Teavivre

Weekend Sipdown #1

I decided to round off my week’s holiday with a few sipdowns, to make way for new incoming teas. Yes, I was baaaaad again! Also because there are many in my sipdown box that I’ve enjoyed a lot, and I want my final acquaintance with them to be a memorable one.

So, this morning’s obvious choice was this. It’s as lovely as I recall from previous cups — slightly sweet, malty, with a sweet potato note and a mild hint of cocoa. There’s a twist of smoke lurking around in the background, too, but it’s never overpowering. I’m just beginning my exploration of plain black teas, so it’s hard to say where this will eventually come in my ratings. For the moment, though, I love it. It tastes wonderful, and it’s the perfect comfort cup. Most definitely a tea I can see myself coming back to!

A sample from ashleyelizabeth. I’ve heard a lot about this one, and I’ve recently had some very positive experiences with Chinese black teas, so I was pretty excited as I brought this one out to try. The dry leaves are simply beautiful — slightly curly, golden brown with cocoa tips, darkening to almost-black. I used 1 tsp of leaf, and gave it approximately 3 minutes in boiling water. The resulting liquor is a medium golden-brown, and the scent is sweetly malty with a hint of smoke.

The initial flavour is similar to the scent — sweetly malty with a very slight edge of bitterness. The flavour of sweet potato develops mid-sip, and I get a hint of milk chocolate. A vague smokiness swirls around in the background, adding a mildly bitter, savoury overtone to perfectly augment the sweetness of the malt. I like this as a middle of the road kind of tea. It hasn’t got the chocolate and bread of Teavivre’s Yunnan Dian Hong Golden Tip, nor the deeper, darker, leathery notes of their Balian Gongfu. Instead, it treads a line somewhere in the middle — the best of both worlds! It’s wonderfully delicious! I would purchase this one as a breakfast/morning tea, simply because it’s strong and tasty, and has many of the flavours I enjoy in a black tea. Truly lovely stuff! Thanks again to ashleyelizabeth for sharing this one with me.

SSTTB: Pick #22

So, when I said earlier this evening that the Hot Apple Ginger Toddy was the last one from The Box I guess I lied, inadvertently though; I totally forgot that I had this one too last minute while packing it up and that I’d yet to log it.

However, going through my notes just now reminded me of it!

Here’s what I jotted down while drinking it:

- WTF? It’s roasty like a Hojicha?
- Some serious malt/bread notes
- Floral Endsip/aftertaste
- Very weird as an oolong; pleasant enough

Obviously it was maybe a little forgettable overall given that I’d totally forgotten I even had it; but now that I’m thinking back on it now I am doing so fondly. It was really good in the moment and while I was really thrown by the flavours in it I thought it was very comforting.

Not something I’d need to drink again, though, I think.

Sample sipdown!

I decided to brew it gongfu style because I have a teensy Japanese soy sauce dispenser that holds 3 oz.

As per their website for the paddy flavoured tea (because this one is no longer)…
Dry, the tea smells really sweet and carby.
2 rinses – A bit smoky, as well as sweet and carby (like cooked potatoes or pasta or something).
20s – Umm. Huh. I don’t like this at all. It smells sweet and carby with a tinge of smoke, but it tastes extremely astringent and bitter, a bit fishy, and just. No. Like a green darjeeling that’s been boiled and oversteeped.
30s – Even stronger and more astringent and bitter.
40s 5s – Nope.

Ok, I’m calling it quits. This is not a tea for me, the flavours are not good. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong (entirely possible!), but I do not like. It was my first raw puerh, too. I have a couple others that I’ll eventually get to. :)

Thank you Stephanie for generously sending me this sample!

It’s a little late for me to be drinking caffeine, but I just woke up from a nap. I was kept awake last night by a snoring boyfriend and a mosquito bite that had me itching. Hopefully the caffeine in this won’t keep me awake later…

This tea is so interesting looking. I love the long slender leaves that are bright green and look pressed flat, almost as though someone had ironed them. I decided to steep this at 170 F for around 3 minutes.

The tea liquor is a light yellowish-green. I definitely get the green bean flavor here but what’s amazing about this green is how sweet it is. The sweetness lingers in your mouth long after you’re done sipping it. It seems really fresh and light which is also good. Teavivre has so many good green teas and I was really glad I got to try this one. I wonder if anyone’s tried cold brewing it? It’s tasty.

I had a hard time figuring out why I still had Sil’s sample, but it’s because I ordered a black tea sample pack and gave my brother the unopened ones and kept this one. Go me?

I added 1/4 tsp maple sugar to this, because it smelled like a tea that would be good with a touch of maple.

While this tea is nice, I still prefer the keemun. Which keemun specifically? IDK, since I still have 3 or 4 varieties waiting for me to sample. This tea is a little sharp for me, which is interesting. This smells sweet, like honey and sweet potato and hard caramel candies, but it doesn’t taste that way due to the sharpness. I think I’m expecting a sweeter, more mellow flavour.

