Liquid Proust Teas

Really tasty, wheat/grass-forward green tea- very organic in flavor, almost with barnyard, farm-like notes of hay, apples, spices, grass, and similar profiles. Comforting and unique, with a slight nuttiness. I might try steeping it more.

My second blend from Mr L.P. Blends arent something i usually go for, perhaps having my experience spoilt by twinigs et al. ergh.

This, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty. It smells delish, and tastes as good as it smells, which is when usually (imo) fruity blend teas fall flat.

Peach, Honey, Sugar, Candy, with a slight green Oolong taste, with a lovely aftertaste and headfeel.

I brewed this western style, as I have never made iced tea before, but this is now spurring me on to try that as a next experiment.

Really very nice and will definitely be trying more blends after this. It worked very well for me western style at 90c 3 mins. i wasnt sure how much to put in because of the flowers but 4g worked a treat.

I love this. It is so creamy and toasty and warm…perfect for a fall day.

a decent tea:

when i smell the leaves dry, they smell like herbs and spices. :)

when i smell the leaves wet, the smell is intensified.

when i smell the brewed tea, i smell lemon, strawberry, herbs and spices.

when i taste the tea i taste lemons, strawberries, herbs and spices.

the color of the brewed tea is a bright yellow.

the smells of the tea remind me of the lemon scented playdough by tuti fruity i used to play with as a kid.

i rate this a 75 because its a decent tea but i have never really been into herbal tea blends

many thanks to liquidproust for this decent tea sample.

Sipdown (127)!

Another tea I was sure I’d finished off already, but then found the tin of it in my stash and realized I still had a cup worth of it left.

So made a nice big Nordic mug of it to drink; it was nice and roasty with solid peanut notes and just a bit of of a grassy and lemony undertone. It’s definitely old; I remember this tasting much stronger in previous cuppings. But for how old it is, it’s far from bad. It was good and pretty affordable for a yellow tea – and I got to help support Liquid Proust by buying it. So a win, overall.

Really nice afternoon Gong Fu session while I was waiting for my tea eggs to finish! I’m honestly liking this the more that I drink it, but I’m also finding that the more I drink it the less I taste the honeysuckle in it. So it’s a bit of a catch 22.

Today’s session had such beautiful peanut notes, with an underlying grassyness and a bit of a hay note that reminded me of the timothy hay that Eilert, my guinea pig, eats. But in a good way! I love the smell of the timothy hay right out of the bag. First couple infusions had an almost “lemon pepper” taste but it quickly subsided. Last infusions had that sort of refreshing “mountain air” kind of taste.

Mmm!

So, I promised my sister I’d take her out trick or treating however long she wanted to go. I expected to be out getting candy for at least a few hours, but after four blocks and twenty minutes she was ready to go home…

Since we were back by 6:30PM I get to drink more tea! Last time I drank this one I was really sick and couldn’t quite taste it – I’ve been wanting to revisit it ever since so that’s what I’m doing this evening! I’m four infusions deep now and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really taste the honeysuckle at all. Instead, I’m getting really rich notes of hazelnuts and peanuts! Quite tasty; not as complex as other yellow teas I’ve tried but very enjoyable!

Happy I revisited this one!

Cold Brew.

This is the last tea I had before I got really sick. At this point I certainly wasn’t ready to admit just how sick I was feeling, but drinking this kind of slapped me in the face and made me go “No, you’ve been sick all week. You need to stop pushing yourself and rest”. And what about it made me realize that? Well, I went to drink the cold brew and all I could taste was water, and maybe lemon? I may have made that lavour up though: I was so desperate to not be sick I could have possibly been projecting past experiences with yellow tea on this one.

So, I resolved to not waste anymore good tea, especially something like a yellow tea which I really want to be able to taste and document to further learn from, until I’m back to ‘tip top shape’. I’m still working on that…

Enjoying this one while I’m working thru lunch. It’s been one heck of a week! I like it. Fruity with hints of floral. It reminds me of a sweet strawberry floral tea but I’m also eating right along with this tea so that may be screwing up my taste buds. No matter, this one is pretty good. Can’t say I’d want a ton of it but today I’m enjoying it.

It’s 11pm and I realized I was drinking shou… no no no… switching to something floral to ease me for the night.

So here’s the story about this tea: Once upon a time Princess Jasmine and Mulan ended up having a tea party and Princess Jasmine brought silver tipped white tea to show off an elegant tea but Mulan had brought some rolled green jasmine tea. They discussed the order of drinking the two teas, does floral come after or before? The solution was to mix the two teas and then tell Mr. Richardson about the experience of a white tea over powering jasmine until the second steep when the jasmine shines, but Mr. Richardson was like “I’m going to spice this up a bit, I mean ‘floral’ this up a bit”. So he made some tea seasoning and made one odd tea.

