sauce. I thought I felt my stomach rumble…

The liquor has a pale peach color and is clear and full-bodied. The first infusion was earthy and sour and had a hint of mushroom. At the second infusion, the aroma resembled cherries and the texture became creamy. Still could only taste earth and sourness. The texture went back to being clear for the third. Sourness waned a little, fruity note appeared. I could have probably gone for more infusions for the sake of the review, but I had to stop at the fifth. The flavor notes – earth, sour – pretty much remained the same. I tried my darndest detect flavors beyond what I was already tasting. Props to me for smelling those weird notes in the aromas (I have a crave now).