Nik select Send Message

Double honey pear honey honey. I’ve only ever had one pear tea before, and I hated it, so I was really kind of reluctant to try this one. In the end, I’m a bit torn about it, and not for the reasons I expected.

The dry leaves smell really strongly of pear. It’s a heady, fruity, very slightly floral (honey?) fragrance. Just lovely, lovely stuff. At this point, I was still really hesitant, but also a bit hopeful: surely something that smells soooo good couldn’t taste bad, right? The tea smells a lot more like honey and a lot less like pear. Given my prior experience, this was actually encouraging to me, alleviating some of my anxiety.

The first (unsweetened) sip was okay. The honey and pear were there (honey honey pear honey), but so were some bitterness and astringency, of which I’m not a fan. I added my sugar and settled in to enjoy my mug.

Happiness: this tea has replaced my awful pear tea experience. Sadness: Too much honey, not enough pear. This was what surprised me—I actually wanted more pear. Happiness: It’s a pretty pleasant tea, one that I would put in the dessert category. Sadness: the bitterness, while not present throughout, randomly pops up now and again; it’s jarring and mars an otherwise nice experience. Further sadness: this tea’s dry mouth factor is higher than I anticipated. Do not like.

The great thing that came out of this is that I am now willing and looking forward to trying more pear-flavoured teas.

It’s become apparent to me that I can’t really tell one black tea from another. Not yet, anyway. This isn’t the best cup of black tea I’ve had, but it’s very nice. Its fragrance is comforting, as the tea smells exactly like what I think when I think black tea. This is a very humble, unassuming tea; it just ambles along, dum dee dum, doing its thing. It’s that A- student that gets her grades by keeping her head down and getting her work done, not by wriggling in her seat with her hand in the air every time the teacher asks a question.

I think this is one of those tea types that you will either love or hate. I don’t think that there’s a lot of room for somewhere in between, here. I am in the latter camp. So far, this is the worst tea I’ve ever had.

I was excited about the prospect of trying a completely different, new-to-me kind of tea, and I am still very happy that I got to try it. I’m even happier that I didn’t go out on one of my tea-buying adventures and spend a bunch of money on this; the Golden Moon sampler was more than enough.

I put the water to boil, took out my kitchen scissors, and snipped the end off the packet. There was no need to stick my prodigious proboscis in the packet and inhale deeply—it was like the aroma was just waiting to escape, and within a matter of moments my whole kitchen smelled like a smokehouse. Having no knowledge of lapsang souchong, I was quite taken aback and rather sceptical. Instead of adding my customary demerara sugar to the tea, I actually felt like adding salt. The whole thing was a very strange experience, and I hadn’t even tasted the tea yet.

Well, things only rolled further downhill from there. I took one (unsweetened) sip of the tea and the flavour accurately matched the aroma. I didn’t like it, but I thought I would give it a chance, so I tried a few more sips. In my mind, I was drinking water that had been poured into a mug by way of a bed of coals. This might be the first mug of tea that I couldn’t finish because it made me physically ill. Lesson learned: I do not like lapsang souchong. =)

My first taste of this1 was reminiscent of Lucky Charms marshmallows marinated in oolong. This second taste was a second steep, this time correctly pressing the oolong button on my kettle. The leaves, prior to steeping them a second time, were almost fully unfurled, making themselves quite comfortable in the roomy infuser. This time, the fragrance was not of Lucky Charms marshmallows, but of…cotton candy. The tea itself smelled mostly like the oolong, with faint, sweet undertones. The flavour is a bit hard for me to describe. Adjectives that come to mind include “mature” and “baked,” maybe “layered.” It’s quite nice, really.

1 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/127666

So…I read “green leaves” and pushed the “green” button instead of the “oolong” button. Oops. I’m going to see if I can get a second steep out of this at the oolong temperature and see how that goes. Aaaaanyhoo…

This is, hands down, the oddest tea I’ve tasted thus far. When I opened the packet, my first whiff of the tea was just sweetness, nothing else. I gave it a minute and inhaled again, and this time I could smell the oolong base. The first “eh?” moment came when I steeped the tea: the sweetness all but disappeared from the fragrance; mostly I just smelled the earthy, vegetal fragrance I associate with green teas. The second “eh?” moment came when I took my first (unsweetened) sip: how do you have sugar-caramel flavour without it actually being sweet? I just don’t get how that works, and it made my brain hurt because the taste didn’t match the fragrance. So I went ahead and sweetened it, as I usually do. I’d left out the sugar because I thought the tea was going to be sweet on its own.

