Teavivre

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Warm, cozy chrysanthemum tisane. The little sample packets were stuffed to the brim with small white blossoms.

The main flavor note for me is somewhere between chamomile and musty hay. It has a very soothing gentle and sweet herbaceous flavor. There’s a touch of sweetness that reminds me of licorice root as well. And of course, that signature pepperiness that I always find in chrysanthemum. Perhaps a touch of cooling, menthol-like flavor at the end of the sip?

It sounds like an odd combination, but it comes together in a somewhat complex yet easy-drinking tisane. There’s a brothiness to it that just feels so restorative to me, perfect for winding down at the end of the night.

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Another pair of Teavivre samples down!

This is a lovely jasmine tea. The leaves are beautiful – white and downy and spiraled up into cute little rounds. As for the taste, the jasmine is very strong, but it’s sweet and juicy, almost fruity, and decidedly natural-tasting. I don’t taste much of the green tea because the jasmine is so powerful, but it’s quite smooth with a bit of minerality. Overall, this tastes like drinking pure jasmine nectar.

Delicious. I’m really not sure how I’ll pick which jasmine tea to get when I eventually get around to ordering from Teavivre…

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I used two flowers for one 12-ounce mug of tea.

Ahhh, chrysanthemum. Such a cozy and comforting tea, and really an autumnal flavor to me. I love the nectarous honey-sweetness paired with soft hay and hints of menthol, herbs, and pepper. Such an interesting combination of soft, sweet, and more savory aromatic notes. It has a slightly thick, viscous mouthfeel as well that makes it somehow more satisfying to sip on.

It makes such a cozy before-bed cuppa. Happy that I still have a few other samples of different chrysanthemum tisanes from Teavivre to sip through! :)

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Love this one!

I adore osmanthus, and I really should seek out more of it in tea form. Here it adds a wonderful honey-sweet, nectarous floral note. It’s juicy, almost fruity, and reminds me of a more floral apricot. The oolong makes a lovely base for it, its silky texture just adds to the feeling of drinking nectar. Otherwise it’s quite mild, with a gentle minerality and greenness that’s somewhere between grassy and vegetal.

So so yummy, I’ll definitely have to order a full-size pouch of this someday. ❤

Another excellent tea from Teavivre. I’m down to my last couple of samples from them: a Dragonwell and this. Woke up to a beautiful snowstorm, everything looking like it had a ton of powdered sugar sprinkled over it, and decided that black tea would be fitting. Getting the notes of sweet potato, getting a little earthiness, and orange/citrus on the finish. It brewed exceptionally dark, and I was afraid I’d overleafed, but no, it was perfect. The second infusion was still great, a little lighter, but still flavorful. Damn, Teavivre has such great stuff!

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So I have this gallon Ziploc bag of Teavivre samples from a previous order, and I figured it was time to start working through them. There’s two samples of each tea, so if I have one every day I’ll get a sipdown every other day. Huzzah!

This is tasty, as their jasmine teas always are. I’m not sure where this one falls in terms of price, but it’s definitely not as delicious as their jasmine pearl teas. The jasmine is nice enough, sweet and lush with a nice hint of creaminess. But I feel like the base tea isn’t giving me much? It’s sort of just slightly grassy and mineral, and there’s some astringency even though I steeped it for just two minutes.

Still a pleasant and relaxing tea this evening, it just doesn’t measure up to a lot of Teavivre’s other jasmine teas that I’ve tried in the past.

Laziest review ever: I liked it. Complex. Nothing I can add to the tons of reviews of this tea already on Steepster. Wondering if I should have brewed gongfu as I started doing or if Western (how I ended up brewing) was the way to go. I only had a sample so I’d need to buy more to try out the other method. Still, I got two steeps out of it.

This note may be skewed. I have a canker sore on the tip of my tongue. I made myself sit down because I was really craving a cuppa. This is the one that jumped into my hand. This is a very earthy tea. Though it says five minutes I’m finding I actually prefer it less. The honey notes and the wet twiggy notes come out more with less infusion time. While the later infusions are charcoal-filled. With compost, wet woods. First infusion was better than the second. While this isn’t a tea I would seek out to buy it has done its job.

This was another of my early 2020 sipdowns. It was actually the tea I finished immediately after the Bihar Doke Silver Needle I just reviewed. I received a sample of it in a 2019 order from Teavivre, but I can’t confidently say whether or not it was a free sample or one I purchased as part of that particular order. I can say that I had never tried a Tan Yang Gong Fu prior to trying this one. I found this tea to be very enjoyable, so hopefully I will enjoy other teas of this type when I eventually get around to trying some more.

I prepared this tea gongfu style. After a quick rinse (about 5 seconds), I steeped 6 grams of loose tea buds in 4 fluid ounces of 185 F water for 5 seconds. This infusion was chased by 17 additional infusions. Steep times for each of these infusions were as follows: 7 seconds, 9 seconds, 12 seconds, 16 seconds, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, 1 minute, 1 minute 15 seconds, 1 minute 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 7 minutes, and 10 minutes.

