New Tasting Notes

Last tea of the night, I promise. ;)

I’m not tasting the sweetness very much this time for some reason. Ah well, it’s still a great bedtime tea.

BTW I put a bunch of teas I don’t want on the ‘Take It Away’ thread on the Discussion Board. Some of it’s been claimed, but there’s still some left. If you’re curious go have a look and see if anything catches your eye. :D

http://chaykoff.com/product/aloe-vera/

http://chaykoff.com/product/harmutti-100g/

I’ve tried about 7 teas from this brand and every single one has been disappointingly lacking. The kind of tea where if you drank it, you couldn’t place the flavour until someone told you what it was, then you spend the rest of the cup convincing yourself you’re drinking said flavour.
So I usually steer well clear, but I was lured into buying a packet from the smell of the leaves! The smell is heavenly and incredibly almondy, which instantly made it a contender to replace The Best Marzipan Tea In The World from The T Shop (which I believe has been discontinued). I couldn’t have been more wrong! The tea base seems to be a typical for Tea Total, meaning it tastes like nothing. You can get away with a crappy tea base on occasion if you have some kick-ass flavourings, but surprise – it barely tastes like anything. I can pick up a very faint hint of weird vanilla, with perhaps a ghost of an almond. Or maybe I’m imagining the almond simply because its in the tea name and I want to believe I can taste it…
Oh Tea Total. You are like the on-again-off-again boyfriend I keep going back to even though you treat me like crap because I want to believe you can change! But after 8 tries, I think we are finally done. For good. I’m blocking you on all my social networking sites and will cease to answer your texts/calls/emails/weepy knocks on my door at 3am.

This could be one of those “now that I’ve tasted loose leaf, I’m never going back.” It really is much better than bagged tea. I never thought I would drink a black tea this smooth. The flavor isn’t very strong because I didn’t use much leaf and I put it in a big cup, but it’s still really good.

I say it could be one, because while I like it a lot, 1) I don’t have the budget to buy as many different kinds of loose leaf tea as I have in bagged tea and 2) this tea still isn’t good enough to make me unlazy. I’m glad I bought a tin of loose leaf so that I can enjoy the good stuff when I like and still throw teabags around when I just don’t want to think too much about the particulars of my tea.

It tastes actually a lot better than the normal “Japan Sencha” (same company). You taste a fine sweetness, a grassy note, and everything balances out very fine. This is a nice sencha, will be drinking it alot.

The black pepper is a nice touch and goes very well with the ginger! Make sure you don’t steep too long or it will become very spicy. Great for cold winter nights and/or tummyaches.

While over at a friends house watching The Office & Community (both hilarious shows btw) I was introduced to this tea. Being the only one in her “stash” that seemed better than Tazo or Lipton I decided to give it a try.

The smell of this tea is absolutely delightful. Obviously blackberry surges through every fiber of this teas being, however the sage does add a nice balance to the aroma that would otherwise be pretty fruity.

Now since this tea is technically a “dust” tea it’s a little frustrating trying to find the full range of flavor you’d desire from a tea with this name. Anywho.

Steeped at boiling for 3 minutes this tea, while fantastic on the side of smell, really needed some help on bringing out an enjoyable flavor. Due to the mild steep I wasn’t expecting the taste to come off as bitter as it was, however once reconciled by the appropriate amount of cream & honey this tea wasn’t that bad. Any ideas on the steeping time?

This isn’t great, but not horrible either. The dry tea smells very strong of blueberry which lasts throughout the steeping process. I don’t seem to care much for white teas, but this one seems to have more flavor that others I’ve tried. The tea would probably be good with sugar, which might help bring out the pomegranate that is lost in this tea. I don’t see myself buying this.

A tea I got in a trade with Ricky (who’s still trying to mooch more tea off of me ;P).

This is a lovely smelling tea from the get-go. At my aunt’s old house there was a sour-cherry tree and in the summer my mother and I would go and pick huge ice cream buckets full of them. We’d freeze them and make them into the most delicious sauces. Well this tea smells like those cherries tasted, which may sound a bit odd, but taste and sense of smell are supposed to be closely linked.

