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This is my very first entry under the Random Steepings category. I came up with this idea while lamenting the lack of chocolate in my glass of Chai Diaries Chocolate Chai. Here’s the combination:

1 sachet Chai Diaries Chocolate Chai + 1 sachet Harney & Sons Valentine’s Blend

The result is okay. I noticed the chocolate chips in the Chai Diaries sachet this time, which I did not take note of last time. Now I am wondering whether the reason why I did not taste chocolate was that the sachet did not contain any chips? It was a good glass of chai, but not at all chocolatey.

This time, with a sachet of H&S Valentine’s Blend, the brew is predictably more chocolatey. It should be twice as strong teawise, but it does not really seem to be—though I may pay later (at 3am) for drinking a double dose of caffeine at 6pm!

I also see that there is one of those foody oil slicks (à la Teavana) along the surface of the liquor. The chocolate chips, by the way, were completely whitened, having been exposed to air. They looked old, and I am not sure that they are helping much here. In fact, they may be hurting.

I’ll stick to drinking Valentine’s Blend on its own in the future. Or maybe I’ll try it combined with Kusmi Spicy Chocolate…

(Blazing New Rating #65)

For some reason, I am not tasting any chocolate in Chai Diaries Chocolate Chai. This is a spicy chai, and I’d have guessed that there’s more than just cardamom and ginger involved on the spice front—maybe clove and pepper, too? But what I do not detect at all is the chocolate, which is said to be present in two forms: chocolate chips and chocolate flavoring.

The black tea base is pretty good. In fact, I drank this chai with only a bit of half and half, though this is the one type of blend which I generally drink sweetened. Good to know that there’s a spicy chai out there that I can imbibe without adding a huge dollop of sweetened condensed milk!

I might try a custom-blend combination of one sachet of Harney & Sons Valentine’s Blend (a chocolate-flavored black tea) with one sachet of Chocolate Chai. Maybe that will amp up the chocolate to the point of being detectable by me… It could be that the ginger and cardamom are just overwhelming the chocolate here. I may also be partly at fault, since I was a eating a brownie before drinking this tea. Seemed like a good idea at the time…

(Blazing New Rating #64)

I had forgotten why I requested a sample of Je t’aime—until the scent began to waft off the pot, and I was reminded of Florence, Vanilla Comoro, and some of the other delicious Harney & Sons flavored blacks.

Je t’aime is scented with caramel and vanilla, but it possesses the rich voluptuousness of creamy chocolate as well. The liquor is reddish amber, and I took a couple of sips before adding a bit of half and half. It definitely seemed potable au naturel, but I love to add cream to flavored black teas.

My impression is that the base black tea is of somewhat higher quality in this blend than in the Caramel tea from Kusmi, but I’d have to do a steep-off to be sure…

(Blazing New Rating #63)

I must have got the last bag of Tazo Pi Lo Chun, as it is no longer even listed at the Starbucks website! The demise of Tazo is imminent…

This is my third experience with Bi Luo Chun, the first and second having been from Teavivre and Tealux. These Tazo leaves are not as airy and voluminous as the others, and they are darker in color and more robust in scent. Today’s batch I drank right after a big bowl of oatmeal, which I prepared to celebrate the unseasonably cool and rainy weather we’re having.

The liquor is peach veering gray more than green, and now that I’ve read the story of this tea, it makes sense, given that the leaves are charcoal fired. I like this pleasant, slightly sweet and not very vegetal green tea, and will surely finish this bag!

(Blazing New Rating #62)

I was craving jasmine this evening, so I threw caffeine caution to the wind and brewed up a small pot of Teavivre Jasmine Bi Luo Chun Green tea. The dried leaves are of all different shapes and sizes, with silver striations woven throughout.

The liquor is pale greenish yellow, and the taste is very smooth. I really like the jasmine used by Teavivre in both this tea and the Jasmine Pearls. Which do I prefer? I’ll have to do a steep-off one of these days.

For now, my jasmine craving has been satisfied!

(Blazing New Rating #61)

No one ever seems to talk about Chun Mei—Long Jing, Sencha, Mao Feng, Gunpowder, the list of famous green teas goes on and on, but poor little Chun Mei seems to get little respect. The only time I’ve ever seen it named as a China green tea is on the box of the Tazo filterbag Chun Mee. Lots of other filterbags appear to contain Chun Mei—or a blend one of the components of which is Chun Mei—but when it comes time to rave about loose leaf greens, the topic never seems to come up.

That’s why I decided to order a sample of this tea from Teavivre. I wanted to know what this tea looks and tastes like in loose leaf form. I agree with the description of the dried leaves as eyebrow-like. They are very cute. The dried form also looks a bit like something on the road to becoming Gunpowder.

