Bird Pick Tea & Herb

Rose Hips, you say? Silly person, roses don’t bear fruit. Why yes, they do and boy is it tart!

If you don’t know already, this tea is from the fruit of the rose bush and these little berries have loads of vitamins (A, C, B) essential fatty acids, and antioxidants. They also look very pretty in the wild.

This tea takes a while to steep if you’re not boiling it (again, impatience will be the death of me) and the brew color is a light golden yellow. It’s got a tarty taste that is slightly watered down (think Tang with a few drops of lemon juice and a tad too much water and you’ve got it). It opens rather suddenly on the palate and has a drying effect on the tongue in the final few notes.

Personally, I prefer to brew it with hibiscus and really get into the fruit punch realm, but that just might be me.

This tea is a little meh, there is a lot of Keemun in the blend mixed with Ceylon. It also has a sharp note on the palate that leaves the mouth high and dry. It’s upside is that it brews dark like a true breakfast tea.

ITS GOLD! Liquid gold I tell you!

This has got to be some of the purest Chrysanthemum on the market in LA, it’s organically grown and the tea is the whole flower; not just the petals. The flavor is full and surprisingly sweet and goes down smooth without drying the palate. My secret is to boil the heck out of it for a few mintes, Chinese style (they boil all herbs from what I’ve been told).

My favorite Earl Grey. Light and floral with just the right amount of bergamot. For some reason, the bagged tea tastes better than the loose leaf. I know that they all came from the same place (or so I was told) but they do taste different. The loose leaf tea is much stronger and lacks the more floral quality of the bagged tea.

I quite like this. I am partial to Jasmine tea. A few pearls right into my cup and I’m quite happy for two or three cups. It’s well balanced between the green tea flavor and the jasmine flavor.

If you’ve never had ginseng oolong from Bird Pick before, you’re pretty much missing out. It’s a heavier bodied oolong that is coated with a mixture of ginseng extract and licorice root on the outside (it doesn’t say it anywhere on the packaging, but it’s where I suspect the sweetness comes from). It tastes so full in the mouth and has a gentle menthyl effect of the mouth after every sip in addition to its sweetness. No dryness – and that’s the deal breaker for me.

Don’t get the supreme grade mixed up with the regular ginseng oolong. The difference is highly noticeable. I’ll re-review this tea when I get a fresh batch in, because I’ve had it for awhile.

Woah this packs a punch. Definitely a lot of strong bodied oolong notes with a equally strong aroma and taste. You can sure as hell smell and taste everything congruently upon drinking. The color is a amber gold and the tea is slightly overpowering at first.

Maybe I slightly over brewed it today? Possibly. I’ve got a 25 pack of it, so we’ll find out eventually.

Some teas are too perfumey with their jasmine whilst others aren’t strong enough. However this is a very balanced blend of jasmine and green tea. The leaves are definitely fuller than most and survive up to 4 brews. I’m not typically a jasmine fan, but it’s an excellent blend.

MMMM, Honeydew Sencha!

Upon smelling the dry leaves, you’re presented with an unforgettable marriage of sweet honeydew and fainter notes of strawberry. Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my more traditional teas. However, when I discovered that Bird Pick only uses flowers to scent the tea, I was shocked. All of this aroma without artificial flavoring or sugar? No. Freaking. Way.

Now you might be saying, “oh yeah, well I bet it didn’t taste as good as it smelled when you brewed it”. But to you naysayers, I say, “HA!”. It’s a delicious green tea that isn’t tarnished with the fruity fragrances. It has a wonderful depth of flavor that leaves a pleasant astringency on the tongue afterwards, akin to a palette cleanser.

What I have realized is that this tea is actually better on ICE! Yes, I kid you not. Brew it double strength and ice it over. It’s overpowering olfactory nature just screams sweetness in your mouth, it’s the craziest sensation: sweet fruit without sweetener in a green tea.

Love this tea. Definitely will be rebuying.

I have nicknamed this tea Gunpowder Light. It has Gunpowder taste and aroma but is sweeter and less heavy on the smoke aspect. The dry leaf also looks like loosely rolled Gunpowder pellets. Once steeped, it fully unrolls and I can see that all the leaves are broken into small pieces.

Overall this is a very generic Chinese green tea and I’m glad I have a sample tin.

Silky Green is my absolute favorite tea from Bird Pick! It has a wonderful milky aroma and the leaves are furled similarly to oolong tea. The first brew, which isn’t my favorite has a light buttery note, and with consecutive brews, becomes more flavorful. The tea develops a creamy and almost perfect buttered-toast like flavor. It’s also very smooth on the tongue and doesn’t leave your mouth dry. Be sparing with the leaves, they unfurl quite large.

I’ve been looking for a perfect Jasmine for a long time and tried a lot of teas. Most of them left me disappointed, they were either too sweet or too heavy or too perfumy. This one is as close to perfection as it gets. I’ll refrain from giving it 100 for now because I might find a better tasting tea but I seriously doubt it.

This is how Jasmine should be done. It’s a bliss in a cup. It smells absolutely natural – fresh jasmine flowers that haven’t been picked yet and are blooming on a bush surrounded by lush green leaves. I definitely get some bitterness but it is light and blends well with the flowery aroma.

The brew is very refreshing, it feels thirst-quenching and at the same time leaves my mouth dry and I’m craving for more. The description is right to the point saying that the taste is crisp, it is very accurate. It’s green, crisp and fresh. I’m not getting much sweetness though, maybe just a tiny bit on the background which is a good thing for me because I didn’t find it to work well with jasmine flavor in other teas and discarded them for this same reason.