Whispering Pines Tea Company

The last time I tried this one, I was drinking the old version and I remember really enjoying it. It was on the strength of that cup that I bought a new bag (although after the switch to the new version), and I’m only just now getting around to trying it.

The dry leaf smells just like cocoa. In fact, I could have been convinced that I’d opened a tin of cocoa by mistake if I hadn’t been able to see what I was doing. It’s definitely tea, but SO chocolatey it’s almost unreal.

Once brewed, it’s still amazingly chocolatey! I added a splash of milk just because, although in all honesty it didn’t really need it. The flavour is predominantly chocolate and malt, with just a touch of berry sharpness right at the end of the sip. It seems simple, but it’s SO good. This one could easily become a comfort tea for me.

1 tsp, boiling water, 3.5 minutes. Splash of milk.

Sipdown!

Towards the end of the packet, I noticed the leaves weren’t as soft and fuzzy anymore. They became a little more dry and spindly.

To be fair, I have had this in my cupboard for a fairly long time and they still tasted pretty much as good as they were.

These are absolutely delicious, but it does become weak by the third steep so perhaps I won’t be buying this a third time.

I still highly recommend this however.

After a two year hiatus from Steepster, I am now back to my original obsession following the short-lived affair I had with coffee. Still love coffee but after sowing them wild oats, I know where my heart truly belongs now.

Shipping to Australia is $US18/$AU25 which is pretty high considering other international brands are roughly $5-$10. However, it is speedy service (less than two weeks) with reliable tracking. But it’s pretty much the only thing which stops me from ordering Whispering Pines on a regular basis.

This is from my third Whispering Pines haul and the second time I have ordered this particular tea. Leaves are dazzling indeed. And soo soft and pretty!

Cocoa, malt and fruit flavours with the slightest hint of dairy, savoury and forest aromas. Very balanced in all aspects.

A little bit of good qi going on with this tea, even though I’ve only ever also noticed it in WP’s Wildcrafted Da Hong Pao and some pu-erh served at a local tea house. It could also be because I’ve been reading up on cha qi lately and y’know, power of suggestion and all.

Delicious stuff.

I have had an awful lot of black tea lately, I’m not sure how this happened… I think I’ve had something like six different black teas in the past week and that’s roughly perhaps half of the ones I’ve acquired this past couple of weeks somehow. Anyway, moving on, got this in the $5 sampler that WP is now offering to try their teas, awesome deal.

Threw about 4.5 grams in an autobrewer since my attempts at gong fu black tea so far have been a bit discouraging (I think I may be too heavy a steeper). This had a nice, surprisingly floral scent coming from the leaves, which were a bit moist feeling and yet a bit crunchy as well, very unique and pretty. The liquor was an attractive orange brown, the taste was a surprisingly moderate malt flavor that shifted into chocolate with a malt body as you sipped. There was a definite flavor of sweet potato or yam in the second steep along with that touch of raw sour that seems to accompany black tea and potato. The aroma turned floral again, surprisingly, around the third steep, and it became lighter, with a bit of hay. I probably could have pushed it more, but ran out of time and ended this there. I’m going to have to revisit the rest of my sample with a gaiwan soon to see what all I missed out on.

Overall, it was quite pleasant and much lighter than I’ve come to expect of black tea, not to mention the surprisingly floral aromas I caught. I’ll need to revisit my other samples to see if this is due to the auto brewer or a character of this tea. There is indeed quite a bit of buzzy energy from this tea, though (either that or a helluva lot of caffeine), as I was a bit frenetically enthusiastic and dropped the lid to my pot a couple of times (thankfully not far) while refilling after the second cup.

Additional note amendment, when you push it past three steeps in a gaiwan, it really opens up a crazy sweet sweet potato/yam flavor explosion in the back of the mouth and throat I was NOT expecting on steep 4 as I thought the flavor was fading in the third steep. Floral tastes start standing out late game as well, flavor is more delicate overall. I quite preferred the later steeps, honestly, especially as they lent well to the heavy steeping my intuition generally wants, haha

I used about 4.5 grams to 11 oz of water in a Smacha autobrewer (feeling lazy today). This brewed a beautiful deep orange color with a malty spiced aroma. It turns almost neon orange on the second steep, crazy color.

Taste was a good balance of black tea malty body with a pinch of cinnamon, cocoa nibs, and a light creamy character. Nicely balanced and aftertaste of something kind of like sweet potatoes, although a bit bitter and raw in later steeps, closer to raw potato. A nice, pleasing tea to get you started on a rainy day.

If hot cocoa and black tea had a baby without adding cocoa nibs or anything this would be the tea result. It’s thick, rich, malty and chocolaty. I even think my housemate who says she hates tea will like this.

As I’m entering the world of loose leaf teas Whispering Pines has been a solid company and I like how there is much variety yet it’s small attention to detail. This tea got my attention by how bold it stated to be. Indeed the brew (in a giawan gongfu style) brewed up a nice amber elixir that was very fruity, jammy and a bit musk not very much cocoa noats as some of the other teas, but this is just me, and it’s a rich mouthfeel this one is a wake you up fruity yet earthy black. I liked it very much and the name is just too cute.