It was upon taking a sip of the sweetened tea that I got my third “eh?” moment: Basically, if you take the marshmallows from Lucky Charms cereal and add them to your oolong base, you get this tea.

Odd, right? See, toldja.

After my recent spate of mediocre-to-blech tea tasting experiences, I’d say the universe owed me this. And whoa boy did she deliver. There are loads of other reviews here, from Steepsterites of whom I’m regularly in awe, that dissect this tea, that will tell you all the different flavours and notes you’ll get from it. Whether it’s my lack of experience or my underdeveloped palate, all I can tell you is that this smells like black tea and tastes like very yummy black tea. Note that I steeped it for eight minutes (my tea mug is 16oz.) and there wasn’t even the hint of bitterness. If you’re anything like me, that just might be enough information. =)

(It’s really, really yummy.)

(Really.)

False advertising! My nose feels betrayed! This tea smells amazing. You can clearly smell the pumpkin spice and the chai, and my mouth started to water because I thought I was in for a treat. Sadly, no. It tastes awful.

Wait, that’s not entirely fair. Let me clarify: like some of the other bagged teas I’ve tried, it’s really not that bad, if you ignore its name. As a hot, spiced beverage, it’s okay. Unfortunately, its name and fragrance are its downfall. They create an expectation of a particular kind of yummy, and those expectations never get met. =(

I’ve got a whole box of this stuff, so I might try Frankensteining it like I have some other bagged teas to make them more palatable. In one recent case1, especially, I enjoyed great success; maybe I’ll get lucky again. =)

1 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/126299

I decided to try this because I wanted to get it out of the way. See, I don’t really like vanilla or mint, so I figured I wouldn’t care much for this. Sometimes when I make such assumptions I’m pleasantly surprised, but not this time. Dry, the tea smells like one of those pinwheel candies, except I can’t quite make out whether we’re talking spearmint or peppermint, here, or a combination of the two. Steeped, the minty fragrance is dulled just a little bit; I’m not able to detect much vanilla, at all. The taste is balanced, though. The very first sip had an odd bitterness to it, but it didn’t reappear. The aftertaste is again a bit odd: neither mint nor vanilla lingers, but suddenly I feel like sweet spots are covering my tongue like glitter. So weird. (The tea is sweetened with demerara sugar, but I didn’t eat or drink anything before this, so my palate should be clean/neutral.)

I’m obviously biased, but I think even if I loved vanilla and mint (in tea), this one wouldn’t be at the top of my short list. Unrelated to this tasting note, I’m also giving this tea growly face because it burned my tongue. Hmph.

It smells and tastes like…black tea. Yep. Just straight-up, run of the mill, black tea. It’s the type of baseline black tea that Mum used to make chai whilst I was growing up. As someone said in an earlier tasting note, it’s like a “way better Lipton.” (Mum used Tetley, but eh, same diff.)

Like using The Fifth Element to demonstrate the benefits of a superior home cinema, I’d use this to demonstrate the benefits of proper loose tea to Lipton and Tetley drinkers: it’s familiar enough that anyone should be able to taste how much better this does the basic tea they’re used to drinking. In spite of its obvious quality, it’s not a tea I’d run out and buy again. As you probably know by now, I like my tea with a little more oomph, a little more flavour. If I had more than a sample of this, I would likely have blended it with something else for my next cup.

My first sencha. Underwhelmed. It smells like run-of-the-mill green tea, both dry and steeped. The flavour, though, I dunno, it tastes almost a very a tiny bit…spoilt? Is that even possible? And it even has a very teensy bit of dry mouth going on, something I don’t generally associate with green tea.

I’m very glad I only had a sample of this. From your reviews, it kinda seems like I mightn’t have been able to find anyone with whom to swap the rest if it were more than a sample.