Numi Organic Tea

Numi’s savory options are not nearly as good as Millie’s Savory Teas, but unlike Millie’s they are decaf which makes them a great option for a midnight snacking.
This one tastes like… broccoli! With a hint of cilantro. No surprises there. There’s also some garlic and onion swimming around in there. I find it a bit wimpy but it can be greatly improved with the addition of some garlic pepper. Overall not bad, and the convenience factor of having teabag snacks laying around make it well worth a re-purchase.

I FINALLY FOUND THESE DANG TEAS.

I went down to Boston for a couple concerts last weekend (One Direction because I’m one of those unapologetic pop music fans) and found this at a Whole Foods in Milford. I snagged the variety box and I’m absolutely in love with these teas. This one has been my favourite so far. At some point I’m going to do a real review of them, but for now I’ll just say that they’ve been very yummy.

finally found it in a newly opened organic supermarket. They will continue to keep it in stock. Pff. so pleased. It’s my favourite earl grey. Couldn’t find it for years.

Genuine earl grey tea, doesn’t get bitter. No artificial colourings, additions. Just plain organic assam with organic REAL bergamot oil. A gem.

Yay, last tea of the evening here. The bag itself smells strongly of celery salt and garlic, which I didn’t expect. I brewed it for 10 minutes in boiling water, as per the package directions.

Brewed, it smells like broccoli, celery salt, and onion salt. Like a nice vegetable broth! :) The flavor is quite good too. The broccoli is definitely the base of this tea, and the cilantro pops out and says halloo! It has a nice little herbaceous, spicy kick. I can definitely taste the celery and onion salt as well in here, especially near the end. This one would probably be quite good with a bit of salt added, but I’m enjoying it plain right now. A lovely bedtime tea!

Daily Summary: 4 sipdowns, 146 teas remaining in cupboard

After trying the Carrot Curry savory tea, I was excited to get ahold of the others. Luckily, my sweetheart was making an Amazon order a couple of days ago, so I added the variety box to it. I’m not sure why I chose this one to try tonight, it just sounded so interesting and I figured it would be somewhat sweet considering it contains beets. The dry bag smelled strongly of cabbage and savory spices.

Whew, the brewed tea smells like cabbage soup! Luckily, I don’t mind cabbage, though it’s not my favorite. The flavor of this tea is much more subtle than the aroma, in fact, it’s almost too subtle. The main taste is boiled cabbage, and there’s a sweetness from the beets. The spicing is very mild, though I do get warmth from the clove near the end of the sip. I can definitely taste the parsley, and it adds a nice fresh flavor. Overall, I do enjoy the flavor, but I wish there was more of it. Perhaps next time I’ll steep this with less water and see if that improves the strength. I find that I really enjoy these savory vegetable teas as a caffeine-free nighttime option.

In other news, this is my 300th tasting note. Huzzah!

Trying to keep the caffeine down, so I won’t stay up all night, although I have so many things to catch up on.

While I was visiting my folks, I came across some random tea bags, like the blueberry one I reviewed earlier, & so I brought a few home with me, this Honeybush included.
I much prefer Honeybush over Rooibos, it’s mildly sweet & kind of woody & soothing.
That’s all I’ve got.
:)

So this tea really confused me, and I almost think it was mispackaged. I was at a friend’s house and he offered me tea, and I chose this because Earl Grey is that inoffensive tea that even if awful is still drinkable.

Only, when steeped… there was no bergamot flavor. At all.

And the tea quality is pretty damn awful in these filter bags so there I was drinking bad black tea that didn’t have bergamot to cover up how bad it actually was.

At least I squashed Steven at Boggle.

Pass the Stash TTB 2.0

Savory tea, huh? Okay, I’ll be brave. :P There are actually 3 kinds in the box, but I chose this one first because I figured carrot is a pretty sweet vegetable, and I do like curry. The instructions said to steep this in boiling water, but this claims to be green tea… So I did 185 instead, which is higher than I’ll normally go for green tea. Compromise! I originally steeped for 5 minutes and then went up to 10 after a quick taste.

It smells strongly of curry! But in a kind of sweet way, like it has coconut milk in it or something. I am shocked by how good this is! It’s delicious! Much less intense than you would expect from the aroma, and slightly sweet from the carrot. It’s largely a sweet tea with some added curry spice that makes it amazing! There’s also a little hit of fresh cilantro in there, which adds a nice herbaceous, fresh element. Zippy! I definitely don’t taste green tea at all in here, which is fine with me.