I had a ridiculously awful few days this week. I agreed to take care of a couple of infants my in-laws are fostering, so they could drive their college-age kids back from college a few states away since it’s the end of the school year. So laugh at me all you want, because I should have known better than to agree, even though they promised that I wouldn’t also have to take care of their hundred or so farm animals (yeah . . . you can imagine how that turned out). But when I got home yesterday there was a box of Whispering Pines tea waiting for me, so the week wasn’t a total loss and I’m reconsidering my professed hatred of the entire world (present company always excluded, because I’m not trying to be inflammatory when I say that I hate the entire world, lol).

Anyway, I prepared this tea as directed (Western style) and I think I can safely say that it’s the darkest tea liquor I’ve ever seen. So good job on the name, I guess. And I’m greatly enjoying the flavor as well. It’s not too heavy, but manages to blend actual cocoa with good shu pu-erh in a very effective way so that they complement each other and present a unified flavor profile; the chocolate notes don’t seem out of place alongside the woodsy pu-erh. I realized immediately that I’ll surely end up buying a lot more of this, and I’m now trying to decide whether I should steep the rest of the sample today so my husband can try it too or hoard it all for myself so I can put off my next tea order until next month . . . lol.

It has been such a long time since I have had any serious tea. You know, tea for the serious connoisseurs. A friend of mine recently started a small tea shop featuring witchy and fandom-themed teas. I’ve been exploring her blends lately in addition to trying to finish off a giant bag of sub-par sencha.

So anyway, my thoughts on this tea might be strongly biased by my long hiatus from serious teas. This is such a wonderful tea! It has a very creamy mouthfeel. I pick up the oat flavor right away with only a hint of sweetness that could easily be floral, but I don’t recognize it as such without going out of my way to think about it. I am a big fan of white tea in general, but I am also very very picky about it. My previous favorite white tea came from Whispering pines, but it doesn’t seem to be available anymore. Way to go Whispering pines for offering what might be my next favorite white tea!

I have been eyeing WP teas for a while now, but couldn’t resist a promo sample offer that was posted recently. When my cup is hot, I get a ton of clove and some cardamon to back it up. There is a little malt in the back of the taste that comes out a little more as the cup cools. It has an overall hearty taste and is well balanced. I’m having it without any additions, but would love to try a cup with some cream. Adding cream… it seems to dampen the flavors a little. The malt is dampened, but it does have a sweeter creamier taste overall. I think I prefer it straight. I had my first cup yesterday in class and the caffeine level seemed to go a good job of getting me through the day. Overall I really like this tea!

I was lazy, and instead of fully writing a profile of this specific tea, here’s the review that I wrote earlier of it.
Another lovely offering from White Antlers.

All the notes on here pretty much describe it and I agree with the tasting notes. It tastes like a fruitier moonlight tea with the added bonus of buttery later steeps. Cinnamon butter is a weird description, but it really does taste like you’re drinking a light glaze of it. I’m personally impressed with how the honeydew melon and peach note are stronger than the malt note.

I am very glad to have tried it, but I’m not sure if I would get a full ounce of it. If it were cheaper, I might make it into a seasonal staple.

I shared this little sample with my girlfriend on a misty Ohio day—finals week is in full swing, and it really makes me appreciate the little down time I have.

I think I’m starting to move away from black teas—they tend to have a sort of bitterness that I don’t really like. It’s not like the sweet bitterness of a shou (or even sheng), but a more tangy, astringent bitterness. This isn’t a bad tea by any stretch, but I’m not nearly as into black tea as I used to be.

Anyway, as far as flavor, I tasted classic bready notes in the first infusions, with later infusions tasting more like bitter honey. I’m also getting some mineral notes. Body is not super thick, but it’s nice and mellow. My girlfriend kept getting notes of soy sauce, which was interesting, and it brought her back to her mom’s cooking. She started craving broccoli and tofu—crazy that tea can do something like that.

Anyway, this is a good tea, if not a blow-your-socks-off tea.

This is the third Whispering Pines black tea sample I am reviewing. I mentioned that I found them all to be a bit generic, that is generic to eachother, not among tea in general. Now the other two, I was very curious to try, but this one I just KNEW I was going to like. Why? Because I have had cocoa amore, and other black teas from the same region, with similar notes, and this one was a shoe-in. I am still not sure they send me the correct tea Haha. Bad is definitely not a word I would use to describe it, it was decent, but really, really weird. My first reaction was “This is what they use to make cocoa amore”? MY second reaction was “This tastes like pesto” No I’m not kidding, it really does, I think primarily like pine nuts but with some earthyness too that makes it very pesto-y. Very little chocolate or cocoa at all. I brewed it pretty strong but still, just not as I expected. Very fruity, very floral. Not bad by any mans though, I’m going to give it a lowish grade for now but reevaluate with the rest of my sample.

