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I was very excited to try Harney & Sons Green Tea with Thai flavors, as the blend sounded utterly delicious: green tea laced with coconut, vanilla, and lemongrass! When I looked at the tea in the sachets, it resembled loose-leaf sencha, so that increased my interest. The biggest lure of all, however, is the gorgeous perfume of this stuff. Just removing the lid to the tin is enough to induce olfactory ecstasy! Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration…

The brewed tea is bright yellow. Do you take vitamin B complexes? If so, then you know the color to which I am referring… The taste is clean and bright and lightly coconut-flavored, but also just a bit sweet. I do not find the lemongrass overwhelming, as others have reported. Fortunately, for me the coconut is quite detectable in not only the scent of the dried tea, but also the scent and the taste of the brew.

This is a winner in my book of leaves. I’m also happy to find that the sachets really do hold a lot of tea. I did a second infusion with this one and the already infused Pan Asia bag and it was almost as good as the first. Not quite as flavorful, but still pretty good. A happy discovery, especially since the flavorings are all natural.

Love the pink tin, too.

I received a tin of 20 pyramid sachets of Harney & Sons Pan Asia in the attractive four-tin set. The tea is bancha from China, and it has been embellished with chrysanthemums, although I cannot claim to be tasting much of them. Perhaps I do not know what chrysanthemums taste like, but I do know what bancha tastes like, and this is that.

I brewed my sachet in two cups of water (as directed on the can), and I used my two-cup cast-iron tea pot so that the temperature of the water would be immediately cooled (since I usually overheat my water for green teas), and I specifically timed the brewing for three minutes.

The result is a light yellowish-brown, completely limpid liquid with the toasty flavor characteristic of bancha in my experience. All of the bancha which I drank in the past was Japanese, as I frequented a Japanese specialty grocery store where many varieties of loose tea were available. Unfortunately the store closed a while back, and another one which opened in the area was shuttered after about a year or so. Perhaps most people these days buy their Japanese specialty items online?

Anyway, it’s nice to taste bancha again, and I’ll enjoy drinking this as an alternative to sencha after my first meal of the day, as is my habit—at least whenever I have these teas around!

This tea would probably appeal to people who like genmaicha, but the tea is more dominant than the toastiness in this case. To me, bancha tastes slightly cooked, relative to sencha, but it offers a similar palate-cleansing effect and is perfect after a meal.

I love how the smokey-yellow color of the tin matches the color of the brewed tea!

I tried the Tazo Calm sachet again tonight. I think that it would be better brewed more strongly. I forgot to try brewing with a Harney & Sons Egyptian Chamomile, as I had thought about doing before. I’ll try that next time. Tonight this seems weak and a bit too minty for a chamomile blend.

I wasn’t very optimistic about Stash Christmas Eve tea this evening because I had vague memories of not having really liked it the last time I tried it. They’ve been confirmed. My issue is that the flavoring of the blend smells like all of the spices added together to produce a stout cinnamon black tea—something along the lines of the original Good Earth tea. But there’s a big difference between the two: in Christmas eve, they forgot the tea!

I realize that this is supposed to be a no-caffeine herbal blend so that we can sleep on Christmas eve, but the effect of a blend with cinnamon as the primary component leaves something to be desired. A decaffeinated black tea would have made more sense than this cinnamon water taste. There are some other spices and herbs here, too, including mint, but mainly Christmas eve seems like a cinnamon-flavored water, not a tea. Not for me.

I have always appreciated Genmaicha, but the popped brown rice is much better in some blends than in others. It matters because the cereal flavor of these blends tends to overshadow the green tea base. Genmaicha is definitely an example of a tea which will not improve with age if left to languish in one’s tea chest, because the cereal can reach the point of smelling and tasting stale. No such problem here, of course.

In the case of Den’s Genmaicha Extra Green Tea in the pyramid bag (a part of the new customer sampler pack), the base tea is bancha, and the rice flavor is quite strong. Drinking a large cup of this blend could probably stave off hunger for a few hours. It really feels like eating food. I like it. I’ve had better, but this is pretty good.

The bancha has been dusted with matcha in this blend, so that means more caffeine, but I still find the popped rice flavor to be dominant.

I received a pyramid bag of the Den’s Tea standard sencha in the new customer sampler set. It’s good and very similar to Stash Premium Green, though this appears to be genuinely Japanese (the Stash is sourced from Brazil, but prepared à la japonaise).

The brewed tea is a bit cloudy and a golden brownish green color. This is definitely heartier than Harney & Sons Japanese Sencha, but also less beautiful because the color is less green—again, closer to Stash Premium Green. The experience is overall quite similar to me, with a substantial nutty-vegetal, almost food-like taste.

I noticed that many of the people drinking this tisane are ill. Well, I’m not, thankfully. I just happen to like peppermint!

The pyramid bags are so adorable with their tetrahedon shape, especially when wet. What’s inside is peppermint leaves. That’s all. Smells and tastes fresh. I have some old bags of Stash peppermint tea which are really only drinkable with the addition of peppermint essential oil. No such problem with these fresh Harney & Sons leaves.

I used one sachet for two cups of tea and it had plenty of flavor. I steeped for a long time because I was watching The Borgias and found it difficult to break away. I’ll be drinking the remaining nineteen sachets from my tin at night as a change from chamomile.

I received a small envelope of Adagio White Cucumber with an order, and my initial impression was rather negative. The dried tea smells like vinegar!

Fortunately, that unpleasant scent dissipates quickly as soon as hot water is poured over the leaves. The brewed tea is light and refreshing. The cucumber flavoring is unmistakable, and the base appears to be the standard white tea used by Adagio in most (all?) of its flavored white tea blends, from Fujian province in China.

Is white tea the new green? For a couple of years I was not really paying attention to the tea scene—just drinking sencha and sencha-style blends or else coffee—and there were some big changes during that period. One is the dominance of the silken sachet method of brewing; the other is the surprising emergence of a wide variety of white teas. I suppose that I could say Keurig, too, but I cannot imagine that very many tea connoisseurs are using that machine. (Why?)

I like this tea, but since I used it as a predominant component of one of my custom blends (hrh emperor oliver #2), I probably will not buy it separately. I am needless to say relieved that the strong vinegar scent of the dried tea does not affect my enjoyment of the brewed tea.

Still satisfying. I may be addicted to a cup of post-lunch sencha.

I was craving licorice this evening and happened upon a bag of Good Earth Tea for Digestion. It appears to be one of the last of a collection of Good Earth herbal infusions which I had acquired a while back. I had purchased several boxes, including Tea for Flu, Tea for Colds, Tea for Tension, and this one.

Tea for Digestion offers a triple dose of licorice flavor, featuring not only licorice root (which is pretty common in herbal teas), but also anise seed and fennel seed. These blends are all 100% natural and based on recipes from “Father Kuenzle”, an herbalist from Switzerland. So now Good Earth produces them, boasting of 100 years of success in providing “relief to European families.”

This blend has a strong fennel flavor, much stronger than the licorice (which is the fourth ingredient) or the anise (which is the second ingredient). Basically you must appreciate the scent and taste of fennel seed to be able to stomach this brew. I like it, so I do.

Does this blend alleviate indigestion? That would be an added benefit, though I myself have primarily consumed Tea for Digestion as a source of fennel/anise/licorice flavor in a hot beverage. I think that I really prefer licorice to fennel, so I probably won’t buy this one again.