Culinary Teas

Thank you TeaEqualsBliss for this deliciousness!

I’ve had two chocolate strawberry teas in a row – this one won the contest! (Although I still prefer Love Tea #7)
There is a slight sour note from the flavouring, or maybe the base, but that passes quickly and creates a nice dessert tea! Good chocolate flavour and the strawberry is strong, can’t be missed! The scent is just heavenly – I wish it came out in the taste a bit more!

For my second steep, I added a tiny pinch of rose congou – mmm much better! I love a bit of rose in my chocolate/fruit teas. I rounded it out with some vanilla and milk – very tasty!

I have been very impressed with Culinary teas for the most part! I wish the shipping to Canada wasn’t so crazy ; 3;

This tea is a massive let down and tastes like a basic black tea with absolutely nothing else added what so ever. It doesn’t even look like the tea in the photo! Bleh. Oh well.

I am a huge fan of dessert teas and of chai teas as well. Though the white chocolate flavor gets a bit lost in this tea, it’s sweet and spice flavor mix does provide for a delicious cup. I think I will play around with adding a bit more white chocolate or extra milk or even over ice to see how that effects the flavor. There is something really good here, it just needs a bit of love to bring it out more! I’ll post another note once I have mixed it up a bit.

What a dreamy romantic tea! This tea has everything that any rose tea should have. The floral scent and flavor notes are well balanced and the chocolate does not drown out the over all flavor of the black tea. A sweet lovely scented and very flavorful black tea blend.

We finished this up today. SIGH I love this tea! I love anything Tanzanian. I put this on my shopping list! So delicious for the morning!

I’m growing some chocolate mint and decided to add some of it to this tea this morning. Delicious!! The maltiness mixed in with the fresh chocolate mint was wonderful!

I crushed up 6-8 cardamom pods, 4 cloves, 1 all spice, 4-5 pieces of black pepper and a cinnamon stick and let it simmer in milk. I then added this Tanzania Organic Tea to the mix. WOW! The light creamy brown stew was delicious! I stored some in my thermos and drank the rest. I love the hint of spice in my mouth. It is tingly. I added sugar to it too. I love this blend. Favorite!!!!

I am fairly biased toward Tanzanian teas. This one is great! The tea bits look different than the usual cut up ones. They resemble small pellets. The scent is a nice, malty, sweet scent. I love this tea! This tastes exactly like the teas I’ve had there. It is a really dark brew and needs sugar and/or milk. I made this with cardamom last night as well. I need to go buy some milk! :)

I received this in a swap from Darby. White chocolate is my fav type of chocolate, so creamy so sweet, delicious.
This is definitely one spicy smelling chai, that is however the only smell I am getting. I love the white chips in it. I had to add a few more because I just knew that the few small chips wouldn’t make enough of a white chocolate difference, so I did.
Upon pouring it has a very creamy like colour ohh should be yummy.
Wow this has to be the spiciest chai I have tasted, one of the spices comes out at the front I just can’t quite place it, maybe nutmeg. It’s also creamy I think from my added white chips, although I am getting no white chocolate flavour. Perhaps a little honey would bring it out. As this tea sits and cools slightly it looses the creaminess and becomes bitter. Unfortunetly I can’t chug a hot cup of tea.

First, I want to thank Alphakitty for this one, too!

At first I found this one to be a little strange. It tasted a little bitter but also like Peanut Butter, Apples, Caramel, Cream, various Candies, and flowers.

After it cooled at room temp for a few moments the bitterness was toned down a bit but was still present. The Apple stepped up more. It was a ‘nice’ sweet. But it’s a tad oily due to at least one of the ingredients and the caramel is a bitter yet attempt-at-a-creamier type caramel.

Not one of my faves from Culinary but I’m sure glad I got to try it. Something wasn’t totally jiving for me yet it wasn’t bad. I would sip this on occasion but probably wouldn’t buy it for myself. Perhaps a more gentle infusion time would fit the bill here?

Aroma is strong and slightly peppery. The color of the liquor is very dark brown. The flavor is a medium-strong and it a good-sturdy Irish Breakfast tea! It’s mildly black-peppery and has a hint of an un-sweetened caramel type taste towards the end of the sip trying to hide underneath!

Thanks Liberteas for this one!

I really thought I already logged this one but apparently I didn’t. Oops!

I did two infusions and was just going to backlog but I guess I will start-a-new and officially review :) Stay tuned!

Thanks LiberTEAs!!!

This is so springy and fun and colorful and floral and fruity! It’s tasty, too!

It has just the right amount of Cherry. The Rose/Blossom additional are at the perfect intensity for my palate. The Sencha quality is top-notch!

A Sweet Treat! I’m LOVING this one, too! It’s been a great tea day!

COLD NOTES:
Yes!!!! This is MUCH better iced! Oddly…I didn’t care for it HOT…but…that’s not how it was intended so I won’t hold that against ’em.

COLD this is tasty! After ‘brewing’ the color of the liquor is that of lemon lime gatorade. It’s vegetal and sweet and has nice mango highlights without being overly flavored. The Matcha turned out very satisfying COLD. The Matcha/Sencha worked well. It’s just enough fruity, just enough vegetal-grass vs vegetal-sweet, and just enough green kick to get ya going!

