Red Leaf Tea

I’m not even going to really review this one, because I’m pretty sure this is just me. For some reason, it smells almost exactly like Goo Gone to me. Like, the stuff you use to remove labels from jars… I can’t drink that! But I’m sure it’s not the tea’s fault. I might try a little bit hot with milk later…

My very first Red Leaf Tea order arrived yesterday, in it about four of the basic grade flavoured matchas. They’re good but I find that I enjoy them a lot more if I make them in a smoothie. It has the texture I’m looking for I guess, the texture resembling the Starbucks green tea frap I like so much, or one of the Booster Juice matcha smoothies. Otherwise it still tastes milky — and I hate the taste of milk.

It needs a little sweetening, I didn’t add sugar the first time and then I was trying to dissolve honey in this icy cold brew. You all know how well that goes. I also find that just straight up with milk only it is a little chalky. Once you allow it to settle it gets better, the chalkiness goes to the bottom of the glass. I can’t help but wonder of the higher grade is smoother — I hope so — but since this is my introduction to matcha it felt silly to spring the big bucks for the “better” stuff before knowing what matcha is all about.

Dissolved 1 perfect spoon in a few tablespoons of hot water. Added sugar and dissolved that. Shook the whole thing around 10 oz cold milk. Smells a little chemically but taste is ok, some faint bitterness at the very very back. Overall, I’d say matcha is here to stay.

Oh and… It is not as caramel-y as I expected. I think I like English toffee better but that’s a review all in itself.

The dry tea smells like a strong earl grey. While brewing, I still only get the earl grey smell. On first taste it is a strong bergamot earl grey but with quite an artificial raspberry flavour. I liken it to cough syrup taste but without the punch that you get with cough syrup. As the tea cools the raspberry becomes less artificial and there is less cough syrup taste. It is not really what I expected from this tea. The black base is only slightly astringent. I brewed for my usual 2 min. I am going to bring the brewing time down. And see if that makes a difference in the flavour.

Edit: after the tea cooled to almost room temp the raspberry was quite prominent and nicely flavoured. Still artificial but it worked well with the earl grey.

A 1 min steep tasted mostly like a very mild earl grey. No raspberry or fruitiness

I have had this tea numerous times today and am finding a 1 min 30 second steep is giving me a nice smooth earl grey with a raspberry flavour. Again the raspberry is a bit artificial tasting, but still good. The two flavours blend well together. Not astringent at this steep time.

Thanks Stephanie for this mini cake. I thoroughly enjoyed my second pu-erh experience (first one was from back in 2008). I like the fact that it can be re-steeped many times.

It did have a very slight fishy smell, but that did not bother me. I ‘rinsed’ it for 30 secs, but I decided to drink the ‘rinsing’ water and even that tasted good for me, lol. Pu-erh is definitely in my list of teas to explore :)

Well, this is my first experience with real matcha, and I don’t quite know what to think. I’ve heard so many great things from matcha lovers that I just assumed I would love it. I forgot that matcha is made from green tea, which for starters is just not my favorite. (I know, I know, how could I not realize that!) After some quick reading on how to prepare matcha I finally sifted and whisked my little cup. It got foamy on top, which I think is a good thing. It was a lot more vegetal tasting than I was prepared for. I can taste the amaretto flavor and it’s good, it’s just also very thick in texture. I am enjoying it much better once it cools with a little sugar added. And the fiancee is actually kind of loving it, so that’s a good thing. I have another flavor of matcha that I am going to try. Maybe amaretto just isn’t my flavor? Or maybe matcha is just an acquired taste that I will learn to love? Anyways, thanks Mercuryhime for this sample!

-Dry blend is a powdery green matcha.
-Dry leaves smell lightly sweet and fruity. Tea liquor aroma is strongly fruity.
-Tea liquor is a thick dark green color with foam on top.
-Vegetal and sweet fruit flavor and finish. Heavy amaretto almond aftertaste.
-Best with milk and sweetener.
-Good tea. Thick vegetal flavor with a strong apricot and almond amaretto flavor.

I’m not sure if I should be even rating this as this is my first taste of pu-erh. Anyway, to be blunt, it smells and tastes like dead fish. Maybe it will grow on me? Thanks for the experience Red Leaf, but I’m sticking to your epic matcha. haha.

