Teas Etc

The Final Sipdown: Day 14
Decupboarding Total: 28

I slacked yesterday and today with The Final Sipdown but honestly? I’ve been too busy cooking, eating and napping to worry much about what teas to finish off. However, tomorrow is a new day and I’m back on The Final Sipdown wagon. To show my determination to decupboard, I’ve finished off this not-tea tonight.

I went a little heavy on the leaf just to finish this off and the smell is even more rooibos-y than normal. The taste isn’t as bad as the smell though, so it ends up drinkable and a little orange-y. But I’m still not that hot on this one. Thankfully it’s gone.

Sorta mixed on this one – it’s got a great, true-to-life orange flavor but the end note and aftertaste is on the edge of icky sour wood with little darts into perfumey. As it cools to lukewarm there is less sour wood so I really just get the tasty orange. But ultimately, there are other flavored rooibos teas out there that don’t have to get so to close to room temp to not have that sour wood taste.

Hello, steepster! I’m trying to catch up on my ‘follow’ stuff — I haven’t changed that in months. I will probably be adding people willy-nilly over the next few weeks (or months).

Anyway, tea! Not my first cup of tea since getting back from my travels, but close enough. Decided this morning that I was feeling lazy, wanted to toss two teaspoons of tea into my travel tumbler from Teas Etc. (since I didn’t get to use it after it came in!) and just continue to top it off with fresh water whenever it got sort of low. Usually I’m pretty militant about my steeps. This morning? This morning I was bunkered down into some sort of creative maginot line, trying like hell to put sentences together in comprehensible English after two weeks without writing, and could absolutely not be fussed to bother.

It held up rather well to that sort of abuse, overall. Subsequent ‘steeps’ in the running chain of repours were good through several trips to top off the tumbler, but kind of uninspired. It’s a solid green oolong, floral but less buttery than some others I’ve had. It’s tasty, but there are no revelations in store for the sipper.

(Even now, some five hours after the fact, a sip from the two or so inches of liquid left in the tumbler — in which the two teaspoons of leaves have been wallowing throughout — produces a mellow, standard green oolong flavor. It’s neither oppressively buttery nor uncomfortably astringent in the bitter-green and vegetal sense, and would probably make for a very forgiving iced tea if brewed this way (though I personally find that green oolongs lose a lot of their character when they’re on ice. Refreshing but insipid when cold).

A while back, the husband and I got a food dehydrator to make jerky. (The husband makes seriously awesome venison jerky.) When we first got it, we went a little dehydrator-crazy. If it was edible, we’d try to dehydrate it. Some of our experiments were more successful than others (I highly suggest dehydrated zucchini slices – they are potato-chip-level addictive.) But I knew we had gone too far when we dehydrated watermelon.

The dried watermelon bits were textured like Fruit Roll-Ups (which wasn’t bad) but the taste… it was melon and slightly sweet and very musky. I cannot adequately explain how musky it was. “Extremely” would be an understatement. It was perhaps how licking a male muskox would taste. Obviously, this was very weird to me and I found eating the dried watermelon distracting and unpleasant. After that experience, I decided to retreat back into dehydrating only jerky and zucchini and never think of the watermelon musk disaster again.

Until I drank this tea.

When hot it makes me think of a toasty Macallan scotch. It’s kind of apple-y in the way that some of the lighter, sweeter scotches are. The mango flavor is outdone by the nutty and I have a hard time finding any of the coconut in it. It’s interesting but not great.

This smells like coconut and warm mango juice. It tastes… weird. There’s an almost alcoholic taste but the more I sip, the more I think it is just how the mango juice flavor comes across when hot. It’s very nutty and woody (thankfully not sour woody) but I can’t determine what kind of nut.

As it cools, I get flashes of coconut that override the mango. I definitely like it more once it cools a bit – the flavors blend better and the alcohol taste goes away. This is definitely not as good as their Coconut Custard, but it’s probably one of the best fruity rooibos I’ve had.

Steepster! I miss you, steepster. I am just insanely busy and, in fact, the only reason I have a few moments this morning is that I’m packing to go on a trip. But I do miss you, and all of your wonderful tea discoveries!

