Je t'Aime

This sample tea came from The Cookie Lady and I am enjoying it this afternoon.

To me the cup smells something like coconut and the flavor is mellow with notes of chocolate and caramel. My only gripe is I’m picking up some slight artificial aftertaste in this that I’m not totally enjoying. But there’s a slight fruitiness in it as well. I’m not looking for any more flavored teas in my cupboard, but if I was, this wouldn’t be a bad addition as a nice afternoon/dessert tea. Especially with sugar!

Once again another lovely sample from The Cookie Lady, making this my 5th cup of black tea today! I decided to try this tea without first looking up what others thought of it, and was able to really smell the sweetness of the tea but couldn’t quite place it. Now that I ‘peeked’ it clicked for me that it is caramel and I can’t believe I couldn’t figure it out on my own! The black tea base to this is very mellow and with absolutely no bitterness which I love. I think for my next cup I will sweeten it a bit to really bring out the caramel flavors in addition to the aroma.

I am tasting this for the first time and have been waiting to try this one. I am a little disappointed as I find it doesn’t have a lot of flavour. The mug I am drinking from is a little larger (about 12 oz) so maybe I will try again in a smaller mug. I really don’t taste much of the vanilla or caramel. I will hold off on this one and rate it again.

Thanks so much to The Cookie Lady for sending me a sample of this one! A 3-minute steep produced a rich reddish-brown brew with a strong sweet scent. It has a lovely rich vanilla flavor with just a touch of buttery caramel. The base is nice and smooth without a hint of bitterness. I am so excited to have found another caramel vanilla tea that I love ALMOST as much as Butiki’s Caramel Vanilla Assam (since I know I’m bound to run out of that one eventually…)

Got a sample of this from Cameron B.! :D
Have been wanting to try this tea since it’s caramel and chocolate-which is always good in my book. xD
When I first smelled this tea, I thought that maybe the black tea base would overpower the caramel and chocolate flavors. But when I began to drink it, it surprised me! It wasn’t as strong as I hoped, but I could still taste the chocolate and caramel.
Mostly caramel is in the aftertaste.
So not as great as I’d hope, but not horrible. I’ve definitely had worse-haha!
Thanks for the sample though, Cameron B.!

I got this many moons ago when Laurant was handing out samples of his tea. I jumped on it because VariaTEA loved them so much. She sent me a whole lot of their zodiac blends, but this time with Laurant, I went with the greens and black teas!

This tea is so good oh my gosh. Lovely chocolate/caramel/vanilla scents when you open up the baggie, and it comes out more as it steeps. It did turn a bit bitter when I drank it straight, but I think this is a tea that needed the milk and sugar!! Ahh so so SO good. When I lessen my tea stash, I’ll definitely get my hands on some of this tea :)

Sipdown! (7 | 223)

This was fine, but definitely didn’t have a ton of flavor left. It smells nicely caramelly, but in the flavor I get mostly a bit of creamy vanilla and a slightly tannic Ceylon base. Something about it is tasting waxy as well, like a vanilla Chapstick.

Anyway, there was a point in time when Nina’s had all of their teas on Amazon in 50g increments, but now it’s just tins of a few teas. They have a “Shop” link on their website, but it just tells you to email them for inquiries. Hopefully someday they actually build out an online shop, as there are a lot of teas from them that I would still like to try…

HHTTB

Caramel. Niiiice. This tea has that same delicious caramel taste that MF’s Wedding Imperial has, but seems much more forgiving on the steeping parameters. It is a little similar to Japon minus the genmacha too. It is very evenly flavored and is a very enjoyable cup!

100th TASTING NOTE!!!! WOO HOO!!!

I’m feeling pretty accomplished right now :) In the 2 months I’ve been on Steepster, I’ve tried 100 new teas (although that’s not exactly true since I’ve logged one or two teas twice). My cupboard has grown exponentially, it seems. My tastes have already begun to define themselves and I know soooo much more about tea. I’ve been blessed to find some really good tea people to swap with, and I’ve tried to make sure to be extra generous with those newer than me since others did the same for me at first.

I purposely saved this tea for my 100th note for that very reason. NayLynn was so generous as to send me this tea a couple of weeks ago as a birthday present even though we hadn’t even talked about my birthday coming up. I couldn’t believe it when I opened my swap package with her to find the bag of swap teas and a neatly wrapped and decorated tin with this inside. I cannot believe the amount of goodness I’ve seen in people here on Steepster :)

Anyway, 100th TASTING NOTE!! WOO HOO!! This is my first Nina’s Paris tea, so I was very excited to try it this morning. It was so perfect for a first cup! It is spot-on vanilla and caramel with a hearty black base. I got two really good steeps with a third steep that was weaker but still good. I’m going to be drinking this a lot on crisp fall mornings. It’s perfect. I’m glad I’ve got a sample of another Nina’s Paris tea to try from another swap, too. Perhaps I’ll have to place an order when I run out of this!

Thank you so much, NayLynn :)

Another backlog from last night. I figured I should get through another one of the three I got since the sample was so small.
Brewed this reminds me strongly of Butiki’s Caramel Vanilla Assam. Which had my mouth watering since I adore that tea so much. Unfortunately, like the Eve I’d had just before, the flavor kinda falls flat again. I get the caramel/vanilla goodness mostly in the smell, which is divine, but the taste just isn’t there. Something that smells like that I feel sould be sweeter or something. I dunno. Adding some Truvia made it sweet, but I guess not the right kind of sweet that I was wanting. And on top of it all there’s a very strong astringency that’s off putting for me. I’m pretty sure it’s the base tea since I went light on the time and didn’t use as hot of water as it seemed other’s used. Or maybe that was the issue and I should’ve used hotter water. Who knows. Lol. I certainly don’t have any more to try, and honestly I wouldn’t order this myself for another attempt. I’ll just stick with my Butiki Caramel Vanilla Assam. Lol.