Yup! COLD…certainly the way to go!

Here I go again…PURPOSELY NOT following the instructions…I’m such a REBEL!

I ‘brewed’ up some this and it’s in the FRIG now…but…I have a sip or two of the HOT right now. It smells LOVELY…dry.

The little bit of hot I am drinking is SUPER STRONG vegetal GREEN Matcha. INTENSE. I will try this a few ways – and will try the suggested method soon, too. I won’t rate YET but just wanted to try it hot!

So I could have sworn this tea was in my cupboard, but apparently it’s not on Steepster… nor could I find it on Culinary’s website. I got it a few months ago when I won the $100 gift certificate, which I used to indulge in some dessert blends I usually wouldn’t buy for myself. This one popped right out at me, since caramel apples are some of my favorite fair food and they have such a high calorie content recreating them in tea-form seemed like a good way to relive the experience without all of the sugar. I made this last night while hiding out in the bedroom: I am SO tired of this heatwave, and it’s the only room of the apartment that gets fully cool when it’s in the 100s. On the plus side it’s arctic chilly in there, so I can have a hot cup of tea without feeling like I’m on fire!

This is a great dessert blend, and you can clearly taste the caramel and apple notes, along with a rich, creamy undertone. It’s quite indulgent, especially with a little cream and sugar. It doesn’t need much since it’s naturally quite sweet! Like many of their black blends that I’ve had, boiling water is a big no or it ends up a bitter mess, but brewed at a more gentle 195 this is heavenly. Frankly there’s not much “tea” taste and more “holy wow this tastes like a melted caramel apple” but sometimes that’s really exactly what you want.

-Dry leaves consist of small twisted leaves with tiny pieces of twig. Wet leaves reveal small to medium size leaf pieces.
-Dry leaves smell strongly of plum and sugar. Tea liquor aroma is of fruity cinnamon.
-Tea liquor is a yellow-brown color.
-Fruity plum flavor with a mouth-filling cinnamon finish.
-Self-drinking, sweetener optional.
-Very good tea. Perfect during the holidays. No trace of bitterness.

Backlog:

I’d much rather drink a caffeinated version of a tea than a decaffeinated variety, and I know I’ve said that more than once before. Even some of the best decaffeinated teas … they still taste a wee bit thin and just a bit off. There are some exceptions to this (Vanilla Comoro comes to mind immediately.)

And while this a wee bit thinner in texture than what I might experience from a typical Jasmine green, it’s still a really good tea and I would say it’s one of the better decaf teas I’ve tried.

Here’s my full-length review: http://sororiteasisters.com/2013/07/24/jasmine-green-decaffeinated-tea-from-culinary-teas/

I’ve mentioned before that I tend to be very leery of decaffeinated teas. Once upon a time, decaffeinated meant “icky chemical taste” to me. Fortunately, I’m not getting any icky chemical taste here. Just lovely, sweet green tea and deliciously exotic jasmine notes. Not soapy. Just beautiful flavor.

This tea does taste a bit thinner than a caffeinated green tea, but, it is really quite minimal. It doesn’t really disrupt the taste, nor do I find myself wishing for more thickness or body to this… it’s quite nice the way it is. I’m just stating that I do notice a slight variation from what I’d experience with a caffeinated version of green tea … and I’m very happy that it is only slight!

A big thanks to Azzrian for this sample!

I kind of have a love/hate relationship with chocolate mint tea. I really, really like chocolate mint, mint is easily the second best thing you can pair chocolate with (Vanilla being the first, and a lot of people don’t quite consider that fair).

Now, take this tea for example. It’s quite tasty, the flavoring is good, the chocolate is well done and has a definitely chocolate liqueur taste to it, with the mint flavoring coming in afterwards to cool everything down. There is a smooth black tea flavor that comes in just slightly at the end, but it isn’t strong enough to really play much into the beverage experience. Definitely a solid tea that I could keep around, if I wasn’t such a snot.

But I am, and here’s why: just chop up some mint leaves and put them in the darn tea already. Flavoring is fine and dandy, and really I don’t pick sides on the whole natural vs artificial flavoring thing, as long as the taste works out. But for me, with mint, it never really seems that the taste does work out.

Small detour: I wanted to talk about the weird mint flavoring here, and why it didn’t taste like, you know, mint-mint to me. But my enter key got stuck, and was inserting a billion new lines into my review. So I did what any sane, rational thinking man would do: grabbed the nearest metal thing and pry it off with brute force. This worked well, and my enter key popped up with a nice, satisfying snap and a solid propulsion arc… directly into my tea cup. Seriously, this is comedy gold.

Anyway… plus, mint is so much prettier, and seems to meld in with the tea flavors a lot more than mint flavoring does. This is quite likely psychosomatic, but it seems that I’m much happier with my mint experience in tea if there’s actually shredded up mint leaves, as opposed to mint flavoring which has been applied.

That’s probably enough out of me tonight folks. Have a good first of July ;)

Yay Steepster is back up!

