Samovar

kind of fishy, very smooth, but not much body. light, springy aftertaste

I am having a very enjoyable day sipping this oolong! After a quick rinse, I enjoyed many delicious steeps! It went from dark and roasty and almost tarry, to more nut buttery. I expect to get a few more steeps before the day is through!

That being said, I have lowered the rating a little. I prefer the roasty flavors of Silk Road Tea’s Imperial Red or Premium Steap’s Emperor’s Red. I know they are technically a different kind of tea preparation (black vs. oolong) but I am comparing them by the roasty flavor profile.

The Imperial Red and Emperor’s Red are both are smoother, sweeter, and have that tangy flavor I love along with the roasty flavors. I will gladly finish the three or so teaspoons of leaves I have left of the Wuyi Dark Roast (thanks Takogoti!) but will not restock now that I’m familiar with the IR and ER!

This one courtesy of the Amazing Takgoti! Thank you!!!

I chose this one for today because Robert Fortune has arrived at the Wuyi mountains in China in the Steepster Book Club book, For All the Tea in China! I thought that it would be neat to drink a tea from the very area I am reading about! I am imagining the mists and the dragon skeleton mountains as I sip!!

I did a rinse in boiling water, then did the rest of my infusions at 195 degrees.

The first three steeps had this amazing dark roasty flavor which reminded me of natural peanut butter from the health food store – no salt no sugar! just the ground nuts. It then morphed into something like the barley tea that I had at the Korean restaurant. I’m now getting a good tea flavor with some deep elements. Seven wonderful steeps. This tea had the most dramatic changes in flavor! It was almost like I had three different teas today! I think it could even go for more but I am so full of tea, and need to leave the office soon!

The blurb says it’s good for coffee drinkers – I have to agree. Not because it tastes like coffee, but because it has the hefty presence of coffee. I love it. I definitely would pick some of this up for the winter. I want to see what steeps 8 and beyond hold!! Mmmmm.

Earthy and rustic. Gunpowder type tea that tastes much better in small infusions. Great warm or cold steeped overnight.

(Tea 3 of 8 in the my-boyfriend-is-awesome series)

Living in Japan, I’m surrounded by yuzu-flavored everything, from yuzu ice cream to yuzu soy sauce — and, occasionally, actual yuzus. I’ve become quite the yuzu enthusiast, so out of all the teas Garrett sent me, I probably held this one to the highest standards.

I can smell the yuzu right away. Good start. And I love that cloudy, light green color. It tastes very grassy and sencha-y at first — is it my imagination or is the yuzu taste getting more and more prevalent with each sip? It’s like an author building up the suspense with every chapter and ending the book on a cliffhanger, but you don’t mind because you already bought the sequel. I steep a second cup to find out.

Second cup, the taste evens out. Yuzu and sencha work together, allowing you to understand the relationship between the characters.

Third cup, it’s yuzu all the way. Happy ending.

I liked this tea but was not in ecstasy. I think it’s a great oolong but it fails to win top grades with me simply because its identity is a bit too diffuse. I can tell and taste that this is a tea of great quality but drinking it feels as if I am standing in the middle of an enormous gallery at a fine art museum and I can only get impressions. I would want to move towards an individual painting to get a closer look but instead I cannot do that. It’s a vast canvas of a tea with a lot going on in the scene, but I cannot see if all.

It’s all true: buttery, vegetal, malty, yeasty, like wine, like fruit of various kinds. I think what I’m wanting is some sort of dominant note to ground the tea so that it can define itself more clearly.

Very good. Sweet, smoky, rich, smooth…yet a bit of coffee-like acidity. Don’t know if there is a touch of berry or if i am imagining the taste of the jam we had in it once.

Normally I don’t like smoky teas but this is good. I enjoy the smoky aspects even though I’m still getting used to it. . . I have finished the tea and I want more. Good tea.

Mostly mint, I don’t get much rooibos.

I’ve just spent the entire day working like a madwoman with steep after steep of this tea! Total of seven :) I have to say, if you must sit in your office all day and work without a break, brewing a multiple steep oolong with your kettle by your side is the way to go.

I rinsed with boiling water, and then did my steeps with 195 degree water throughout.

