Whispering Pines Tea Company

Oh My, So smooth and creamy almost buttery even,mmmmm.
Very nice and bold with malty, cocoa notes and honey notes with smooth floral vanilla and just the right amount of spice.
The spice level on this one is just perfect.

I can’t believe how smooth and creamy this one is, it needs no milk or sweetener at all because it is perfect on its own.
I did decide to add a little maple syrup to it just because and it was omg so delicious BUT a bit much for me at first because I used a bit too much the first time. After using less maple the second time around it was perfection.

The maple made it very sweet and even more creamy somehow, the maple sweetness brought about a chocolatey note that is different than the dark chocolatey notes of some of brendens teas and it totally enhanced the Vanilla and made it stand out much more.
The chocolatey notes of this one with sweetener is like a milk chocolate donut or something, omg so good.
Milk chocolate donut with chai spice on top, mmmmmmm so good.

The perfect balance of the ginger and other spices toned down by the vanilla make this a perfect chai on its own and allow it to be subtly sweetened without being too bold like some chais, Some sweet chais give my a slight belly ache from the sweet spicy combo, Not this one!

Totally Awesome on it’s own but if ya sweeten it do try some Maple Syrup, oh my so good.

Thanks BOYCHIK for mentioning Maple Syrup in your review! Great Idea!!!

This was my morning tea. It’s a lovely tea to begin the day with. I enjoy the sweet potato and slighty nutty notes. It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and really enjoyed this one, so it was nice to rediscover it.

Tea of the morning. I’ve received this tea twice in swaps, and I enjoyed it both times. Now I finally have my own bag of this. Yay for picking out my own Christmas presents! :)

I was curious to see how it would taste because the first time I had this it was full of sweet potato and floral notes. The second time I tasted chocolate and bread. This time? Sweet potato, honey, and nuts. It almost taste like that sweet potato casserole with the marshmallows on top (minus the marshmallows). In other words, it’s delightfully tasty. The sweet potato and nut flavors give it an earthy feel with the sweetness coming right at the end of the sip. Very smooth, very nice.

The second steep is similar to the first with a bready note add to the mix. As the tea cools I can taste malt as well. Both steeps were enjoyable. I’ll probably steep the leaves again later today. They definitely have more to give.

Another tea sent by the lovely Ost as part of the Christmas Card Swap. Thank you, my dear!

I am such a big fan of this tea. Tonight there are strong chocolate notes as well as the flavor of fresh baked bread. There’s also the flavor of honey and cinnamon. Perhaps a little floral but not as much as I remember from the previous time I tried this. Still, this is really good and a treat to have in my cup again.

I’ve decided to make September my sample sipdown month. September Sample Sipdown! It’s fun to say and even more fun to sip. Ha! I’m going to drink exclusively from my samples stash this month to see if I can get it whittled down a bit. I’ve been sent some very generous samples this summer… and spring… and last winter (yikes)… and it’s time to really enjoy them. It’ll also help me plan my fall and Black Friday purchases. ;-)

This is an insanely delicious tea. Lots of biscuity notes today with a good hint of floral and honey. I put two teaspoon into my two-cup teapot and have been sipping on this tea for hours. Every time my pot is empty I fill it back up, and the leaves keep on giving me more yummy goodness. I wish I had better words to describe this tea, but frickin’ delicious will have to suffice.

I still have one teaspoon of this left, so it’s not a sipdown, but it did come from my samples stash.

My first tea from the Pass the Stash 2.0 Box. This is one of the two teas Cameron B. sent just for me. Yay!

I’ve read several tasting notes on this tea, so when I took my first sip I was expecting malt, bread, and honey. What I got was honeysuckle and sweet potato. No complaints here – the flavor is amazing. I am surprised at how strong the floral note is, but the earthiness of the sweet potato note helps keep the tea from being too floral in character. As the tea cools the malty flavor appears. Oh, I’m really liking this. Such a beautiful tea!

I finished the last of my 1 oz of this tea today during an extremely rare summer thunderstorm. This tea was not what I thought it would be initially. It is best cool. Dry, it has strong tobacco and carob notes, its a mix of gold and brown leaves that is quite pleasant to look at and smell. I tried brewing it various ways but settled on 2tsp. I get 1 decent resteep out of the leaves this way. The tea when hot has a faint whiff of chocolate the taste is like the hot carob we had at camp with a little smoke and perhaps some pine and sweetness which must be what the vanilla is contributing, it is dense like coffee and I think this would be a good coffee drinker’s tea. As it cools (and the batch I cold brewed) I get some scent but no taste of vanilla perhaps masked in the strong carob. The second steep is not as coffee like, the sweetness is gone but there’s more tobacco and carob taste. I tried adding avocado honey to this cup and the molasses like sweetness really compliments it.

