Featured & New Tasting Notes

While I’m glad I scored a bunch of this before it went away forever, this isn’t how I remembered it to be. This batch smells amazing, and is loaded with dried fruit. There is way more dried fruit than actual tea. As a result, this smells gloriously tart, and there’s no mistake that this has cranberry and pear just by the scent alone.

You’d think this would all be a great thing. Surely this batch will be packed full of flavour. It is, but unfortunately, despite the loads of dried fruit, it tastes on the artificial side. It’s cloying and tastes like what I’d imagine a B&BW fruity lotion would. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but regardless, it tastes off.

I used to love drinking this plain but maybe next time I’ll try it with milk. Maybe it’ll tone down and round out the sweetness.

Always looking for a really good pear tea. Pear is a tricky flavor that is either not done well or gets lost in the base.
This smells like pear, it tastes like pear. It also tastes French – French teas to me have a distinctive essence to them. It’s a little floral, and maybe a little apple. Pretty good but there is something in the base that doesn’t quite work – maybe just a touch astringent.
Yep I like this one, but I do think that it could be better.
Thanks so much Sil for sharing….

This is yet another tea that has expertly stood the test of time. Granted this was stored in an air tight bag, in a tin, in a drawer, in an air conditioned room with basically no light but you still got to give it credit for no flavor loss despite being approximately 2+ years old. This still tastes just like a rice krispy square. Marshmallow sweetness with a nice dose of rice krispy deliciousness. It is awesome hot or cold and I will miss it when it is gone. Luckily, I still have leaf left so that won’t be for a little while.

In other news, I went to Chatime (a bubble tea place) yesterday and got their brown rice green milk tea bubble tea for the first time. I have been there a bunch of times and usually go for the fruitier flavors like honeydew, strawberry, or banana…or for the more desserty flavors like coconut, caramel, or taro. I don’t know why it took my this long to try the brown rice given I enjoy genmaichas quite a bit but now that I have, there is no going back. It was like a delicious, sweet cereal drink. It was so good. Definitely one I will be revisiting!

Steepster, stop eating my notes…I know I reviewed this one within the last month but the note is gone. Oh well.
I think age has had a bit of an effect on this tea because it it a lot lighter than I remember it being. Or maybe it’s my memory that is fading! ;) The pumpkin is still there and I get a bit of the creme brûlée. I won’t have any problems finishing this one off anyway because it’s still tasty.

ugh. No one has added the new davids teas to the database…and their website doesn’t really have them either so you get what i’ve done for now haha. I picked these up yesterday as motivation to get to my step count. Sadly i pretty much drank this one without really focusing on it last night. It’s more fruit tea than green tea IMO. I quite enjoyed the pinappley, coconut, apple taste that this one had. it might actually be a decent cold brew as well, however i didn’t love it enough to think about going back to pick up more. It was refreshing and tasty but i’m good with my giant mug from last night.

Finally got to try this yestrday and it went for 6 hours at work which was great. The first thing that anyone should notice while steeping this is how highly balled up this tea is. For at least 8 steeps this stayed in its shell before opening.
This is the coffee ewuivlitant of tea for sure. Wonderful roasted notes with as deep flavor as you like. Steep it 20, 45, 90, 300…. how ever many seconds you want and you will taste the difference. While this is a premium roasted tgy, I will say the one downfall is that it caused me to pee more often than normal. Considering I drink a lot and daily, it is something I notice.

special tea this morning. My other half splurged on this tea when we went to paris for me. I ADORE the white tea (yes white tea…) in this line and so he wanted to pick that one up along with the black tea for me to try. I don’t pull this one out of the cupboard often – i probably should more often, but when i do, it’s delicious. malty, spicy, fruity…just delicious.