The liquor is light golden brown and tastes rather robust and earthy. It’s actually quite good, with a stronger cooked flavor. This tea is hearty but not at all bitter. I’ll definitely be ordering a full supply, as I find Chun Mei to be tasty and think that it would pair well with spicy food. In fact, I enjoyed this tea right after a heavily spiced Thai meal.

I wonder whether the low price of Chun Mei is an indication that many green tea drinkers prefer less assertive flavors? No matter: I like it, I do.

(Blazing New Rating #60)

With the memory of another sakura-style green tea fresh in my mind, I decided to go ahead and try Palais des Thés Fleur de Geisha. This is also a Japanese style green-tea base (theirs appears to be from Japan), but the flavoring is somewhat more floral and less intensely fruity.

The liquor is pale greenish gold and the taste is rather more harmonious than I’ve come to expect from cherry-scented teas. According to the description, cherry blossoms, not cherry essence are used to flavor this tea, so that must make the difference.

I’m looking forward to trying a second infusion of the spent sachet (which plumped up quite a lot) later on tonight.

(Blazing New Rating #59)

The labeling of my package of this tea from Thé Santé is a bit confusing. The first line reads “Sencha Kyoto Cherry Rose” and right underneath, in doubled-sized font, reads: “China”—rather like the tetsubins advertised as “Japanese” when they are in fact produced in China. I see that the website has now removed “Kyoto” from the name, so perhaps someone complained?

Anyway, this is a good flavored-green tea. The base seems to be of quite decent quality. It’s identified as “luxury green tea” in the ingredients list, and my suspicion is that there may be a smidgeon of bancha thrown into the mix along with the sencha. I happen to love bancha, so that’s no complaint, mind you!

The rose petals are beautiful in the dried tea, but I’m not sure that I really taste them with all of this cherry. As I often find to be the case with cherry flavoring, it can easily become overwhelming. Here it works pretty well, but I feel on some level that the underlying tea (which is of high quality) is being done some sort of injustice. Rather like a pretty young woman who piles on thick make-up. Or an older woman whose attempts to look younger are undermined precisely by a foundation which magnifies the lines on her face.

Anyway, this is perfectly fine, but I think that I prefer to imbibe green tea of this quality au naturel. This may be a better choice for people who dislike Japanese green tea and wish to shroud it in strong flavors.

(Blazing New Rating #58)

Teavana’s sole straight sencha offering, Sencha Jade Reserve, is an excellent one! Very smooth and slightly sweet, with a pale green clear (not cloudy) liquor. I drank my two glasses quickly, right after lunch, in part because I had steeped at a sub 70C temperature, so the tea was starting to descend below my optimum drinking preference. (That happened because I changed my mind and switched the cooling water from a 17 ounce to a 22 ounce tetsubin, as I realized that I wanted two full glasses. As a consequence, the temperature dipped lower than usual. A propos: tetsubins are great for immediate temperature reduction, among their many other functional and aesthetic virtues…)

I’ll have to compare this sencha side-by-side with the Tazo Collection. Both are very good and haute senchas, veering toward gyokuro!

(Blazing New Rating #57)

I was curious what a peach-scented jasmine-scented tea might smell and taste like, though I admit that I was not entirely optimistic. Sometimes I find that doubling up on flavors leads to a less appealing result. In the case of the Teavivre Peach Jasmine Dragon Pearls, my worries were for naught, as the end result was perfect potable and even rather pleasant.

The dried pearls are quite strongly scented, which also had me worried a bit. The scent is peach, peach, peach, with not much jasmine breaking through the fruity aura. I was surprised that the pearls were of various sizes, as the straight-up jasmine pearls from Teavivre were of uniform size. I weighed out about 3 grams, since I could not really estimate the weight by sight alone. I infused them in about 10 ounces of water at 76C for about 3 minutes.

The liquor was pale peachy, and the flavor was more peach than jasmine, but I could taste some of the jasmine in the brew. The peach still dominated but not nearly as much as it did in the dried form.

All in all, I like this tea, but I do believe that I prefer the straight jasmine pearls and will be restocking with those not these. That’s probably just a reflection of the fact that I happen to prefer jasmine to peach. I am sure that peach amateurs will love this tea, and it’s definitely good for a change of pace.

The second infusion was nearly as flavorful as the first, so this is a good example where it’s definitely worth reinfusing the leaves. They were so tightly rolled that they did not finish fully unfurling until the second round. The resultant liquor was more green than orange, and I could taste the green tea more than I did before.

(Blazing New Rating #56)