Nothing But Tea

I really liked it, I found it a nice change from the whites and greens I’ve been drinking. The chocloatley notes are quite in your face but for the price a nice cuppa.

Had this at bamd rehearsal last night. It was warm and comforting (our bandroom has a heating problem and the fans are always full blast). The tea itself was smooth and vegetal and the rice gave a nice nuttiness. It did feel a bit thin though, I was expecting a thicker mouthfeel.

I got the unscented version of this flowering tea, and I consider it a good choice, because the flavor is very enjoyable, like a quality tea, and scenting would have changed it. I think the long buds used in this flower are white tea, judging from the taste, liquor color, and steeping performance. Not a hint of astringency or bitterness, and the golden liquor is thick and rich in mouthfeel, aka body. I love a heavy-bodied tea, when the flavor is light.

The pink blossom looks similar to an amaranth flower, but the seller says it’s lychee flower. The pink flower hasn’t risen to the top yet, and watching for it to release is kind of intriguing. Flavor and body maintained through multiple steeps, trailing off at the fourth one. Be sure to use cool enough water for this tea. I poured the water into a 16oz glass pot and waited until it cooled to 175F. I gave the tea flower ball a quick rinse under the faucet and gently placed it on the water. The bloom didn’t sink to the bottom until it had been open a while, but it was worth the wait of a few minutes. I refilled the pot when it was 2/3 empty, letting the hot water run down the side of the pot, so the bloom would be less disturbed. I watched and sipped from this bloom for hours.

It made a good-sized bloom, 3in across. I think this is the best-tasting, sweetest tea I’ve had from a flowering type. I would actually feel good about serving it to a guest. Little to no aroma, but that’s okay in my book, even though I love a good jasmine. It’s just that the scented flowering teas I’ve had didn’t taste so good. I haven’t tried the jasmine-scented version of this bloom which is sold by the same seller. Maybe it could combine the best of all worlds?!

When I first came upon this it came as quite a surprise to me.

First of all it comes in long strands – think anorexic All-Bran. These are a bit difficult to spoon out of the container – you either get just two or three strands on the spoon or a baby haystack towering over it.

It’s also a surprise in the cup. There’s a good, generic tea flavour, but there is also a definite element of coffee or chocolate. I also get the tiniest hints of eau de cologne and raw mushroom.

That may all read a bit odd, but it’s become one of my real favourites – I really love it.

I make it with one heaped teaspoon to a mug and steep for three minutes.

ETA – Over time I’ve slightly downgraded my opinion of this. When I first tasted it the chocolate element was something new to me (in a tea, anyway). As I’ve tasted more and more teas with a chocolate element I’ve come to realise that this one has it a bit too strongly so that it’s not balanced with the other flavours. So I’m now tasting it as quite pleasant but rather ‘one-dimensional’.

Incidentally, I accidently found that I can make a quite interesting and enjoyable mug of tea by using a heaped half-teaspoon of this and a heaped half-teaspoon of the Postcard Teas Big Smoke. Doesn’t really work with the teapot, though – by the time you get to the second mug the flavours have blended together into something different.

Nom. I liked this one a bit. For me it had all the earthy, dark, heavy flavors that I want from a pu-erh, and none of the scary fishtank or aquarium flavors that I really don’t want. I’m on my second western-style steep, and it’s still very flavorful and amazingly dark. Thanks Angrboda!

I figure I have time for a quickie before the boyfriend joins me. Wait, that came out wrong.

Anyway, the leaves here doesn’t really have much in the way of aroma in the dry form. There leaves look CTC, but even so the aroma doesn’t have much kick. It’s got a certain sweetness to it, but nothing that I can really put a finger on it.

It’s the same after steeping. The aroma is rather weak and what is there of it has that slightly spicy, kind of earthy wet-dog and leather note to it.

The flavour is, considering the aroma, surprisingly sweet. but also with a rather rough and coffee-like background. It’s not astringent or outright bitter at all, but I wouldn’t really call it smooth either because of that coffee note.

