63 Tasting Notes
ITS GOLD! Liquid gold I tell you!
This has got to be some of the purest Chrysanthemum on the market in LA, it’s organically grown and the tea is the whole flower; not just the petals. The flavor is full and surprisingly sweet and goes down smooth without drying the palate. My secret is to boil the heck out of it for a few mintes, Chinese style (they boil all herbs from what I’ve been told).
Preparation
So, a strong black tea and a lemon tea walk into a bar. They go to a hotel, have a great night and bask in each other’s glory. The lemon tea decides he wants to marry the black tea even though everyone knows that bergamot and black tea are actually soulmates. They have a baby together. However, they didn’t know that they were in fact, brother and sister. This tea is that mutated baby.
“It can’t be that bad” you say. Oh, but it is!
It’s got a strong lemon taste; and no, i don’t mean bergamot. This is black tea if it was garnished with a 10-day-old lemon with a zester. The brew is so pathetically bland, underbodied and unbalanced that I might have to say that the great Disney powers that be blended this with the intention of pissing people off.
Bleh. Considering a toss out to the bin.
It went down like this Steepsterites:
Oh! They have a Jasmine Green tea in this set, since the Mad Party Tea was serious enough of a blend to merit a Steepster mention, then it MUST be good.
Jasmine Green tea entails the visualizations of tiny fragrant jasmine blossoms floating into a cup of perfect golden jade liquid, complete with monks bowing in the background and an effervescent hum of prayer. Little did I know that I was wrong. Oh so very wrong.
I was filled with doubt, fear, and most importantly, I doubted my $20+ purchase of tea blended by the hands of corporate Disney. My biggest question still left unanswered is why a tea labeled “Jasmine Green Tea” would at all taste like cauliflower?
I bought with my Dessert Tea Sampler pack from Art of Tea, and it’s my least favorite from the medley of other flavors they provided. By itself, it’s an interesting fruity rooibos with a hint of weight (chocolate + peppercorn + banana). However, I think the fruity notes and heavier ones get muddled and don’t come through with enough clarity. The brew is slightly cloudy with a lingering banana note.
It’s a balanced brew that doesn’t leave the mouth dry and doesn’t overwork your tastebuds, but doesn’t wow you either.
Decidedly Apricot, less Ceylon. This could be a good or bad thing depending on what type of tea drinker you are. The finish is very sweet and the brew itself is slightly tannic, but it’s above par for a tea bag.
I like it to steep really dark because of one thing. The fragrance. It’s divine :D
Preparation
I got this in a Dessert Sampler pack from Art of Tea, and I have come to the conclusion that it’s a quick second to the Caramelized Pear (definitely the best of all the ones in the set). If you’re going to have a snack with it, pick up some Ginger Cookie Thins from Trader Joe’s. It really brings out the flavor of the white chocolate pieces in the tea. This tea seems to be missing something crucial— like a spice to really bring out the flavor. Without it it seems sweetly bland, like a lower-end rooibos with a touch of honey or something.
The citrus is really distant, even though this has hibiscus and black currant in it. What is a plus is that it’s smooth and full. All in all, it’s a nice base tea, but really needs to be paired with something.
Preparation
At first taste this tea is definitely more pomegranate than green tea. However, with consecutive cups, it definitely is more balanced (i don’t know if that’s just the tongue assimilating to the citrus of the blend). I also had this with a cilantro chicken salad and it was an awesome pairing. The tea goes down very smooth and has a slight tinge of cherry (like that weird zing… stop me if i sound crazy).
I had this tea iced and enjoyed it very much unsweetened, but i feel that the addition of the sugar would help bring out the sweetness of the pomegranate and override the cherry-esque-ness.
If you’ve never had ginseng oolong from Bird Pick before, you’re pretty much missing out. It’s a heavier bodied oolong that is coated with a mixture of ginseng extract and licorice root on the outside (it doesn’t say it anywhere on the packaging, but it’s where I suspect the sweetness comes from). It tastes so full in the mouth and has a gentle menthyl effect of the mouth after every sip in addition to its sweetness. No dryness – and that’s the deal breaker for me.
Don’t get the supreme grade mixed up with the regular ginseng oolong. The difference is highly noticeable. I’ll re-review this tea when I get a fresh batch in, because I’ve had it for awhile.
Preparation
I do not think the sweetness is from licorice. Ginseng oolong usually has a sweet after taste from the ginseng. It is usually a little bitter at the sip, and then sweet with the exhale. That has been my experience with ginseng oolongs. I asked my local proprietor about the sweetness in the oolong, and he said it was the ginseng.
Actually, I was just in a Bird Pick Tea a week or two ago, and this was the tea they were serving (it was delicious by the way, no bitterness at all). The person who served me the tea said it was coated with ginseng AND licorice, and that the licorice sweetened it.
Pleaseexcusemyomgit’scoming…. tea*GASM*. Phew thanks. I just needed to break the ice with that.
Well this little ravishing thing is definitely a tease on the taste buds. I had the ecstasy of taking a sip of this tea a few days ago paired with a bag of Archer Farm’s Cinnamon Apple Pie trail mix. Um, until this point in time, I’ve always considered myself a prudent girl… however this whole little threesome between the tea, the trail mix, and my tongue was enough to make me into a permanent sinner.
I bought this along with a few other teas in a Desert Sampler set from Art of Tea. I haven’t gotten around to them, but if all the teas in that set are half as good as this one I might just quit my day job and take up teanography. Hmm.
The first few sips are a lovely heavier bodied rooibos with a hint of cinnamon. Later gulps (cup licking?) result in a fantastic end note of pears and other sweet ditties I just can’t place. It’s definitely smooth on the way down, not a single thought of dryness. (Haha.. dryness… smooth… [AHEM]).
Me and my little friend went for about 4 rounds (i mean cups, naughty thinker ;]), afterwards it degrades into a plain ’ol rooibos. I am definitely ordering more than 2 ounces because this little sample pack is NOT going to tide me over.
MMMMMMM!!!
This Earl Grey is the BEST tea to make a latte/milk tea out of. It has plenty of body and flavor to stand up against the milk and sugar, yet still soothes the tongue with bergamont in a pleasant non-citrusy way. (That makes the tea sound heroic, don’t you thinkk?)
D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S. I love the fact that you don’t need a lot of leaves to make tea with it because it’s such a strong-flavored tea, it makes me feel like I’m really getting my dollar’s worth.This is basically the gateway tea for me in Art of Tea’s other loose leaf. I CANNOT WAIT until I get my dessert tea sampler set.
Thank you for this! I was looking for Chrysanthemums for tea and a general websearch yielded very little—mostly tea that would take at least a month in shipping. From your post I discovered Bird Pick AND was able to find what I was looking for. Thank you!!