There are little, red, round things in the tea that look like red peppercorns but they smell like cherries. There’s also some light green needle-like things that look like rosemary possibly.

The taste is quite authentic too; not much like the traditional Bing Cherry flavour, so if you’re looking for that then this might not be the tea for you. All the flavour seems to hit me right at the start of each sip: fruity, fresh, and even slightly acrid it’s a very clean, but yummy taste. It seems to quickly tapper off into a rather sour sort of tea flavour, which is a bit disapointing; but other than that, this is rockin’ tea.

Refreshing! Like it more than Le Touareg.

This has a more complex fragrance than a lot of similar herbal infusions. I think this would be wonderful iced.

Huh. Today this actually hit the spot. It is very sweet, but it’s not “yucky” the way my last cup was. At the same time, this was so sweet that I had to chase it down with some water. I definitely won’t repurchase, but I may be able to at least finish off the carton.

Sadness! I’ve tried this twice so far using my Zarafina, and I never got the caramel taste. Instead, I got smokiness—almost like the black tea version of Shanti by The Simple Leaf. The cup I made at the “green” Zarafina setting was not bitter at all and went down easily without sugar or milk—a rarity for me. I didn’t get to taste the tea made at “Oolong” setting until 5-6 hours after it had been brewed, and it was cold and super bitter (there was a lone tea leaf in my mug, so maybe it kept steeping).

Sigh. I need a thermometer, I guess.

It is amazing to me how many different non-tea flavors and aromas you can find in tea. Bananas, orange creamsicles, gummy bears, artichokes… and now Dawn, which brings chocolate like no other. The dry leaves smell very nice, cocoa is the main thing that hits me but there’s more too – something that I can’t quite place vaguely reminds me of my trip to Japan. My girlfriend thinks there’s a bit of seaweedy smell, which might be it. Don’t let that put you off, though, the leaves smell very nice. The leaves are very long and full, something you rarely see in a black tea. Tiny steepers won’t work here!

I made it with a bit of milk, because I love milk tea so much. The actual brew was an olfactory and gustatory illusion – while sipping, it’s chocolate. Exhale, and it’s a lightish but smooth black tea, without the spice or vegetality you’ll find in most Darjeelings and Nilgiris. In my eyes, this is a very good thing. There is also a little of the woodiness or smokiness that is often quite strong in Chinese teas. It even took the the milk gracefully. In the end, it’s maybe the first light black tea that I can say I really like, without a “but”. Dawn is really a rare achievement – it’s not just a great tea, it’s great and unique.

As a final note… The Simple Leaf’s marketing on this tea is facepunchingly incredible. I dare you to look at those tea fields and those happy Indian dudes and read about sustainability and not buy some.

Thanks, Steepster, for pointing me towards this tea :D

My free sample (thank you twitter!) arrived today, and so I naturally had to try this “sneak preview.” Very jasmine-scented and -flavored, it has almost no notes of the oolong base. First steep – 180F, 4:30. Second steep – 185F, 4:15. Third steep – 175F, 3:45.

I have a bit of a dry scratchy throat and a bit of a dry sniffy nose today. I am hoping it’s from not sleeping well and not from getting sick. I thought some warm tea would be soothing and picked this out at the last minute from the cupboard. It tastes exactly like you might think a lemon and ginger tea would taste. I’m not super fond of it though. I had originally thought I’d like it more than I did. I did steep it for less time and liked it better this way. I believe this one was a gift from mom, who sometimes buys me tea when she buys herself some.

GM Sampler | Tea 6 of 31

Darjeeling | http://bit.ly/cHh5kY
Toutes les Choses | http://bit.ly/cHWS3X

This tasted like darjeeling, which means that it was bitter for me. Whenever I get a black tea that has this high, sharp, bitter taste to it with a fruity fwip of flavor afterwards, my brain goes to darjeeling now. A former round with a sample of SerendipiTea’s Darjeeling Autumnal from Auggy taught me that if I hit the right parameters [although it could have partially been the tea itself] darjeeling doesn’t have to equal BITTER, but this one had it. It wasn’t as loud as I tend to get with Darjeelings, but it was there.