This is note #250! I guess I shouldn’t make a big deal about that, but I reached #100 without noticing and thought, ah well #200 I’ll notice…big nope. That one blew past me without even ruffling my hair. So I noticed this one and have been saving it for a worthy tea (even though I have a tasting note backlog) and this tea is definitely worthy.

I just love the leaves of my this tea. They’re a lovely silver green, perfectly plump, and oh-so-soft with their fine coating of down. How could you not love this tea? It’s adorable. “I will name him George…And I will hug him and squeeze him and pet him and pat him and…” wait, what? Oh yeah, TEA!

http://instagram.com/p/rqqf0Nqmz2/

Specifically this tea. The taste and smell are also soft and inviting. Sweet hay and honeysuckle. Yum! The sip begins with a delicate sweet hay, which melds into honeysuckle. Then, these notes start to fade as if you’ve just smelled them on a fresh spring breeze right after the rain. The finish is clean and refreshing, like a swallow of cold alpine water. It is like drinking the springtime sunshine after a long winter.

This tea makes me rejoice in the soft, nourishing, and lovely side of nature from inside my tiny apartment in a major metropolitan area. But if you hate fresh air, light, and the splendor of nature, never buy this tea. MOAR FOR ME. Muahahaha. It gets better every time I drink it

Now this is a white tea for white tea lovers. Or at least it has everything I love about white tea! I decided to brew this gongfu method, but the tea didn’t really vary between the steeps. However, I still think it was the right choice because I got 10 great steeps out of the leaves. I brewed 3g at 190F for 15/15/30/40/60/90/120/150/180/210 sec. Since the taste was consistent throughout, I won’t review each steep separately.

The leaves are just gorgeous! They’re all silvery green, covered in white fuzz. They’re extremely plump and soft to the touch. They’re pretty cute. They smell of sweet hay, which happens to be a smell that I enjoy a lot. The liquor is a very light yellow and the taste does not disappoint! It’s incredibly delicate, airy sweet hay accented by honeysuckle. Drinking it is such a calming experience and it feels like a real treat. Pretty much everything I want in a white tea! I’m sad I only bought one ounce.

Sipdown (184)

I bought this during the last sale because it was really cheap and I was curious, so why not pop one in? Who’s afraid of Pu-erh? Not me!

I wonder if I was supposed to rinse this first? Oh well.

This is nice though. It’s really earthy, but warming and comforting. It’s not as fancy/special as my beloved Special Dark, but this is still a nice go-to puerh. I like the tuocha cups too – they seem like they’d be easy to take to work.

This week, I decided to do a gongfu session again after a night out. I’m liking this a lot. It may be a ritual for me. It’s the one day a week that I’m not exhausted from a cumulative sleep debt and I also don’t have to be up at a particular time the next day. So I can drink tea from 2-5am if I want to :-) The perks of adulthood!

The Jabberwocky was a perfect choice for my late night steeping. I’m enjoying it while listening to Maroon 5’s “Hands all over” album, which was a gift from my dear friend Cordelia. Both the Jabberwocky and Adam Levine have a little bit of that bad boy appeal (heeeyyyy boyfriends haha) I brewed this 15/15/30/40/60/90 sec.

Steep 1: This steep is all about that bready base taste. It’s also buttery and salty with lovely caramel.

Steep 2: The chocolate is here! Cue the dancing munchkins from Wizard of Oz. It weaves between the bready, caramel-y, salty, buttery goodness that was already rocking my socks off and takes it to a whole new level!

Steep 3: The bread retreats a bit, but the chocolate and caramel step up to fill that void. Oh, ok, if it must be that way I suppose I’ll survive :-P

Steep 4: The cream finally shows up! Oh hey buddy, good of you to drop by. This steep is smooooooooth and sweet with a wonderful amalgam of chocolate, caramel, bread, butter, and cream with a light sweetness to the finish. I’ve noticed that I tend to be a 4th steep kind of girl, at least with WP teas

Steep 5: It starts tapering off here. There’s still a breadiness present, paired with a light sweetness and a cooling effect at the end of the sip.

Steep 6: The tea is played out at this point. But I’m still gonna drink this steep :). This steep is just lightly sweet and a little bit cooling. Like a sherbet at the end of a rich meal.

