New Tasting Notes

This tea is another good example of a daily-drinker that has moderately above-average complexity and yet is easy to brew, with satisfying simplicity and flavor. Crisp, chestnut-laden vapors, warm mint, and some long lasting bright open-field greenness. Also works well as a cold-brewed summer tea.

Thanks for sending this to me Rachel!!

Mmm… I love adagios caramel tea so this tea is right up my alley. It is a little less caramelly and a little more creamy than the plain caramel tea. I am really enjoying it! I had my first cup with milk which brought out the creaminess and I am about to have my second cup plain. This was an excellent first tea of the morning. And really is an excellent tea for anyone with a sweet tooth like myself – haha!

See my other review for a more in depth look at this one. :)

This time around I just want to say that the aroma is still awesome and the taste is still very good. Not as much chocolate this time around but the lemon is lovely and a nose ahead of the bergamot. This one is still on my REALLY ENJOY List!!!

As I said, I am running dangerously low on my Strawberry Matcha and my Mandarin Matcha – going to have to reorder soon, but trying to go through my other Matcha stashes before I get to that point.

I have a decent sized bag of this, because it comes as a mix in 4 ounces. Honestly, this mix is fantastic alone, slightly sweet, nice and frothy and creamy, using just water – You almost get a shake when you make it with milk, and if you use orange juice you get an orange creamsicle matcha shake. All versions are delicious, but I am using it in my protein shake still. Since it is not straight matcha, I tend to use more.

2 scoops Vanilla Dream Protein Powder (use the included scoop)
2 scoops Matcha Latte Mix (it comes with a scoop also)
8 ounces of milk

This is very thick, yet goes down very easily. The vanilla mixes well with the Latte Mix and matcha flavors, though it seems I am missing the added boost of flavor I get from either strawberry or mandarin orange. I should look into adding a fourth ingredient for some extra hidden flavor if I continue to use this.

Enjoy!

I can never get enough of this “tea”. My husband, who is not normally a fan of sweet drinks, also loves it.

I’m not sure why I felt like Oolong this morning. This is a nice nutty toasty tasting tea. This tea is smooth w/o any bitterness or astringency. I’m getting ready to leave on vacation tomorrow and I just needed a nice relaxing tea. I’m hoping to buy more tea in various locations. I’m taking 3 weeks to drive down the east coast so if anyone knows any great tea shops along the way, please let me know.

I needed a brisk, robust, and malty tea this morning. This one sure fits the bill. The 2 1/2 minute steep time gives me the chewy taste that I need in the morning. This tea has only a tad of bitterness and astringency. A longer steep gives it too much of both.

Backlogging. Yesterday.

Used in a 1:1 ration with A&D’s Earl Grey. A delicious pair. I did not resteep.

Backlogging. Yesterday morning.

From my experiments combining this Earl Grey with the Tiger, I firmed decided I like this Earl Grey blended with a plain black tea rather than on its own. It was quite good with the Tiger and I’ve no doubt I’ll drink them together again but I am also willing to explore other partners for it.

Today was my first attempt pairing it with A&D’s Ceylon and a very nice pairing it was. It may be a better match than the Tiger. I did a 1:1 ratio as a starting point and that worked just fine. I could taste the strong Earl Grey and I could taste the end taste of the Ceylon. The Ceylon also tampered the what-is-to-me overly strong bergamot of this Earl Grey. These teas did not create a smoothed blend as if they were meant to be one tea, rather it tastes like two teas that went quite well together or two teas layered nicely together, if that makes any sense. I did not try a resteep.

I’ve been using just a bit more leaves in my tea preparation in general recently and a bit less water in my standard sized mugs. I’ve noticed this seems to be improving the taste of the teas overall.

Yes, it is almost 1am. Yes, I am drinking black tea….no, I’m not sure if I will be sleeping anytime soon.
I needed something strong to get the grass taste out of my mouth after the sencha fiasco…this is working and is also very good.

Okay, silly question: This tea tastes remarkably similar to the Golden Monkey sample I’ve had. I know that Golden Monkey is from a Yunnan, but do they do anything special to it for the tea to be called Golden Monkey? Or is this Yunnan pretty much the same thing?

This tea is a little meh, there is a lot of Keemun in the blend mixed with Ceylon. It also has a sharp note on the palate that leaves the mouth high and dry. It’s upside is that it brews dark like a true breakfast tea.

ITS GOLD! Liquid gold I tell you!

This has got to be some of the purest Chrysanthemum on the market in LA, it’s organically grown and the tea is the whole flower; not just the petals. The flavor is full and surprisingly sweet and goes down smooth without drying the palate. My secret is to boil the heck out of it for a few mintes, Chinese style (they boil all herbs from what I’ve been told).

I’ve never had a Japanese green that I didn’t like….until this one. Although I guess since I typically DO like sencha, I still like all Japanese greens.
The smell of this tea was so promising – nutty and sweet, not at all grassy. After brewing, however, I was a bit confused. The wet leaves had swollen up a lot and were sticking together like a clump of wet grass. The tea was very cloudy and murky. There was also a very distinctive grassy scent along with the sweet scent from the dry tea. The tea tasted like sweet grass and not in a good way at all.
Now, I don’t typically think Japanese greens taste overly grassy, I actually usually enjoy the grassy aspect, but this one was way overdone. I was able to make it through 4 sips before dumping both the tea and the leaves in my infuser. I’m a bit disappointed and now I have a very strong grass aftertaste lingering. On to more tea!

