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I’m excited to finally try this tea which has reached a seemingly mythic reputation here on Steepster. Thanks to

Cait

SECOND STEEP: A nice fragrance which is more subtle. It seems as if there’s only 1 stick of butter in this and not an entire pound. I do like creamy and buttery teas and this is excellent. The second steep is a bit more vegetal; I can see that we’ve moved down the flowery garden path to the vegetable garden. I steeped this for two minutes which seems about right for a 2nd steep. I’m still liking this tea and will have to order it someday. But today I got: 4 boxes from Andrews and Dunham, a big box from Upton, some generous samples from Norbu, and an order from Pangea tea which also calls itself the Lavender Tea Company. Not to mention a genuine, old-fashioned letter from a friend.

The first impression of the brewed tea is a strong sense that I am wearing spinach perfume. I’m not put off. There’s a company that makes odd perfumes: Demeter Fragrances: http://www.demeterfragrance.com/
They are novelty odors and don’t have much staying power. I consult their web site to see if they have spinach perfume. No, but if you are interested in wafting of celery, dregs, earthworm, tarnish, vinyl, or waffles, that’s the perfume company for you.

The tea is still hot and tastes like really rich spinach water. As it cools, however, more flavors are starting to emerge. It’s as if someone unleashed some fruit and flowers into the spinach brew. And yes, it’s like butter.

Does anyone remember “Coffee Talk with Linda Richman” on SNL? She thought that Barbra Streisand was just like “buttah” and so is this tea. It’s a deep golden brew of buttery spinach with a touch of flower and little slice on honeydew on the side.

I’m liking this and looking forward to the second steep. I hope that nobody is put off by my description of “spinach” tea because I really do think that the taste has got something of ineffable sublimity to it and I have not found the words to describe it adequately.

SECOND STEEPING: What a difference! I steeped this for 2 mins and 30 seconds and should have left it at 2 minutes. It’s slightly oversteeped. The spinach aroma and taste have disappeared almost entirely—just fleeting little returns are present. Aside from the slight overbrewing (a lesson to learn: green teas are more sensitive than the ever vigilant infant who suspects his or her parents have fallen asleep and hence must shout inconsolably) this is a very light floral experience. Orchid? I cannot quite pin it down. I don’t recognize it from any of my perfumes. It’s subtle but excellent.

THIRD STEEPING: The cost of this tea has become eminently reasonable when I consider that I can get three very good cups from it. The third steeping was less rich and deep and tasted more like a generic vegetal green tea that was somehow buttered. I also added a tiny bit of brown sugar and that was nice—the natural sweetness of the tea does not require any additions, but I wanted to experiment. It still felt like a full brew but less distinctively unique. Third cup remains most certainly satisfying and rich; did not have any hint of being “water down” in any way.

This is a winner in my book. It’s very refreshing after a surplus of rooibos teas. I used to hate chamomile until I realized that I had never experienced it in a decent format. This lovely delicate balance between orange, lemon, chamomile and a few other flavors is refreshing and will make a splendidly bracing iced tea. The flavors are very nicely balanced and nothing dominates.
It’s a

Mélange

I woke up to a hallucination today: snow was all over the place. It could not be because last night I was drinking this lovely brew iced—and it makes a divine iced tea. But as my eyes are clearing, I see that snow really is everywhere1

I love this both hot and iced and can see it becoming a favorite iced tea for the summer. I’m giving it a nudge up the ratings scale.

CAIT

sent me this and I think I’m getting along with it better than she is. While she got menstrual blood, I got fig newtons. I’m not sure that the flavor of “love” can be distilled into a rooibos blend. The envelop that TeaFrog uses calls it “Love Flavored Rooibos”. The ingredients include rose and orange, but I am not picking up on them (at least not so far). The dry leaves smelled like root beer, which was delightful but the brewed tea is a bit of an anticlimax. Is the TeaFrog presenting us with some sort of a Zen Koan about the flavor of Love? And more powerful than the tea itself, the name has me regressing into a Burt Bacharach kind of mood and I hear Dionne Warwick warbling “The Look of Love”. “I can hardly wait to hold you, feel my arms around you”—I think that was before she was a psychic friend.

A tea that gives me a Proustian moment cannot be all bad; but the previous tea I sipped led me to Florence Italy in my mind, which might be a better place to be than my old bedroom when I thought that Dionne Warwick was the epitome of sophistication and that Burt Bacharach was the bard of love!

Design a Tea was offering free samples—perhaps they still are. Today I got mine only a few days after I had requested them. One of my picks was Zabaglione because I love the flavor mixes. It’s difficult to make a good zabaglione and because the dessert requires so much intensive, last-minute cooking and detailed attention, few restaurants seem to offer it. Sometimes it’s called a “Sabayon”.