Prior to the rinse, the dry tea buds emitted aromas of malt, cedar, cocoa, smoke, straw, sweet potato, and molasses. After the rinse, I detected fresh aromas of butter, roasted almond, and roasted peanut. The first infusion introduced a baked bread aroma and fainter, less clearly defined scents of honey and sugarcane. In the mouth, the tea liquor presented notes of malt, straw, smoke, molasses, sweet potato, honey, cedar, roasted almond, and roasted peanut that were balanced by subtler impressions of coffee, sugarcane, roasted hazelnut, baked bread, butter, and caramel. The majority of the subsequent infusions added aromas of cream, marshmallow, vanilla, pine, orange zest, roasted hazelnut, and caramel. Stronger and more immediately notable impressions of roasted hazelnut, butter, and caramel emerged in the mouth along with notes of cream, earth, minerals, pine, vanilla, orange zest, and marshmallow. Hints of tobacco, oats, raisin, and cocoa were also present. As the tea faded, the liquor continued to emphasize notes of minerals, cream, malt, marshmallow, orange zest, cedar, pine, roasted hazelnut, and sweet potato that were chased by hints of roasted almond, butter, straw, cocoa, earth, sugarcane, honey, caramel, molasses, and roasted peanut.

This was an earthy yet surprisingly balanced and refined black tea with a very appealing sweetness. It reminded me a bit of Wuyi Jin Jun Mei in some respects, but this seemed to be a more reserved and more carefully layered sort of tea. I enjoyed it tremendously. I could see people who are into subtle, sophisticated black teas being impressed by this tea.

Thank you, Angel, for this sample.

And it’s a belatedly posted sipdown!

#long time ago internet hiatus sipdown

Sipdown (1456)!

Matcha Affogato but make it dirty!? For #matchamonday this week, I decided to try something new! I’ve made “Matcha Affogato” before, but this time I used coffee flavoured ice cream and poured over a strongly dosed and freshly whisked bowl of this long forgotten Teavivre matcha sample. It was very good; the creaminess of the icecream was maintained because the matcha was prepared so thickly but the more umami notes and slight vegetal/grassy quality cut down the overall sweetness quite a bit which made for a unique taste experience. I’m not generally super into coffee or coffee flavoured things, but this wasn’t super strong and emphasis on cream in terms of taste and mouthfeel really did wonders for my enjoyment.

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjqTrZUL_2U&ab_channel=Claud

This is a flowery, thick and surprisingly nice tea for $25 a cake. The statement that it comes from big 100-300 year old trees can’t be true, and that irritates me, but I like the tea.

Stellar! I very much enjoyed this one.

Thank you for the sample, Angel.

And it’s a sipdown!

#long time ago internet hiatus sipdown

Pu-erh tea is a type of tea that isn’t everybody’s…uh…cup of tea. I, personally, am a big fan of Pu-erh and always welcome the opportunity to taste its unique flavors.

The round raw Pu-erh cake arrived in decorative outer packaging. The cake was also wrapped in tissue paper for freshness and extra protection.

The hard cake appeared to be wound with long young green leaves to form the circle. The aroma was subtle and slightly floral.

I brewed 18 grams of the leaves in 40 ounces of water at 205 degrees. I was surprised by the honey-amber color of the finished product. The aroma was floral with a touch of sweetness.

The flavor of this tea was unusually smooth for Pu-erh. It was floral, a bit grassy, and had sweet undertones. There was a tad of astringency, but this is common with young raw tea. The astringency was not obnoxious and dissipated rapidly. The aftertaste was pleasant and brief.

The TeaVivre 10th Anniversary Raw Pu-erh Cake is truly a special tea that more than lives up to this momentous occasion. I highly recommend this selection for current and future Pu-erh enthusiasts.

This could have been a good tea if it weren’t so hibiscus heavy. It’s my fault though for not realizing the roselle listed in the ingredients is the same as hibiscus. The dried fruit pieces in this blend – mango, grape, papaya, pineapple, etc. – smelled wonderful and sounded like a promising combination but were completely overwhelmed by all of the hibiscus. It ended up tasting like a slightly sour fruit punch. Couldn’t really taste any of the other ingredients. Adding sweetener, something I am normally loathe to do, helped balance the flavor a bit and brought out some of the underlying citrus and grape.

I struggled with this one a lot. Couldn’t coax out the flavor I wanted despite multiple efforts at brewing it. Brisk and vegetal with a nutty green bean taste. Borders on astringent at times but doesn’t become bitter. The nuttiness becomes dominant as it steeps and it also presents toasted grain and fried vegetables along the way instead of the more subtle grass and water chestnut notes in the aroma.

Not the best dragonwell I’ve ever had but certainly not the worst either. It’s possible that something was lost due to the shipment delay.

Meh, this was a pretty basic green with a generic flavor. Sweet flowery aroma similar to another Teavivre green, Tian Mu Yun Wu. However it tastes like a bowl of green beans. Hot or cold steeped, there’s nothing really memorable about this tea. Will use the rest in my stash for blending but don’t care to have it straight.

Past sipdown – unfortunate, didn’t actually record this one. I’m sure I enjoyed it, but don’t really remember beyond that.

First tea from the 2023 harvest.

So happy to be reunited with this tea! I’ve tried other Anji Bai Chas but Teavivre remains my favorite. This year’s batch was no exception. It’s just as good as I remember.

The long, slender leaves are needle shaped and bright green with a light tint of yellow like a green apple. Intensely fresh, beany aroma.

Steeped 1.5g in a glass pitcher and poured out half after a few minutes. Clean, lush vegetative flavor. I tasted peas, grass, romaine lettuce, and a touch of hay. Very spring-like and delicious.

Since this was such a delicate tea, I didn’t top off and instead poured out what was left in the pitcher. Sort of a hybrid grandpa/western style. The second cup was more beany and had more body but still sublime.