Numi Organic Tea

I liked this, but it wasn’t as strong as I’d like. I usually drink chai when I want the strongest flavor I can get out of a tea. (And I usually leave a tea bag in until I’ve completely finished drinking.) And I also think there is something going on with me and ginger. I do not dislike ginger but I have a suspicion I’m not exactly allergic but it isn’t good for me to be eating it.

Seriously- when you have to spend the whole day craming for finals, some light flowery/fruity tea is just not going to cut it. The richness and powerfull punch this tea gives is something i was in serious need of today. I was able to steep it twice and it was just as good the second time around. It is usually hard for this tea to disapoint me.

this is my kick me in the face morning tea. lovin’ it this morning to get me through my morning of classes and meetings. bitter- in a tasty, fantastic way. and yay for fair trade and organic!

Another of my “starter” group that I get to wave goodbye to. Not at all sorry to see this one go. Looking back on my previous note, I see I had convinced myself I’d been able to improve it some. Now I’m wondering whether it wasn’t that I was just better prepared for the assault to my taste buds.

This was the first vanilla tea I tried. In a way, it was probably good that it was the first because it set the bar really low. In retrospect, I now understand just how low as I’ve since had really, really excellent vanilla flavored tea.

So as I take my leave, knowing what I know now about just how good vanilla flavoring in a tea can be, I must dock some points.

The first time or two I had this, I thought it was, quite simply, terrible. To the point of almost setting off my gag reflex.

But since I tried it so early on in my tea travels, I couldn’t be sure the problem was with the tea. That and being a glutton for punishment led me to try it again. I’m actually getting to the point now where I’m finding it ho-hum rather than awful.

For one thing, it is vastly improved with shorter steeping time. Three minutes is far better than five. For another, it takes some getting used to. At first, the vanilla tasted somehow detached from the tea, which was dark-tasting verging on bitter. Detached, beany and fake, all at the same time. The last couple of times, however, the vanilla has been more integrated with the tea and sweeter without the fakeness, and the tea less bitter. It does still smell better than it tastes, both in the bag and as brewed. Though I can’t see buying this again, I can see finishing the box.

I had no idea what this tea was before I tried it, but it was EXACTLY as I thought it would be. A nice scent and a nice flavor. It also doesn’t get bitter if you boil the water. I think it would be nice if Numi paired honeybush with some kind of melon flavor in another tea.

Smooth and pleasant. I drank it with honey. I left the bag in my large mug as I drank, and it tasted good when steeped 5 minutes and tasted good when steeped 20. It’s not something I will step over babies to get again, but I wouldn’t refuse it if it were given to me (as this bag was).

Surprisingly, this tastes best with the hot water at work! For me, I discovered the perfect brewing method:

1. Tear open and empty three tea bags into a 12 oz travel mug.
2. Fill with hot water from the hot water spigot.
3. Steep indefinitely and sip until done.

That’s it! So simple. I get all the velvety, earthy cocoa and spice flavors. Nothing bitter. Very smooth and comforting.

I steeped this strong and for a very long time (like 10 minutes!), added some cream and it was yummy! Like a smoky, cocoa-cinnamon tea latte.

The cocoa is more bitter than normal and a bit chalky…so I lowered my score a little. Maybe there are differences with each tea bag. I wonder how the loose leaf compares?

This tea arrived today from Amazon—yay!

This brews a shade lighter then the Teas Etc. pu’erh I have now. The scent is very much like a tablet of Ibarra chocolate from Mexico—which is a dry, bittersweet, cinnamon-infused cocoa. I don’t taste much of the earthy puerh—I get mostly the cocoa—but the earthiness is in there somehow adding depth. I would describe this tea as a bittersweet, “powdery” tasting cinnamon cocoa (not chocolate—which (obviously) is smoother and creamier) with a lingering sugariness (due to the rooibos?). When the liquid cools, a hint of woodsy mushroom appears and the earthiness becomes more pronounced. And I could detect a hint of citrus.

In short, this is yummy and very easy to drink. Try this if you’re at all a fan of chocolate…especially dark chocolate.

I drank the whole thing. Not very fussy about brewing it, either. Just kept the pot full and the liquor poured off. Got about 6 very decent pots of delicious afternoon.

Cooling and refreshing, perhaps due to the chrysanthemum blossoms used.

Sipdown no. 95 for the year 2014! It’s looking like I’ll make it to 100 this weekend. Woo hoo!

I am sorry to see this one go, so I’m bumping the rating. Another of my “starter” group, it became the commuting and toodling around tea after the Three Kingdoms Mao Feng, mostly because it was in bags and it was easy to drop into the travel contraptions, but it’s also just a nice, fairly light, tasty-without-calling-attention-to-itself tea.

No. 1 really liked it as well.

It’s one of the few in the starter group I’d consider buying again, along with Refresh and Lotus from Tazo, and Chinese Breakfast Yunnan Black and Monkey King Jasmine Green from Numi.

I have a few bags left of this in my work stash and more at home. I haven’t had it in a while, and I’m not sure why as I like it quite a bit. In fact, I’m bumping the rating up a tiny bit.