I am totally amazed that I love this tea! I would absolutely drink this as an evening tea (the green base is decaffeinated). There are a couple other savory tea flavors in the box, I’m considering trying another one. But I don’t want to deprive someone else… I don’t know how much interest there will be for these… Hm!

Earthy & smooth. Very earthy. Reminds me of a forest in the dead of winter. No snow. Just brown earth and bare trees. Actually, this tastes like the smell of one of those bare trees when you break a branch. ..

I am not a big fan of this tea. It has a really strong and sour flavor. I think it has a bit of that bumpy flavor too. I drink this tea in the morning.

I am a real gringo when it comes to pu-erh, so I have been trying out various blends, attempting to prepare for the day when I muster up the courage to imbibe the liquor produced by some caked pu-erh tuo cha reeking rather awfully of … horse manure!

This Numi Jasmine Pu-erh seems to be designed for someone like me. I had no idea that this is actually a pu-erh jasmine green blend. I was thinking that it was all pu-erh as the base tea, with the use of jasmine as a sort of deodorant.

Instead, Jasmine Pu-erh brews up brown but tastes mostly like a pretty good jasmine green tea, to be precise Numi Jasmine Green (logically enough). Okay with me—no complaints! Not bad at all for a quick filter bag fix, especially given that it did not suffer from my treatment of it as a straight black. Near boiling water and a five minute steep might have ruined a straight-up jasmine green, but the result was fine in this case.

Compared with a nice loose-leaf Genmaicha this isn’t anything special, but as far as bagged teas go this is one one of my favorites. I like to keep this on hand when I know I won’t be around a kettle. You can pretty successfully brew it with hot water from those water coolers that most offices and schools will have around.
The green tea base is unremarkable but ultimately inoffensive. Not particularly bitter, grassy, floral, or anything that would have given it some character. If I didn’t know it was a sencha I probably wouldn’t have been able to guess. The rice gives some toasty-ness but is a bit stale tasting compared to my favorite loose genmaicha (Harney’s). But overall it makes for a decent brew under less-than-ideal conditions.

This one SERIOUSLY is like powdered citric acid. Even steeped, it smells SOOOOO powdery.

I steeped 4 bags in 1 litre of water, accidentally for 24 hours. 10-12 would have been better. I dumped out 1 cup, added 1/2 tsp sugar, refilled with plain water, and now it’s drinkable! Haha. Wow, that was INTENSE.

I do like this tea, I like the idea, I like the intense lime, I even like the powdery impression. But you do have to be careful how you steep it.

(Just one cold brew of this one left!)

Cheaters cold brew: http://instagram.com/p/pZHPAvR5PN/#

It actually worked really well, and I do like the tea even though it’s INCREDIBLY sour and I’m doing a sugar free challenge for 10 days. It’s a nice and easy way to get flavoured water. I’ll have to remember this the next time I’m out and thirsty, as plain water is not something I like to drink.

I love the taste of cloves, so was automatically intrigued when I found this Numi Tea that had cloves in it. I love it and wish it was available year-round because it tastes great as an iced tea too. Living in Texas, we’re big on iced tea, and this one is an absolute favorite (mixed w/ honey and unrefined cane sugar as sweeteners). A glass of iced Winter Spice tea also is a perfect compliment to Ines Rosales olive oil tortas as a snack or dessert!

Mini rant: Guys! Please hide the coffee from me so I’ll go back to drinking tea more often. Stupid rough job making me get bad habits for a multi-cup coffee habit that I do not need.

Stash Down: I have been going through my tea and seeing what tea I would actually drink or not because I need to drink more of my teas so I can get some shiny new teas eventually and I found this one. It is really tasty and I am so glad I found that I had a bag of this left to drink. Just a splash of milk and one spoonful of sugar.

Samples Only TTB
I’m actually on my second box of Numi Broccoli and Cilantro savory tea, so I could already tell that I was probably going to like this. Fennel seed always reminds me of pizza or Italian sausage. As is, I’m not a fan of this. But the same goes of my beloved broccoli and cilantro. But with a healthy dosage of salt, this is amazing. I love love love soup. To the point that a lot of times I order just soup when I got out to eat. And this is like drinking a nice flavorful broth. What I really love about these teas, is if they’re a bagged broth and not a tea, then they’re so versatile. They taste a million times better than those cubed bouillon things, they also don’t have added salt which is perfect for those watching their sodium or who think most of those broth mixes are too salty, and they’re much easier to make than having to cook and strain your own broth.
You can also use them in recipes. Throw one in the pasta water while it cooks, use the broth instead of water for lentils, or in place of any recipe that calls for broth for a different twist.
I actually enjoyed this one so much, I’m going to order some from amazon the next time I order more of my broccoli and cilantro (which is going to be soon since I’m adding some to the TTB)

Samples Only TTB

So fennel. Much soup. Many savory. Too spice. Wow. What flavor. Not tea. How drink.

