New Tasting Notes
The blueberry completely overwhelms the delicate nature of the white tea. Also, I’m used to loose leaf blends with smaller pieces — this batch looks like it contains the twigs and branches of the tree, not just the leaves. Unpleasant. I trashed it.
Preparation
hey y’all! I’m in Boston! (Know if any good tea places around here?) I spent the last few days running around trying to get ready, so I didn’t have much tea. However, yesterday I did manage to find this in a pyramid bag at my Starbucks. It actually looked like real tea!! & it was a bit better than average, too. So that’s good news.
I picked up 5 new teas at Tealuxe today… so many new tasting notes to come once I’m back home with my tea supplies!
Have a great time!
Boston Harbour Tea, sometimes Boston Harbor Tea. Its more that just a tourist trap item, its really good tea. Its imported by Mark T. Wendell, but I know that I found it in tourist trap establishments around the Boston Harbor 20 years ago. It is a very good English Breakfast style blend, largely Ceylon teas. Can’t say enough good about it.
Can’t wait to see the new teas. :)
Thanks guys! @Atacdad, thanks for the recommendation… I wasn’t able to get over to it… so I think I’m going to have to order. :)
a good breakfast tea, this time with some creamer, but the more i drink this tea the more it reminds me of generic orange pekoe. tastes good, but i kinda wish it were a little more unique.
A lovely cup of a tea that remains a favourite despite it’s inadvertent creation.
I had to get up very early, and I’m not ready for anything heavy, but I wanted to move on from my cup or two of Jasmine an hour ago.
A mint tea can be a dessert, and I used it to follow some toast. The aroma has filled my office, and it keeps drawing me back fro another sip, and the inevitable second cup.
The green tea teases the palate; the mint smashes it to smithereens a millisecond later.
It’s the most exciting think happening in Adelaide at 5:59am, I am sure
Preparation
Apparently last time I had this the vanilla was too strong,but with using a teaspoon of leaf instead the vanilla and peppermint are more balanced and I like this more and of course the black tea tasted nice.
hmmm, that’s unusual. Is it mainly black tea with just a hint of mint and vanilla? And which black?
Its a black tea with alot of vanilla and abit of peppermint. It’s just for some reason I last time used a tablespoon instead of a teaspoon of leaf and I thought it was too strong.
And now I’m off to experiment!
So this smells like raspberry. I steeped this up a short time. This tasted like raspberry but with a tartness. I liked the raspberry part but the tartness perhaps the hibiscus that seems to be in alot of fruit blends made this score lower. I did enjoy the raspberry though.
Just a personal preference, but adding hibiscus to a tea is like improving chocolate by adding gravel. I prefer my hibiscus in the garden and not in my cup.
Lol I know I kind of agree It’s just I got some as a gift and I like raspberry so I wanted to try it. Thanks for the comment.
My first sniff of the dried leaves smelled just like canned pumpkin with a little additional spice. But sniffs after that were more… pumpkin cider. And then more of a sweet chai. I’m missing the sweet bit that I had on the first sniff. All brewed up, I get more pie spice still, but the pumpkin is back a little. I’m expecting this to be very chai-like.
The taste isn’t a strong as I expected actually and after I swallow, a few pauses later I get an expanding taste of the tea base. Also a little warm spiciness is left on my tongue. There is also a distinctly different spice taste at the front. So each sip goes sweet spice, warm spice, nothing, spicy spice, pause, pause, pause, tea. Honestly, it’s the nothing that’s throwing me off. I can’t seem to taste anything when I hold the tea in my mouth. Even swishing it around, all I taste is just a spice aftertaste. Once I swallow, I get more spice but when the tea is in my mouth, I just get the post-warmth aftertaste. It’s really really weird.
I’m wondering if the sweet taste I get at the beginning is pumpkin. Or maybe the nothing taste is really pumpkin. Either way though, it’s overpowered by the spice when I sip so I just can’t get my tastebuds to it. But it’s weird because none of the tastes seem to blend. They are all separate. Standing there independently, not glancing at or even acknowledging the other tastes there.
With half a cup left, I put a little sugar in to see if that helps any. I’ve probably put too much sugar (maybe a quarter teaspoon) so I imagine at the very least this will be sweet now… And sugar did it no favors. Sure, now there is an underlying sweetness that attempts to mush the uncooperative tastes together but having that added sweetness makes the spice and the tea flavor at the end show up as bitter. Yes, I added sugar and I taste bitterness now.