Today I am drinking the nest shaped tuocha! There was only one in my bag, most of them were the little rectangular cubes. It is even smoother than the cube! I really need to get my hands on some high quality puerh in the near future. I wish Mandala had a small sampling pack or something!

Brought one of these little cubes with me to work today, and I’ll be sipping on it all day! I’ll drink something more exciting tomorrow, but today I really just needed something to keep me awake!

Not a bad puerh! I wasn’t expecting much out of this since it was free and all (just paid for shipping) but it actually turned out to be a good smooth non-fishy cup of pu! I probably should have cut the cube in half, I am not sure I will be able to drink enough cups during the day at work today to use up these leaves. Might have to take them home after work and do a cold steep as ashmanra suggested :D

Thanks a bunch Red Leaf Tea!

When Red Leaf made this puerh packet available to us way back when they said they were including a large number of cubes of puerh and one very fine quality tuo cha. I have logged the “every day” type and now I am finally having the good stuff.

This is a shu. I gave it a rinse and it was still quite compact. I gave it a longish first steep, maybe 35 seconds. The resulting tea was medium brown but tasty. The tuo cha fell apart at that point and the next steep was maybe four seconds, yet the tea was nearly black! At no point in the many steeps we drank did it ever become bitter or hard edged, though. It was lightly earthy with the very faintest horse barn and definitely no fishy aroma or taste. And when it finally gave up, it really gave up! One steep was dark and then BOOM! Pale. I knew it was time to retire these leaves, but the three of us enjoyed a liter of good shu out of that little bitty tuo cha.

Confession time: I am going to Ireland on Sunday. I have never been on a plane. I have no rain gear or luggage. I need shoes. I am about to panic and am wondering if I will get airsick which would be absolutely humiliating.

Also, I am a homebody. I love being home. I don’t want to start wishing I was back here in just four days when I am staying two weeks.

Suggest some places for a quick little plane ride that would be fun to see. We really love the countryside and small towns more than big cities and someone suggested Sterling, Scotland. Any other suggestions from you well-travelled Steepsterites? Any travel suggestions?

Not long ago, Red Leaf Tea announced that they had received some puerh by mistake and we could have it for the cost of shipping it to us. I signed up and received mine yesterday. My daughter got some as well and had it shipped here because she works twelve hour shifts and the apartment complexes have those postal boxes like bird houses and I am concerned that they get too hot.

This has led me to wonder if I should order tea in the summer at all. My mail is left in a box on my house, under the porch, but in the meantime it has traveled quite a bit and sat in the back of a hot mail truck before arriving. Does anyone else think this might make a difference? I have never noticed a tea not tasting good and attributed it to heat, though, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Thoughts?

Anyway, I love making puerh the way Bonnie suggested and have enjoyed it very much. She has a cup hot and then puts the leaves in cold water to steep in the fridge. It is too blooming hot here this morning to drink anything hot, so I actually just poured some hot water on two tuocha, left it a minute, and filled the pitcher the rest of the way with cold water and cold steeped it.

The resulting brew is quite dark, so I poured a glass and refilled the pitcher with water. The tea is SO good and refreshing! My friend was astonished a few days ago when I told her I loved iced puerh, no sweetening, but you really should try it! It is a very refreshing drink, and my tummy was a little angry about Chinese food last night followed by popcorn with coconut oil and butter on it. The tea seems to have helped a lot!

Made this one cold brewed mixed half and half with cola matcha. I added about a 1/4 tsp of white sugar. I quite like it like this. It doesn’t really taste like cola matcha or like orange matcha. It is kinda of like flat cola (my favorite) but with a light citrus flavour. It is not orange pop though. It reminds me of what I think an earl grey cola would taste like (ATTENTION COCA-COLA: please make me an Earl Grey Coke with natural oil of bergamot! Mmmmm). Anyway I think I may drink the rest of my orange matcha like this.

So I mixed this one half and half with cheesecake matcha, cold shaken. Both robust flavours. Bad idea! I was expecting a creamy orange taste, think creamiscle. But all I got was gross. I get a strange orange chemical flavour on first sip and after I swallow I get a bit of creamy cheesecake with no orange in it. The aftertaste is coating my throat in a milky and oily way. The kind of feeling I get after I eat soft ice cream. Hmmm. I was thinking of mixing the orange with French vanilla matcha too but I think I am going to stay away from that. Both the orange and the cheesecake match are great on their own, but not together.

