Vahdam

So I thought I had done a good job of sipping down my teas before I moved to Wyoming, but I found an unopened 100g bag of this today. Like finding an Easter egg! I have never thought I needed a tea inventory spread sheet, but now I’m reconsidering. But maybe that takes the fun out of finding and old/new tea in your cupboard (or bin).
It tastes like velvety cocoa with honey undertones, I think I will like drinking the rest of this tea. There is a bit of a coppery metallic aftertaste, but it’s not unpleasant. It’s certainly smooth enough for keeping for special occasions, and to me seems a cup to savor or try gong fu.
I don’t see it available on the Vahdam web site, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will never sell it again :)

This is the last one of my Vahdam tea samples, I’ll look into other teas at some point which I’m looking forward to

It’s strong and bitter, maybe a bit too bitter but still enjoyable.

This is quite a tasty tea, earthy and vanilla in flavour. I don’t drink or eat a lot of vanilla flavoured things, but this was quite delicious.

Minty is one of my favourite flavours in tea/food, so this one sounded interesting to me. It tastes delicious with neither the green tea or the mint overpowering the other. I decided to steep the leaves a couple more times – the second cup had a darker appearance than the first whilst the minty flavour was stronger. The third steep was similar to the second.

This is the first of the green tea samples I’m trying from the Vahdam samples I bought via Amazon. It has a yellowish appearance.

It has a very pleasant flavour, floral and citrusy and is certainly one of my favourites so far.

The tea is very strong and has malty and sweet characteristics. The sweet tones are somewhat overpowered by the bitterness of the tea. The bitterness for me is not very pleasant because it lingers for too long in your mouth.

Not one of Vahdam’s best Assam teas, but you can’t win them all ;-)

The tea has the normal dark oak colour of an Assam tea. The smell is however less pronounced than with most other Assam teas. Same goes for the flavour. You can taste the hints of malt and honey-like sweetness in the back, but for an Assam tea this one is extremely mild.

I have to say that i quite like this one. The less pronounced flavour leave more room for the small amount of bitterness and astringecy to kick in, making this a nicely balanced tea. Perhaps a bit too bland if you’re looking for a kick, but a very nice every-day tea to be sure.

This makes a great iced tea! More caramel earthy notes than most assam’s I have had but with the same sweet malt taste I love. VERY smooth and refreshing. I never got the chance to try it hot, I ended up using the whole bag in a week to make it over ice.

The best iced tea I have ever made! Very smooth and malty with a sugarcane finish, if this wasn’t so much more expensive than their regular assam I would make iced tea out of this every day.

This is a brilliant tea for people who like a strong cuppa. I have this with or without milk, depending on my mood. Love it!

Well, Vahdam… you dropped the ball big time
I don’t know what to say… I ordered https://www.vahdamteas.com/products/antu-valley-golden-tippy-souchong-nepal-second-flush-black-tea and got this:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BOutAy9AZ3X/

I can promise you that this tea is not smoked, it has no malty notes, and it 100% does not look like that.

Guess I have no idea what I’m drinking, but the package says Antu Valley Golden Tippy Souchong Nepal Summer Black Tea.

Darn.

Okay well after trying a number of my Indian samples (of which I have.. like 25), I kind of gave up all hope to review them, save for an Avaata white, but I pulled this one out on a whim because I’ve actually got very little tea at the moment and I can’t wait for my new shipments to arrive ugh, anyways, I opened this to a pretty unique aroma, a very soft sort of soapy, a very indian floral aroma, anyways then I started to pour them out into my presentation.. bamboo scoopy thing, and I was just startled I mean look at these leaves!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BM0mDwoDM4w/?taken-by=mackie_tealife&hl=en

so many huge, long thin needles, it’s obviously very carefully processed, and this is something I’ve always felt is missing from typical tea pretty much from anywhere in the world outside of China. Now there is decent amount of breakage in this one, so I’m just going to pick out all of the whole leaves and brew just those, because I can.

oh my god, okay in the gaiwan it smells pretty much exactly like a laoshan green and oh okay this gonna be wonderful, I’m not gonna rinse this one.

oh my goddddd after the first steep, the leaves smell again even more strongly of a laoshan green, but there’s this fruitiness and this like meatiness thickness too, and then something that reminds me of a sangria tea I had from teavana (I’ve never had sangria so I don’t know if this smells like that..) but okay I’m so excited to drink this.