As it cools, as I’ve come to expect, the bitterness falls back and the sweetness comes forward. Then that grape taste that I’ve come to identify as the muscatel is much more apparent in the tea; not just on my breath or in the aftertaste. I probably would have been tempted to wait and drink the whole thing cooled, but IT IS COLD HERE, Y’ALL.

So the moral of the story is that this was decent, but I won’t be ordering it. I probably should have steeped it shorter to compensate for my apparent sensitivity to bitterness in tea, but I used the packet up and reading the other reviews doesn’t make me think I missed out on anything phenomenal. There’s really not much else to say, as it was relatively straightforward.

[Sorry, I couldn’t resist doing it one time. Here’s the actual Darjeeling picture: http://bit.ly/bIf03p .]

The eagerly awaited A&D DFT Yunnan arrived today!

The husband brought it up. We didn’t wait until I’d rescheduled his eye dr appointment tomorrow. We didn’t wait for the husband to take a shower. We didn’t wait until we were ready to drink it. We opened it up within moments of it entering the apartment.

The tin was wrapped in brown paper instead of in a bed of shredded zig-zags. I liked the art better on this tin than tins from Series 1. This tin opens like a mini paint can lid. I had to open it with a flat screw driver and bang it closed with it. I do not like that about it but am hoping it becomes easier to open and close with time. In the meantime, I’m keeping a screwdriver over the stove in the misc. cabinet. Oh, and we got two Series 4 stickers in our box. Anyone else get two?

The tea leaves were dark brown with golden yellow brown and ash gray mixed in. They smelled smokey and like something else that I can quite put my finger on right now but am hoping will come to mind when I’ve smelt the tea more. It smelled strong, bold, and good but not what I was expecting.

After putting a huge pot of chilli on to cook, the husband pushed to try the new tea tonight even though it was after 7pm at the time and it’s a black tea. So we steeped up a pot. The wet leaves were a dark brown of two shades and smelled smokey, like burning paper in a good way if that is possible. The tea was deep brown in color. It smelled smokey, rich, and full.

Sip sip. Sip sip.

It tastes smokey, no surprise there. But yummy smokey. I thought I wouldn’t like a smokey tasting tea. It also tasted ashy, non-cigarette ashy though, unctuous, and bold. The surprise was no bitterness or dryness. More notes on taste will comes as I drink more of this tea I’m sure. It’s unlike any other tea I’ve had. The husband also liked it but wasn’t as surprise he liked it or as into it as I was.

We steeped a second pot for 5 min. I was expecting it to be watery and need a pinch of fresh leaves to keep the taste strong enough. It was not at all. It was as full of flavor as the first steep but muted, less smokey. I think I liked this steep better. I also drank the end of this steep as I started to eat my chilli and was surprised that it held up to the chilli and complimented it well.

I decided to steep the leaves a third time to see what happen since the second steep went well. I steeped for 6 min this time. It was watery with nearly no tea taste. I threw it down the drain.

In conclusion, A&D’s Yunnan is a damn fine tea, I look forward to drinking it again quite soon, and it’s possibly better than Series 1’s black teas.

Enjoying this tea during meetings at the T-Bar
First cup was very mellow – enjoyed with better half, she had milk. Was and mossy, I would say.
Second cup with good friend Aaron, we have finished and are pulling the leaves apart.
aaron says "Balanced between herbal quality (mossy) with slightly tart finish. (Sweetly bitter!)
I added a little sugar which thickened it on the palate and bought the wood.

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness! As I am drinking this it just hit me…this tastes like liquid Big Red!!! I haven’t had that gum in ages!

Great tea- very lemony. But DO NOT ever mix this tea w/peppermint. This was the worst flavor of my life!