This stuff tastes kind of like it has been brewed in a coffee pot and nothing can wreck a tea as efficiently as a coffee bean.

I’ve had a green tea from Bolivia that I rather liked, but apart from that I have yet to be impressed with the tea production of South America.

I’m not sure if I’ve had a vietnamese tea before. An oolong I think, but another black? I’m not so sure. Consequently I haven’t a clue what to expect here. I’m the second one to post about this one and the other poster thought it was great, so that’s a good beginning.

IF, that is, his taste in tea is similar to mine.

The dry leaves have a strong aroma of tobacco and leather. Sort of dark and spicy. I don’t know why I know what tobacco smells like actually. I shouldn’t logically know as the few people I know that smoke all smoke cigarettes. My grandfather smoked a pipe when I was a child so that must be how I remember, but still… Memory is a pretty funny thing.

Anyway, after steeping the dominant note has a hint of something more Darjeeling-y with that slightly grassy sort of greenness but the grain-y part of it is dominant. I’m getting rather a lot of freshly baked and still warm rye bread out of this.

That rye is there in the flavour as well. There is TONS of it. This is very robust with lots of flavour and like the Chinese that I prefer, no astringency to be found. It’s well rounded off and gradually builds that rye bread aftertaste that makes you feel like you’ve actually had something to eat as well.

It has a fair bit of a smoky note as well, which makes the whole thing rather remind me of a less refined, less civilised Keemun. This is like a Keemun that has strayed from the path and gone rogue.

The funny thing is, though, that while this little number displays all this Chinese behaviour, it doesn’t taste Chinese at all and it’s got some of the same strength and power that you find in Indians and Ceylons. It’s rather like the middle of the road between those two ‘directions,’ if you can call it that.

I’m finding I quite like this. I think that it would be an excellent tea for the breakfast table and that people who tend to prefer Chinese blacks over Indian or Ceylon, might get a number of good things out of this one. I’m not certain yet if it’s one I’ll want to own, but I would certainly not be opposed to having it again.

My last green sample from Nothing But Tea. This one definitely has a ton of aroma. I could smell it already when I was pouring and it has that almost radioactive greenish colour in the cup as well, but after pouring it quickly darkens into something more greenly deep yellow.

The aroma as mentioned is very deep. It’s sweet and thick and a bit salty, and it sort of reminds me of something but I can’t think what it is. My brain is grasping at some rather bizarre straws here such as fish and fruit. Let’s disregard the fish here, and focus on the fruit. I’m thinking apples. Not the sort you just eat, but more the kind of apples that are better for cooking than eating raw.

It’s the same with drinking it. It’s got a lot of flavour, and it’s got that salty, grassy sort of cooked broccoli all over the place. I’m not really getting that apple note here again, though. Just the main sencha flavour.

I don’t mind that it’s not a very complex flavour here. There’s so much of it that I don’t need to sit and hunt around for the details. It’s a good solid sencha and I’m considering a purchase.

Don’t you just hate it when you’re carrying a full cup of tea and then you sneeze before there’s time to do anything else than just hold the cup away from your body and hope?

Anyway, I’m not really very much of a Darjeeling fan at all. I had a short period a few years ago where the thought of a first flush Darjeeling filled me with song and sunshine, but the infatuation ran out, to the point where these days I find that green grassy-spicy Darjeeling-ness a little bit unpleasant in a blend. It’s so spicy and it gets wickedly bitter on me at the drop of a hat.

How wonderful for me then, that the black sampler box from NBT had some 10-15 or so Darjeeling samples in it… Single estate, see. In many cases both first and second flushes, which I can’t really tell apart anyway. I have used some of them and I’ve given away a few and this one is, I hope, the last one of the Darjeelings. After this I should be completely unblended Darjeeling-less.