The ingredients for the Zabaglione are “Koslanda-Dimbulla blend from Sri Lanka” and “All natural flavoring”. My tea revealed a complex unfolding of flavors. As you might expect, the eggnog flavor predominated but there were little rushes of true marzipan, almond, and a general sweet creaminess. The only tea I’ve tried which is similar is, not surprisingly, an eggnog tea by David’s Teas. This one, of course, offers more than the generic eggnog—not that that is not delicious alone.

I drank most of it straight up and then added a soupçon of sugar and milk which enhanced the creamy sweetness.

I’m impressed with Design a Tea. They have a similar concept to Adagio’s, but seem to be smaller and perhaps offer a purer, more organic, and focused product. I plan to order from them after the fantastic tea prOn experience of spending time on their site.

This tea is not quite the Nirvana that Premium Steap’s Organic Black with Coconut is. But it’s excellent! The chocolate is deep and rich. The coconut comes out mostly in the aftertaste for me. Black tea is most certainly the base note and a sweet bright chocolate is the middle note. The after-note is the coconut. As the tea cools, the coconut comes out to play a bit more.

Think of this as a bit of coconut enrobed in a big swirl of dark chocolate. It’s very good but perhaps I prefer single-notes in teas (or at least for today!).

Premium Steap has most certainly earned a spot on my "to buy from " list. They have some luscious looking samplers too!

Note: I did use 2 tsp. for about a 10 ounce mug; I’ve been adding more tea than suggested to many of my brews.

I’ve just finished McNulty’s Vanilla and the best thing about it is a top-note after-taste of vanilla. It’s a decent “basic black” over all with hints of vanilla that start to emerge as the tea cools. They decided to very very slowly come out and play on my tongue. The taste is there; it’s just subtle. And nobody accused me of being subtle or of truly appreciating the subtle.

Overall, I like a stronger vanilla flavor. I would recommend this for vanilla junkies who are fond of nuance, understatement, and insinuation.

I picked up this sample from the marvelous Travelling Tea Box and am eternally grateful to Angrboda for getting it started. I think that Vanilla by McNulty’s has got “a good beat and you can dance to it” but it’s not balletic.

This is a pleasant brew. The citrus really emerges. I had a very small sample and did not have enough to try this on ice. I agree that it might make an excellent iced tea. There’s a touch of astringency here even though I steeped it for only one minute and 30 seconds.

This is a decent tea in search, I think, of an identity. I think it will make a good basic black for iced tea. As a morning brew, it does the trick adequately but is not audacious or bold. It’s like the shy kid at school who hangs back a bit so it won’t get bullied. Black Frost most certainly has got some fresh-mown grass mentality, It’s a Nilgiri but does not speak to me of high elevations—more of gently rolling slopes. It’s most certainly a black tea which smells and tastes as if it’s been travelling with a group of green teas on the same bus.

The aftertaste is naturally sweet in a gentle, mellow way. Overall, it’s not a spectacular tea that boldly asserts itself but I think it might be an overall “good chum” of a tea—a regular pal who can be trusted and respected. I’ll drink more and possibly revise the review.

I posted a review of Florence by Harney & Sons here last November. It was my first review and Florence was the tea that launched a thousand tea orders….and still remains one of my top five teas. If we were forced to go to an unlikely dessert/desert island and only allowed to bring 5 beverages, Florence would be one of mine.

I’ve got some notes to add: I’ve been drinking Florence (I’m now on my third tin since November) regularly. It never disappoints; it never fails to evoke richness and wonder. I do love that taste of chocolate.

When I was in the real Florence I used to zip into Robligio’s -http://www.robiglio.it/index_ing.asp - several times a day for a coffee. They had lovely thick little slabs of chocolate that you could put into your coffee as well as many other accoutrements. It was easy to make the chocolate dominate the coffee. (Aside—thank that Italians for not allowing Starbucks within their borders!). So I have a lot of great taste memories that this tea evokes.

Today I tried Florence iced for the first time. And despite my trepidations, it was simply brilliant. I feared I would get some watered-down chocolate concoction or something akin to a sugar-free melted fudgsicle. Oh, me of little faith! How wrong I was. This is a new and unique drink for me. It’s certainly related to my lovely hot Florence tea, but the chill seems to crystallize the chocolate taste in place. The black tea stepped forward to make certain that there was a good dash of caffeine. I added no milk but a certain creamy taste remains. Florence has a natural sweetness and I rarely add sugar. To add sugar to Florence is gilding the lily and I absolutely love to gild my lilies frequently but this is not essential. With the iced tea, I get the natural sweetness.
So here I am with a sweet, creamy, chocolatefull, caffeinated taste-filled beverage and the expenditure in calories is miniscule.

I want to stress that Florence has been there for me on cold days and hot days; on sick days and ebullient days. Like the ancient city itself, this tea endures with elegance, beauty, panache, and true artistry. Meraviglioso! Rivelazione divina! Voglio baciarti, Signore Harney (e figli)!