I made this one cold shaken again this morning. I used only 1/2 tsp this time and added about a 1/4 tsp white sugar. It was better and worse in some ways as compared to the 1tsp I tried yesterday. The sweetness level was much tastier with the white sugar that with the artificial sweetener I tried yesterday. The sugar brings out a bit more natural orange flavour. It is not so much tart or so much vitamin c tasting. However, with the less matcha there is much less orange taste and much more matcha taste. I am finding that personally, I am not liking the orange mixed with matcha flavour. I preferred it with the larger amount of matcha mix where it was much more dominant orange tasting. Overall both ways have their merits, I will continue to experiment to find out what works for me.

I had a hard time deciding between this one and the mandarin matcha. I ended up getting this one to try first, I am sure I will try the mandarin in the future. I got classic grade, robust flavour.

On first smell, it smells EXACTLY like chewable vitamin c. Mmmm. To be honest, that was my favorite candy as a child. Ha ha. It is not the super tart kind, but the slightly tart and sweet kind of vitamin c. Very similar to orange flavoured Emergen-C.

I started by using 1tsp in about 8 oz water, cold shaken. It tasted very similar to the vitamin c type flavour. But it was missing something. I was at work and added about half a packet of Splenda. That helped to make it taste more like a classic orange flavoured drink, think orange pop or C plus. But I really don’t like the taste of Splenda so that was throwing me off a bit.

I think I have to experiment with this one a bit. I am going to try a bit less matcha and play around with sweetener. I also got this one to mix with my cola matcha and cheesecake matcha. Looking forward to the results.

I haven’t been on steepster in forever, but had to share my new way to drink matcha. I’m sure someone has probably written about it before, but I don’t feel like searching so I’ll just tell you.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine was going on and on and on about bulletproof coffee, which, in its simplist form, is coffee, butter, and MCT oil (derived from coconut oil & Palm oil). I don’t drink coffee so I didn’t think much more about it. Then I was at New Seasons (a more neighborhoody version of Whole Foods and infinitely better) and the nutritionist launched into it too. I bought the MCT oil and came home to give it a try, but as a matcha drink instead of coffee.

I chose caramel because the idea of putting butter in tea sounded gross. But I love butter caramels so it seemed like the best bet. I put the matcha, water, and ghee (clarified butter) in my milk frother (I use the breville milk frother thing for my matchas) and when it was done poured some of the mct oil in.

It tastes exactly like a butter caramel. Smooth, creamy, buttery caramel. So delicious and (butter and all) super healthy. If you want to try it and don’t have MCT oil, coconut oil is supposed to have a similar effect. I will definitely be experimenting with other flavors and teas, but this was a clear winner.

So that’s all.

I wasn’t going to log on to steepster today because it is 70 degrees in Portland today. That’s unheard of pretty much anytime before July. So. Yeah. CRAZY!!!

Anyway, nice weather made me want a cold drink. I made this. I’ve had a few of these flavored matchas that haven’t worked for me but this is no brainer. So good. Yum.

Okay, back outside.

This reminds me a lot of all the raspberry champagne white teas I have tried to no avail. In reality, “light cabernet” is actually a better way to describe those things than “raspberry champagne.” Or maybe actually more of a combination, or even better, like blanc de noirs.

It’s kind of funny after I say that, looking through other notes everyone has compared it to a different wine!

This is pretty sweet though, at least for me. It also is pretty floral, definitely jasmine. It wasn’t bad but I am pretty particular about wine flavored teas, and for some reason white tea really just doesn’t do it for me as a base for any.

The good thing about box A is that I have less things to try that’d go back in the box. But since it’s been awhile, probably since it came, I figured I’d try something else.

This is SO strongly rose in the bag I was worried it would taste like soap, because it sure smells like soap.

I followed the recommendations on the bag and it turned out just fine, as long as you drink it while it’s hot. Once it cools a bit, it does start to get that soapy rose taste. I didn’t really get much of a fruit flavor, but I guess it’s what helps keep the rose under control, because it is a rather nice rose black.

I may give it one more try, but it’ll probably continue on in a tea box.