I thought that the first three steeps were a sort of a floral nutmeg and cinnamon flavor. This tea reminded me so much of a lighter, more floral, less sweet Dragon Ball from Silk Road Teas! Very delicious. I was getting a not quite milky flavor, but a sort of coating that was like milk in my mouth, if that makes any sense?

The fourth and fifth steeps were a bit less cinnamon and nutmeg, and the milky feeling became even more pronounced. By the 6th and 7th steeps I was getting a light and pleasant tea flavor.

I think this is a great tea, and probably would have flipped if I tasted it before the Dragon Balls, but I prefer the Dragon Balls! They have more gusto and sweetness.

Doulton’s Shakespeare: A Tasting Note in 5 Acts
Act I scene 7

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Sonnet 116

Oh the smell of the sampler when I opened it: a fruity ever-so-lightly smoky fragrance. I actually thought that this would make an excellent perfume. I have yet to throw out the bag: I keep sniffing it.

I was a bit concerned with Samovar’s instructions. I tend to make larger cups of tea using about the same amount of tea (if not a little more). What if I destroy my first experience with Samovar? And I was still concerned after I went for it and had my first few sips. I felt like it really wasn’t that remarkable of a tea. Then the magic happened.

I’ve never had lychee before (I now suspect that there’s some in the Nil Noir that I had yesterday), but I think it’s absolutely delightful. As I sipped my first steep I began my now almost ritualistic pondering of where this tea would fit in Shakespeare’s works. I got a lot more sweetness than smokiness out of this tea. It’s as if the tea blender just happened to be in a room where a fireplace was in use. Just the subtlest hints of smoke.

During my musings I kept coming back to Hamlet, but Hamlet the character or the play? It just wasn’t sitting well with me. This tea is elegant in its simplicity, but I think that my Hamlet tea will be complex as all get out and still be one of the best cups of tea in my life. It may be years before I stumble upon my Hamlet. Then I tried to think of sweet/masculine characters: Romeo? No. That’s not right either. And then the glimmer of an idea came. I should look at sonnets. I realized that if I felt like writing a poem to the tea that I’m drinking, then I should peruse the sonnets and see if one fits. And one did for this tea.

Sonnet 116. It’s got it all: the declarations of love, beauty, and most importantly it is very masculine. I didn’t study much of Shakespeare’s sonnets in school, but I thought that I recalled that these are written from one man to another. So I did some research and found a great site that helps put the sonnets in context. Here’s the link to Sonnet 116 in its entirety as well as its commentary for those who are curious: http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/116comm.htm You’ll need to scroll down a bit to get the sonnet and its commentary. This tea truly is a beautifully sweet masculine sonnet. TG

I have limited Samovar experiences. (HINT HINT…if anyone has some extra Samovar Blends I would LOVE to do a swap…)

Anyhow…because the spicy chai aroma was so VERY intense when I first open the package I decided to do a little less loose leaf that I usually do. It was about a half to 3/4 T worth in a 12-ounce cup – usually I do about twice that…I like my stuff strong…but chais are often UNpredictable so I have decided to play with them a bit.

The color is a pale medium brown. A little cloudy but it doesn’t have a texture or murkiness to it.

Eventho the scent of the cuppa is FULL OF SPICE the taste isn’t as intense and I am grateful. Most of the ingredients hold hands nice but I can taste the cardamom a little bit more out in front than the rest.

This is ok. I’m glad I infused the amount I did. It worked out well.

I’ve been looking forward to trying this sample ever since Ricky said he thought I’d like it since I’d liked Maiden’s Ecstasy.

The little pu erh leaves are so small and cute, like they are with the other Samovar loose pu erhs, and perhaps loose pu erhs in general (my experience isn’t yet broad enough to comment). They’re not a uniform color, they’re gradations of brown from a medium, milk chocolate to a dark, bittersweet chocolate color. They have the deep, dark, leathery smell I have come to associate with pu erh. And something mocha-like, too.

What a gorgeous, dark color this brews to! It’s a deep dark brown, with some red in it. Depending on how the light hits it, it is either very nearly opaque, or darkly translucent. The aroma is gorgeous too. It’s only a little leathery, and not barnyardy, or fishy that I could detect. It reminds me of a savory mushroom soup. Not cream of mushroom. The other kind; the brothy, gravy-esque kind.

