New Tasting Notes

Spring in Texas is kind of odd. My garden already has blushing tomatoes, but the lawn won’t grow. When I go throw disc I always need a shower, but driving home from vespers I have to turn the heat on in the car.

Weird.

The good news is, this oolong tea can fix ANYTHING.

I am not sure what they are referring to with “full leaf”, unless its the bits of twig in the mix; otherwise, it looks like it was run through a “Weed Wacker”. Nonetheless, I was warned by a collegue that this brewed up “bitter”. Guessing that he over brewed, I used 1 tsp, 200 deg water and 2 minutes to good success. The tea is a pale sepia brown with yellow undertones. Even short brewed, it has a mouth cleaning astringency that lends credence to it being easy to oversteep. Otherwise, its a pretty standard Darjeeling… green vegetable taste, not grassy; very dry and tannic…the chardonnay of tea.

I’ve decided that this is some kind of wonderful. Something about the roasted almond flavor when mixed with honey and creamer. The coconut just kind of skims long the top. Very wonderful morning.

I am pretty certain this is a frist for me (wintergreen in tea, that is). I have pure spearmint, several pure peppermints and a couple teas with mint in them, but never before has wintergreen come up. It’s refreshing. It’s different. I like it! I am mostly getting a minty flavour (very wintergreen and spearmint, nothing pepperminty) without much of a tea base (it seems I never taste tea in tea!) but I am loving it. The black tea lends a depth of flavour and colour that pure mint don’t always have. This was an excellent oops week surprise!

EDIT: I know that this disagrees with other reviews, but I think that for the first time in my life I’ve found a mint tea that really does put me in mind of mouthwash/toothpaste. This isn’t a problem for me, but I definitely get more of a toothpaste taste than a proper mint leaf sort of taste. And I still don’t really get a lot of tea taste. Weird!

We had some of this for breakfast and the beau (surprisingly) wanted to give it a go. I gave it a boil, then 4 minutes steep. It came out quite dark, and very strongly smelling of vanilla. The beau claims his cup is a little bitter, but that’s because he got the second up and any dregs would have gone to him (I always pour him the second :D). Definitely a yummy tea. I was surprised he wanted to try it, since he’s not a huge fan of vanilla comoro, but I think the over-the-top vanilla smell had him intrigued.

Nice, calm, balanced. Not especially old, but this one has quite mature Qi.

The taste is soft, round and harmonious, first steeps had sweet aftertaste which diminished in later brewings.

I brew this in 1,5dl glass pot, and around second brewing I started to get slightly dizzy. Qi isn’t aggressive, the tea is past its youth. In a way this tea is right now at a very boring age, it isn’t young and arroganta and interesting, but it hasn’t yet reached the deep wisdom and calmness of elder pu’ers.

A fairly light tasting jasmine green tea,

David’sTea claims this is “premium”. Well, it’s not. I’ll be honest, this tastes very much like a typical grocery store jasmine tea found in China, infact i’ve had many that tasted just about the same, just a whole lot cheaper than $7/50g. It doesn’t mean this is a bad tea, I had run out of China jasmine green tea, so i figure heck why not, lets see if this is anything special. It’s fairly decent as a jasmine tea, but we’ll leave it at that.

Don’t use boiling water on this one, the bitterness comes out, otherwise it’s still a very enjoyable tea to drink. It’s floral, its light, it’s what its supposed to be.

The owner of the Granville Island Tea Co. told me that this is one of their most popular blends, though I do wonder if that has partially to do with the fact that Granville Island is a popular tourist destination and ice wine is becoming known as a rather Canadian sort of thing – like maple syrup.

I found the smell of this tea to be richly sweet and quite fruity\grapey. It doesn’t smell fermented or yeasty like actual wine might, which I’m thankful for as I think that would be rather off-putting. The flavour is quite strong and authentic as if I’d actually mixed ice wine with the black tea in my cup. The flavour is very wine-like but sweeter and with a hint of something a bit floral on the aftertaste.

I really enjoyed this blend; maybe next time I’m in Vancouver I’ll buy a full pouch rather than the little sample of it got on my last visit.

I came across this tea as I was going through my stash. It’s so good. Such a delightful Sencha.

I’m very sad that Urban Tea is closing! http://www.myurbantea.com

I got a sample of this with an order a while back and was surprised to realized I hadn’t logged it. I think Greg’s description gives a good sense of this tea—nutty and toasty, sweet and grassy, oddly Dragon Well-like. and definitely a potential for bitterness so I keep it cool. Tonight brewing in a medium gaiwan, about 100mL per infusion, with about 3 grams of tea, first infusion at 30 seconds was delicious. Mmm. I generally like my 2nd infusions of green teas to be very short, because the freshly wetted leaves seem primed to let bitter elements out quickly if I don’t, but on this one tonight I was careless, and went more than minute for the second infusion—often a recipe for a wasted infusion. This one was a touch unpleasant at first sip, but a 50% dilution with more hot water and voila, back to the lovely tea I remember. Nice flexible tea.

A previous gongfu session went about 6 infusions before I lost the good tastes and started over with the rest of the sample.

I had a stomach ache tonight and decided some chamomile tea would help. I’m coming around to this cup of tea. The flavor is still a little bit strange, but I like the smoothness. It’s almost “fluffy” — not in texture so much.. but just in presence. I also like how the vanilla calms the spearmint since I wasn’t crazy about that note in the original Sleepytime blend. So soothing, I may have a second cup tonight.

Hooray! After over a month and a half, I finally received my pouch of Coconut Cheesecake.

This is delicious. As many others have noted, it’s rich and creamy and coconut-y. I am not tasting the cheesecake (maybe if I really strained?), but it’s delicious. It tastes quite like the Coconut Cream Pie, which cannot be a bad thing.

I just finished my huge Libre of this, and it had been in there steeping for over an hour. I think it is best this way! Delicious.

Had Blenz matcha today at another location, not as well mixed unfortunately :(

Not the best tasting tea admittedly, but I think it works well to detoxify. The taste has grown on me and this is a tea I typically like to keep in my cupboard.

I am not a fan of Lipton Teas (even less so after a recent post in our forums revealed that up until this year they engaged in animal testing… I mean, why test tea on animals? What’s the point of that? I mean, I can almost understand the testing of cosmetics – although I don’t condone it – but tea? But… I digress) Anyways… as I said, I’m not a fan of Lipton Tea, but one particular blend that I do happen to like of theirs is the jasmine orange passion fruit blend, and up until I learned of the animal testing this is the tea I would order when my husband and I would dine out at Sheri’s.

You’re probably wondering why I would bring that up… well, here’s why… this tea is almost that tea… only better. Not just because it’s not Lipton’s (although that certainly has a lot to do with it). This one is better because it has a lot more fruits going on, and a lot more teas… too. It’s one jumbled mess, but it is a delicious jumbled mess. The only flavor profile I’m missing with this blend is the passion fruit… but, it’s really so tasty that I don’t miss it that much.

YUM! Thanks to TeaEqualsBliss for sending me some of this!