Obviously I’m not going at this as the most optimistic person in the world. But this one, being autumnal, I’m hoping should be sufficiently different from all the others. Already in the product description I’m learning something new which adds to my hopes. Supposedly the ‘make-up’ of Darjeeling has changed over the last forty years or so as the German market appears to have preferred the light, almost green, version we get today, while these darker leaves are more similar to what was exported to the UK some forty years ago. Interesting.

The aroma of it is sweet and very grain-y. It doesn’t really have much of that spicyness that I’ve come to avoid. It’s a slightly heavy sort of rounded aroma. Smooth and solid. The spicyness comes out if you concentrate and search for it, but it doesn’t assert itself front and center.

It is present in the flavour, however, and it does have a good deal of astringency and a slight bitterness. This is not a smooth tea. This is the sort of tea where you can almost imagine the brown miscoloration that you get on the inside of the cup cover your tongue.

And then that strong strong note of spice. The aroma was so promising on this one, but the flavour is all grassy-spice. It’s not quite as offensive here as in the spring flushes, but it’s still there and it’s still dominant. Unfortunately the sweetness and grainyness that was in the aroma and sort of gave me vague hopes that there might be a Keemunesque edge to it were nothing but trickery.

I don’t care if Darjeeling is supposed to be ‘the Champagne of Tea’. I would prefer a Chinese, any Chinese to a Darjeeling any day. I think I might even prefer a Ceylon…

I’ve tried Houjicha once before. Just a sample, and I didn’t really like it much then. But when I was ordering samples from Nothing But Tea anyway, I thought it was interesting enough to give it a second go.

The dry leaves smell primarily like burnt toast, and this aroma is also released in large amounts when the water is poured on. After it has finished steeping the aroma is not so much burnt toast as it is burnt microwave popcorn. It even smells a bit salty. There isn’t really anyway around this, it’s the aroma of something that has gone horribly wrong.

Again I’m reminded of the fact that I’ve tried this before with little success.

So it’s with some reservation that I take the first sip and indeed it tastes burnt as well. I know it’s supposed to be roasted and it definitely is. I would even say that maybe it got a few seconds too long. I imagine that this would be suitable as a breakfast tea. If you burned your toast, you could cover it up with the flavour of this tea.

I’m trying really hard to find other flavour components here, and gradually as I sip and get myself used to the flavour, they seem to come out more. I can find something green-ish underneath all the burn, a slightly butter-y but rough green note.
My initial impression here, is the same as the first time around, I think. I don’t think this is something for me. However, the first time around I had not yet been introduced to the wonderful world of smoky teas, so now I’m thinking that while I’m not falling head over heels for the Houjicha right now, there is room for development. I’m not above trying other samples in the future, but at the moment it’s not something I would care to invest in on a larger scale.

I’m actually cooking today. Honest to Odin making real food for my evening meal and I don’t even have company. Stuff that requires the use of two skillets, a lid and the oven! (Chicken, mash and broccoli if anybody’s that curious) I’m normally pretty lazy in the kitchen so this is a big deal. A feast, even.

I figured a feast deserved a little aperitif, and why not tackle that with one of the Nothing But Tea samples? I couldn’t actually remember what all I had, but when I looked through the miscellaneous basket and came across this one, I remembered exactly why I had ordered it.

This is not leaf. This is ‘formed tea’, matcha turned into a sort of dough and then run through some sort of machinery to come up with these needle-like things. Normally, I haven’t actually joined the matcha band wagon. I don’t find the flavour of matcha all that different from regular sencha and it seems to me to be a pain in the rear to prepare and generate way more washing up than should be required for a cup of tea.

This though, was too interesting to not try, and you steep it just like you would regular leaf.

I smelled the… not leaves… Bits? Needles? Dry paste? Substance? I smelled the thingies before steeping. They had a very green, but a very dark aroma. It had some earthy notes that was a bit like a cross between a green oolong and a mild pu-erh. It didn’t really smell like just another regular green leaf at all, which was encouraging because I couldn’t help but wonder if I was turning my nose up at the trendy matcha only to turn to something even more pretentious.

