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I had this tea right after trying Keemun 2 Grade by Teavivre and wow, what different teas they are. The Imperial has very showy, attractive dry leaves and one of the most heady fragrances I encountered with any tea. The aroma is very sweet and full of honey, tulips, some other flowers, pine needles and rich cake with frosting.

The taste is very smooth and sweet, the typical Keemuny notes are barely discernable. It tastes almost like an oolong. The tea resteeps well: even the fourth gaiwan infusion is sweet and memorable, although the roughness starts to increase after the first two steeps. Despite all of this honeyed sweetness the aftertaste is lingering and unmistakably Keemunish. The infusions need to be short to keep the complexity intact and in no way this brew should be adulterated by the addition of milk or sugar.

This is certainly an excellent desert tea: lazy, voluptuous and decadent. I can’t say it is better or worse than Grade 2 but it is certainly more complex. Just two excellent Keemuns for different moods and different situations. But, of course the Imperial costs three times as the Grade 2, which tells something about how leisure is valued much higher then work.

I probably will have to stock this tea for special occasions because it IS really special.

I like Keemuns and have been always confused by many kinds and names Hao Ya, Mao Feng… I decided to go through all Teavivre Keemuns (and a couple from other companies) to find the one that would become my go-to Keemun. And the package with them finally came today.

The Grade 2 Keemun… I ordered it with hesitation since I usually skip the cheapest options. And boy, was I surprised and rewarded. Robust is the word for this tea. It has the robust aroma and appearance and the taste to match. Malt, roast, leather, spices, and some berry-like sweetness. And the taste is not shy: it strong, persistent and stays for multiple gaiwan infusions. It is by no means refined but its major components come together very well. There is nothing second-grade about this tea.

This is certainly a tea for cold days, for times when you need a beam of energy, the tea that would go well with greasy food and take milk and sugar well. The Clydesdale of teas. I would keep it instead of personally disliked Assams.

All in all, a great find. Really curious to discover what other Keemuns from Teavivre are like.

P.S. Short steepings are key with this Keemun to keep the taste more complex.

Now, this one was a disappointment, which does not happen with Teavivre often in my experience. The appearance was cool and the aroma intriguing – grass, mushrooms, leather, spices. The taste, however, was quite meh, with astringency and copper predominating. No reason to order it again.

It came together with a several other mini-puerh tuos in a nondescript paper with a little picture of lips. It certainly smelled like a raw puerh but it took me some travel acrooss W2T to figure out it was the 2015 Smooch.

It has a very pleasant aroma for a raw puerh with the sourness augmented by some leafy and sweet notes. The taste is tricky: it is easy to oversteep and then it tastes a bit like vomit but in a good way. Since I am not a big fan of even a nicer tasting vomit I switched to very short infusions in a gaiwan (10-20 secs) and it revealed a powerful puerh sourness together with some notes of black currant leaves, raspberry, grasses, orange and spices.

It is way more complex than typical low-cost raw puerhs I used to get from Upton Tea. You can get many resteeps out of it and a long, long lingering aftertaste. So far it has been the best raw puerh I tasted.

I am drinking it now. The ingredients look good on paper but in reality this tea is quite meh. The aroma is underwhelming and in the taste profile cloves predominate. Just not a very interesting tea with not a lot of going on.

Unless someone is a big fan of cloves (and I am not!) I would pass on this one.

This is the rooibos blend that has been slowly growing on me. Apple, oranges and cinnamon flavor blend well with the rooibos and enhance it quite a bit. I am drinking it now in a cold office and it does cheer me up . It is a good alternative to decafs with a bold, in-your-face flavor profile.

If you are watching the daily caffeine intake this blend is a welcome addition to your arsenal.

One of the few teas from Teavivre I did not care much about. The roast is pretty strong and as a result the taste of Tie Guan Yin is mostly overpowered. The taste of char, malt, some floral sweetness and grass: it sounds more complicated that the taste itself, which is pretty one-dimensional. It just seems to me that you do not have to start with a good quality tea to achieve very similar results.

As the roasted oolongs go I strongly prefer Huang Guanyin from Teavivre as a a good representation of this style.

I have been drinking this tea for a while and it has been steadily growing on me. It has a very appealing sweet smell and taste (chocolate, honey, some indeterminate flowers). The taste is not very complicated but consistently pleasant and warming. In addition, it holds extremely well across for multiple gaiwan infusions.

This is not the tea that wows you and stops in your tracks but rather the one you can rely on to cheer you up. A bit of a trusted daily drinker.

I had very high expectations for this one based on the ratings by others. It does look gorgeous: wiry and multicolored. And it does taste great: malty sweetness. But when you drink it it feels weird. It has a strong backbone similar to keemuns but it adds to it the sweetness of blackberries, overripe black cherries and mangoes – and it does not blend that well. Maybe because I like keemuns so much …but this tea just comes to me as a worse option for a robust cup of tea.

In the subsequent steepings the taste of berries becomes way less intense but that results in the loss of its most memorable quality. It could be good for someone else but I will stick with my keemuns.

I am just getting into puerhs, trying to understand all the hype. This one really helps to do it. I had a sample(25 g) and looked terrific: like a multilayered old piece of something from the strange, ancient forest. When you steep it it does not give you much of smell but the taste is pretty complex and cool. There is mineral, coffee, pleasant sourness and a lot spices. These spices predominate in a long, evolving aftertaste.

Also, if you steep it for 3-4 minutes the brew comes out very dark and tastes remarkably like coffee.

All in all, a pretty good experience that holds through multiple resteeps. I am not sure if I get more of this one – need to try more puerhs to figure out if this one is that unique – but you cannot go wrong with Brown Sugar.

(later addition) I started to steep for 2 minitues instead of 30-45 seconds and the taste profile changed completely: typical puerh earthiness and rotten wood came in force and became main notes. It was not bad but quite different. Note to yourself: this rea produces completely different taste profiles depending on the steeping time (which is not bad at all you can get multiple teas for the price of one).