New Tasting Notes

This is very complex tea. I get different nuances every time I brew it different. Its a very earthy tea that is slightly sweet on the tongue. Its very nice for a cold rainy day in Maine.
An enjoyable tea.

Ah dessert!

Once upon a time it had little caramel bits in it too, making it even sweeter and caramel-ier than it is now. Those bits aren’t there anymore, because… I may possibly have accidentally kind of a little bit eaten them, but totally not on purpose. Or something.

Only one more serving of this left too, I think. Problem with that is that every time I think there’s just the one pot left and I make that, there always seem to be leaves enough left for one more pot…

I’m pretty likely to get another caramel tea when this one is out. But I think I’ll try to find one somewhere else and broaden my horizon a bit. It’s not one of those that I must replace urgently.

(“Sporadic presence,” she said… Ha!
You are thinking it, Steepsterites. You know you are.)

The second steep is much lighter and sweeter. Everything from color to smell to taste is mellower on the second steep with the exception of a prominent marshmallow sweetness that I didn’t get in the first steep. Definitely worth a second steep.

YAY for a tea that can handle 4 infusions so far!! If you can’t tell, I am slightly obsessed with this tea.

I have been thinking about this tea all morning and now here it is! Perfect for working on this presentation.

Slightly fruity with a hint of cut grass and pleasant, fresh but mild taste. Very easy to drink but not really a lot of character. A couple China greens I’ve tried are really enjoyable, but some I find difficult to distinguish when tasting.

I’m not digging this one as much today for some reason…not that it’s bad…just not really what I was looking for…and I think I over infused…sigh…keeping the previous rating tho!

The tea brews up garnet red. The smell is mild charcoal, leather and pine. Sometimes I get a saline mineral taste like sea air, other times it tastes earthy and vegetal like peat or hay. Moderate astringency and a little bitterness.

This is hands down the best black tea I have ever had. Good and strong, but needs a bit of sugar for my taste.

There’s nothing else to say except that this is an absolutely perfect 2nd Flush Darjeeling. Steeped in spring or glacier water and you have liquid excellence.

Full Review:

http://www.teaviews.com/2010/03/04/review-thunderbolt-tea-giddapahar-musk-09-second-flush/

When I introduce friends to aged oolongs, this is usually the one I start with. It is a really difficult tea not to like! All of the classic flavors of young Tieguanyin are preserved, but are made much more mellow and complex through the 20+ year aging process. The brewed tea looks beautiful, a nice crimson red. The wood flavors in this tea are very strong, and it often reminds me a really good single malt scotch. While the tea is never bitter, there is a mouthfeel and flavor that also brings to mind a good port or dry sherry. Fantastic tea.

Delicate but also tasty and balanced. A nice smooth cup.

Since I’m finding that I like tea with not-quite-boiling water, I’m trying to be a bit more careful at work. This time, I stopped the kettle right as the water started to boil, poured the water into my empty cup, then poured the water into my ingenuiTEA. It seems to have helped though I could probably go down temp-wise just a hint more. There is no bitterness to the Darjeeling so that’s good. And actually, as my cup cools this is back to being a smooth but bright, fairly well balanced, tea-tasting tea. Another few seconds before I poured the water over the leaves might have helped calm it more but it’s not necessary for me to enjoy this cup. So yep, water just cooled off from a boil is great for this tea.
3.0g/8oz

This is a very unique aged oolong, and very different in flavor from a traditionally roasted or unroasted Ali Shan. It’s charcoal every year since the picking date of 1991, and as such the tea is very dark, almost black in color. The brewed tea however is surprisingly light in color, coming out a beige-orange.

The aroma is wonderful, a blend of aged wood and roasted dates. The flavor consists of raisin, caramel and baker’s chocolate tones. It’s a fantastic dessert tea, but a bit too naturally sweet for everyday drinking (at least for me). Definitely a nice treat though!

The second of my Kusmi splurge. :)

The first time I smelled this, I definitely got a sense of the citrus, and vanilla, and spices (the clove comes out strongly). But then I had a revelation: This tea smells like Coca-Cola! So now all I smell is Coke. :P

Brewed, it smells more like black tea with clove. Mmmm.

It kind of tastes like Coke, too, but spicier (not overly spicy, though). It’s smooth and warm. Mmm. It has a little bit of sweetness to it too, but it’s not anything overpowering. It’s not overly anything, and the flavors just work really well together. I like! :)

Since my St. Petersburg turned out a bit strong this morning with a steep time of 3 mins, I thought I’d try this at 2 to see how that would be, and it works! Yay!

First steeping is being a bit harsh this time, more smoky than sweet; I’ll try a higher water-to-tea ratio on the next. Milk softens the harshness, but it feels like a shame to add anything to such a normally classy tea. For those who found a caramel taste – do you add anything? Cream/sugar/honey?

Like other posters I have an emotional attachment to this tea, and it is hard to separate the memories from the experience of the tea itself. The ingredients are black tea, orange rind and “sweet spice” which to me is heavy on the clove and cinnamon. This combination is iconic in my olfactory memory. In college I had an apartment mate who was a tea drinker and she introduced me to this tea. So the smell reminds me of my youth and my first taste of independence, and it’s hard to avoid pleasant associations with that time of my life.

The taste, too, brings pleasant associations. If I try to be objective and drill down into the flavors, the tea itself is unremarkable either way, the orange is a little sour and doesn’t sweeten up as it lingers, and the spices are what one would expect from clove and cinnamon. It’s not fabulous, but it doesn’t approach horrible in my view, and the thumb on the scale is the Proustian value of transporting oneself on a rainy day present, to another rainy day when life was opening up like an oyster and anything was possible.

The aroma of this oolong is absolutely heavenly – obviously coconut in its dry form, but delicate when steeped. It leaves a little bit of an oily taste in the mouth from the nectar after the first steeping, but not in subsequent steeps. While the bouquet is pleasing and the golden color pretty, I’m actually a little disappointed in the flavor, having been perhaps spoiled by a slightly sweeter coconut oolong from Townshend’s Tea. Still, as a lightly flavored coconut tea, it’s something I can drink a lot of without getting overwhelmed by the tropical aspect. I’ve heard it makes an amazing kombucha, so I’m looking forward to trying their brew sometime.

The genmaicha that wasn’t genmaicha! I could have sworn it said ‘genmaicha’ on the label at the bottom of the tin when I got it, but now it says Japanese Emperor Blend. Odd. I can’t understand why I didn’t initially add it as such. It never even occurred to me to go to their site and see if they had a regular genmaicha as well or not. Which, as it turns out, they had. That should all be taken care of now though. This is the genmaicha with matcha powder in it.

This one is also in the to-be-finished pile. I got the tin as a free present from A C Perch’s when I bought their book because I ordered on the day that it was released. I didn’t even know they offered this, so that was an awesome surprise. Anyway, I used it sparingly and eventually forgot about it, which was stupid, because it’s A C Perch’s! It’s not like I can’t get more.

Down to one more serving of it though. I thought that was what I had left before making this pot. I’ll never get through that pile…

Super bummed today. This cheers me up a bit with some almond milk.