The taste is amazing. Again the words deep and dark come to mind. Again, there’s nothing barnyardy or fishy about how this tastes to me. There is some leather, but there is a lot more, too. Earth, moss, coffee, and an interesting mix of other suggestions. On the one hand, gravy. On the other, tree resin. On the other… ok, I realize I don’t have three hands, but if I did, the third would be almost a very dusky, deep, dry cabernet, the kind I don’t generally find palatable. In this tea, though, I like that suggestion. What I don’t like about those kinds of cabs is the abundance of tannin. This, however, is exceptionally smooth.

I think what I must be trying to describe is what ancient trees taste like. Which is awesome to think about.

This is quite lovely. Unlike the other Samovar pu erhs, this is so rich it’s not something I could drink every day. Fortunately, since pu erhs improve with age, I don’t have to worry about it going bad in my cupboard if I limit my indulgence to a sometime thing.

I was scared to try this tea. It’s such a big favorite here on Steepster, I felt awed and intimidated by its very existence. It’s like being in the presence of a celebrity.

On the one hand, I’m glad I looked at the notes for it before I tried my sample. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known to give it a try at 175. On the other hand, wow. Such (almost universally) high numbers! Am I worthy?

Pretty leaves with those golden tips punctuating the darkness of the leaves. My smeller is off today, so I don’t get much from smelling the dry leaves. But the aroma of the steeped tea is incredibly complex. Sugary, fruity, buttery and smooth.

The sugar flavor is a very distinctive type of sugar. I know from whence the reference to yams comes. Last Thanksgiving, when the rest of the family was having some sort of goopy yam concoction with marshmallows and pineapple, I, on a restrictive diet, stuck a half yam, sliced longitudinally, in the oven to bake and eat plain. When I checked on it, the sugar in the potato had bubbled up from the orange meat, fallen to the bottom of the oven and carmelized there giving the most amazingly delicious smell. That’s the sugar I taste here.

It marks a return to the preternatural smoothness of Samovar blacks following a slight detour with the Ceylon Super Single.

I understand the high ratings on this. It has depth, body, character, all the things I look for in a tea.

I need to sit with this one for a while, taste it multiple times. On this first tasting when I’m tired and stressed, I fear I’m not in the frame of mind to give it its true due. But oh, how I am looking forward to getting to know this tea.

My little sample of this tea is gone and I’m sad. But at least I’ve ordered more! The flavor is so surprising coming from a black tea. Okay, coming from any tea because the only other tea I’ve tasted that is similar is Samovar’s Royal Garland. This is caramelized fruits and dark flowers. I gave the husband a few sips and he mentioned wanting a full cup so he could really figure out the flavors. Too bad – there is no more! A few minutes later he came in and asked if I had sweetened the tea because the aftertaste in his mouth tasted like raw sugar. Nope, that’d be the tea. So yummy.

I’m having a lot of trouble describing this tea. It is so unlike any other black tea I’ve ever had. It’s sweet, but a dark sweet, like grilled and sugared fruits. It’s got a bit of raw sugar or almost caramel flavor to it too that makes it cuddly. There’s something that’s maybe like a sweet rye bread. Or not. It’s just so hard to peg the flavors! It brings to mind Samovar’s Royal Garland a bit as far as overall taste profile – darkly sweet but clean but also a bit cuddly and comfort-food-like. There’s no bite or astringency in the flavor – it’s very smooth if a bit light bodied. I really can’t be more specific about the flavors other to say that it is surprising and different but good. INSANELY good. Like I kind of want to buy twenty pounds of this tea RIGHT NOW just to roll around in and go “OMG, GOOD TEA.” And that’s perfectly normal, right?

I know the rating I want to give this tea but I’m going to hold of for just a bit – I want to try a second steep first to make sure the insane goodness wasn’t a fluke. And why is Samovar out of this one now? Boo! How will I be able to buy my twenty pounds to roll around in?

ETA: Second steep @ 5 minutes. Nope, not a fluke. I just seriously think this is fantastic. It tastes like raw sugar and faint florals with an aftertaste of grilled fruit. I just love this. Though I will say, I made the husband try some and he said, “It is very good, but I just don’t see the fantastic.” That just means more for me!

And again ETA: Third steep at 8 minutes. Very bready and sweet though getting a tad light now. I tried to do a fourth steep at 20 minutes and while it was actually okay tasting, compared to the first three it was very much less than. But three steeps? I can deal with that!

