Kusmi Tea
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Sipdown no. 5 of August 2019 (no. 91 of 2019 total, no. 579 grand total).
Given my poor sipdown showing last month, I’m trying to squeeze in a few on this very last day of August to get myself back to a respectable level. I’ve already bettered my July total with this one, but that isn’t saying a ton. I just don’t have it in me to sipdown 5 more teas in one day, so I’m calling this month a miss as well.
I remember liking this a lot more when I drank it way back when, but maybe it just hasn’t aged well. It was good cold — No. 1 really loved this one and drank it by the pitcher full. If I was looking for a Constant Comment-like tea but with a French twist, I’d buy it again.
In the sample tin, there’s a strong spicy smell to the dry leaves which are dark with bits of what looks like citrus peel among them. This says it has three kinds of citrus in it, lemon, bergamot and grapefruit, but I am not smelling any of those. Instead I smell the spices, clove in the lead by a wide margin.
It mellows some after steeping but there’s still a good bit of clove, a vanilla note, and a bit of citrus. It’s a dark reddish amber.
The minute I took a sip, I knew I’d tasted something similar before. And then it hit me. This is v. much like Constant Comment in terms of its spice profile. It isn’t as orangey, but that’s what it reminds me of. The main difference is that in the Prince V., it’s a more subtle flavor and the tea shines through.
It’s quite nice for when you’re feeling that such a flavor profile would hit the spot, but you’re not in the mood for heavy spice. The tea base is smooth and tasty, and the spice is just enough to flavor the tea without masking it in any sense of the world.
I like.
Preparation
Sipdown no. 4 of 2016 (225 total). A big tin.
After putting some in the fridge to cold brew, I had about two spoons left. I made some hot so I could record the sipdown.
I will say that as much as I don’t find the hot version at all interesting, the cold version is quite nice. I think the same things that make it not a great hot tea to me make it a good cold one. It’s unobtrusive and lacking in depth, bland but not without flavor. And these things make it easy to drink as a cold tea.
Now I have to figure out what to try cold next…
This is the current cold brew, and I suspect it will live out its existence in my cupboard that way for the most part. It makes a perfectly decent, if not particularly distinctive, iced tea. No. 2, however, voted that it needed sweetening. I personally don’t think it does, but then I don’t take sweetener in my iced tea evah.
Sipdown no. 142 of the year 2014. This isn’t actually the sipdown I had planned. It’s also sort of a cheat to call it a sipdown because although the sample tin is now gone, the big non-sample tin hasn’t even been opened yet. But hey, it’s a container out of my life, so I’m counting it.
Something seems to have gone wrong, though. This steeped very weakly today even though I used what I ordinarily use to measure a single cup serving for the cups I have at work. Not sure what happened.
Since it wasn’t a favorite to begin with, it’s not too much of a disappointment. And any disappointment that might have been had is far overshadowed by the feeling of accomplishment from getting back on sipdown track. Yay!
I wanted to try this again to see whether I thought it was worth tossing into the take to work pile. It’s billed as a lower caffeine tea so I thought it would be good for work in the afternoon. I had it on the heels of my oft-noted English Breakfast.
After I tasted it again, I decided to bring it to work. It’s not a favorite. It’s kind of bland and doesn’t have a lot of flavor except the peppery flavor I noted before.
I’m bumping the rating down a bit because I’ve had so many better black teas lately, including from Kusmi.
If there’s darjeeling in here, as the Kusmi site appears to suggest, it’s a very dark one. The dry leaves in the sample tin have no green-ness to them. If I try really hard, I can get a bit of a darjeeling sharpness in the smell of the dry leaf, but it isn’t overly obvious. Mostly it smells like a peppery black tea. Hmm. I got pepper in the Earl Grey too.
The aroma is mild with a tiny bit of the pepper I smelled in the dry leaf. Otherwise it has a generic black tea smell. It’s a medium-dark amber with a little red in it.
The flavor has a cleanness and a perkiness to it that could well be from darjeeling. It’s a little brisk, and fairly smooth except for a small, barely noticeable peppery kick. I can see why this is billed as an evening tea. It isn’t thick or malty or hearty or eye-openingly strong, or any of the other qualities I’ve come to associate with breakfast blends.
It’s sort of like the Earl Grey, except without the pretext of being Earl Grey and so lacking a little bitterness injected by the bergamot, and though it has a peppery reminder, it’s not nearly as peppery as the Earl Grey is to my palate. Which makes it, actually, more pleasant to my mind than the Earl Grey. There’s a mild, slightly sweet aftertaste.
Though I like some of the other Kusmis better, this isn’t bad. It’s probably on the low end of the good black tea huddle I have going that I’m going to have to pare down eventually, but only because it doesn’t have the depth and character I enjoy in really fine black teas.
Preparation
Sipdown no. 10 of 2020 (no. 605 total).
I could have sworn I just posted a note on this. Maybe it didn’t take?