Dark Matter 2016, taste test

I bought over $40 of samples from Life in Teacup and they were nice enough to just take my money and pick out what they thought would be best :)

I was constantly reminded of the ‘Pine Needle’ tea from Yunnan because it highly suggested from them. Currently it is not being sold online so I feel a little special to try it. At first I drank it at work on break and played with the leaf: https://www.instagram.com/p/BBqREXaRYOj/

I’m now drinking it at home and decided that there is no way I could leave this out of the 2nd group buy I have going on this year: Dark Matter. This tea absolutely wonderful. It’s not often you’ll hear me say such a thing about a Yunnan black tea because they are all malty and lovely. What sets this apart? The mouth feel lingers for over 30 seconds and the taste just hits your brain like ‘woah’. No complains from me. No doubt in my mind that this is going to cause people to go over to Life in Teacup after trying this when they get it :)

So apparently i love 52’s chais :) This one is even better than the toffee bar chai imo. I don’t typically love a lot of coconut in my blends, but this is downright the perfect blend of spices to go with the coconut. Anoher sample from Evol Ving Ness the cumin and cardamom are lovely here. In a way i’m greatful that there isn’t any left on the website – yay for saving money but boo for not seeing this one again for a while unless it comes back as a reblend. At least i’ll know that i like it :)

Oh. My. God.

I opened up the package that Sil sent me (which came with the GCTTB5) this morning, and it smelled LIKE BOOZE. CHOCOLATE AND BOOZE AT A QUARTER TO 7 IN THE MORNING.

Since I don’t drink a lot of alcohol I couldn’t name exactly what kind of booze I was smelling. Rum? Brandy? Nevertheless, it smelled amazing. Like chocolate covered cherries.

The flavour was more subtle, but very enjoyable. I super wish I had this tea on Valentine’s Day, it would have been so perfect.

This is an interesting tea. Not sure I’m tasting all the ingredients like the Viking Moss etc. I am certainly getting the cinnamon and the cloves from this. I added sugar to this so it’s hard to say just how sweet it is. It does have a nice taste. The main question will it give me energy throughout the day as it claims? I won’t have an answer to that until later on at the earliest. I think I will refrain from giving this a number until I see if it gives me energy throughout my day as it claims. It is tasty.

This is a factory production which I have had carefully stored for over two years and now it has had 10+ years to develop into something worthwhile. I quite enjoyed my time with it yesterday! The material is comprised of mostly “chop” – very few, if any, whole leaves. Pleasant enough scent though – sweet and pure. The liquor is dark gold in color albeit a bit on the cloudy side. The sip is quite mellow and smooth – looks like ten years of age really has helped this mid-level quality material develop into something interesting. A bit fruity and a low sweetness; no real bitterness and a cooling and decent sensation throughout. Mouth action adds a little tingle to the tip of the tongue. This cake is part of the Six Famous Tea Mountain Tea Factory (Liu Da Chashan) series of six cakes composed of old tree material from well-known tea mountains in southern Yunnan (Jinggu, Youle, Mengsong, Bangwei, Bulang, Nannuo). Each cake is 100% material from that particular mountain.

It’s 5 am here and I’m up super early because I have a big long to do list to get finished before I have to be in at work at 7 am… To get through the next couple of 18 hour days I’m going to need bucket loads of caffeine!! Which is perfect because I’m still on my mission to sip down all of my one offs and samples in preparation for our move in a week… Wow, a week… How did that happen so quickly???

I’m a greedy overleafer and since this is a sample bag that came with a recent order my cup is a little under leafed than I would usually brew And so I was a little concerned as to whether my taste buds would pick up the intended flavors. Not to worry! Hot, the tea has a faint banana taste however, like most of 52 tea’s creations, the flavors definitely become more pronounced as the tea cools… Luke warm, the buttery, bready, banana flavors really pop! A Little more subtle on the flavor side than most of 52 tea’s blends but it’s still a great way to fulfill a craving without any of the calories!!

