Bird Pick Tea & Herb

Sip down! Sample from Heather at the Victoria tea meet.

I really like this one, and if it was available, I’d consider picking some up – either bags like what I received, or loose.

The toasty tea with the caramel is really lovely. And as a bonus, it’s lower in caffeine, so I won’t make myself vibrate with caffeine today. :)

Received this one from Heather at the tea meetup over the weekend.

Since I have some time to kill before leaving to do more math today, I thought I’d try this one in a mug rather than relegate it to the travel mug.

The smell of the tea in the bag is intensely caramel. A lot more buttery and salty than the Red Leaf matcha caramel. Steeped, I think I used too hot of water. I smell and taste some caramel, and creaminess definitely comes through as I swallow. But the houjicha tastes more green than I was expecting, and that greenness isn’t really doing it for me with the caramel-creaminess.

As it cools, more of the toasty houjicha flavour is coming through, as is the caramel. However, there is still that greenness lingering in the back. I should try more houjicha teas. :)

I will sit here and slowly sip the rest of this mug, and I’m glad I have another tea bag to test out. Next time I’ll pay more attention to the water temperature.

I received this from Heather at the swap meet today. It smells like baked rice crispy squares with chocolate caramel drizzling. The flavour leans more heavily towards the strong roasted profile of the houjicha, with the sweet syrupy quality of the caramel appearing near the finish. It gives an overall impressing of oozing syrup from dry crisps.

This is the kind of tea I want near the end of a late night dinner and I think it was a good way to end the evening. Casual, firm, and sweet. Time to curl up and read some Terry Pratchett.

Second day Edit: the roasted sweet flavour gives off a coffee-like impression.

Eh. This tea smelled nice dry, but I’m not getting much flavor at all. A little bit of green, a little bit of vanilla and absolutely no wow. Adding sugar just made it sweeter and did nothing to bring out any flavor. Pity.

This is a sassy tea that teases you with its tartness then mellows into something sweet. I can’t wait to try this as an iced tea – or even a mixer base.

Dry, this tea definitely smells like rich honeydew. It is a smell that carries over when brewed, but it exchanges some of the richness for juiciness. The honeydew flavor is strong when the tea is hot, but mellows out letting the sencha come through as it cools with the honeydew hanging on for the aftertaste as if I just had a bite of melon. I love sugar in my tea and adding it did perk up the flavors a little, but somehow didn’t do much to make the tea better.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this tea overall. It is well done and the flavors are good, but it’s not knocking me off my feet. Maybe in time…

I was looking for a particular tea today, one I think I left at someone else’s house, when I caught a whiff of this and needed a cup. It’s strange that I likely have a couple hundred teas to choose from, but I’m focused on one that I noticed was missing and not there when I wanted it. I’m glad this tea was there to distract me.

The caramel smell is much stronger than the flavor, but the flavor is quite nice. The roastiness goes well with the caramel making a well rounded tea. No sugar in my cup today. I still get a lot of flavor on the aftertaste. I think I have about a serving left of this tea and I may cold brew it since I don’t think I have tried it that way yet. I can’t believe I got this tea two years ago according to my first tasting note! Time… she is a flying!

I’m remembering this tea having grown on me a bit since I first reviewed it and I was eager to try it again today as a latte, but I can’t taste a thing through this cold! I’m imagining it as creamy, carmaely and delicious. It is like trying to see in the dark. Sometimes I wonder if there was a sense I would prefer to loose over taste and smell, but I honestly can’t come up with an answer. It is one of those things you take for granted until it is gone… like indoor plumbing!

When I got a whiff of this tea dry in the store, I was greeted by a deep smell of caramel with something salty, almost like dried seaweed. When brewed, it took a few sips and a little sugar to taste much. It has a deep caramel flavor that is strangely subtle. It reminds me of the tea I’m used to getting in Japanese restaurants but with a touch of caramel. Not sure how to describe the base of the tea other than that comparison. The caramel hangs on and lingers after each sip. If I could get used to drinking tea with more subtle flavors, I’m sure I’d love this, but as it stands I’m still a fan of bold bossy flavors. I’ll give it some time to grow on me.

Having this one for the first time in a long time, and having it as a latte. It’s really good like this. I’m on the couch with a cold compress rotating back and forth from my right ankle to right knee, with my laptop, and listening to my friend’s radio show playing from Orlando, FL, and this just goes. I feel like I am comfy and cozy and relaxed and I have this sweet, nutty, rich beverage next to me.

For some reason, I always seem to forget I have this one, and yet, I always try to buy some when I’m in LA every February, since there is a Bird Pick near my friend’s house. And I’ll be there again in 3 weeks, so if I am by Bird Pick, I will be getting more, because it is a nice low caffeine option for the evening, and for a green tea, it had a nice hefty warmth.

Is this my favourite tea?No, but I also like to have some on hand if I can.

It was a weird sort of day today. It started out cold and overcast, then sunny and warm, then the wind kicked in and it got cloudy again. Work was refund city, so it seemed like every step we took forward, we got pushed back again. It was a struggle for sure. And I’m still feeling super emotional right now, and just mentally and physically tapped out.