Luckily, it was short. I just noted we polished off the rest of this as cold brew and it was every bit as tasty as it was hot. The first two notes provide detail upon which I can’t improve.
Sipdown no. 185. Sample tin. I’m counting this as a sipdown even though I’m pretty sure I have a full sized tin of this somewhere.
This time around, I got the pepper in the aroma, but not really in the taste. It’s funny, having had the Simpson & Vail Creamy Earl Grey, which wasn’t creamy or an Earl Grey to my tastebuds earlier this morning, I am noticing similarities between that and the Troika. Except the Troika is less floral and more citrusy.
A bit of orange, a bit of undefined citrus that for me leans toward lemon, and underneath a smooth, mild black tea base that as I mentioned before seems to be easy on the stomach. Not sure it’s distinctive enough to be a must have, but it’s definitely a very good tea and one that might very well hit a very particular spot from time to time.
After yesterday’s October Revelation mixture of seven citrus fruits, this seems a modest little tea. Only three citrus fruits here, and I’m expecting to taste orange and maybe a little lemon. Seems like this should really be called Troika times two, as there are two troikas here, the citrus fruits and the black teas. But that wouldn’t sound very Russian.
Bergamot is the main scent of the dry leaves. It opens up after steeping into an orange-laced, somewhat fruity, somewhat biscuity aroma. The tea has a medium amber color. I’m not getting pepper here, which I wondered about since I definitely get that in the Kusmi Earl Grey.
The taste is quite nice. I think I prefer it to the busier flavor of October Revelation. It’s sort of a citrus equivalent to the Kusmi 4 Red Fruits, except that the individual notes are harder to detect, but that may be because they’re all sort of similar flavors to begin with. Though the bergamot was strong in the fragrance of the dry leaf it is not strong here. The tea is smooth and easy on the stomach. The tea underneath the citrus is perky without being darjeelingy if that makes sense. It has a cleanness and a bit of briskness to it.
This is one for the cupboard, I think.
Preparation
Sipdown no. 9 of March 2019 (no. 44 of 2019 total, no. 532 grand total).
I drank the last of this as a cold brew. My initial notes on this tea are still ringing true to me, though I wouldn’t have identified a smoky note in the most recent cold brew, I don’t think. At least I’m not identifying it now.
It’s the sort of thing where I’d be happy to drink it, but I don’t need another tea like it. It’s solid but not distinctive enough to merit a permanent cupboard spot.
I made this into a cold brew sort of accidentally. I didn’t remember what the tea was like when I decided to use it, and later read my original note which mentioned smokiness. I was worried that wouldn’t translate well into a cold tea but it did.
It’s actually pretty nice. The smoke is present but not very strong and just gives some additional interest to a tasty cold tea. I noticed that I detected some sharp notes in the hot version. I don’t get the same thing in the cold. It’s a smooth iced tea.
I was sick for a couple of weeks starting about three weeks ago, and guess what. The 4 year old now has what I had. He’s getting better; today’s the first time in four days he hasn’t had fever. But as a result of his being home sick, and me just now being well after a pretty nasty bug, I’m pretty emotionally spent. I’ve been trying to work from home while attending to him, but I haven’t been exercising or paying attention to what I eat and I feel bloated and my energy level is like, nowhere, man. I haven’t even felt like making tea. Though if someone made some for me I’d drink it.
I thought this might be a good choice to break me back in since Kusmi tends to be fairly mild. I have a little sample tin of this, and they fill these to the brim. When I stick the spoon into these little tins I always feel somehow like I’m loading a pipe with tobacco. I have to use the fingers of the non-spoon hand to keep the tea in the spoon while I’m trying to get it out of the tin without boosting tea over the edge and onto the counter.
In the tin, the leaves have that spidery, Ceylon look to them. They smell slightly smoky, and mysteriously, slightly sharp like an oolong or a darjeeling. There’s no maltiness that I can detect.
The tea’s aroma, though, does have some maltiness. I’m guessing there’s some Assam in here. It also has a fruity smell, slightly berry-ish. But also some stone fruit notes? It doesn’t quite steep to the Ceylon red/orange color that’s so gorgeous, but it just needs a drop or too more red to get there.
The flavor is fairly mild, fairly smooth, and fairly evenly distributed between a sweet-ish malty note, a smoky note and a sharp fruity note. I wonder if there is oolong in this? This isn’t called “Russian Caravan” but the Russian nomenclature makes me wonder if that is where the sharp fruity note is coming from. The smokiness isn’t enough to seem like it comes from lapsang. It might be from Keemun instead.
The tea is medium-light bodied with a clean feel to it. I’m liking this just fine as a late breakfast blend. I really don’t know what to do about the breakfast blend problem, though. I like so many of them, I really no longer have any excuse to keep adding to the list. I have to come up with some way to differentiate between them and zero in on a few true favorites. Sigh.