Bought in 2011. 6 oz of pu for $5.99. It smelled and tasted really bad back then. Still has a not great but tolerable smell. With time the taste has become mild, sweet, cedar, loam, and light leather. Has a hefty dusty note as well. Certainly not great puerh but a pleasant everyday sip. Worth every penny :)

This tea is better than it has a right to be. I bought this two years ago and forgot about it in my giant Yixing container. I only paid something around $10 or so. There is a fair amount of fermentation flavor to this tea. It has definitely not cleared. But the fermentation taste is not of the unpleasant sort. There were some notes of chocolate it there and it was think and rich in the early infusions. It is very sweet as ripe puerh tea goes. I don’t know if this improved in the two years I stored it or if it would have tasted like this originally. Oddly enough I think I’m getting some qi off of this. It is quite relaxing. Odd to find qi on a $10 ripe tea. I have only put in two orders with pu-erhtea.com, one two years ago and one last night. But I think they are a good retailer. I bought mostly ripe in each order. I am waiting to see how fast they ship the order I put in last night.

I steeped this tea ten times in a 120ml gaiwan with 9.7g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse and a 10 minute rest. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, and 1 min. If I could allow myself more caffeine this cheap shou wasn’t done. I’m sure I could have gotten another few steeps out of it. It was still dark in color at ten steeps.

Sipdown (132)

I may have skipped class but at least I was productive enough to get my studying done and over with. Yay!

So, now I am sipping on this lovely tea and writing tasting notes, with less guilt than before as I knew I was procrastinating earlier. Anyways, as for the tea, it is incredibly nutty and has an essence of baked bread, though with that said, I don’t think I am having the same experience everyone else seemed to have had. It’s pleasant enough but nothing particularly special to me. Meanwhile, everyone seemed to be in love with this. I am wondering if I maybe grabbed more banana pieces when I attempted to make this back on vacation with the shitty Florida water that made everything weird because I got zero banana in this cup. Also, pancakes is a stretch though I could sorta see it from the baked goods element of the base. All in all, it has been fun to try but I doubt it would be a restock for my cupboard.

Speaking of which, I think I need to do a whole reorganization of my teas and my steepster cupboard. I am noticing I don’t have some teas listed while others, I thought I got rid of, are still present. Sometime soon I will need to go through and do an inventory of my stash and hopefully prioritize some teas to drink.

Thanks for a sample of this one, Tamarindel! Sadly, on the search for some more good replacement EGs, this one just isn’t my thing. The flavor isn’t quite the bergamot I love. I could swear this was a plain EG and not a creamy. And the black tea base isn’t strong enough for me. Just not one for me! But I really appreciate trying this one. The search continues…

Smooth and thick, with a fruity note on the tip of my tongue I cant place. I can see where some people are getting vegetal from as well.

Its easy drinking, even more so than I imagined. I pushed it and it was still nice and didnt go bitter. I also got the resemblance to fresh green tea, it really does taste like it, snappy peas and beans, with sweetness and slight sour you get with some green tea that hangs around the sides and tip of your tongue.

Sipdown no. 34 of 2016 (no. 245 total). Backlogging from yesterday morning.

I had big plans for this long weekend on the clean up front, but alas, I got sucked into playing Unravel. I loved it, but this reminds me why I stopped playing computer games. I get obsessed and don’t get to the other things I need to do. It’s the first time I’ve really played a computer game I wanted to play with my kids (as opposed to one they wanted to play), and we made an excellent team. I was the brains and they were the brawn-I figured out the puzzles and they got me past the parts that required fast-twitch reflexes.
Much fun.

I started yesterday morning with this, on my continuing crusade to sip down things I like, not just things I don’t like as much. It’s remarkable how well this captured the butter pecan flavor. The only real negative about this one is that sometimes it could hit my stomach wrong, particularly if I hadn’t eaten first. But in terms of flavor accuracy and pleasantness, it was very nice and I’m sorry to see it go.

