Teapigs

A friend gave me this tea and I’ve been working my way through it. It’s not as subtle as I normally like my tea – it really only has one level of flavor, which is strong and dark. The chocolate is there but it mixes with the black tea. It’s an okay tea but not one I will be in a hurry to buy after I finish my supply. It is caffeinated though, which is all I really need in the mornings some days.

This may be better as a latte with milk and whipped cream on top.

I had been drinking rooibos semi-regularly for a while, until one day my usual dealer was out of stock. Desperation made me turn to an impressive but expensive little tea and coffee bean shop just off Aberdeen’s high street – http://dft.ba/-9PBo (not my image, twitter account or self).

Anyway, I was in a rush so i had a quick look around and grabbed the only rooibos i could find. I’ve seen teapigs for sale in a few other shops, mainly cafés, so i wasn’t sure what to expect, but i gave it a chance anyway. And i’m glad i did, the tea is a delightfully smooth drink with slightly fruity, earthy tones. The caramel isn’t overpoweringly sweet, it’s a good compliment, something i wouldn’t have expected. And it’s only really present on the first steeping.

That was another pleasant surprise – yes, these are teabags, but they’re triangular based pyramids made of some high quality silk like material that doesn’t stain or absorb water like filter paper ones. And as long as you don’t rip it when undoing the string, you can re-steep them at least three times. Supposedly biodegradable too. I added five minutes per steeping, starting at roughly five minutes with water fresh from the boil. But since rooibos doesn’t contain any tannin you can be pretty lax with your timings. This more than made up for the somewhat meagre fifteen bags included in the pack.

All in all a good, convenient, staple tea if you can find it for a reasonably price. I’ve been drinking it probably more than anything else lately so i’ll definitely be looking to get some more.

I don’t know if it’s just that tea after a long walk in the chilly rain is good, but right now this is the BEST tea I have had so far in the UK! We needed a couple of things for the flat, so I decided to walk to the big Tesco. It took longer than I thought it would, and the day is grey, chilly, and rainy. I got two of the items I needed, forgot one (d’oh!), and added this and a couple of other items to my basket as well. Trudged home like a local with my bags on my arm – very tempted to get one of those wheeled shopping carts I have seen the older ladies with.

Anyway… Got home and brewed up a cup, immediately followed by another. I am now warm and dry and still enjoying it immensely. Very smooth, not overwhelmingly spicy.

Sipdown!! (185)

Try all the genmaichas!! This one isn’t bad. The rice is toasty and flavorful which makes for a nice cup. Right at the end, the green base, which is sorta vegetal slips in to remind you it is there. Definitely a nice take genmaicha. Thank you Nattie for the chance to try this tea!

Sipdown!! (187)

This is another from the amazing Nattie (thank you!!!). It reminds me a lot off DAVIDs Creme Caramel rooibos which I did not love so much. The rooibos is just too strong and medicinal for my tastes and I find I am always searching for the caramel. So far Teapigs have failed to impress but that’s alright since you can’t love everything and if you have to not like something, best it be something you can’t get easily anyways :). I am grateful for the chance to try it though.

Sipdown!! (188)

Thank you Nattie for the chance to try my very first Teapigs tea. Unfortunately I am not loving this one. It seems artificial and thin. I am grateful for getting to try it but I am not sad to see it go.

I bought this expecting it to be at least average given the pricing. Teapigs usually has good teas, albeit bagged, but this matcha is terrible. I have had low grade matchas far cheaper than this one that were far superior. I felt a bit conned when I opened it, the colour was off and the grassy, nature fresh notes were just missing. I still prepared it in my chawan, and not soon after found myself with a displeased frown on my face, bitter and stale.

This cannot be a sipdown—there’s too much left. I did enjoy a mug tonight while watching Boardwalk Empire Season 5, episode 4. The remaining sachets I shall leave for my brother!

This is my second journey through the land of Teapigs, and based on these two experiences, it appears that the sachets contain 3g, rather than the more common 2g sachets, so part of the increased quality may simply be that the brew is bound to be more flavorful because of the leafage.

Liquorice and Peppermint, subtitled “Sweet Treat”, is a very simple blend combining only licorice root and peppermint leaves. That’s all. No elaborate bells and whistles or any of the standard herbal bases and fillers such as rooibos, hibiscus, and rosehips.

The brewed liquor smells just like minty licorice or licorice scented peppermint! (I just noticed that the British spelling contains the word ‘liquor’ in it!) The two components are well-balanced, and I happen to love both, so this tea is truly a sweet treat for me!

I saw Teapigs boxes at the grocery, so since I’m a tea hog, I figured, “Why not?” In truth, I was surprised at how pricey they were, relative to other grocery store fare, but I decided to see whether the quality matches the price and the hype in the marketing text. To be honest, I was neither impressed nor intrigued by their blanket denunciation of all China blacks in the description on the box. Obviously, the powers that be at Teapigs have never tried Golden Monkey! But that’s another story…

Darjeeling Earl Grey. This was a first for me, and a happy one. I happen to like darjeeling, but I don’t believe that I’ve ever had a straight-up darjeeling scented with bergamot—or much of anything, come to think of it. I like both darjeeling and bergamot, and Earl Grey as a genre of tea. The big surprise here was to find an Earl Grey which I have no reason whatsoever to douse with cream. I drank this glass au naturel, and it was smooth and satisfying. I’ll add this to my list of no-cream-necessary Earl Greys, which includes now Darjeeling Earl Grey and Harney & Sons Earl Grey White.

