592 Tasting Notes
Sipdown (90)! I had saved the last teaspoon or so of this tea to try as a hot tea, but I stupidly messed it up. I didn’t check the parameters beforehand, so I decided 200 F sounded good enough. The tea ended up being pretty bitter. Fortunately, I was drinking it while eating a really sweet pound cake, so they balanced each other out nicely. Otherwise, it may have been undrinkable to me because I’m so sensitive to bitterness. Anyway, I thought it was odd until I came on Steepster and realized that the recommended temp is 185 F. Oops! I actually think that underneath the bitterness, there was a really nice tea, so I’m bummed that I don’t have any more of this tea to experiment with. Ah well, lessons learned.
Backlog. Yesterday was a series of semi-disasters that physically left me in pain, so of course I had to bust out my go-to comfort tea. I’ve gotten my whole family hooked on this tea in particular, so my stock is dwindling much faster than I am comfortable with. But for now, I’m just going to enjoy it and think about restocking later.
I think this was a perfect morning tea for me today. It has a nice, bold malty flavor that is complemented by some sweeter cocoa notes. I’m also kind of in love with the name of this tea, haha. Not gonna lie, it was one of the reasons I picked it up this morning. After my first cup, I resteeped the leaves and the flavors are still going strong. This is one of the top contenders for a morning wake-me-up tea.
This is the tea that I decided to sip on and resteep throughout the day. I only had a little packet of this, so when I fell in love with it, I decided to hoard it a bit and save it for a figurative rainy day. I think that was last winter. Anyway, I busted it back open and I think that I may have waited a little too long because it was much weaker today than I had remembered. Not only was it weak, but it also just tasted like a plain-ish black tea instead of having all the nuanced and intricate flavors that I remember and loved so much. It wasn’t bad or anything, but it just wasn’t quite as special as I remember. I still have some left, so I’m hoping that maybe I was just a terrible tea maker today, and that the rest of this tea will be back to my normal deliciously lovely tea.
When I first started out on Steepster as a tea newbie, this quickly became one of my favorites. Now that I’ve really gotten into the world of straight teas (unflavored), my taste buds have definitely changed. While I still enjoy this one, I’m gonna lower my rating just a little because it does come off as a little too perfume-y to me now. Not so much that I can’t drink it, but just a teensy bit enough that I wonder how I didn’t really taste it as much before. I think that today’s cup was also just a little extra jasmine-y, which is usually not the case if I remember correctly. But all in all, it’s still a good flavored black tea to me, and I’m still liking it!
And I’m back from vacation and back on Steepster! I actually got back home yesterday, but kind of took the holiday to decompress and relax without diving right back into the land of the internet. I’ve been saving my last little packet of LB, but I decided to bust it open yesterday to celebrate coming home to my teas and also Christmas. This tea is every bit as good as I remembered it from last winter. It’s so intensely malty with chocolate notes at the end and so many other flavors all cooperating so perfectly in this one cup. I even got three or four resteeps out of it, so I’m definitely savoring the last that I have of this tea.
I’m finally getting around to tasting the last of my new teas from my two Butiki orders. I was hesitant to try this one after tasting the cantaloupe and cream. Both of the teas had a really nice melon smell mixed in with something funky smelling (to me at least). After I steeped this up per the instructions on the package, I could still smell that weird smell. It’s hard to describe. Maybe like something is spoiling? The tea starts off tasting wonderfully melon (but again, very similar to cantaloupe and cream), but then ends with that weird taste that I could smell earlier. Perhaps it is something about the flavorings that I’m sensitive to? I’m really sad about it because other than that weird smell and aftertaste, the melon is so wonderfully light and delicious! I will have to do some investigating and experimenting to figure this out (hopefully).
Oops, I accidentally deleted my tasting note. Basically, I pulled this one from the T&C TTB before sending it off based purely on the fact that it had “breakfast” in the name. I didn’t realize until after taking a few sips and going onto Steepster that there was puerh in the blend. That would explain how it got so dark (it looked like coffee!) and why it was less malty than I expected it to be. I also found it sweeter than I expected, which seems to have been on purpose. It was a bit of a caramel taste to me rather than chocolate. And finally, I also feel like I tasted some kind of spice. That’s about as specific as I can get. I also spilled about half of my mug as I foolishly practiced doing headstands near the cup. A have a nice little tea stain on my carpet to remind me not to do that again. Oops!
I polished off the last of my free ounce of this, but I have to admit that I used another Starbucks reward to get a fresh new ounce of this tea. There’s not much else at Teavana that I really wanted to try out an ounce of, so I just went for this reliable tea. Besides, I normally wouldn’t spend that much money on this tea. Anyway, price aside, this is a pretty nice tea. I’ve mostly had it cold brewed over the summer, but I had it as a hot tea today. I was mostly getting baked bread/potato-y notes from it, which is one of my favorite flavors from straight black teas. Otherwise, it was a bit light for a black tea, but that may have to do with my leafing. The flavors did fade a little on the resteep, but were strong enough to be worth it.
I pulled this sample from the T&C TTB before I sent it off, and now I’m glad that I did. Lately, I’ve been drinking a lot of the same teas, so I haven’t been motivated to write tasting notes. I thought I’d be a tad more adventurous today, so I steeped up this darjeeling. I’m still on a quest to figure out the different types of straight black teas, so I had to snatch this sample out of the box to try.
The packet says “muscatel and cut wood.” I’m definitely getting a woodsy taste out of this one, but I’m not entirely sure what muscatel is even supposed to taste like. So perhaps it is in there and I’m just not tasting it? To me, it has the malty flavor of a black tea with wood notes in there. Others have also mentioned something about lemon that I’m not picking up on either. I do have enough leaves for another round, so I will keep these facts in mind and see if I pick up on any of that next time around.
I did quite enjoy this tea, though. It wasn’t bitter and only had a slight hint of astringency. If this is representative of darjeelings in general, that is definitely a direction I want to be exploring!