I’m brewing at 82C, 5ish grams in a 120ml gaiwan

okay well on the face of it, there’s a very familiar soybeany, spinachy taste, a grapey fruitiness and a very indian florality in the finish akin to darjeeling black teas, there’s a certain unpleasantness to it though, I’m not sure what it is, but the body is also thin, I’m going to attribute that to the first steep though, so okay well anyways

Okay nevermind the second is also thin, but lots of new flavours, still very green, but a bit more grassy, very sweet as well this time, some very pleasant bitterness, there’s a very odd fruitiness, it’s like.. I wanna say it’s a combination of orange and blackberry? and there’s a more mellow floralness, less perfumey

Okay okay okay it’s thicker in this one, it’s so hard to describe the tastes.. it’s very bitter and satisfying and sorta green beany and sort of a pear-like taste, lots of spinachiness and like.. I don’t know, it’s vaguely citrus-like and smokey!! I didn’t notice the smokiness

I don’t know, for some reason it reminds me of chow mein. And now I’m craving chow mein..

oo I got a nice strawberry aroma like a minute after finishing the sip, also the sweetness is very sheng-like. This is some weird tea
Oh ew, it’s like lemongrassy and sour and blech I think this one’s finished..
jk the next 2 have still been good, it’s developed this lovely creaminess and really it’s starting to taste a lot like a weird young sheng

I got 10 steeps out of it though, that’s pretty impressive for green tea

Omg okay so today I got 3 packages, one from Vahdam, one from Teasenz and another from Jake’s stash sale, I’m drowning in tea right now and its fantastic.

Anyways okay this is not going to be as proper of a review as mine usually are, I’ve been studying all night for my midterm tomorrow and caved and decided to start gongfuing this one while doing work so this is from memory. This is actually the only sample (of like 21) that I’ve opened just to give it a smell, and I was amazed by the dry leaf aroma, I don’t know how to describe it, it smells so pure and sweet, very fruity (orange/peach/grape) and not at all floral, more to the point I was really impressed with the look of the leaf, they’re completely whole and beautiful, just like in the picture. And with my complete disinterest in white tea recently and my past experiences with indian tea being pretty negative, this amazing aroma was a huge shock if I’m being honest. I had very low expectations for a Nilgiri white tea, but I’ve been very happily surprised.

It brewed up very strong and thick and almost malty in a way, hints of bitterness every now and then but for the most part it had a very nice body, I got notes of berries and lovely florals, as well as some of the fruits from the aroma, and at one point I’m pretty sure I tasted chocolate. Honestly, while I wouldn’t have had a hard time telling you that it was a white tea, it was quite.. Burly, I want to say. I feel like it has the body of a black tea, with the flavours of a fruity white.

Also, looking at the name, there is something that feels frosty about this tea. I don’t know why, but it’s very fitting that this is a winter harvest (Feb 2016).

This was a very good first impression for Vadham

Need to do a side by side with some of their other Assams but this one so far is not a standout. The leaves smell of a strong sweet malt but the flavor is somewhat lackluster. From this first cup, I get a moderate, average black tea. Need to try again. No rating.

Yum. The dry leaf smells like molasses and hay. The flavor is indeed plummy as their description says. A good heft of malt. A very classic taste. I can’t remember any more what the full leaf Nahorhabi from Harney tasted like but being from the same estate, I can’t imagine it was too different and I loved that one as well. Might have been a different flush, though, no idea and Harney only offers broken leaf now, which I don’t care for as much.

I ordered two big Golden Tips Teas samplers about a year ago (almost exactly a year ago, actually) and there are still so many I haven’t even tried yet. Gotta get on that! Golden Tips seems to be in the process of rebranding itself as Vahdam, and this particular sample bag is branded Vahdam so that’s how I’ve entered it into the system.

This is a classic assam: strong, malty, slightly astringent. There’s a hint of fruitiness/acidity with a clean feeling on the palate. The leaf is mostly dark/black, and small/broken. It’s good but not particularly remarkable. Would probably be good with milk.