Drinking this to combat the super rich lunch I ate and enjoying it more than usual. Mild and nutty and I can live with that.

Truly meh. The 72 rating is from when I first joined Steepster and had only tried a few teas. Dropping a rating goes against my personal philosophy of rating ‘the best version of each tea’ so I won’t do it, but if I rated it now it would be somewhere in the 39-44 range. I shared this cup with my brother, who after learning the name of this tea said “I guess it could taste like popcorn, if popcorn didn’t taste like anything”. I will always think this tea is poorly named. I have found that if I lower the water temperature a lot and give it a fairly short steep it’s okay to accompany a meal. That’s probably how I’ll finish it.

I decided to get a cup of this down while I’m still ill and can’t taste much, which speaks to how much I don’t love this tea (mainly due to personal preference rather than it being a bad genmaicha). I thought it would make it more palatable, but it turns out to have had the opposite effect. I can’t put my finger on what this tastes like, but it’s definitely something which Should Not Be Consumed. I’m going to dump this cup and make something else. Yuck.

Recently sipped down, and now back in my cupboard thanks to my aunt and uncle! They bought me four Teapigs teas for Christmas, of which this was one.

The instructions on the packaging say to brew at boiling, but I ignored that and went for 80 as I have grown less fond of green teas recently, and higher temperatures usually lead to unwanted astringency. For the second time tonight, lowering the temperature of a tea was a good call! The popped rice is the focus of the flavour this way, with the mellow green tea present mainly in the background. And I don’t mind it! My mam, who actively dislikes the majority of my teas, agreed to try this after smelling it and even seemed open to me leaving her a couple of bags! Big success. I think this was my favourite way having this tea too, and I will likely follow these steeping parameters in the future.

Sipdown! (14/203)

Apparently I liked this a lot more the first time I had it, because I’d rate it in the 60s at the moment. Reading my previous tasting note, the deep, grassy green taste doesn’t seem to have bothered me at all, and now, that is a flavour I try to stay away from. Maybe I used to be more tolerant of green teas than I am now, or maybe my tastes will continue to change throughout the years. Who knows. I still don’t think this tastes like popcorn, and I think they should rename it. People might be tricked into buying it expecting it to be sweet or buttery, and it may but off genuine fans of genmaicha. Even having said what I have about green tea, it’s not my favourite genmaicha I’ve tried – I prefer both 52teas and the custom one blended by KittyLovesTea. It’s an accessible route into genmaichas for the inexperienced, still, so I won’t begrudge it a place on shelves of my local teashop.

This is my first time trying a genmaicha, and I am very much looking forward to trying and comparing Kittylovestea ’s genmaicha from the Traveling Tea Box when it gets to me! (:

At first, I did not care for this at all. It both smelled and tasted exactly like a toasted rice cereal (I can’t think why…) from my childhood, which I absolutely hated. The smell was bugging me because it reminded me so much of something that I couldn’t place, and as soon as I first sipped it I figured it out. Blech. Only the reason I didn’t like the cereal was that it was just toasted rice, with no additional flavours and no sweetness. It was just so bland. This tea is different, though – grassy, deep green tea flavour with the toasted rice background adding a lovely warmth to it, and an almost floral aftertaste which I can detect, too. I don’t think it was the flavour of the toasted rice in itself that I didn’t like, because I like it just fine in this.

If anything, I would have preferred a little more green tea, as it wasn’t too strong a flavour and in the bag, there was roughly a 50/50 split between tea and rice.

Overall, I enjoyed this as a pleasant lunchtime tea, although I could tell it was rice rather than corn, and wouldn’t market it as ‘popcorn’ tea as I think it is a little misleading, and doesn’t actually taste much like popcorn. It grew on me throughout the cup, and by the end I was wishing I had a couple more bags. I can’t wait for the TTB to try the version Kitty has made!

Sipdown. Kind of. My local teashop sells single bags of teapigs tea, as they have a Café upstairs which you can buy them from. I bought just one of these to try, as I had previously had Yerba maté a grand total of once (in Bluebird’s Morning Kick blend) and I’m not so sure I could taste it at all in that. So out of curiosity, and the need of energy, I brewed it up this morning. As frequently happens, I forgot about my cup and let it brew for about 20 minutes. I don’t know if it was a product of this oversteeping, but I found this tea incredibly astringent, which I was not expecting from a blend without black or green tea in it. It was also very earthy, and reminded me of a pu’erh.

The flavour changed up as the cup cooled, getting less earthy and a little more perfume-y, although not in a floral way. The astringency didn’t let up at all, but it wasn’t too bad with the overall flavour, considering I’m not a fan of astringency at all, and prefer a smooth cup.