This isn’t one of them, sadly. I’m slowly beginning to come to terms with the fact that I’m running out of Jackee Muntz, and I’m in need of a really solid Keemun to replace it, so I’ve begun the hunt. When Teas Etc. shot me an email about a crazy keyword deal, I decided that the time was nigh. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be the staple replacement I’d hoped for, but it’s a pretty good tea — it just doesn’t knock my socks off the way that Muntz does.

Reading the scant notes about this I can see that one person thought it was weaker than usual (Auggy) and another person thought it was stronger (someone I don’t recognize). I’m leaning in Auggy’s direction. I’m not sure what I was hoping for, but there isn’t much punch to this one. In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I’m slightly stuffed up from allergies, so part of this is probably not the tea’s fault, but I did steep longer than my standard for new blacks of three minutes, in the hopes that my water would continue to turn amber, which took quite some time.

On the plus side, the flavor is clean, there is a pleasing sweetness present, and even if the cup is slightly watery compared to the Keemun I’m searching for, there isn’t a hint of astringency to be found, which might make it a pretty swell afternoon cup.

And that’s it for me! One brief and inadequate half-asleep cameo before I dash off to shower and throw a few more things into a suitcase so that I can wing my way south for a family reunion I am not even a little bit prepared for. Whee!

Hope all of you marvelous steepsterites are beating the heat with endless pitchers of iced tea.

Medium cherry flavor that is much tamer than the smell. Nice clean finish.

I got this tea not because I thought I’d like it, but because I thought that having lemongrass in a cherry tea was weird and that intrigued me.

It smells like tart cherries with a little fake cherry sucker on a wooden stick. The taste is fairly similar to the smell but with a dash of cherry Crème Saver thrown in – you know, those fruit and ‘cream’ candy LifeSavers? (Or were the pink ones strawberry? I dunno, I always got the orange ones.) Anyway, it tastes like that. With a bit of wood, like how a popsicle tastes when you are right up to the wooden stick. But sometimes I pick up some of that sourness that I dislike so in rooibos. So maybe the Crème Saver popsicle is really old and the wood is going bad in spots.

Anyway, I don’t really get the lemongrass. Though if I close my eyes and imagine a bit, I start think it comes through in a kind of fresh top layer the tea seems to have. The Crème Savers certainly didn’t leave that fresh feeling in my mouth.

So yeah, this basically tastes like supermarket candy. On a old stick. Which doesn’t sound that positive, but I will say that I liked the second half of my cup (once it had cooled) more than the first since all the tastes seemed to meld better and become smoother. So it was a fresh, smooth Crème Saver on a stick.

Wow! Lemon grass and mint – a perfect combination . The mint tempers the tanginess of the lemon and the lemongrass gives the mint a tang. Wonderful iced.

Smoky but not too smoky. Subtle sweetness and a great way to start the day.

Backlogging…

Like others have said before, this is sweet and SLIGHTLY smoky. The smoky flavor in this tea is not overpowering…. It is quite mild and pleasant . I think I am going to enjoy this one….

This blend is a bust! It tastes 100% chamomile . So why not just save some money and purchase chamomile? Oh well…. luckily , this was only a free sample. And obviously I am backlogging from this weekend…

Sipdown no. 13 of 2019 (no. 48 of 2019 total, no. 536 grand total).

This is probably better than an 80, so I’m bumping the rating a tad. My original note likened it to wine. I’m not getting that so much now, but then this tea is quite old and it’s possible that some of its wineyness was lost over time.

But like a nice red wine, what it morphed into with breathing for quite a long time was also interesting and pleasant. Much more of a subtle currant flavor, good for sipping while taking a day off and catching up on Madam Secretary episodes.

Since I have Teas Etc. on the brain today I thought I’d try something else of theirs.

In the tin, this tea has a deep, strong, currant smell. It’s a lot like raisins, or pre-raisins (i.e. grapes). It has a slight sharpness to it that reminds me of red wine. There are whole currants in here, about the size of blueberries and looking far less shrivelled than I think of when I think of currants. Cool. And it has those blue cornflowers that I love looking at so much.

The aroma is also very curranty. It does remind me of some sort of baked goods. I wouldn’t have picked hot cross buns, but I might have said currant scones. Yum.