Picked this up while shopping today.

I absolutely love Ito En. Oi Ocha is clean tasting, no bitterness, no aftertaste, no sweeteners at all, just tastes like tea brewed and poured into a pretty bottle for me.

So so good, and chilled for the drive in the heat today. Ahhh!

So, a strong black tea and a lemon tea walk into a bar. They go to a hotel, have a great night and bask in each other’s glory. The lemon tea decides he wants to marry the black tea even though everyone knows that bergamot and black tea are actually soulmates. They have a baby together. However, they didn’t know that they were in fact, brother and sister. This tea is that mutated baby.

“It can’t be that bad” you say. Oh, but it is!

It’s got a strong lemon taste; and no, i don’t mean bergamot. This is black tea if it was garnished with a 10-day-old lemon with a zester. The brew is so pathetically bland, underbodied and unbalanced that I might have to say that the great Disney powers that be blended this with the intention of pissing people off.

Bleh. Considering a toss out to the bin.

I neeever saw a black tea with jasmine. Have you?
Should be packing now, we bought a new apartment, and we are moving tomorrow. (it’s actually 3 in the morning over here and I should also be sleeping) but oh well.

Back to the note.
I was not able to see the color of this tea, but I am guessing BROWN. I sniffed at the teabag (God, it’s a oldfasion teabag) and I can’t detect any jasmine at all. Took a sip or two and tried really hard to find the jasmine flavor but to no avail.

No jasmine.

Bummer. They get one star for trying. (Out of TEN!)
Black tea and jasmine… never saw that before…

Drinking it again after a break, and loving it again so much. I was reading a typically excellent article by Harold McGee in the NYT (link http://tinyurl.com/24rs3zw) in which he discusses the power of dilution to enhance flavor. I think this may be a tea where that really holds true. Many many very short steeps bring out a sweetness and richness of flavor in this tea without the bitterness that can overwhelm with shorter steeps. Works for me!

One of my favorite afternoon teas. Dragonwell to me is the king of green teas. This one is very fine. It makes a very substantial cup of beautifully scented and tasty tea. It is my tea of choice if I am working on a project that needs my absolute concentration. A small purple clay teapot with a teaspoon and a half of Dragonwell refilled periodically with hot water takes me through the afternoon. The scent alone is worth the price.

I found this tea to be gorgeous I just wanted to keep looking at but then I realized if it looks this good I wonder how it tastes and it doesn’t disappoint. I felt It had depth of flavor and a touch of cocoa. It was delightful.

Thank you ThePuriTea for sending me this wonderful sample.

Well, I love Jasmine tea particularly in the afternoon where it’s light liquor, subtle taste and indescribable scent waits to rouse you from the afternoon doldrums. I love it just as it is, straight from the pot preferably a Yixing purple clay Teapot which Mark T. Wendell sells. The tea pot makes a real difference.

Orange, vanilla and… cactus? Really? So weird! And the smell is kind of weird, too. It’s simultaneously herbal, vegetal, citrusy and a little… crisp. I can’t tell if mixed in with all that is the sour rooibos smell that I detest so much or if it’s something more pleasant that I just don’t know how to properly register.

And now I’m going to say something I never thought I’d say. The sour rooibos taste is there but it works. It somehow blends into the orange, is softened by the vanilla and matches oddly well with the cactus (or at least what I recall cactus tastes like from the one time I’ve had it). It’s crisp, natural, smooth and fresh in a sharp, clean way.

This is definitely a different tea. I never would have thought that the flavors would work based on the description but it does. It’s pretty outside the norm but I could definitely see it growing on me. I’m kind of on the fence about whether I’d order it or not but the more I think about it, the more I think I would get it just to see exactly how much it would grow on me.

Thanks to TeaEqualsBliss for this share!

Well, Genmaicha is sort of like the white bread or jug wine of teas. This Genmaicha is real, serviceable and drinkable. Is it exciting?, no, is it subtle, no, but when you really want a drinkable Genmaicha without buying the Sencha and toasting the brown rice for yourself, this will do…

Thank you Rachel for sending this tea my way. I have recently discovered I love roobios and I have really been on the look out for a line up of night time teas. Tonight I decided to try this one and was not disappointed.
I believe that this tea smelled delicious (there was a skunk somewhere outside smelling everything up so I was having a hard time getting a good whiff of the tea). And it tastes like strawberries, vanilla and roobios in that order. It is quite lovely! I might consider ordering some of this when I am not overflowing with teas.

Finishing up this sample. Second time around with this, it was tarter than the first and the raspberry remained discernible but not particularly strong.

A little sweeter and with stronger raspberry and this would be something I’d have to reorder. The BF’s favorite food (not just fruit, food) is raspberry. He tried some of this and remarked “I like the raspberry, but not the tart.”