Anyways, why did I steep this tea like this??? http://postimg.org/image/prk0qrcyf/full/
Talk about a rookie mistake :/
https://www.facebook.com/LiquidProustTeas/videos/vb.1424903851168617/1495418324117169/?type=2&theater

I received this as a free bonus with my order – Thank You!

I’m not sure what to think of this. It’s a little fruity, a little nutty, and a little floral – but it’s not any specific fruit, nut, flower. It just seems vague to me. I’m not sure what it’s really suppose to be – ingredients list black tea, rose petals, almonds, apples….
There is nothing offensive or wrong about this tea, but it just seems generic to me – not really special. It’s just ok.

Sipdown (120)!

First tea of the new year! There was no deliberate choice to the tea I picked out, but when I stopped and thought about it I realized that two of my tea related resolutions for the year were to get my cupboard under 100 teas and to explore Pu’erh in greater depth so perhaps there’s something kind of perfect to the fact that the tea I chose was a sipdown and a Pu’erh. Maybe that’s an indicator of good things to come this year?

I like to think so.

You know what else I started off my year with? A new pet! January first I brewed up my tea, and took my tea with me to the pet store. I was kind of looking for a rat, but when we got there they didn’t have any. I didn’t go home empty handed though: instead I brought home the most adorable Skinny Pig! What’s a skinny pig, you ask? Well a skinny pig is a hairless guinea pig! AND HE’S SO CUTE!!! But damn does he eat a lot. Maybe I’ll post pictures of him…

I named him Eilert after Eilert Lovborg (In Henrik Ibson’s Hedda Gabler). He’s my new best friend! So gentle, and calm. We had a nap together today.

So, that’s how I started my new year; good tea and a good pet.

My mom is really enjoying her “Tea a Day” advent calendar which I made for her!

This was this tea from Day #3; I only included two different kinds of Pu’erh in the calendar. This one, and Tea Desire’s Caramel Pu’erh. I may be trying to get her outside of her tea drinking comfort zone but I’m not entirely comfortable around Pu yet either so I took even smaller baby steps with her.

The ‘rules’ of her calendar are that she has to prepare each day’s tea ON the day and she has to finish the entire cup. We’ve already broken one of those rule’s though because she was NOT a fan of this tea at all; but don’t worry! I didn’t let a drop go to waste. Instead, I drank the remainder of her mug! I thought this was fabulous. Hopefully, she likes the other Pu’erh in the calendar better…

Cold Brew!

I made Laphet (pickled tea salad) last night, and drank this whilst preparing everything for that. I think this was the perfect tea to drink while making everything though: the entire kitchen just stunk of intense green tea, garlic, and lemon. The salad uses 100g of green tea which has to get steeped in a pot of boiling water several times so the smell was super strong. I needed an equally strong tea to drink during the process, otherwise everything else going on would have just engulfed the experience.

I’ll write about the salad later, after it’s done fermenting and I can try it.

This cold brew was really interesting; there were notes of copper/brass and a metallic like tinge, as well as a meatyness and leathery quality to the flavour and of course a strong earthiness. It was as tasty as the hot brewed version, but in a very different way.

It’s also hard to explain, but the mouthfeel felt really, uh, round? But not like in a “well balanced and smooth” way (though it was) but in a way that was more of an experience and ‘action’. This might sound crazy, but I took a sip and it felt like I was licking the surface of a big, copper/brass orb? Sometimes I hate using poetic language to describe the feeling of drinking tea but that might be the best I can do in this case.

I’m totally believing the “psychoactive” properties of the Dagga in this tea…

I made a 16 oz. mug of it last night to enjoy while catching up on Heroes Reborn (anyone else watching!? I’d love to discuss fan theory) and the taste was basically all semi-sweet nutty/woody and very earthy Pu’erh but after finishing off the mug I just felt like jelly. Ever been high (or not high) and had that feeling like you were peacefully ‘sinking into yourself’? It felt like that. So calming.

And the Pu is smooth/tasty to boot.

Confession time:

I had no idea what wild dagga was when I bought this tea, I just thought it looked pretty and I wanted to continue my exploration of Pu’erh. Imagine my surprise when I looked up wild dagga and learned that dagga is a mild psychoactive plant sometimes compared to cannabis.

Straight from Wikipedia: “It is sometimes used as a Cannabis substitute by recreational users as an alternative to illegal psychoactive plants”.

