TeaGschwendner

I’ve been hearing about this type of tea a lot lately so when I asked about it the tea shop in my area gave me a sample to try. I was instantly drawn to it after the first sip despite it’s slightly fishy scent. They say it gets better with age and I must say I am a bit intrigued to taste that possibility.

I’m getting a nutty smell from the dry leaf. No hint of banana, but I’m okay with that. Brewing, it smells like a peeled banana dropped in the dirt next to a bonfire roasting nuts. Which could be pretty much what they were going for. Once I’ve drained my handy dandy ingenuiTEA the leaves smell a little… candied maybe? And maybe a little synthetic? I don’t know but it’s kind of odd. Not hideous or anything. Just weird.

The tea smells more of roasted nuts but there’s still some dirt-covered banana in there, too. And…. it kinda tastes like that too. Nutty and then a bit of banana-in-dirt (without the grit). It’s weird but I don’t hate it. But it’s weird. Maybe it will be better sweetened… I forgot to bring raw sugar from home so I’m such using plain ole white sugar but I’ll deal. I put a whole packet in so yeah, pretty sweet now. Pretty much now all I’m getting is roasted (almost to the point of burnt but not quite) nuts and then sugar. There’s a weird banana-peel flavor on the tail end if I slurp. I’m not going to slurp anymore.

Okay, so yeah, it tastes like what it says it should. Walnuts and bananas. But it’s just not right for me. It’s not horrible and I finished my cup but yeah, that’s pretty much the only positive I have to say for it. TeaGermanname and I just don’t get along.

3g/8oz

(PS to the Overlords: Yay on the confirmation window! It saved me from making a user error! You guys rock!)

The final tea in the first month of my tea tasting experiment came from a new company to me, Tea Gschwendner. As for this particular tea, I was a little disappointed. It has an almost overpowering citrus scent, but the actual citrus flavor left much to be desired. It was a decent tea, but compared to the scent it gives off it was very tame. There was almost no orange flavor and the Ceylon tea they used as a base isn’t remarkable. It calls for a shorter steep time than I would normal do, but didn’t get bitter when I left it in a little longer than they recommend. Overall it was a decent tea, but nothing to write home about.

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It is cold outside and the snow is falling in clumps and that calls for a wonderfully scented warming tea. I picked up this blend after work today and am now relaxing back and thoroughly enjoying this tea . The smell is sweet and fills the nose with a creamy scent. The taste is very mellow compared to the smell, but just the perfect level to not be considered “too much”. As the name says, khali-kahwa or really good cup and it is just that!

Pouring this in to my cup I got a lovely poof of fresh peaches. But then when I stuck my nose into the cup to sniff? Peach schnapps. It was a little surprising and a bit unpleasant. I had these peach gummies once that were peach-tasting only on the surface. Once you actually, you know, tasted them, they tasted fake and synthetic and left a horrible aftertaste. This tea? Smells like those gummies.

I’m scared.

Okay, I did heavy on the leaf compared to what is recommended, but I typically do with oolongs and greens. I haven’t had a yellow tea before but honestly figure I won’t do them any differently. Unless they just suck when done that way. But considering this is a flavored tea and I haven’t had huge luck with TeaGermanname teas, I’m not going to judge all yellows by how this turns out, good or bad.

And I’m really braced for bad here. I try to sip and the schnapps/fake gummy scent burns my nose. Help. Please.

Okay, well sipping it does not cause physical pain like I was afraid of so that’s a step in the right direction. But really all I’m getting from this is fake peach. Fake, synthetic, nasty-aftertaste-from-gummies peach. I’m still sipping and it’s improved but it’s still not good. It’s peach schnapps peach. Fake gummy peach. It leaves a little fake-sweetner-esque burn on my tongue that makes me want gum or toothpaste or stinky cheese.

Yeah, I’m half way through my cup and I can’t torture myself anymore. I’ll give the husband some to see how he likes it. He actually likes those peach gummies.

