Teavivre

Western style : 5g (the recommended is 3), 250 ml, 90C, for 5 minutes

The bitterness reminded me of the citrus peal kind of bitter, with chocolate.I enjoyed it more this time.

Reminds me of melting a square of dark chocolate in the mouth.
rinse, 15s, 25s, 40s, 70s, 100/120? (distraction)

The second time brewing this tea. Western method (2.5 g/ 250 ml/ 80C) produced better results for me. A more delicate tea, with a better drinking experience.

I may try 85 C for the next one.

I didn’t enjoy it for some reason. Ho sentito solo l’amaro. Non ho notato aromi particolari tranne l’odore d’erba.

Gaiwan : rinse, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s

Larger than usual pearl balls. Pretty to look at, dark and gold mix.

110ml Gaiwan, 212℉, 5 steeps: rinse, 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 60s. The wet leaves smelled heavenly, like a dark chocolate fruit bar. The balls unraveled fairly quickly. A strong aroma of a mixture of dark malted cocoa, strawberries, dried berries, and honey.

The taste is lighter than the aroma but with the same aroma notes. Dark chocolate, malt, honey, and fruit notes. The taste lingers for a long time after the sip. I think this would go wonderful with a dessert. It’s always so yummy to take a bite of cake or donut and then chase it down with a great tasting tea as the taste mixes with the dessert. Every sip, I thought about that. lol I don’t have any sweets in the house but I’ll have to get some to try it sometime with this tea. I don’t recall thinking that particular thought with any other black tea. I really like it, and recommend it for a great daily drinker.

Hope you are all doing well. Me… It’s always same ol’ same ol’ and working on sipdowns, trying to behave and not buying too much of any new tea for now.

rinse, 15s, 25s, 35s, 60s, 100s

at 35s a little too weak . To try 20s and 30s next time.

Sono un novice.
E’ la prima volta che lo bevo. Gusto delicato floreale, toni bassi e caldi di affumicato. Spicy notes, piacevolmente tannico sulla lingua. Anche dopo la sesta infusione le foglie profumano.

6 steeps: (rinse 5s), 15s, 25s, 35s, 60s, 100s, 160s Gaiwan 100 ml

Not sure if I wrote a review on this. I’ve had this a couple of times and will order it again in the future. Maybe I passed since it has lots of reviews already. Don’t remember. I’m getting old. :)

Preparation: Gaiwan, 5g, 185℉, 110 ml, 6 steeps: rinse, 5s, 10s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s.

Dark and gold twisted strips. Smelled of cherries, yams, lightly floral, maybe some sweet tobacco pipe aroma. The liquor was a beautiful bright, clear, orange-reddish color and on the subsequent infusions, it became more of a bronze color and had the aroma of yams, fruit. The wet leaf smelled of caramel, hay and dried fruit.

Malty, fruity, sweet yams, a bit of dark cocoa, and toasted caramel notes. Somewhere in the middle, I got some roasted nuts, honey. It’s a light, smooth cup of tea but the aftertaste is powerful. The lingering sweetness, the desert feeling of satisfaction. Baked bread, a wee bit of smoke as some others mentioned, molasses and raisins.

I’ll probably put it back on my wishlist to remind me to get more and write about it again lol (forgetting if I wrote about it or not hehe).

Hope you’re all having a great Sunday. <3

Very nice. A ton of reviews on this so I knew what to expect.^^

I did get lots of dark cocoa, chocolate, honey, yams, fruity, malty tastes notes as many described. Also got a lot of baked bread notes in the beginning. The bright orangish-red liquor had mainly a sweet potato aroma. Recommended. :)

Gongfu with 194℉, 5g in 110ml, 8 steeps: rinse, 5s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 25s, 35s, 60s, 90s

Dark oolong with a mineral floral aroma. Chocolatey roasted flavor that is minerally and floral. It is complex and delicious, a real winner.

This tea has the aroma of molasses and the dry leaves are curled to resemble small snails. It is malty and sweet with a honey wheat flavor to it. It is not bad, but not for me.

This is a tea with a pleasant and distinct taste, both as a dry and wet leaf: warm hay, spices, old books, berries. Very enjoyable.

However, the taste disappointed me. First, it is very weak, even for a white tea. Second, it is meh: some sweetness, faint hay and fall leaves and a lot of rather unpleasant flavor of wet paper. Maybe it is too young yet, but in any case I found older years of this same tea being way more interesting and satisfying.

First, when I just discovered smoky Lapsang Souchong I was madly in love with it: because it was so different, strong, with such a distinct personality – I like assertive teas. Then gradually I began to lose my interest when it became clear that smoky Lapsang manufacturers often use second-grade teas as a base and the smokiness itself frequently comes from the cost-cutting, industrial scale smoking process that completely overpowers the base with some very generic and uninteresting smokiness. And once I even encountered the unmistakable acridity of the liquid smoke!