I’m trying to learn my lesson about over-caffeinating on the weekends. After two 12oz steeps of Troika, I’m switching to something decaf for a bit so I don’t explode. I’m typically not a huge fan of mint (or rooibos, really). There is an edge to mint that feels raw to me, so for me to enjoy minty things the mint usually needs to be mixed with something to heavily tame it down to a bare fresh tingle.

This tea is pretty much full on mint. I don’t really taste the rooibos except for maybe a hint at the end (and even then it is more of a not-mint undernote than a woody rooibos taste) and I can’t pick out the bergamot at all (which is a little disappointing). Except the mint doesn’t have that mint bite, that rawness, that I dislike in things that are so full on mint. If I have to guess, I’d say that the rooibos (and bergamot) add a little heaviness to the flavor of the mint that prevents it from seeming so thin and prevents that biting raw edge at the end.

I’m still not a huge fan of strongly mint things, but this is pretty good. I imagine that if I were the type to like drinking pure mint tisanes (or even predominately mint tisanes), I would find this very tasty. As it is, I do find it one of the best strong mint tisanes I’ve had.

Yay! Grown up peach gummy tea! This makes me happy! A great celebration tea for what has been a great celebration weekend – today is my birthday (and it’s been fantastic) but even cooler – yesterday the husband and I paid off our house! So yeah, I’m pretty happy with life at this moment and this super-sweet, tasty, floral and fruity gummy-like tea keeps the happy going! YAY!!!!

Even Samovar says that this tea is sweet. Yeah, it is. It’s like a Kasugi peach gummy (http://amzn.to/d6o1Bh) but all grown up. It’s not as sweet and it has a bit more depth to it than the gummy, though – there is a gentle softness (I’m thinking from the jasmine and osthmanthus flowers) and a little tingle of crisp, tingly freshness (I’m thinking from the orange and tangerine). There’s a darker, more savory note of the white tea hiding underneath but the predominant flavor is fruity sweetness. The strong fruitiness of it makes me think a little of an herbal fruit tisane but, just as in the case of the peach gummy, grown up and toned down. Herbal teas usually make me think of Kool-Aid and while this still has a strong fruit flavor, it doesn’t even begin to skirt Kool-Aid territory.

I can taste the floral notes and the tea itself a bit more in the second steep (4 minutes) but it’s still sweet and fruity and clean. And peachy. This is definitely not a tea for those that dislike fruity teas. But personally, I am really enjoying having something so obviously fruity but not sickeningly sweet. I could definitely see myself buying a tin of this.

All day, I’ve been thinking about giving this tea another go. So I did. I did a shorter steep time and that really seems to have decreased the rooibos taste, which has given me the chance to check out the berry flavor closer. It doesn’t say this in the tasting notes, but this tastes like it has rose hips in it to me. I say that because Lupicia’s Rose Hip tea reminds me of spaghetti sauce and I’m getting a hint of that here – not full on spaghetti sauce but more like hints of canned tomatoes. (Of course, Lupicia’s Rose Hip tea also had hibiscus in it, so perhaps hibiscus makes me think of spaghetti sauce.) Anyway, when I sip this tea, I get a flash of berry followed by a quick dip into canned tomato and then lifted back up into dark berries again. As it cools, the dip into tomato becomes shallower to where it almost doesn’t happen. The rooibos wood is pretty much totally gone in this shorter steep which I oddly find I miss a bit. (Not much, mind you. It is still rooibos.)

That being said, I think I kind of like this. Even with the shorter steep time, the berry flavor is pretty strong so I do wish that could be mellowed out more, making the first steep more like the second. If a black tea tasted like this, I probably wouldn’t love it, but for a rooibos, this isn’t bad.

PS – I did the second steep at five minutes and it’s really quite lovely. No tomato, just mild and pleasant dark berries and a whiff of the lattice they are growing on.

I might have to spend a little bit more time with this tea to properly peg it. The dry not-leaves and even the brewed tea smell like these (really tasty) fruit gummies I get at Costco. Oh, sure, they are called ‘fruit mini-bites’ but they are gummies. http://www.sunrypeusa.com/viewproduct_us.php?line=9&group=1 And that’s what this tea smells like. Which is pretty awesome.