This is not tea. o_o

This is soup that needs salt and some noodles added.

I don’t even.

What.

I had to. I had to try it. Because sister insisted we should try it. And she was right. We had to try it. Because wow. It was. It was. It was not tea. I don’t even.

Seriously feel I could add some salt and noodles and have a nice lunch here. o_o

But its not tea.

Queued post, written May 3rd 2014
You may have noticed that I’ve lowered my posting frequency from daily to three times a week. I’ve got the queue whittled down to 14 pages and I haven’t been adding to it very much lately, so I’m trying to delay the point where I run out of pre-written posts and the system collapses.

This was from the first round of the EU TTB.

I’m not sure why I took it. I’m not sure what to say about it now that I’ve had it either.

I did try to pay attention to it, but even then I found I couldn’t put words to what I was tasting.

It was sweet, somewhat flowery, a great deal wood-y and sort of green tea-ish here and there. Really, that’s all I’ve got.

It was relatively pleasant, though I’m sure the magnolia scenting has been done better by other companies in the past.

I am a somewhat frugal person, probably in part because I was so broke in college and grad school. So my natural inclination is not to throw stuff away, if it can possibly be salvaged. Whence my “filter bag cold brew” initiative, of which Numi Berry Black is now a part. I do like a few filter bags—above all, Harney & Sons Japanese Sencha—but for the most part, I am moving farther and farther away from filter bag tea. Still, I have quite a bit lying around.

I brewed six filter bags in a liter of water overnight in the fridge and the liquor changed from clear to crimson during that period. I was optimistic that this would be a good iced tea, though I had found the hot brew to be less than desirable. Do hibiscus and darjeeling mix? That is the question, my teaful friends.

When I tried a glass of this cold brew yesterday, I considered tossing it. Then it occurred to me that it might taste good with sugar. But I did not really feel like adding sugar, so I poured the glass back into the pitcher, thinking that it might taste better on a hotter day. The weather was very mild, with a high of about 75F.

As predicted, this iced tea tasted much better on an 80F+ day. I don’t think that it is great, but it is somewhat refreshing, and I was not driven to adulterate, so overall the experiment was a success. Not that I’ll be buying this tea ever again.

I was really looking forward to trying this fruit-laced darjeeling from Numi. Unfortunately, Berry Black is much more about hibiscus and rose hips than darjeeling! In fact, this will sound bitchy, but it seems a bit like a waste of good organic darjeeling. And fruits!

The hibiscus really overwhelms. I should have known as I watched the liquor brew up bright red, but this is much more than I was expecting. I have something like 15 more bags of this blend and will likely brew them up en masse for a gallon of iced tea, which I suspect will be pretty good, but I would not choose to drink this again hot. Cream would not help—in fact it might curdle!

(Blazing New Review #21)

I have tried Numi Mate Lemon before, but not since joining Steepster, and I have some fresh bags in my cupboard from the sampler boxes, so here goes:

This blend offers a pretty mighty punch of caffeine, which was what I was really after this afternoon. No idea why I have been so tired. Perhaps staying up until 3am has something to do with it, but then I slept in until almost noon!

Anyway, this is a mate for gringos. I’ve spent some time in Argentina and around Argentinians elsewhere, so I know what unembellished mate tastes and smells like: bitter and grassy. Closer to an oversteeped darjeeling than anything else!

This blend masks any and all bitterness with lemon myrtle, which imparts both flavor and texture (think licorice root texture, but without any sweetness or licorice flavor whatsoever). There is also some green tea here—something chum meeish, it seems.

The overall effect to my palate is of a pleasant lightly flavored mid-range filterbag green tea. It’s okay. I regard this more as a functional blend than a tea which I would want to stock up on and find myself craving. There are many good sources of a powerful punch of caffeine. This is one of them, and it tastes perfectly fine. The real virtue of this sort of blend is that it does not require any cream, as do many equally potent black blends.

(Blazing New Rating #19)

(backlog from 5/29/14)

The liquor of this Numi filterbag-produced rooibos is reddish-brown. Comparing it side-by-side to the Numi Honeybush, I believe that I prefer the rooibos. It’s a close call, though, as I don’t love either.

(Blazing New Rating #11)