Thank you for sharing, Sil. :)

This tea was intruiging from the moment I opened the foil packet. It seemed there was just as much dried tangerine rind as there was tea leaf inside! Now, this is my second flavored puerh. Before, I had tried a chocolate one by The Tea Spot, but I didn’t care for it much.

The scent is very interesting. The fruit is in the forefront, but it isn’t so much a fresh fruit aroma. It smells more like the tangerine tree itself. Sure, there are notes of citrus in it, but I also smell wood, dried leaves, and something very sweet.

As the tea steeps, it comes to a dark shade of brown, almost like coffee. The tangerine peels float to the top and rest there. The flavor of the tea is “cooked” for lack of a better word. The fruit tastes the way it would in a cobbler, sort of. There’s also a hint of something that reminds me of cereal. While this is very new and interesting, I can’t say I’m a huge fan. Maybe I still need to grow into puerhs.

Fruit teas are hard for me to review. They aren’t bad, but they often all have a very similar tart taste, as most use hibiscus or some other tart ingredient like that. This tea has that tart taste, but it also has a blueberry taste in it, and there is a touch of vanilla in it.

However, this tea doesn’t have as much of the flavours in it that I would like. The tartness is a little overpowering, and I don’t taste enough vanilla to consider it a vanilla tea in any way. It wasn’t bad at all, of course, it just wasn’t as flavourful as I’d like it, and it wasn’t my favourite tea.

I do think it may taste different cold though, so I am going to let it cool and then keep it in the fridge for a while. I’ll report back when I drink it cold.

I keep wanting to call this Black Pearls. It has a nice chocolate scent (that could also be my kitchen, as I just made cakes). The flavour is a bit towards the mildly sweet hot cocoa side. Not overly strong, just delicious.

This tea is amazing.

First of all, the leaves are perfectly whole, just dried and flattened out. They are so HUGE. It almost felt sacrilegious to put them into a cup and pour boiling water over them.

The dry tea smells slightly vegetal, similar to cabbage or spinach but not quite. The smell is familiar to a vegetable soup base.

The brewed tea brews up fairly strong. There is definitely a vegetal flavour but it is very light and mild. It is not floral, but it is not strong cabbage, it is just somewhere in between. It is smooth and creamy. Just slight butter notes.

This tea is delicious. Thank you Angel from Teavivre for this free sample. I appreciate being able to try such awesome and high grade green teas.

Very light both in color and in flavor, but not lacking. A subtle delight and excercise in sensory awareness.

Silky smooth with flavors of water chestnut, a light vegetal taste (I’m inclined to compare it to a nice mild cabbage flavor), with some notes of coconut and a natural sugar cane sweetness. This is a wonderful tea. It is delicate and requires your attention and focus in order to be fully appreciated. I feel very calm and centered after appreciating this beauty. Definitely recommended.

I was surprised and, to be honest, a bit skeptical about this flavored milk oolong from Teavivre. Not that I knew anything about milk oolong anyway, but it struck me as strange that an excellent pure tea purveyor such as Teavivre would be trading in those disreputable “flavors” added by so many companies to mask mediocre base teas.

My worries were for naught, as this Jin Xuan tastes very good. However, I am a bit confused, as it tastes, looks, and smells very similar to the Republic of Tea Milk Oolong, which boasts only natural milkiness. Both dried teas take the form of gnarled green knots with a huge amount of very enticing aroma. This Jin Xuan exhibits less variation in the coloring, with a more uniform dark green sheen, and the knots are also smaller in size. The Republic of Tea Milk Oolong came from China, not Taiwan, so I suppose that it should not be taken as “classic”, whereas this milk oolong from Teavivre appears to have come from Taiwan.

The most important question of all is this: how did I go my whole life until yesterday in a state of complete and utter milk oolong ignorance and (now I see) deficiency? This is a wonderful genre of tea, which I definitely intend to explore further, beginning with the unflavored milk oolong from Teavivre!

This keemun tastes like it has a history. An ancient history filled with with time, patience and old places. It is a deep tasting tea with a nice balance of earthy dark chocolate, a touch of smoke and a wee bit of malt. It is not overwhelming with it’s keemun flavors, but it is delicate, honest and true in what it represents. I am getting fewer top notes in this keemun that in TeaVivre’s Organic Superfine Keemun, but this isn’t a matter of quality in the difference between the teas… more than likely it’s my allergies. This is the top of the line for TeaVivre’s keemuns, so if you love the earthy goodness of keemun but don’t know where to begin in TeaVivre’s offerings, begin here.

I tend to forget I have this in the cupboard…well I just drank the last 7g of it so now it’s gone…

This is the roasted type, bolder in flavour with so many different notes and nuances, it’s not possible to identify them all in one session.

I don’t drink it often enough, too bad cause it is worth the attention. It smells like roasted chestnut and coffee, but strangely, the first thing I get in the first steep is a strong floral mouthfeel.

Then, it’s a party in the mouth. I mean fourth of july with fireworks kind of party. Baked goods, spicy nutmeg, peach, apricot, charcoal. It’s complex but so easy to drink.