4g/8oz

So I managed to somehow spill most of my little sample bag all over the kitchen floor. I don’t seem to be having all that great of luck today. I guess I shouldn’t say that though because I did end up with enough tea left to make a good-sized cup so it could have been worse!

This brews up surprisingly dark. It looks like spiced cider but smells like apple cobbler without the crust and strong on the cinnamon. Very apple. Very baked apple. Definitely not fresh apple.

I got distracted while I let it cool so oops on that but still, taste-wise, it’s pretty much what it sets out to be. Apple and cinnamon and tea. I’m totally missing the almond it says is in here though. Perhaps that was added to give it a crust-ish flavor? I’m pretty much missing out on anything-crust related but I do get baked apple. It says it is baked apple, I believe it. Now, if it said Baked Apple Pie, I would have said it was fibbing, but it didn’t so I won’t. It’s not quite sweet enough to be the innards of an apple cobbler, but with a little sprinkle of sugar it might match almost exactly.

I shared some with the husband – at first sniff he asked me if this was a Celestial Seasonings blend because it smelled like it had fruit in it. And when he sipped he said it tasted like a cinnamon apple fruit mix. So yeah, pretty cinnamon apple!

Overall though, I can’t really get behind this. It seems sorta… boring. I mean, sure it’s accurately flavored (the most accurate of the TeaGermanname teas I’ve had so far). But it’s just a bit too mild and the flavor doesn’t really develop from start of sip to finish so it just seems a little… boring. No nuances (that I can pick out – maybe it’s just me) or flavors layered upon flavors. The flavors don’t dance or twirl or flitter around each other. All the little flavors are just crammed together in a box, sitting cross-legged and pouting. And personally, I’d rather the tea be given a little room to dance.

3.5g/8oz

I went in to the tea shop with no real plan. Just that I wanted a plain black tea. No clicks and no whistles. I was suggested the Russian Samovar Black Tea. This tea has a very traditional black tea scent and a nice dark coloration once steeped. The taste is a very straight up black tea as I hoped for. Though there is just a little something extra I keep noticing with each swallow. What it is I can’t figure out….and I am in no way complaining. It is just a nice extra bite with each sip. I will have to make a batch tomorrow and see if I can figure it out then.

Expanding my taste buds to the world of Oolong! This tea has very little odor to it prior to steeping though it does a nice job of filling the room with an earthy tone while it steeps. Overall this tea is very calm in every way. The taste is very laid back and woodsy smooth. It almost has a mouth filling creaminess to it. I do like this tea quite a bit. And to think the last time I raved about an Oolong was when Sobe came out with those Oolong tea drinks……….shame on me.

First yellow tea review!

And I’m a bit confused of what to make of it. I think I would prefer a yellow tea without any flavoring added in, but here we have one with peach included. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to differentiate what flavors are coming from the tea, and what are coming from the flavoring.

Anyway, the tea is quite gorgeous! Lots of full, beautiful dark-green leaves, peppered with sunflower blossoms. The leaves are almost papery to the touch, but really, I haven’t seen leaves this large… ever. So I steeped up two tsps of this in my pot, and let it brew. This is sort of the last “big” tea I have from TG, so I’m hoping for something amazing. It steeps up to a orange-y yellow, with a scent that’s pretty peachy. with a hint of… buttery floral? I can’t really tell.

Anyway, the taste is pretty interesting. I can’t tell if I like it more than I do, or not. If that makes any sense. The taste is almost a little musky apricot. LIke dried apricots that you get in a bag at the supermarket. And then there’s an almost weird, savory quality. It almost tastes like a green tea turned into a black tea. It’s… bizarre. I guess it’s a light fermentation taste? But it blends too much with the peach aftertaste for me to really decide. The peach aftertaste kind of is like those gummy peach candies. Pretty sweet, but a bit one-dimensional.

This one is pretty nice to sip, but it’s not blowing my socks off. There’s something almost off and… odd about it. Something that just doesn’t fit. I can’t really place what it is that’s pretty off-putting about it, but I did have no problem finishing the cup. Hrm.