This wasn’t exciting enough to drink on it’s own, and not too pleasant although not awful either. I don’t dislike it enough to avoid blends which use it, but I wouldn’t choose to drink it plain again.

Sipdown! (38/371)

My mam drank the last teabag of this by accident, so I’m only adding this tasting note to add it to my List of Teas Conquered – 10% through my no-buy! I don’t think she was very impressed, but this is a very sweet tea and she abhors anything sweet. Plus I’m not sure she brewed it correctly. Oh well.

Truly awful this time around. My mam (bless her heart) decided to be sweet and make me a cup of tea while I was working. She knew I usually steep my teas for a few minutes, so she’d seen this downstairs and popped it in boiling water for at least 5 minutes (probably closer to 10) before bringing it to me, teabag still in. It was too late by the time I realised. This tea becomes mega sweet if you leave the bag in for longer than a couple of minutes, and it is a bit iffy to brew. Unfortunately, the liquorice root was really overpowering in this cup, and I couldn’t even taste the peppermint. It definitely sorted out my sweet craving for the rest of the day, though! I powered through because my mam had been so sweet to think of making it for me, and by the end of the cup I was sort of getting used to the sweetness and beginning to taste a hint of the mint. I only have one cup of this left, and I will make sure to brew it for a much shorter time! Not changing my rating as it was a brewing error at fault, and not the tea itself.

I got these teabags for Christmas from my amazing parents who know me too well. I always loved liquorice root as a kid, and this tea sounded amazing.

It smells really good brewed, mainly peppermint with a liquorice background, and that’s how it tastes, too. The peppermint comes through strongly first, then lets the liquorice root come into play a bit more, giving a nice natural liquorice flavour instead of a taste of the mass-produced sweet. However liquorice root is very sweet, and the aftertaste of this is just too sweet for me unfortunately (and I like my teas fairly sweet, too). It hasn’t stopped me from getting through the majority of my teabags already, as it’s the only negative to a good herbal.

I got around it, though! Tonight, I fancied a hot chocolate with a twist, and, whilst I would normally go for a chocolate chai latte, I fancied mint. Sooo, I brewed a cup of this, and added it to cocoa instead of plain water and BAMFT! mint hot chocolate! It’s goooorgeous, and the sweetness means no added sugar! Plus the liquorice aftertaste is still present, giving it a more sophisticated twist. Yummy.

Scheherazade sent me this one. Chai is not really something I’ve ever been particularly fond of, although I’ve sometimes wondered what I’m missing out. The problem with chai is partly that they invariably contain ginger and cinnamon, neither of which are things I’m fond of in tea, but mostly a rather traumatic introduction to it at around age 10. I will tell you what happened.

As a child, I was a scout for many years. At around age 10 or so, my group got new leaders. These were two guys who were… Well. A bit hippie-y in some ways and very correct in other ways. These two traits came together in a common purpose whenever it was time for giving the children some sort of treat. Like when we were camping or the last meeting before the Christmas holidays or what have you. For a child age 10 or so, this sort of occasion is pretty much synonymous with hot chocolate.

BUT GOSH, NO! Hot chocolate, that’s full of sugar! And fat! Very bad for children! Also very very common and boring, let’s put our own personal Eastern spin on things.

Let’s give the children chai instead, what a good idea!

I think they even had their own spice blend for it. Dear scout leaders that I had at around age 10. No, it was not a good idea. It was in fact a totally rubbish idea. We, the children, drank your strange spicy concoction dutifully because it was that or nothing, but I’m willing to wager a rather large amount today that none of the children even knew what chai was and the vast majority of them would most likely much rather have had hot chocolate.

A couple of years later, when we got new leaders again the concept of chai for these special occasions went the way of the dodo right quickly.

So yes, I will definitely claim to have had a rather fraught and difficult introduction to chai in general.

I have never really warmed up to it, although I’ve tried again several times. Now Scheherazade is providing me with another go. It seems a fairly simple one. It has tea, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and cassia, which is also some kind of cinnamon-y spice. So not a complicated one, just the base ingredients that I would associate with chai. It strikes me as being a very good starting point, really.

I made it with half milk and half water. I gave the cup of milk about 90 seconds in the microwave, put in the bag and filled up with boiling water. The milk makes it difficult for me to see when I think it’s done steeping, though. I’m not at all used to milk in tea, but I have learned this much in my adventures with chai; milk is essential.

It smells very nice indeed, actually! All cinnamon-y sweet, but not soapy and nostril-assaulting like cinnamon can sometimes be. Cinnamon sugar and rice porridge cooked with milk. This cup smells pretty much like Christmas.

It tastes quite mild and milky. Possibly I should have used more water and less milk? I plopped the bag back in while drinking though, to see if I could get it to be a bit stronger. I can’t pick up anything in the way of a base here at all, which I’m rather missing. This doesn’t really feel like I’m drinking tea at all. It’s more like warm milk with spices, which in itself is actually also quite nice, but not really what I was hoping for.

The spices are tempered by the milk and not even the ginger is bothering me in this. Ginger is usually my downfall because I don’t much care for the burning sensation. This is a chai that I could actually drink because it’s so mild and unassuming. A true chai fan might find it a bit dull though.