Whispering Pines had this one down as “The highest grade tea you can find outside of china” or something along those lines. It certainly wasn’t a disappointment. It didn’t have any particular flavor in the foreground which I think was the most appealing thing about this tea. There was some cocoa, a bit of malt, definitely flowers. The main thing i thought about this one is that it is a bit too similar to the other blacks I got from whispering pines, nothing really made this one stand out from the crowd for me, except that it was a pretty balanced, and generally satisfying cup of tea. I should say, Whispering Pines teas always surprise me with how much they hold up to multiple brewings. This tea is definitely worth the try.

Pretty much as described. It smells just like sweet potatoes. Not like other teas which have a slightly sweet scent, like caramelized sweet potatoes. The taste is pure malt, cocoa, and maybe bread< with a small bit of fruitiness, and a definite floral note. I would hazard more towards lilac than gardenia, but of course that’s just a point of taste. In general a very satisfying tea, that (though this was just a sample) I would buy again.

I’ve never tried Whispering Pines before, but I’ve heard lots of great things about their tea, so I was super excited to try the $5 sample pack deal. Today the box arrived :) First up, this lovely Jin Xuan. It’s not a really ‘buttery’ milk oolong, and I can’t detect the pineapple and coconut notes listed in the description, but it does seem slightly fruitier than the average milk oolong, and the flavor and mouthfeel overall is very smooth. Nicely done!

This is my first DHP, so take this with a grain of salt.

This tea is all right. I ordered a sample of it from a promotion the company was having, and was excited to see the package in my mailbox today. I steeped up the tea with 190 degree water, and sipped.

Roasty.

The first steep was good—intense roast on the front end and then fruitiness on the back. However, steeps 2-6 all just tasted like roasted leaves, without nice fruit flavor. I think this might be a freshly-roasted tea…? It’s just so dominated by this roast flavor, which is surprising because the leaves are pretty green. Ah well.

Later steeps are definitely better. The roast dies down a bit and the fruit and flowers come out a little. Still, I can’t help but think that for $40/100g, this tea is not worth the money. Would probably be better if I left it alone for a couple months and let the roast die down.

Okay, get ready for a lot of back logs. The last few weeks were honestly hectic. Had a final presentation project, a twenty page paper on the Ptolemies and Rome, and a book review on a Flo Kennedy biography all due consecutively. It was a lot to handle even for this 4.0 academic coupled with work and the complications of type 1 diabetes…personal drama aside, I was blessed by Whiteantlers in those few weeks with her incredibly generous gifts of tea.

Leading from the implications of that sentence, this tea was indeed one of those gifts.

The dry leaf reminded me of black licorice with anise. The taste gong fu was the same in each steep, each granting a few different qualities of malt and smooth texture that I’ve gotten used to with true Chinese black teas. The licorice stood out to me the most in every cup, and was practically the flavor of the tea.

I will probably write about this tea again, probably with the specifics of my steeping parameters. I definitely liked this tea, and am glad to have little in my possession.

Breaking off from my recent Keemun and lapsang souchong binge, I decided to turn my attention to white tea. I ordered an ounce of this tea from Whispering Pines a little less than 2 months ago and enjoyed a couple glasses of it, but had shoved it to the back of my tea cabinet and forgotten about it. I guess I will now work on polishing the rest of this off before I move on to something else.

As far as preparation goes, I decided on a three step Western infusion. I followed Whispering Pines’ preparation outline and steeped one tablespoon of this tea at a temperature of 190 F. The infusion times were 3, 5, and 7 minutes.

Prior to infusion, the dry leaves showed a lovely dark green with pronounced white tips, offering aromas of cucumber, honey, hay, and a floral, nectar-like sweetness. The first infusion yielded a light ecru cup with pleasant aromas of cucumber, nectar, honey, white peach, and honeydew. The palate followed the nose, producing delicate, subtle notes of cucumber, nectar, honey, white peach, and honeydew, with subtler grain, cream, and hay accents. The second infusion produced a darker, slightly yellowish liquor and a fruitier, grassier bouquet. Notes of honeydew, honey, white peach, and nectar were underscored by cucumber, grain, hay, cream, marshmallow, and grass. I could also detect faint traces of nectarine, white grape, and apricot. The third and final infusion yielded a somewhat lighter cup with a gentle fruity bouquet. The notes of cucumber, grass, grain, marshmallow, cream, and hay skillfully balanced a melange of honey, nectar, white grape, apricot, nectarine, white peach, and honeydew. As hard as I tried, I could find nothing resembling eucalyptus, cinnamon, or honey wheat bread.

The aroma and flavor profiles of this tea tend to be what I think of when I think of a typical unflavored white tea. For what it is, it is very good. I have enjoyed my experience with it so far. This is a very subtle, delicate, and sweet tea. In the end, I would say it is a very respectable white tea.

Fruity, chocolaty. Coats whole mouth with a warm sweetness. Cup gone way too soon.

From Dark Matter 2016

I really couldn’t get into this tea. After a 10 s rinse, the first cup tasted extremely bitter, with dirt underneath the bitterness. Second steep was pretty much the same. Third steep, I could detect a bit of cherry, but it mostly tasted like dirt. I’m now suffering from the extremely unpleasant aftertaste.

Tastes of earth and minerals and has a very smooth and thick mouthfeel.