It’s just a bit weird in general.

Nice aroma, not as sweet as other white teas. Very nice flavor, little bit of spice on the tail end of the flavor. Great tea!

Sigh.

This is going to be a bit of a teaplz Manifesto, and a reflection of my tea journey so far, so I apologize in advance for the rambling. Actually, I don’t apologize, since I mainly write these entries for myself.

I feel as if I’m come a long way since my first sip of loose leaf just a few short months ago. I’ve tried lots of different kinds of tea, from several different companies. I’ve become friends with a lot of wonderful people here, who have opened my eyes even further to what tea could be, what tastes good, and what I might actually be interested in. I’ve felt myself evolve already, and start to become more solidly what type of tea drinker I am to become.

That being said, let’s take a look at my TeaGschwendner order. Back just a month or so ago, when I ordered these teas, I was terribly excited in the newness and novelty of it all! Tea that tastes like almond cookies and apple pie and bacon! All sorts of desserts and flavors and exotic items steeping up in a beverage! The sheer expanse of flavor profiles and different odd things was just plain exciting to me. Of COURSE I had to order Chili-Chocolate tea and strawberry tea with pepper flavoring. Bring it on!

But now, the novelty has worn off. Having been exposed to companies like Samovar, Golden Moon, and Rishi, my tastes have changed. The more quality flavored tea and regular plain-old tea I have, the more I crave that more than the way wacky stuff. Almond Cookie by SpecialTeas, by the way, is still an amazing flavored tea. Ranked up there with some of the best I’ve had. But I find myself more and more preferring flavors that … occur naturally. Like jasmine or orange or ginger. Stuff that occurs naturally instead of mimicking other flavors. I want natural flavors. Robust flavors.

But I also want tea. And after all, that’s what brought me here, right? Tea. Sure, there’s a lot of fun in novelty-style tea, but then the shine and newness of it wears off, and then there’s almost a weariness. A battle and toil to finish that sample, to trudge through that cup. I really dislike the feeling, and honestly, it’s weighing me down.

So let’s get to Gwendalina’s Baked Apple. It shares a problem that a lot of TeaGschwendner’s flavored teas I’ve sampled have: amazing smell, and lack of flavor. I can’t speak for some of TG’s more quality offerings, of course. They’re a huge company with a vast variety of teas. For all I know, I’ve just chosen cheap and affordable teas from them that just don’t really suit my taste the way that I thought they would.

This one smells like an apple pie pulled right out of the oven. I can smell completely the crust and the cinnamon and the almonds. The apples smell sweet and freshly cooked, oozing in their syrup. It smells amazing.

So I get out a level teaspoon, and steep this up. TG recommends boiling water, but with green tea mixed with black here, I went for a bit lower than that. The resulting infusion was a nice yellow color, and the smell coming off it was a liquid version of the dry leaf. It almost reminds me of when Snapple had their apple pie flavor. Does anyone remember that?

Unfortunately, the flavors aren’t nearly as potent and exciting as they smell. They’re all there, but they’re very faint and non-descript. I catch hints of apple and almond, mixed with an almost crust-like, bake-y flavor, but none of it combines together in an exciting way. The tea base itself tastes fairly weak and unexciting. It doesn’t have enough body and oomph to support the generally weak flavor. So while it doesn’t taste bad, by any means, it’s severely disappointing when compared to the smell.

Not all crazily-flavored teas fall into this category! Take Almond Cookie, for example. Its smell and its taste are pretty damned close, yet it manages to incorporate a tea-like base as well. It manages to be robust and subtle and entirely sippable. And each sip surprises me with the pastry-like intenseness of cookies. I get none of that here, which really makes me sad.

Yes, I think I’ve moved away from exotic-flavored teas. Give me a regular old flavored tea that isn’t overly ambitious, that just tries to do a flavor well. I actually really enjoy more than anything picking out flavor notes in non-flavored teas. Plain tea. The original. It’s so much more exciting to pull, say, a caramel note out of a keemun, than actually drink down a caramel tea.