So, I approached this sample bag from Teavivre with weariness and low expectations. But this tea restored my faith in smoky Lapsangs: they are a great, distinct kind of tea – when done right. This tea has an absolutely fantastic smokiness. The fragrant is incredibly rich and real; you can close your eyes and almost hear the cracking of the pine branches and needles in the campfire. I usually spend a minute or two just inhaling the aroma before taking a first sip.

The taste is very piny and smoky, with a good deal of complexity. It also feels very authentic and not mass-produced at all. A looong piny aftertaste. The tea itself is not shining through – it is by no means a lightly smoked Lapsang – but it does add some sweetness, which becomes more pronounced with subsequent steeps. And this tea can produce several of them without substantively changing its character.

This is not a tea for everyone. It is barely borderline a tea at all. But it is very “real” and can easily command one’s attention: I actually was late for a work meeting because I just HAD to finish this cup.

P.S. I ranked it so highly since I consider it to be a great representation of the class and not because it reveals the complexity of the tea itself and calls for the exploration with a gaiwan and a stop watch. The tea itself is moderately broken and probably not the best: it is all about smoke and pine.

Long fuzzy green strips, pale yellow-greenish liquor. The liquor smelled like buttery lima beans, spinach, zucchini vegetable broth. There was an undertone of orchids with plenty of notes of stonefruits, such as apricots and peaches. On the second and third infusion, It was like yummy chestnut broth, umami, seaweed, spinach, sugar snap beans, lima beans, so vegetal with minerals. Lots of natural sweetness of honey and sugarcane and a long sweet finish, pleasant mouth and throat feel. Very nice.

Porcelain gaiwan, 4g, 185℉, 4 steeps: rinse, 30s, 50s, 70s, 90s

Many thanks to Kawaii433 for providing one of these cuties to try.

Today was a rough day. My housemate and I had to take our mechanic friend’s old woofer Cricket to the vet. She had been living in the house for a few months rather than in our friend’s RV out front to keep her comfortable as she succumbed to heart and liver failure, so Cricket and I got to know each other pretty well. No more suffering. <3

I needed something comforting and easy after sending off Cricket. This worked. I poked some holes in the orange with my electronics screwdriver that doubles as a puerh pick. Despite that it still floated in the cup. That’s ok, it brewed well and most of the tea stayed in the orange. The shou puerh inside was clean with a lightly sweet, dark cedar wood note. The green orange flavor was smooth, nowhere near as sharp as I was expecting. Light to medium body and very lightly oily. Light generic shou and tangerine aroma. Overall pretty good, I just would like the shou flavor to be more pronounced. The flavor imparted by the orange was perfect. Daily drinker. Three steeps western untimed beyond the first.

The dry leaves are long and twisted with golden tips. The liquor is an orange-reddish color. It started off with the Yunnan black tea notes, the malt, baked bread, freshly baked bread, sweetness, particularly the sweet potatoes. Very nice smooth and mellow beginning, fragrant. The mouthfeel was soft, there was some honey, sugar-cane sweetness that traveled down my throat, lingering there. In the beginning, it was toasty, malty, sweet potatoes, wood, cocoa notes, and a couple of infusions down the road, there were some nutty notes.

As I continued through the infusions, stonefruits and dried fruits came out. In the end, it transformed into something different. It was complex, and it did remind me of an aged raw pu’er as some other reviews mentioned, perhaps because of the astringency but also because of the mouthfeel and throat-feel, new fruit notes.

For $9.90 for 3.5 oz, this is a bargain for such a good tea.

Gaiwan, 194°F, 110ml, 8 steeps: rinse, 5s, 7s, 9s, 12s, 18s, 28s, 35s, 45s (I kind of sorta followed TeaVivre recommendation. I lost it at the end though lol).

This is my last sample of it, and I really enjoyed it the second time around much more. Less busy days equals enjoying my tea that much more. I’ve been drinking it all day. It’s a clean pu erh tea. Has light wet earth, wet wood notes, some tobacco. Tea-sipper couldn’t put a finger on the taste and neither could I but it’s really tasty. It turns out that its the taste of Jujube fruit, a Chinese date, which tastes similar to apples.

The bright reddish-bronze liquor smells of fruit, not the usual fermentation aromas one would expect from pu erh tea. It has a very calming Qi energy. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy. :) It’s soft on the palate, full-bodied.