Someone else suggested coconut to me from another Big Red Robe tea. As much as I want to get coconut, it’s just missing in action in this one. Too bad, I do love me some coconut!

On the fifth steep I just let it cool.

It’s juicy and very refreshing on this very hot summer night. It gets winey, like a bright citrusy and oaky white wine.

I really like this and would definitely consider replenish my cupboard with some Da Hong Pao soon.

Another great tea from Teavivre!

I got this as part of my Giveaway Sampler. The golden tipped leaves are rather pretty. And I get a lovely aroma of sweet potatoes both from the dry leaves and the brew. There seems to be more honey in the flavour, but I do get the potato as well. It seems to have hints of nuts too. Thanks Teavivre for being so good at picking my teas.

From my first actual Teavivre order. I like osmanthus, but I’ve not had it as an oolong yet. The scent is nicely floral, a bit of honeysuckle perhaps. As for flavour, creamy, and sweet. I do taste the osmanthus, as well as the grassy oolong.

BLACK TEA, YES.

I have not had a good, truly deep, dark, black tea in a loooooooooooong time. I have definitely had black tea recently (not logged since it was all bagged and out of town away from computer access) but not what I really consider black tea, and not THIS good.

The smell steeping was a grainy, malty smell.

The taste?

I am drinking a cup of chocolate, caramel, wheat….goodness. That’s exactly what I taste. Sugar and milk definitely brought the chocolate to the forefront, that’s the first taste that hits you right away. The wheat taste is a sweet, middle tone, that develops in the middle. The caramel is an underlying flavour, tasted throughout, and strongest at the end of the sip.

Usually, I do not taste three flavours as distinctly and powerfully in teas as I do in this tea, and they usually don’t taste as delicious. I mean, I have had flavoured teas recently that taste delicious—just look at my reviews—but that’s usually ONE flavour, not three. Teas with more than one flavour can be hard to pin down. I think that is why I love this tea so much—it is SO complex and so rich and dark and I LOVE it.

Man, and this was only a free sample from Angel at Teavivre that came with a purchase. :( IT’S GONE, NOOO.

I miss having a great black tea in my cupboard. I urge you all to go drink this—sweetened to taste and with milk or cream. It’s divine!

Something about my three Teavivre tins standing tall on my tea tin shelf makes me really happy. And, on mornings when I want a sure-fire good tea, I go to one of those.

I don’t think I have ever been disappointed by a Teavivre tea. How do they do that?

I can’t remember if I have reviewed this before. I think I might have opened it when the site was being wonky and didn’t write anything up. It surprised me. I got a very strong muscatel smell from the dry leaf – at least I think it is muscatel. I see other people have described it as fig, and I could see that too. I don’t have much experience at all with figs so I can’t say for sure.

That flavor carried over to the brew as well. Somehow it managed to be both malty and fruity at the same time, which was nice since most of my golden teas are just malty. I’m really glad I have an obscene amount of this one.

Second cup. I dumped in the rest of the sample. Still pretty sure it was more than one cup’s worth. Drinking this at 6:30 pm is probably a really bad idea. I’m pretty sure this tea could bench press me and I’m not s small person.

Had a really nice dinner with Stephanie last night, where our husbands finally met. They have a lot in common but it was hard for them to talk because my daughter is so enamored with Stephanie that she absolutely dominated the conversation. It’s really unusual for her, she is normally very introverted. Sorry Steph! Anyway, we had some great Chinese food, and as usual, exchanged tea samples.

This was in my goody bag from Stephanie, and I really like it. I’m not sure if I underleafed it, since the package gave the temp and length and all that, but no information about how much to use. It’s possible that the sample was meant to be a single cup; it looked like two to me. But when I resteep I will add more and see how that goes.

It’s really nice! A little weak but that might be my fault. The 2 minute steep might have been short as well.

If I’m being honest, after so many cups of tea I start getting heartburn, but I just chew up some Tums and keep going. Bad girl.

I’m back…again :)

Thank you, thank you Angel from Teavivre for this free sample!!!

For anyone that has not tried Teavivre, I highly recommend it, their teas and customer service are amazing.

So life has been getting in the way of tea, what a bummer :(

OK on to the review…

This dry tea smells like pickled cabbage to me. Delicious, just delicious.

The recommendation on the package for this tea was to steep for 3-5 minutes. But I don’t like my green tea too strong, so I brewed only for one minute. The brewed tea is a very light hay-like colour. The taste is quite light. In hindsight, I could have steeped for longer.

The brewed tea has the vegetal, cabbage, bean greens type flavour. It is smooth and very slightly sweet. Even though it is smooth, there is definitely a crisp and clean taste to this tea. This is my favourite type of green tea. Reading the description on this one, it says it is a high mountain tea. I quite like high mountain oolongs, so I am going to make an assumption that I will like high mountain greens.

Thank you again Teavivre!

Edit: A two minute steep yields a thicker liquor, the flavours are a bit stronger but not by much.