So it’s a bit of a jaded teaplz here, with quite a bit of unsatisfying tea. Time to give it away? Time to order stuff that suits my tastes a bit more? We shall see.

This is great tea! Wonderful aroma! Mild and delicious flavor! Excellent!

How is it I always forgot how much I love the scent of jasmine. Maybe it is a quirk in my brain that resets a few hours after each experience so that the next time I smell jasmine it is like it is my first time. A quirk I am so glad to have! I can’t describe the smell of this tea other than to say its a treat all its own. The loosely wrapped curls are just a beautiful thing to watch as they steep. The color of the tea steeped is a deep golden color. The taste is an overall floral experience. The jasmine hits your tongue smoothly as well as your nose. Such a treat! I am just babbling at this point, but damn I can’t help it. This is good stuff!

After work today my girlfriend and I ended up at Tea Haus, a tea shop a few doors down from where we work. This is a fantastic place to end up at any point in the day. While browsing I asked about any green teas that may be considered similar to a current personal favorite, the China Lung Ching. I was given a sample of this Japan Bancha to try. The aroma of the dry leaves is just so inviting. Such an earthy warmness fills the nose. My favorite!!! Plus the tea itself is just so pretty. The color is slightly darker than the China Lung which I was told is due to how each is dried differently. Once the steeping is done and poured into a mug that earthy green smell carries on with a little more umpfh. The taste is quite similar to the China Lung but its earthy vegetal taste stays consistent throughout. Where as the China Lung begins as such then ends with a slight sweetness. Overall this tea is quite enjoyable and upon my next visit to the Tea Haus I am going to have to get a bag of this to add to my collection.

The leaf smells odd but I can’t quite place the scent… a little spicy and almond-y but weirdly also reminding me of the Strawberry Dream from last night. The liquid form, however, smells very different. My first sniff made me go, “Hmm, Christmas.” Then I remembered the name and though, “Well, duh.” It’s sweet and dessert smelling – really quite delicious. Orange blossoms and almond are easily picked up and without the weird smell from the dry leaf that reminded me of last night’s honeybush… unpleasantness. There’s a little potpourri smell but it doesn’t show up unless I’m constantly sniffing the tea (and honestly, I can get that smell from most spiced teas). But it’s like almond pastry potpourri. Something with sweet, nummy icing on it.

But darn it, the taste is more potpourri with a almond + orange blossom chaser. Larger swallows give me a POW of orange blossom with a spice base which is nice, but the overall taste of the tea seems to be brought down by the green tea… it’s a bit flat and heavy. I think a lighter tasting green tea base would make this tea sparkle some.

There’s a lot of promise in this tea but unfortunately it just doesn’t combine right for me. This seems to be a disappointing trend with TeaGschwendner’s teas. But as I’ve said before, one aspect of these teas that I do like is the fact that they don’t overflavor their teas. If only most of the flavorings didn’t make me go ‘meh’.

So, it’s 2am and I’ve had a lot of caffeine today. A lot. But I’m not tired yet (not really surprising, huh?) and I want some tea. Since I really don’t need any caffeine right now, I went with this lovely fruit smelling beastie from the delightful teaplz. And it does smell lovely. Light and fruity, though maybe not quite strawberry… I’d vote for raspberry or an unripened blackberry, but that could be the smell of the leaves – berry leaves pretty much smell all the same to me.

I’m having trouble identifying the smell of the tea. Fruity, tart… sorta strawberry-y but mostly not. A smell of burnt sugar, maybe caramel. And sour. I’m typically okay with honeybush – not in love or anything, but okay with it (rooibos typically is the evil one) – but I’m thinking that the sour smell I’m getting is the honeybush. As the tea cools a bit though the sour smell melds a bit with the fruity-that-we-shall-call-strawberry to make a sour gummy fruit smell. This could be interesting.