I also wondered if the thingies would dissolve while steeping so I would have to sit here and stir like an idiot while drinking anyway. This appears to not be the case. The tea is a dark forest-y pine needle green, but there are tons of bits in the filter and the pot after draining, and they are still thingie shaped. At this point it has a very salted aroma and bizarrely remind me of popcorn. Apart from that it’s very like the dry …thingies.

I never really realise how slow I actually am at this, and now that I’ve just taken the first sip, dinner’s ready. So much for my little aperitif there.

I shall be brief with the rest then. It’s actually a fairly thin flavour this. That’s a bit of a disappointment considering how strong the aroma was. Flavour-wise, it’s not that terribly different from your average regular sencha. Bit darker in flavour and a bit earthier, but still not that much difference. And it even got a somewhat longer steep than intended because the potatoes chose the pouring moment to start boiling over.

It’s pleasant but nothing terribly special. We’ll see if the resteeps will prove any different.

Never had a darjeeling oolong before. I’m not a big fan so far. As Angrboda said previously, it’s got a bit of a sour tone to it, along with the grassy flavors and normal oolong-y ness.

I’m glad Iv’e gotten to try it, but I’m just not liking it much. Meh.
(thanks for the sample Angrboda!!)

First of my recent batch of Angrboda teas.

This is an unusual milk oolong for me. I’m used to these types of teas being oolongs with heavy, silky, mouth feel, low astringency, and mellow flavors. This has a lighter mouthfeel, a fair amount of astringency, and a much greener yet malter flavor. The milky aroma (and I can totally get the yoghurt thing) is very nice. It also has a nice after-taste (the milky aroma bounces around in my mouth after swallowing.)

This is a nice tea, but I’m always a fan of the very silky mouthfeels, especially in my milky oolongs, so while good, it’s not my favorite.

Good afternoon Wrimos and other Steepsterites.

I’ve broken 8K this afternoon and have reached the point where I realise that my manuscript is nothing short of utter tripe.

Clearly this means it’s time for a change. Today and yesterday my writing teas have been dark and strong. Orange pu-erh yesterday, 1886 blend from Whittard of Chelsea today.

Maybe something light and bright might make a difference. So I took ten minutes to wash and clean my favourite pot (OMG all those yellow bits were actually white!) and turned to this sample I received recently from Nothing But Tea.

Sencha Sakura. It almost sounds sparkly bright and fresh and optimistic, doesn’t it? I haven’t had it yet, and I’m already planning to include a 100g bag with my next order.

It certainly has a ton of cheery cherry aroma. It smells a bit like cherry sweets or that sweet cherry sauce that it an invaluable part of the traditional danish christmas dessert. I can’t smell the sencha underneath at all, only the cheery cherries.

It’s the same thing after steeping. Cherries, cherries, cheery cherries everywhere. It reminds me rather of cherry flavoured winegums, only not as synthetic. Very very sweet though, and I still can’t pick up any of the sencha underneath.

Now I’m getting a little worried after all. What if it’s just cherries in the flavour as well and nothing of the sencha? That would be a shame. It is giving off some rather amazing hot cherry aromas sitting there in the cup more or less right underneath my nose though.

It’s a very christmas-y smell for me. Not because cherries as such are all that associated with christmas in anyway, but it’s just… I mentioned the traditional danish christmas dessert, right? Yeah, that’s what it smells like when I don’t have my nose that close to the cup.

I need not worry about the sencha. It has a strong sencha-y flavour and the cherry isn’t at all as overpowering in the flavour as it is in the aroma. It’s still very fruity though, but it’s not cherry with some tea flavour, it’s a very smoothly blended even balance between the two, and the flavours are perfectly interwoven with each other.

It is indeed a bright and cheery cherry thing. And yes. I shall put it on my shopping list for the next time I want to order something.

Very nice. Girly. But very nice.