Gaiwan, 110 oz, 10g, 10 steeps: rinse, 20s, 20s, 20s, 25s, 25s,
35s, 45s, 65s, 85s, 120s… and still going strong. ^^

Recently, I tried a yellow chrysanthemum flower tisane and found it to be a pleasant evening sipper, so I gave this dragon ball a try the following morning. I had not yet brewed a dragon ball in a teapot large enough to accommodate that volume of leaf, so into the family pot it plopped.

This tea was pleasant enough as I drank it, but it was very dull for my tastes. The dry leaf smelled good with malt, leather, spice, brown sugar and rose and chrysanthemum notes. Light chrysanthemum aroma wafted from the cup. In the mouth, the tea was thick but rather flat with sweet potato, leather and floral notes. It seemed to taste much more herbaceous-vegetal than any black tea I’ve had from Yunnan. The info about his tea on Teavivre’s site states the tea leaf is from Jinggu county (thanks for providing that info Teavivre!). In my experience with a white tea and several puerh that have been explicitly stated as originating from Jinggu, I’ve had little luck. They don’t seem to work with my palate — too vegetal, herbaceous and floral. Strangely, when I poked through the spent leaf, some of the leaves appeared to be only partially oxidized, reminding me of some lesser oxidized Wuyi oolong.

Rating is a reflection of personal preference, as usual, not based on any faults the tea might have but the fact that Jinggu teas don’t mix well with me. I’ll stick to plain chrysanthemum tisanes.

Thanks for the sample, Kawaii433.

Another TeaVivre free sample. It’s a 3g tea bag, I can see big chunks of yummy ginger in there. The ginger aroma is super strong. I’m ginger crazy so I like it. First or maybe the second time I’ve tried store bought ginger tea so no experience in comparing it to others. Its a reddish-amber liquor that smells like surprise… Ginger. :) It’s a smooth tea, mild in flavor, lots of ginger taste with some spices. A little peppery feeling on the tongue, cinnamon notes. What I liked about it is that it was mild in flavor despite the strong ginger aroma, and it was delicately sweet so if you have to have honey in your ginger tea, you may be able to bypass that on this one. The black tea was mellow and a little malty. Overall, it was a good experience and a good cup of ginger tea.

Nice afternoon genmaicha. It has only two ingredients: Brown rice & a good sencha base. The teabag is 3g and I got it as a free sample. It’s a very toasty, roasty cup of tea with nice toasted rice and seaweed-marine aroma but not fishy. The liquor was golden yellow with green hues. It was a tasty genmaicha with no bitterness or astringency, delicately sweet but nothing artificial. I just had a genmaicha at a restaurant the other day, and it was far too sweet. Ick. Not this one, thank goodness. It’s a simple, straightforward, yummy sencha genmaicha.

Smooth, very slightly astringent, and a rich, malted flavor profile. Rather mild, for a black tea, and dark golden brown in the mug.

From the looks of it, this tea is a silver needle white, but it has a depth to the aroma of the leaf and aged character toward the end of the session that seems more along the lines of a puerh or aged white.

I prepared this sample from Kawaii433 gongfu using 7.3g in a 150mL gaiwan, 200F water with a rinse and unknown number of steeps starting at 10s. The calming energy of the tea hit me pretty hard drinking it the morning, so I brewed it over the course of two days.

Aroma escaping from the cup was butter creamed with sugar and oats. Light and mineral on the sip, fruity and citrusy-lemon, thickening up greatly midmouth with a creamy quality. Combined with sweet flavors of dried mango, apricot, cantaloupe and oats, the theme early on reminded me of Quaker instant peaches and cream oatmeal. There was also a sort of tropical quality to the taste. Daylon R Thomas jogged my memory of jackfruit in one of his reviews in the past week and I would also ascribe the flavor of a jackfruit smoothie to this tea. It had a good astringency, plenty of salivation and strong huigan to keep things interesting. The coating, lingering aftertaste seemed to perpetuate the instant calm that overtook me. My notes after that were “Aw geez” and something illegible.

The next day, the tea moved from creamy and fruity into a more herbal, earthy, pungent tone that reminded me of the scent of the dry and rinsed leaf. There were notes of herbs, cooked vegetable, cooked mushrooms, hay, oats, skunky cannabis, thyme, mineral soil and cantaloupe.

I haven’t had time to read about the processing of this tea, and, not to dive deeply into semantics, but by tastes alone I wouldn’t classify this as a puerh. Regardless, it’s a tasty brew with plenty of depth.

Nice smooth taste, sweet aftertaste

tea from today and a sipdown. Day 1 on my own today so i wanted a straight black to kick off my day earlier. Figured i might as well try to make progress on my cupboard so that eventually i’ll have no teas and HAVE to order some haha. Still think this one is relatively uninspiring, but a decent enough cup.

Final Count: 30