The taste was much more… exotic, however. Not as sweet and with a woody follow up (hello rooibos!). The rooibos in this isn’t bad though – it’s not sickeningly sweet like so many rooibos. This one just tastes of dry, clean, nicely sanded wood planks. Covered in berry preserves. There’s a tang that isn’t quite tartness but it really brings to mind the taste of dark berries. Boysenberries, blueberries, grapes, blackcurrants…

I was missing the sweetness from the smell though so I tried it with a little sugar. The woody rooibos pretty much disappeared but the berry flavor was much more… normal. Kind of dull, like any old herbal tea and I think the sugar accentuated the tartness a little. So I tried at second steep (7 minutes) with no sugar.

I think the second steep was my favorite. Still berry-y and a tiny, minuscule hint of wood, but it wasn’t as overpoweringly flavored as the first cup, which was so strong it made me thirsty for some good ole water. I’m going to have to revisit this tea before I can fully judge it, perhaps with a slightly shorter steep time on the first steep. Right now, though, I could see potentially picking some up to expand my painfully thin decaf tea selection.

Four Seasons pisses me off.

Don’t get me wrong—this isn’t a bad tea. It’s actually quite tasty. But it’s just not that special. It tastes, to me, like an average Tie Guan Yin, but missing the delicious heaviness I associate with TGY. It’s delicious, but no more delicious than some of the other TGYs I’ve tried.

But here’s the biggest kicker for me—you have to use a lot of leaf, and it does not produce that many infusions—certainly not 10-15, unless you’re thinking 2 ounce cups in 2 tablespoons of leaf. This is kind of infuriating, since the whole selling point on the Samovar website is that it lasts forever, so you’re getting a good value even if it’s $25 for a small, half-filled tin. I don’t like being lied to or misled. And there sure as hell aren’t 40 servings in the tin I received. Hell, there aren’t more than 15 teaspoons in there. And this tea requires, at the very least, 1.5 teaspoons for 6 ounces of water.

The tasting note descriptions intrigue me…I’ve done a little research, and I’ve never heard of Four Seasons/Si Jie Chun being described as bread and milk. The description I’ve come upon most is flowers, fruit, honey and pineapple. Hm. I’m tasting less milk or lactose or bakey-bready-ness, and more gardenias and sweet floral perfumes. [And yes, I have tried this at a number of different temperatures, and have gotten mostly the same results. No increase in dairy/lactose/bread at a lower temperature, for me.] I wonder how much of the (omg milk! bread!) love for this can be attributed to the power of suggestion…makes me want to experiment by writing up a tasting note for a random tea that’s like “OMG THIS TASTES LIKE CHERRIES!” and then see if anyone else says the same thing :)

So what do I taste? Gardenias, mostly; honey, certainly; and butter from my cooled down second infusion. The proportions of the flavors changes slightly from infusion to infusion, but the leaves don’t last very long either. Something I’m noticing this time around—it’s pretty bitter. I’m not sure if it’s because my water is too hot, or if I’m oversteeping it. A warning: do not try to brew this with 8 ounces and 1 teaspoon. I’ve brewed other TGYs this way and it’s been fine, but Four Seasons is not like other TGYs :) I ended up with one okay-but-light first infusion, and then almost tasteless 2nd and 3rd infusions. It’s so difficult to rate this one…on the one hand, it’s yummy when you do everything right. On the other hand, it’s extremely expensive and you have to use a lot of it to make a decent cup of tea, plus all the reservations I mentioned above.

I know I’m blaspheming, writing a negative review for a Samovar creation…please don’t hurt me!

This was on my shopping list for a while, so I was super excited when Takgoti sent me some of this! It has received mostly fantastic reviews, which added to my super excitement. Not to mention that Samovar and I are currently deep in a passionate love affair – shhhh!

I definitely agree with those here who loved this. This is not a harsh tea, and it is very complex. The tastes are gentle; honey, yam, caramel. In order to get the caramel, I have to hold the tea in my mouth and let it wash around for a bit. The texture is unusually smooth and buttery, which is something I’ve never experienced in a black tea before. It leaves your mouth feeling full and coated like some whites do. I keep running my tongue over the roof of my mouth, expecting to find something stuck there.

This could certainly withstand the addition of milk, but this tea is so pure that I would not want to tarnish it in any way.

I want to thank Takgoti again for giving me the chance to have this experience! It was exquisite.