On the upside, I think there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll have a finished first draft before I hit 50K. Of course then it needs rewriting, but still. Mind-boggling accomplishment.

My Nothing But Tea order arrived today. That was insanely fast! It’s only three days (from the UK to Denmark) since I actually placed the order and I wasn’t even beginning to expect arrival yet. This of course prompted me to pull up NBT’s contact form and send them some rather lengthy praise. :) Really, I’m more and more pleased with this company every time I shop there.

Inspired by the sencha that Auggy shared with me recently, I included some samples of their japanese green selection to my order. Two senchas, one flavoured sencha (sakura, of course), houjicha and kokeicha. The latter of which I find really really interesting sounding, but the Sencha Yamato won the ippy-dippy of which one to try first.

Definitely smells like a Sencha. It has that salty, grassy kind of aroma that is becoming more and more familiar to me. It’s quite mild on the intensity of the aroma though, and it has a note of something else that I can’t really place, but it’s definitely familiar. I even suspect it’s something I’ve eaten recently so now I’m searching my brain for what it could be. No result though. I’m sort of leaning vaguely towards unsalted peanuts, but that doesn’t really seem quite right either.

I accidentally steeped it a full minute because I wasn’t using my head at the time. I’d have used half that if I’d spared it some thought, but it’s too late now. It does have a fairly prominent nearly-bitter note now though that I know isn’t actually ideally supposed to be there. It gives it a certain stabby sharpness.

Underneath that however there’s a vegetable note, like asparagus and to a smaller degree broccoli.

Even with a double steeping time, I’m finding it quite nice, but not really as good as the one Auggy shared with me.

Yum, yum. Finshing off the part of my stash of this tea at my work. Luckily I have more at home.

Last day in the office until January 6th, so I’m celebrating by drinking the last of my work stash of this Lovely Lovely tea. This is so nice.. so very very nice. :)

I needed something special to help me get my head wrapped around coming into work this morning, so I picked one of my favorites. (Especially since Angrboda is sending me more, so I don’t feel the urge to hoarde it. Have I recently mentioned how awesome Angrboda is??)

This tea just feels so clean. It’s like the 7-up of teas, light and clean and crisp, and almost feels bubbly. A few more cups of this, and I may make it through the day.

Light, lemony, and almost tingly on the tongue. A lovely lemon flavor blended with a lighter oolong. Kinda green, very clean feeling. Wonderful warm, but I bet iced and sweetened this would be amazing.

Needed something to wake me up this morning, and this fit the bill. Unfortunately, it means my sample is gone, but it’s gone to a better place, namely – ME. :)

Got an lovely swap package from Angrboda which all began by a discussion of Orange Pu-erh, so I figured I needed to try it first.

This is pretty good! The orange blends well with the pu-erh flavor, and the pu-erh is good, rich and earthy. I can taste the orange flavors even on my second steep, it’s mostly an aftertaste with an orange kiss

Yum!

I’ve never had Sikkim before. I even had to go get out the atlas to figure out where it is. (Only to find that it said ‘Indian state in the eastern Himalayas’ in the description of the tea. Can’t win them all.)

Anyway, my immediate expectation of this one would be something Darjeeling-like based on the fact that according to my atlas, Sikkim is just north of Darjeeling.

The aroma is fairly light. A little spicy and rather honeyed. That sweet honey-y note doesn’t really fit in with my picture of Darjeeling, so I’m pleased to find that it might not just be a differently named Darjeeling clone after all

The flavour is UNbelievably dark though. Not bitter as such, but seriously overbrewed. And I only gave it one minute. All I’m really getting here is astringecy en masse, and underneath that there is the greenish pang of Darjeelingness. And that’s it, really.

So far my impression of Sikkim is an overcooked Darjeeling. I am not convinced.

A while ago I was complaining about Darjeelings all tasting the same and how Indians just weren’t doing anything for me, and Thomas Smith suggested that I try a Nilgiri. I said that I didn’t think there was one included in my sampler box, but closer inspection has prooved me wrong. There was one after all. So I decided to try it out.

