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You really need to use boiling water with this one. Using 195 degree water just makes the tea laugh at you and taste like wooden stirrers. Great with (lots of) milk and sugar.

A decent black tea. I think it calls more for a dark sweetener and lemon than cream and sugar. I had mine with milk and caster sugar. I wouldn’t go out of my way to drink it, but it’s a definite “wake up” kind of tea (or a “sleep is for weaklings” kind of tea, really).

Delicious fruit-candy tea! It’s like eating candy without the sugar.

I generally don’t like to use boiling or near boiling water on white tea, so I treat it similarly to green. It re-steeps well for me too; I can get two mugs out of a tea bag.

This is a wonderfully sweet and complex tea without the vegetal taste that most non-green tea lovers find distasteful. It’s quickly climbed my favorites list to the top three, and my fiancé, who is rather impartial to tea, enjoyed this as well. I enjoy it both cold and hot, and I would not recommend using sweetener with it (though if you had to, I’d recommend light agave or a touch of honey).

Like many teas on my favorites list, this holds up to abuse rather well. My first brew ended up lukewarm before I remembered I was brewing some tea. It was still delicious! I was expecting it to be incredibly bitter, like other grocery-store green teas or sencha. Thankfully this tea doesn’t get that heavy, bitter taste.

I only add two pinches of the tea to my cold cup before adding hot water (195 F). If the cup is pre-warmed, I try to take the tea out before 2 minutes. Two minutes is what I usually consider the longest steep-time for green tea, though Lung Ching has proven me wrong.

If you’re watching the leaves sink, take out the leaves when most of the tea has sunk to the bottom. Using this method, you can go for a second steep but definitely not a third.

If you like lavender teas, you’ll probably like this. If you’re familiar with lavender bath products, (and associate scents with tastes) I wouldn’t recommend it. It tastes like lavender soap to me. It’s pure lavender blossoms, so I have no quibble about the quality of the ingredients. I just couldn’t drink an entire cup because it smelled like I was drinking soap. It smells lovely though. :)

Quite tasty and heavy on the cinnamon. This is incredibly forgiving tea to brew. As much as I hate to admit to my tea abuse, I didn’t have enough water for a full pot, so I poured what I had, started more water, poured that in the pot, and then forgot about the pot for an hour or so. Imagine my surprise that it was still tasty!

This works well without sugar, but is excellent with brown sugar or a dark agave. I would also recommend either using disposable tea bags or an extremely fine strainer.