Actually, it’s surprisingly mild. Woody but not sour (hallo honeybush) with a tart almost-strawberry fruit taste coming through, especially on the aftertaste which is pretty much all fruit. Ultimately though, it just doesn’t work for me. The flavors aren’t quite right and just don’t mesh for me. Additionally, I keep smelling sourness as I sip and that’s not cool (also not cool is the aftertaste I’m getting that seems remarkably related to that sour smell without actually tasting sour). I do like the fact that the flavor isn’t overwhelming though so that keeps it from being a bad tea (I realize my rating seems to contradict that but I had to go right below the yellow face). And in a running theme, the husband likes it more than I do so I’m the lone voice of ‘meh’ for this tea.

I have too much tea.

This was on the shopping list because I thought I was out. I was straightening out the tea collection, when I realized that the old webtea tin (does it age me? Anyone else remember this company?) still had some Smooth STrawberry Dream in it!!! Joy!

This is my absolute favorite rooibos. The first one that I actually liked, and one of the few that I’ve liked well enough to thing about reordering. It doesn’t come accross as rooibos to me, instead the strawberry and the caramel take center stage. I guess that’s why I like it so much!

I haven’t tried it iced, and I haven’t been in the mood for iced tea lately, so I’m drinking it hot today. I’m not sure how long I let it steep, I did a little bit of cleaning in the aquarium while I was brewing the tea. (Using a battery powered vacuum, which is fast, but that’s probably a review for a different website.)

Amazingly subtle strawberry flavor that tastes totally natural. The leaves are large and unfurl beautifully while brewing. (I steeped this in a gaiwan to give the leaves a lot of room to move.) The white tea itself is very mild, but only slightly behind the strawberry taste. Brewed well a second and third time.

In the bag this tea smells almost identical to robotussin. Weird. Besides that start off the tea steeped shows off one beautiful brown almost red shade. The smell coming from the glass is most definitely that of a rooibos but with that added zing of ginger. The taste follows that of the smell. The rooibos stands out a great deal while the ginger faintly pops up. Which to me is just perfect since I am weary when it comes to anything ginger. Overall, even the smell from the bag, this tea is a wonderful pick-me-up!

What would a log of mine be without a wayward analogy? [Don’t answer that.] I’m just going to lay it out here at the start.

This tea reminds me of Sudafed. Not because they taste similar, but stay with me. When I was younger my mom used to give them to me and my brother when we were congested and I liked the way they tasted. One time I was feeling particularly petulant [possibly upset because I had to stay home and miss something fun at school – that’s not something that really happens any more] and she gave me a Sudafed and a little cup of water. I told her I wasn’t going to take it and she told me that if I didn’t I was going to be really uncomfortable that day. So I grabbed at it and put it in my mouth and stood there, pouting. Then she said, “You’d better swallow that or it’s going to taste bad.”

I did not [and still do not on occasion] deal well with people telling me to do things.

I stood there, glaring at her, arms crossed, and didn’t swallow it.

A few seconds later, I was spitting it out on the floor and rubbing my tongue with my finger. My mom laughed at me and said she’d make me some jello, and I smiled sheepishly and took another Sudafed.

If you’re wondering what this story has to do with this tea, it’s because it starts out nicely but I found that it has a kind of nasty finish. It’s a shame, too. It smells amazing – somewhere between caramel and kettle corn and I was pretty excited to drink it.

In sipping it, it starts out tasting as advertised – that delicious sweet and salty combination you get from caramel, with maybe a little bit of a roasty note swimming beneath that is reminiscent of popcorn. And then I gulped it down.

it was bitter. Sour, almost. And actually, lightly reminiscent of what Sudafed tastes like if you melt far enough through that red sugary shell. It wasn’t happy, and I found myself taking sips of the tea to try to combat it only to be greeted by the far less appetizing aftertaste on the finish. It was an unpleasant little vicious cycle it pulled me through, right to the end of the cup. I would have stopped altogether, if I hadn’t been holding out hope that it would fill out as it cooled. No such luck, I’m afraid.