2016 Sheng Olympics

Not being a fan of the purple variation oolong I have drank, I was still optimistic about this tea. Its really dark and has that funky smell to it, yet I hoped for something mild and unique. Unique I got. At first I was conflicted about my like and dislike for this. In the end I was glad to have tried it and find that this is something I do not enjoy. Its not anything to do with mouth feel, steeping abulity, or price. .. There is just a level of funk to this that makes it seem to be something that was made against its own desires; if a plant can taste such a way.
I am not done trying purple variations though. I will find one I enjoy!

2016 Sheng Olympics

This one was a bit different. It has a slightly different flavour, like all the purple varietals I have tried before – this has a similar pleasantly sour flavour, and is quite lively in the feeling it gives you. I had to stop every once in a while because caffeine started kicking in.

Its an interesting flavour, not something I am really used to, having only tried a few different processing types of purple tea.

Throughout the session the sourness got sweeter. I am on the second day drinking it and it is stonefruit flavour and aroma. With also something softer, but I am having trouble picking out the correct term for it. I am preferring today, I think mainly because this is still a flavour I am trying to wrap my head around. I dont know if its for everyone – but you could say that for a lot of sheng, right?

I would love to see what this tea tastes like aged. Maybe I should start buying some?

This is as close to perfection in a ripe puerh that I have ever tasted. This is another one from Global Tea Hut that I wish it were possible to get more of. It is a blend of five different puerhs, all I think ripe or at least partially fermented. Some younger, some older. The first thing I tasted was bittersweet dark chocolate. This taste was notable along with a certain amount of fermentation taste for the first four or five steeps. Around steep six I began to taste an older tea that definitely seemed to have been wet stored. I got a distinct note of wet wood for another four steeps. After that it just got sweeter. In the end I gave this more than my usual. I steeped it fifteen times and it was not quite played out. If I could allow myself any more caffeine I would go back for more. I may choose to save the leaves I have not yet decided. I got my moneys worth out of this tea anyway. In the last couple of steeps it developed a fruity note as well. This is quite possibly the best ripe I have ever had.

I steeped this tea 15 times in a 100ml gaiwan with 8g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse and a 10 minute rest. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min. 1.5 min, 2 min, 2.5 min, 3 min and 3.5 min. There was still some color in the brew at fifteen steeps. I think I could get another two or three steeps out of it. I am getting some cha qi off this tea, not tea drunk but quite relaxing. More cha qi than I usually get off of ripe.

So sad that no one owns this tea on steepster, nor has it been reviewed. Thanks to the post office these took a long time to get here, through NO fault of Lauren’s. She’s awesome, so there. :) We decided in February to get back on track with being healthy and are working our way through a “reset” on the food front as well as weekly exercise goals. My toher half is doing something like 200km in a week of cycling and I’m trying to do a workout every day and yoga every other day in addition to work on flexibility.

What does all this have to do with the tea? Well I am currently not 100% and after a week of this reset (with a week to go) i just want all the bready, sweet delicious things i can’t have. So i made this tea today hoping it would help with the cravings.

First off, it smells AMAAAAZING. Chestnut, creamy, caramel..so insanely decadent. Brewed, it’s a great blend. You can still taste the base tea, but in addition it’s this creamy, caramel tea. The chestnut is a little weak, but it comes through at the end to sort of tie it all together. I would seriously consider picking up more of this even with the crappy dollar. noms.

Getting this from the Sheng Olympics box.
I pulled the whole sample out to brew this one, a tad under 10 grams.
I got out the and gave a rinse and let it sit for a few minutes. I started out with a 5 second steep and did 3 for the big cup. The brew comes out with a nice gold color. The aroma belies a bit of humidity but not overly powerful.
The sips have a little smoky, just the least bit, and a bit of sheng sharpness with a touch of mineral on the front. The front to middle part of the tongue is where this one seems to go. The mineral goes to a sweet finish. It carries through with some camphor and mintiness in there as well. A nice warming tea on a cold Winter evening.