So, I decided on this tonight, even though it is some caffeine, but not much, and I even had it with milk…it’s just a little bit of comfort in a cup right now! I dunno, it’s a weird taste, initially, but it really grows on you. If you love toasty teas with a bit of sweetness, this is for you.

Had a cup of this tonight. Decided to add a little genmai hojicha from my amoda box from January. Didn’t really make much of a difference, to be honest, in terms of flavour.

Still, I like this tea. It was the right tea for tonight. I’m glad I picked up the bag when I was in LA.

Had this as a tea latte, while at a Bird Pick shop yesterday. They made it with sweetened condensed milk, which was pretty good, but maybe a little much. I think I would try it with standard milk new time….though next time ended up being tonight, and I have a bare fridge post-vacation.

Nice to know I can drink this one without sugar, though I do think it would benefit from a teensy bit. I did have maple syrup on my waffles tonight, so I’m sticking with my unsweetened mug for now though.

Still roasty and lightly sweet as remembered, though a little strange tasting at first. I got about $5 worth, which isn’t a huge amount, but sufficient number of servings, considering this is a lightweight tea. It cost half as much as the bags I got last year, and i have more servings, getting it loose.

I’m gonna try cold steeping in the summer, I think, and maybe use the sweetened condensed milk again. I’ve got enough to experiment. I may even mix in some green rooibos…

The thing I like most about this tea is that it is low in caffeine, but has body, and works well hot (as well as sweetened and with milk). This means that I am fine at the thought of having this in the morning, in an attempt to take control on the caffeine level, even if it still feels like more of a n afternoon or evening tea.

Backlog…I picked up a bag of this on a vacation to LA recently. I just got the bagged versus loose as it came in a nice sealed pouch that would pack better for my return home.

This is a nice and easy tea to drink. Not bitter, not overly sweet (though things are rarely too sweet for me…though I am trying to cut down on my sugar intake), and the hojicha is supposed to be lower in caffeine, so I thought this might be a nice afternoon or early evening tea.

The bags unfortunately, are a bit dusty, and I wonder what the tea inside is actually like. I will have to open one to see.

I’d say that this is a nice and inoffensive tea that for someone who wants to drink something lower in caffeine and wants to use little to no sugar, this is a warm and roasted sweet caramel tea that brews up nice and dark.

Is it my favourite tea? No. Will I get more when I am back in the states? Quite possibly. My friend who lives there that I was visiting may come up later this year so I might get him to bring me another bag of this, and maybe some others too. There is a Caramel Ruby tea that is this tea, blended with rooibos that caught my attention too. Again, that would be lower in caffeine. I am trying to watch how much caffeine I am having daily as well as my sugar for fertility reasons, but general health as well.

This is my favorite afternoon tea. It is robust enough to get me through the 4p slump, but still soothing enough to help relax me in the midst of a stressful day. I also love just smelling the tea; the heady lavender scent is simply divine.

The tea flavor is very clean and has the right balance of jasmine fragrance. The flavor lasts after 2-3 steepings. The quality of the leaves are evident, as they unfurl intact.

Milky fragrance. Very delicious. The leaves look really beautiful after steeping.

I got this as part of Bird Pick’s Oolong Tea Sampler Set, which came with three other small tins of oolong. I like this tea. I am currently using it to stay up tonight because I couldn’t go to sleep and decided that better use of my time would be to do work (a.k.a. procrastination via writing about tea on the internet).

Very well balanced for a tea latte. None of the flavors are overpowered by the condensed milk (or vice versa); great for a chilly evening!

This had been sitting in my cupboard for a long while, half-forgotten. I decided I needed to try something new today instead of hopping back and forth between Earl Grey, Bailin Gongfu, and Pumpkin Ginger.

I’ve never had a rose oolong before, so this is certainly an intriguing first for me. It smells more of the actual tea leaves than rose as it steeps and cools. Instructions on the back say that it needs five minutes to steep, but I feel like that may be bad advice. Also, it says that this tea is known to enhance beauty… does that mean this tea is supposed to make me pretty? Hmm.

Upon the first sip, I’m glad I only went with two minutes. The rose flavor is subtle, more in the aftertaste and on the exhale. It has a hint of that peppery taste that rose teas tend to have, but it isn’t harsh. This tea seems to showcase the oolong more than the rose, which is something I respect. It has nothing to hide. It’s a quality tea, especially for something bagged.

I purchased this from Wing Hop Fung, the parent company of Bird Pick. I’m pretty sure from reading the SKU numbers on both sites & their descriptions that this is the same tea.

This is a lovely Jasmine, and as the previous reviewer stated quite a few years back, neither "…too sweet or too heavy or too perfumy.” So there’s something to be said for their consistency! It’s a lovely balance and just what I look for in a Jasmine.

Tastes of lychee and black tea. Straightforward description does the job here.

Aparently I am not a fan of jasmine tea, but it is good for a jasmine. Tastes like flowers.