Now, I’m not sure if those properties come through through steeped tea because the article references smoking the plant, but one thing is certainly true – I steeped up a mug of this Western style and after finishing that one mug I felt more tea drunk and pacified than any other tea has ever made me feel. And the taste was great on top of that; I don’t think I tasted the dagga at all (I don’t even know what it’s supposed to taste like) but the Pu was very nice. Smooth, earthy with savory, meaty notes and a cocoa sweetness. Maybe a little wood-y as well.

I look forward to further exploring this one.

Sipdown (128)!

Finished off as a hot mug, which was sort of unpleasant until this reached around room temperature; and then it was surprisingly good? The floral notes which I find very poorly paired with the chocolate notes seemed to melt away and instead it was like drinking milk chocolate. I feel like that’s more what LP intended this to taste like. Not sure why I could only achieve that flavour so briefly, though.

Happy (Belated) Turkey Day to my fellow Canadians!

I cold brewed this one for work today just to switch things up from the last time I had it, but it’s still not doing it for me. I’m sad to report that after a couple swigs after hauling in some dressers someone wanted to donated I decided to go without tea/hydration for the rest of my shift rather than drink the rest of this…

Sorry Liquid Proust…

I’ll continue to experiment, though.

This is one of Andrew, from Liquid Proust Teas, crazy ideas but one which certainly looked interesting to me. I can’t actually remember ever trying a mind blowing chocolate oolong and so the possibility of this tea filling that whole intrigued me a lot! The dry leaf looks really interesting; and it has a soft, sweet cocoa smell and some floral notes too.

Hmm, this didn’t brew up to be the most appetizing smelling or aesthetically beautiful. It’s very murky/cloudy looking, and I get the impression it may have an oilier mouthfeel. However, the really concerning thing is the aroma of the liquor coming from the cup: it’s like the most floral oolong smell I’ve ever come across mixed with mildew and wet dog? And I know that’s harsh – but honestly that’s what I’m smelling and it’s making me gag just a little bit.

The weird thing is that it actually doesn’t taste bad; and I don’t know if I’ve ever come across a tea with such a disconnect between the taste and smell since those two senses are so incredibly intertwined. I mean it’s certainly not the delicious cocoa tea I was expecting but it’s actually nice enough. There are very strong nutty notes and then more medium notes of burnt toast and cocoa in the body of the sip. There are also subtle moss and floral notes. I don’t really like the way the more natural/floral notes pair with the toasty notes and sweet cocoa – it’s kind of like some sort of unholy Frankenstein’s monster of tea.

I’m gonna call it; this is the first offering from Liquid Proust that I dislike – I could probably handle it if, when I went in for a sip, I didn’t have to smell the steeped tea but that just kills it for me. That said, every other review I’ve read has been favourable so if you get the chance to sample this I encourage trying it and forming your own opinion. It’s just not for me.

I’m torn with this one…..
The genmaicha base (or blend) is just spectacular, amazing, phenomenal – it seems almost sacrilegious to add stuff to it. With nothing added this could easily be one of my fav genmaichas.
But – he did add stuff to it…..
Toasty, roasty, nutty everything a good genmaicha should be and then way in the back there is just this hint of cocoa. The sencha is there but without being grassy and intrusive. I think the hojicha is a smart addition, just adds more nuttiness to the genmaicha. I’m not really getting the caramel, but there is a sweetness here.
I really think this is a case where less is more. If this were overpowering chocolate, I would miss all the awesome notes in the tea. Perfect example of using a good quality base and then adding subtle flavors to it without loosing the awesomeness of the tea.
If you are looking for a heavily chocolate genmaicha – this isn’t it. But if you love good genmaicha – you should try this.
I’m happily drinking my 3rd cup of it – but still torn about spoiling a great genmaicha.

I’m a huge fan of coffee flavored teas – Davids Coffee Pu’erh is one of my secret guilty pleasure and I really really miss HI Moosetracks. When I saw this as an offering from Liquid Proust, had to try it.
MMMMmmmmmmmm awesome. This is everything it should be. Dark and rich. It has a really thick mouthfeel. The coffee is present without being overly bitter or beating you over the head. The black base adds some dark chocolate notes. The pu’erh is more subtle but it adds some really nice earthiness and depth. I was really worried about the grapefruit (I don’t normally do well with citrus in tea), and while I don’t really taste it as grapefruit, there is a light acidic note in the back that breaks up the heaviness of the black and pu’erh. I think it’s one of those things that I woudn’t have understood what it was (without being told) but would miss it if it was taken out of the blend.
For my tastes this is almost perfect – well balanced, flavors as they should be. This is one that just makes me happy. :)