Okay, before sugar, this cup was weird. After sugar, this cup is unpleasant. But I’m going to rate this on the better of the two tastes and go with the unsweetened cup. Which means instead of being gross, this cup was just… confusing.
Preparation
I wish I had the $ and the cupboard space for this one! I get more interested w/ each tasting note.:(
I initially didn’t like this much. It was drinkable, but only just. I found that adding (plenty of) milk to it helped a lot to smooth it out. But then I’m not entirely sure that my problem with it (a dry, almost dusty dark sort of flavour) is the same as yours (spicy aftertaste), so that might not help for you. Taken that way, it’s been growing on me though. Not enough that I would cry if someone took the rest of it off my hands, but I can drink it now and will likely actually finish the bag.
Thanks for the suggestion – I will give that a shot the next time I try it. I think the milk would help mute the spices and maybe (hopefully) let the pumpkin come out more? And if I’m really lucky, it’ll bring the tastes together for me. Because this tea confused me a bit.
I haven’t first clue what pumpkins actually taste like so I wouldn’t know. But it made it more tolerable and less soap-like for me. I find it’s good for just before bedtime so I can fall asleep. But that likely has more to do with the warm milk than with the tea. :)
Do you put sugar or just milk in it? I’m currently plotting a take two.
I only put milk, but I use a LOT of milk. About one part milk to four parts tea or something like that. I’ve tried it with sugar and that worked too, but I decided it wasn’t as necessary. I can’t remember if I’ve ever tried it with just sugar other than the very first time I had it and I was experimenting, so I don’t know how that would be now that I’m liking it a little better. I’ll have to test that out.
I found the teas in the local caffeteria!
Today has been a tough day. Last night I went to World Cup of Tea and met the fabulous Lena in person – we had a tea swap and drank some yummy teas at the store. After a great time, I went back to my hotel (I’m traveling for some business training) with all these amazing smelling teas.
And I won’t let myself try them, because I don’t have any spoons, a decent mug, or a way to get hot water where I have a clue about the temperature. (The stuff the little coffee maker spits out is kinda scary looking). It’s been acceptable for the orange Tazo, but I don’t want to waste all this nice tea!
So close, and yet so very, very far!!!
On lunch break today however, I noticed that they had tea at the on-site caffeteria! Tazo teas. How could I have not seen this before??? I decided to try one, and went with Berryblossom White. It’s not bad. Nothing to write home about, but not bad. I think I oversteeped a little, because it was a little bitter. Got two steeps out of it though. Can’t taste the individual fruits, but I get a sense of fruit, and tea. It’s pretty much right in the middle of the meh scale.
But I can’t say enough how happy I am that there’s some better tea around!
Dry tea is tightly rolled, small nuggets, dark olive green and khaki, and smells very fresh. At 190F, 3 gm in 3.5 oz pot. I poured water in, and then over the pot (which was seated in a small shallow bowl) to increase and maintain temperature, as in Chinese gongfu chadao. Steeps of 2 min, 30 sec, 1 min, 1, 1.5, 2 min.
On to the drinking! The maker of this oolong tea has coaxed a lovely sweetness from the leaf. It is accompanied by orchid notes and low astringency, a combination which spells happiness for me. There is a base of lightly roasty deep-greeness, characteristic of a rolled oolong. Successive steeps mellow the experience, as notes of caramel emerge. A most enjoyable series of cups!
Preparation
I love mixing my genmai cha with matcha (http://steepster.com/teas/maeda-en/2498-shiki-matcha-powder)! The matcha definitely gives it a little kick that I especially need when it’s one of those mornings.
On first steeping, it was really light and there didn’t seem to be much discernible flavor. There was some left in the pot, so I iced that, left the tea leaves out over night and rebrewed it this morning, let it steep for longer. Mmm, good strong cup of tea with a smooth flavor and that beautiful gold color I like to see in my oolongs. Very good tea for morning or night.
Preparation
Sample provided by a co-worker. Tastes like somebody just indiscriminately dumped in the contents of a spice cabinet with a heavy licorice sticky-tongue feeling that overrides all of it. Will sip dutifully (for the health benefit) but rather reluctantly.
Another cold morning in San Francisco made better by a fantastic black (or more appropriately, black and golden brown) tea. Golden Spring’s subtle sweetness makes for a mellow flavor that’s smooth and enjoyable, while the smokey, sweet aroma rounds out the experience. Great stuff!