All in all, the aftertaste wasn’t HORRIBLE, but it did qualify this tea as being something I’m not going to order. I have a little bit left, so I’ll try it with sugar, or maybe some honey. But I’ve got a couple of other caramel-tasting teas that treat me better, so I’ll be sticking with those unless adding some form of sweetener kicks this up to mind-blowing.

I’ve gotta thank teaplz for sending me this, because it is for sure something I would have ordered without thinking [I mean, it’s called Cream Caramel – which is the equivalent of a talking puppy jumping in front of my face yelping “CHOOSE ME!”] and would have ended in annoyance. Here’s hoping the remainder of my sample ends up sparkling.

What a wonderful sense experience. In the bag, this tea has such an awesome aroma, heavily dominated by the coconut, with a nice undercurrent of the sencha. Once steeped, the aroma still lingers in the steam, but is less pronounced in the actual drink. I wouldn’t say the coconut is heavy, but I wouldn’t serve it to someone who didn’t like coconut either. Very pleasant, and just as yummy cold!

Auggy was drinking this a couple of days ago, and so I decided to drink it as well, as I’d also gotten some from teaplz. [Folks, it took me literally five minutes to structure that sentence to a point where it made sense so please bear with me today. I also just typed out “sentence,” as esetnce, senetence, setence, sentece, and pony. I don’t know what’s going on this week, I’ve got a really bad case of the mental klutzes.]

I was expecting something like Decaffeinated Chai Agni. That, this was not.

I should have been expecting it after reading Auggy’s review [which I am now perusing again and is bringing me to realize I’m about two days behind on logs]. First of all, at times it smelled like Red Vines [best red licorice ever]. Red Vines, but also…peanut brittle? Maybe? It was something specific, but I couldn’t quite place it and whatever it was that I was smelling was not matching up with what I was expecting to smell.

When I started sipping it, all I could think at first was, “Yep. This isn’t chocolate.” When I began to try and place what it was, all I could think of was that toffee, caramel-like, brittle-taste. I’d almost call it butterscotch. Somewhere in that general family of tastes was where this landed for me.

And then the chili started to arrive, like a train approaching in the distance. I could feel its presence in little pwiffs on the tip of my tongue, and then it grew in volume where it was undeniably there. Luckily, it remained at a volume where it was enjoyable. In that aspect, it reminded me quite a bit of the Decaf Chai Agni [and thankfully, not of the Mayan Chocolate thing].

I’d like to say that I was able to find some chocolate in the tea, but I don’t think I did. At times, I thought I might be tasting it, but it never grabbed me enough to be able to say anything definitively. What I did taste, when I thought I was tasting it, wasn’t a dark chocolate, or a cocoa, or a good milk chocolate taste. It wasn’t Godiva, and it wasn’t even Hershey’s, it was like…Russell Stover. Or Fannie May. Not that I want to rag on those two companies, but in the hierarchy of quality chocolate I’d pin them near the bottom of the totem pole. It’s not that they’re bad, they’re just…no Scharffen Berger. So I’m going to officially unofficially declare that this tea had no chocolate taste for me.

When these two things came together [and it’s possible there were more components to it that I just wasn’t able to pick out], I didn’t really know what to think. Forgiving the absence of chocolate in a supposedly chocolate tea [which was a bit of a high hump to climb over] the tastes did not marry well in my mind. When I think butterscotch sprinkled with chili powder, I do not think, “Oooh, NOM.” And that is what I was essentially tasting. To repeat the mantra that I seem to be using for many of these types of teas that fall in this category for me, “It wasn’t bad, it was just…not good.”

The chili on its own was nice. That was at a good level. I wish I had gotten some vanilla bean from it like Auggy had, because I can see vanilla and chili possibly working together well-ish.

I can’t paint my face and jump up screaming in the stands for this tea. I’m not even sure that I’d sit there and half-heartedly wave a flag. But I’ll go to the game and drink a beer. And if they want me to hold up one of those colored cards to make some kind of picture message at some point, I’ll do that, too, even if mainly because no one likes the dead-pixel-a**hat who refuses to do even that. This metaphor is out of control. I’m going to end this log.