It has a funny sort of aroma. It’s very spicy, and maybe even a little bit burnt. Or a very dark sort of caramel-y thing. I believe I’ve heard people mention burnt sugar before, although I think it was about a different tea. But I’m sort of getting that in the aroma here. On top of that there is a funny sort of Ceylon-ness about. Overdone Ceylon, actually, which has me a little concerned.

Gosh! Astringent! Astringency times whoa! O.O It only steeped for a minute, how can it be this dry?

It rather tastes like an overdone Ceylon too except without the bitterness. The idea of a slightly-too-strong-Ceylon, more than actual ruined Ceylon itself. This is a strong tea, and it’s got a LOT of flavour. Without actually tasting like coffee (thankfully! Certain things just shouldn’t mix. Ever.) that’s the direction it takes my mind in. Allow me to go a little out on a very abstract tangent here. It tastes like the bushes were grown in a field that used to have coffee plants (trees? bushes?) in it.

Apart from that astringent coffee-esque sort of flavour there, I’m still getting a lot of spicyness, but the burnt sugar has diminished a lot. Oh there’s still burntness (which shouldn’t be confused with smokyness), but the sugar-y aspect is gone. This leads me to believe that adding a little sugar might be good here. So I tried that, but it didn’t really give me any sort of burnt sugar-y aspect after all. The flavour profile of the tea stayed the same and then just a hint of an aftertaste of sugar. I might as well not have added anything, because it made absolutely zero difference.

Underneath it all there’s a fruity note, but not a sweet fruit. A darker-flavoured fruit. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what, but it’s definitely something fruit-like. Sour cherries, maybe. It doesn’t realy matter what sort of fruit either, becuase the two other layers of flavour are dominating it so much.

If I were to drink this regularly, I would have to drink really weakling brewings. It seems to me that I frequently find myself complaining that a tea isn’t strong enough, but then when I finally find one that is, that’s wrong too.

And yet, of all the Indians and Ceylons I’ve tried out of this sample box, I thing this is the one that appeals to me the most. It’s got power and strength and a surprisingly complex flavour. It might not be over the top awesome, but it’s interesting. And interesting is definitely worth a lot of points too.

The last of only three chinese from NBT. I do wish they would have a larger chinese selection! Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get rid of some of the ten million different indians that frankly all taste the same. But that’s probably just me.

Anyway, I’m on holiday! Finally! Three glorious weeks ahead of me, ten days of which to be spent with low-level panic and underlying homesickness. Yes. But at least we’ll be cleared up on the ‘What if his parents don’t like me?’ question, which in spite of many many assurances, it’s impossible to shake.

So we’re celebrating today by remembering that I had a sample still from NBT and this one for their lapsang souchong, renamed Smoky Caravan. Don’t know why. If it’s just lapsang souchong, why not just call it… lapsang souchong? Renaming it makes me think it’s blended with something else. But again, that’s just me.

Oh the smoky sweetness. Especially that sweetness, actually. The aroma is all thick with it, like smoked honey. I think we’ve got another hit here.

It feels fairly thick to drink too, as if it had milk in it. It coats the tongue and the mouth, sort of guarding me against the smokyness. Sort of. Not that I need guarding, but it gives a positive addition to the impression of flavour. Not that it really needs any more positiveness.

This is rather more smoky than I had initially expected when taking the first sip, so I had a bit of an O.o moment there until I got the flavour sorted out in my mouth. The smoke is strong, but it doesn’t seem to be lasting very long. It does build up an aftertaste, but it’s build up gradually. I prefer a little more power in that department. Something that is also there on the first sip.

The sweetness is also a little funny. It’s there and it’s strong most of the times, but then on the odd sip it seems to be sort of missing. How odd! It’s like getting half a flavour.

This is a very good lapsang, yes. But I think the A. C. Perch’s lapsang souchong is better and I’m sticking with that one.