Tonight we are trying another sample from the generous Azzrian. Thank you!

Chocolate and mint are mixed pretty well here. The mint is a tad bit pushy but not enough to hide the chocolate. The base is smooth and quite mellow. This was a good dessert tea.

Experience buying from Culinary Teas http://steepster.com/places/2981-culinary-teas-online-milford-indiana
I bought a partial sample of this sometime in the fall of 2011.

Appearance and Aroma of dry leaf: about the same as the rest of the flavor-added black teas from Culinary Teas: medium grade leaf, strong, sweet, fruity aroma, hard to say if it smelled like pineapple, but I did like it.

Brewing guidelines: sixteen-oz ceramic cup with metal basket; stevia added; my standard black tea steeping times and temperatures; three steepings.

Flavor of tea liquor (based on the most recent session): The first was fruity, but a little bitter and too strong for me (maybe that’s from drinking the delicate flavored green teas as often as I have been these days?); better on the second (no bitterness, and not as intense), but with a somewhat artificial-ness to the more-or-less pineapple-like flavor; and the third is tasty, but considerably milder. Still, there was no off-flavor in any of the steepings.

Value: Culinary flavor-added tea’s are generally very reasonably priced; as most of her flavor-added black teas are, this one is $8.15 / 4 OZ, which puts it at about $2 / OZ (and even less with any discounts and/or if you buy it in larger quantities).

Overall: I bought this one since I love pineapple (incidentally it was not in the batch of flavor-added blacks I bought during the Black Friday sale). This is at least the third flavor-added black Culinary Tea I have noticed that I find a bitter taste from on the initial steeping, and something tells me it may be wise to adjust one of my brewing parameters (either lower the temperature, or shorten the time) the next time I brew another flavor-added black and see if that helps. I will say these teas always seem to have a nice, clear color; that’s always good; I wonder if this one would be better iced. Oh well, although it’s reasonably tasty, there are plenty of other flavor-added teas that are more interesting than this one, and I’m more interested in pure teas now, anyway. This is the last of it and as it stands I don’t plan to repurchase it.

Experience buying from Culinary Teas http://steepster.com/places/2981-culinary-teas-online-milford-indiana

Appearance and Aroma of dry leaf: about the same as the rest of the flavor-added black teas from Culinary Teas: medium grade leaf, strong, spicy aroma with the barest hint of pumpkin.

Brewing guidelines: four TSP, four cups H2O; loose in four-cup ceramic teapot; stevia added; my standard black tea steeping times and temperatures; three steepings; two separate sessions.

Flavor of tea liquor (based on the most recent session): mostly chocolaty, no pumpkin flavor I could taste on the first two steepings, and some kind of weird off-flavor that was in the first two steepings, but which was more prominent on the third steeping. It did not taste good at all when it came to room temperature.

Value: Culinary flavor-added tea’s are generally very reasonably priced; as most of her flavor-added black teas are, this one is $8.15 / 4 OZ, which puts it at about $2 / OZ (and even less with any discounts and/or if you buy it in larger quantities).

Overall: This is the sixth? of the flavor-added black tea samples from Culinary. I was ‘scolded’ for brewing this up out of a desire to finish these samples off as she’s not digging drinking scalding hot tea in the summer; what’s her problem, anyway?! :p It’s weird that the chocolate notes were much more in the forefront and that there was no pumpkin flavor (at least none I could discern). I didn’t care for this tea, and my wife didn’t either. Not planning on buying this one again. Still, another one bites the dust … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNQRfBAzSzo (I didn’t know Queen performed this?).

I found some other notes on this tea, so I am updating this review (6/12/2012)(Changes in bold)

Backlogging

Experience buying from Culinary Teas http://steepster.com/places/2981-culinary-teas-online-milford-indiana

I bought a one OZ sample of this in late November, 2011, having brewed it twice (most recently on 6/8/2012?).

Appearance and Aroma of dry leaf: It had a strong, sweet fruity aroma (definitely smell the apple) that smelled like tobacco, and also reminded me of a kind of bubble gum I would buy as a kid (or pop rocks); dry leaf was about the same as the rest of the flavor-added black teas from Culinary Teas: medium grade leaf.

Brewing guidelines: four TSP, four cups H2O; four-cup ceramic teapot, with ceramic basket; stevia added; my standard black tea steeping times and temperatures; three steepings; two separate sessions.

Flavor of tea liquor (based on the most recent session):
1st: OK, but A little bitter
2nd: OK flavor, but missing something.
3rd: not much flavor

Wet Leaf: Slight scent of tobacco and of something artificially sweet.

Tea liquor color: Wonderful, clear, caramel color.

Value: Culinary flavor-added tea’s are generally very reasonably priced; this one is $8.15 / 4 OZ, which puts it at about $2 / OZ (and even less with any discounts and/or if you buy it in larger quantities).

Overall: This was the forth of the batch of thirteen flavor-added teas from Culinary we finished off. To me the best thing about this tea was the aroma of the dry leaf. Overall, my wife especially felt that this tea was a “no go” (we are still looking for that one tea ….).