I think the main issue with this one is that the rose is the reason to drink it and I’m not always in the mood for rose. I have a bit of an idee fixe that the rose is stronger in this tea than it really proves to be when I drink it, which adds to the feeling that I need to be in the mood. It’s also one of the bagged teas I still have left that I like better than most, so I’ve been sort of hoarding it.

The rose is still the reason to drink this. It’s really quite nice for an afternoon tea. I should drink it more.

I love the fragrance of roses, both directly from the flower and in scented products such as soaps and perfumes, so I’m the perfect target customer for this tea. The perfume of this tea is indeed very rosy. It’s an old world scent; to some it brings to mind grandmothers or their blue haired luncheon companions, but it makes me think of cream colored china with pink floral designs displayed on doily-draped antique washstands. And it makes me feel calm, content, and meditative.

The color is a dusky pinkish brown, as though someone dropped a little of the color associated with the pink version of the flower known as a tea rose into a cup of standard light brown tea.

I know I’ve eaten rose petals before but I can’t call to mind their flavor. There is something sweetly floral about the taste of this tea, which must be the rose. I have only had flavored white teas, but my experience of them has been generally that tend toward sweet and fresh-tasting, and so this is (though I think I steeped it a bit too long this time around as it was more astringent than the last few times I had it when I steeped it from 3-4 minutes).

Not liking this one today. :P

Not a favorite of mine. Perhaps it is the use of green puerh? Who knows. But it mixes great with hot cocoa and once I am outof tis classic, it will not be restocked. Sorries.

Sipdown no. 39 of 2016 (no. 250 total).

I took my stash of remaining mixed teabags to work before I fully appreciated the tea availability at work. They have a good selection of Numi bagged teas available for free. Even so, if the past is any indication, my only hope of sipping down the remaining teabags is to do it at work. I just don’t reach for them at home, and I’ve given up on doing loose leaf at work. Too hard to get leaves out of the filter.

So I started a bit of a sipdown campaign, and this was the first to go. Either it became a little tastier over time or I’m just more used to puerh than I was when I wrote my first note. I didn’t get the horsiness that I mentioned before. There is a sort of a loam flavor, and the leather is smoother than I recalled.

Moving on to the other three Numi puerhs I still have, starting tomorrow, probably.

I haven’t had this in a very long time. Today we were running out of the house to go to the laser tag place and I had to grab something fast. I didn’t have time to measure or think too much about water temp and I am down to very few types of bagged tea, so I grabbed this and stuck it in the Timolino.

I think that pu-erh isn’t really the best toodling around tea. Or at least not for me.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy this. It was leathery and a bit brothy like it apparently was the last time I had it, judging from my previous note. I just think that it’s meant to be sipped in peace and quiet and in smaller amounts.

I never realized how rushed my life is most of the time until I started having to fight for minutes to get tea made before leaving the house. Or even getting it ready to steep on the way. Sigh.

After the Chocolate Puerh experience I thought I’d give the others a try. I’m starting with this one.

I’m rather a novice at wine-tasting but I always found it amusing when I read tasting notes for wines that describe them as having a “barnyard” or “leathery” nose or taste. And yet, that describes the smell of the bags. It’s peaty, loamy, and horsey, more on the poop side than the saddle side (though this last note is not so strong as to be unpleasant). The aroma of the steeped tea, though, reverses that and has a much more leathery scent to it along with the earthiness. The liquor is indistinguishable from black coffee.

I’d describe the flavor, too, as leathery. There’s a bit of smokiness to it as well, almost like what you find in Scotch, and an afterlingering sweetness I associate with breakfast blends containing Assam. The consistency is very similar to that of the Chocolate Puerh, smooth, slightly slick, and brothy. It’s thick, and gives the illusion of chewiness.

It will be interesting to taste for this next time I drink the Chocolate, as I imagine that under the lovely chocolate and spice additives to that tea, this is pretty much the unadulterated tea flavor. I’ve also ordered some samples of loose puehrs as I think I could become a fan.

I’m wondering if this is more of a spearmint rather than a peppermint. (Looking at the packaging it just says mint) It’s a darker taste than I expected. I think I prefer the brighter, lighter taste of peppermint. This is a nice tea, and it’s helping me get through an evening of massive overtime, but I’d rather drink a cup of Celestial Seasonings Peppermint.

But, as far as mints go, it’s pretty decent.

Having discovered that I am not the world’s biggest lemon myrtle fan, I also discovered that dropping a bit of ground cinnamon into this significantly improved the taste in my view. It cuts the soapiness of the lemon myrtle, and boosts the taste of the chamomile a bit. However, it is easy to overdo it and if you do you just get a mouth full of cinnamon.

I actually didn’t read the ingredients (or the subtitle) of this before I tried it or I might have been scared off from my last lemon myrtle experience, the soapy memory of which I can still, unfortunately, bring to mind pretty quickly along with a strong urge to rinse my mouth and spit. But as I’d speculated, lemon myrtle seems much more suited to blending into other ingredients where it can be balanced by other flavors. I actually like chamomile, though I have to be in the mood for it, and this was a nice balance between chamomile and a lemony flavor. If I let my mind wander to the thought, I could sort of taste soap in the lemon myrtle in this, too, so I tried to steer my mind from that. It’s sad that one negative experience can have such influence, as the last thing I really want to do while sipping tea before bedtime is have to think about what not to think about….