This is a sneaky little tea. At first it didn’t really taste all that remarkable. But the more I drank, the more I liked it. It’s interesting. It has a thicker mouth feel than most black teas, and the flavor of the currants is nicely balanced with the flavor of the tea. It’s almost like drinking a red wine without having to worry about getting tipsy. I’m for that, especially during a workday! It’s very comforting while hot. As it cools, the flavor becomes more raisiny/grapey, still quite nice but not as comforting. I think it would lose it’s charm iced, but I’m not much of an iced tea maven.

I’m glad I ordered this with my last Teas Etc. order. I’ll likely keep this one around for when I feel like a glass of wine but without the alcohol. ;-)

Though I continue to protest that I can’t add tea swaps to my already horrendous schedule, that I’m trying to simplify my life rather than complicate it more, etc., Rabs prevailed upon me to accept her generous offer of a sample of this. The sample came in a lovely heat sealed ziplock, gold on one side and clear on the other, with a charming label indicating the name of the tea, the company, and steeping temperature and time, in a quaint old-timey font that looks like what my old Smith Corona used to produce. Really well done, looks more professional in its packaging than some samples I’ve received from companies!

I didn’t know until now that this was another of those mixed green and black teas that tend to drive me nuts. But fortunately I don’t have to guess at the steeping time and temp because Rabs has taken the guess work out for me.

This is a visually pretty tea, a lot of rose petals adding color to the mix. In the packet it smells really flowery and I totally get the adjective “frou-frou” to describe this. The mixture of rose and jasmine is a really nice one, with the components of each scent blending together to create some third scent with aspects of both but something unto itself as well. There’s a green tea aromatic aura more than an actual smell. I’m made aware of the green tea’s presence but it’s not obvious. And there is a black tea strength around the edges. I don’t get Earl Grey but I’ve discovered sometimes it comes out in the steeping even if I can’t smell it in the dry leaves. Really, this smell is mostly flowers.

My first attempt at making this, in the Breville, didn’t come out right. I am gradually learning that the measuring spoon provided with the Breville is not at all to be trusted with mixtures that include things other than relatively small tea leaves. Even though I clearly made it weaker than it ought to be, it had a really lovely jasmine/rose aroma and a pleasant, mild taste. There’s even a hint of Earl Grey.

Second try: Stronger, more flavorful, as expected. Very nice flavor. Nice enough that I want to spend more time with it as I ended up having to get on a phone call for work and didn’t get to savor my second try as much as I would have liked. I’m not sure I’m getting as much Earl Grey as I’d like even now, but that’s what experimentation is for — and besides, there are some teas styled as Earl Greys that don’t taste like them and that I like just fine.

Believe it or not, this one is enough to make me break with my decision not to order black/green mixes.

Rating is provisional for now. I can see it going up with more experience, though.

This is a fine example of an Oriental Beauty. This one is very fruity and woody as primary notes. The fruit and oak remind a bit of the complexity you find in a good red wine. However, despite all that wood, this has very little dryness in the mouth. There are also some floral notes and this one flirts with being creamy though it never fully delivers that creamy mouthfeel. If you are a lover of Oriental Beauty, then this one is not to be missed.

Last time I had this with additives and it was surprisingly tasty so I thought I’d try it straight. Once again, it is surprisingly tasty! It’s a bit bolder than the typical Ceylon with some almost malty Assam notes, but nicely smooth and it has a very sweet, fruity finish. Really quite delightful. I’m bumping the rating up a point or two because this is one Ceylon I could definitely see having in my pantry on a regular basis.

I had this with additives since I wasn’t willing to risk bitter ickiness on my drive to work. It stood up surprisingly well to the half & half and sugar, which I wasn’t anticipating. It was much sturdier and richer than the few Ceylons I’ve had previously. I wasn’t anticipating liking this – Ceylons tend to me a little thin and light-tasting for me – but now I want to give this a try straight because it could end up being really good.

Very good dark Oolong, and I don’t usually like the dark ones. 3 steeps and it kept its strength really well. If Anything it got stronger as I added steeps. I can really taste the Scarlet Robe. J/k

This tea is interesting – good interesting. Tastes like very smooth Yunnan, but the end has a bit of….cream. And a bit of astringency…but the flavors are separate so it is not a spoiled cream taste.