I do love this tea so. It’s top 5 for sure!

I don’t know about you, but I love waking up with the Jabberwocky. Once you get to know the Jabberwocky, you discover he is no fearsome beast, not at all ;-). In fact, the Jabberwocky smells like chocolate and anything that smells like chocolate is welcome at my breakfast table.
The first sip though. Big sigh So much better than the lovely aroma or the Steepster hype led me to believe! There’s a rush of salted caramel blended with a river of dark chocolate. There’s a gorgeous bready element that reminds me of short bread. In fact, the whole initial flavor combination resembles these homemade twix bars sprinkled with sea salt that I make sometimes. After that first sip, I started to notice this luxurious creamy element that adds a big dollop of crème fraîche on top of that twix bar. Despite all these heavy, rich flavors, this tea leaves you with a refreshing and cool sensation. The Jabberwocky is positively sinful but requires no “Hail Marys” or extra cardio afterwards :)

I see why so many people love this tea. To start with, the little fuzzy snails are so cute. The tea is smooth, malty, chocolatey yum. So far I have steeped it a couple of times, but I think I could do more with shorter steeps. It’s pretty strong and dark.

I just realized I hadn’t tried this tea yet! Gasp! I’m sorry Whispering Pines, I didn’t meant to neglect you! I received a sample of this from Nicole, and I also bought a decent amount of it in a stash sale (was it Shadowfall? I don’t remember now, sorry!) It’s funny, even though this is a far less tippy Yunnan (appears to be about 30-40% tips?) than the others I’ve had from them, I can still definitely tell the quality difference in the leaves between their tea and other companies’ similar offerings. The leaves are long and unbroken, and very light and fluffy. And the golden tips have an obvious fuzzy texture and metallic appearance. Lovely! The smell is quite mild, like most Yunnan teas I’ve tried (some exceptions with the bud varieties). It’s light malt with some honey sweetness and vague fruit reference.

Brewed, it smells slightly earthy, but nowhere near the amount of the darker Yunnans I’ve been trying lately. And there’s definitely malt and dark dried fruit alongside it, which really turns it away from the mineral/smoke element that can be present in these teas. The taste is also somewhat earthy, but there’s no smoke here. There is malt and molasses with some dark dried fruits (raisins, cherries, figs maybe), and these really help to take the edge off of the earth notes and make this tea much more enjoyable for me. I wouldn’t call this tea bready, but it’s almost there. Not my favorite, but not bad for an everyday Yunnan, especially for someone who likes those darker flavors.

This tea is…whoa…it’s, wow, um, just really remarkable stuff. From the first sip it… no wait, first I sniffed the wet leaves and, what IS that lovely scent? I can’t quite place it. Wait, is that…miso? Whooooa, what’s THAT doing in my cup of tea?

I followed Whispering Pines’ suggested brew: 1 tbsp/8 ounces/190ºF for 3 minutes/5 minutes/8 minutes. There was cedar, there was honey, there was nut of some kind (cashews? pecans?). And I gotta tell you, this gave me quite a lift (which is just what I needed coming home from a long day of work). I didn’t notice additional tastes coming out at each steep, but they didn’t really go away either. Good, as they say, to the last drop. Yup, glad I got an ounce of this. It’s going to be a regular brew.

MzPriss’ Unflavored Tea Box – Tea #23
The tea box is on the way but I still have a few tasting notes to post. AND I loaded up all three of my infusers with tea before running to the post office to steep the teas later! I will never tire of these fun tea boxes!

A solid black tea! I want to say it is mostly tomato soup… my annoying taste buds have turned a ton of black teas into tomato soup. Luckily I like tomato soup (at least the canned) a lot better than I like actual tomatoes (but not necessarily for a breakfast tea!). The strength is mid-level. The second steep magically transformed into mostly cherries with a hint of the tomato soup in the background. Both cups are a little bit cedary. Not many teas have switched flavors like that for me in the past. I think what was once ‘malt’ for me is now ‘tomato soup’. Worst case scenario, as malt is one of my favorite tea flavors, tomato is certainly not. I might be getting burned out on tasting notes. I’ll have to resort to some old favorite teas I don’t have to write tasting notes for for a while, but I still have a ton of teas to review and a ton of new ones to try!
Steep #1 // 1 tsp // just boiled // 3 min
Steep #2 // just boiled // 4 min

Originally I wanted to make Golden Orchid but I wanted to save that for after work tomorrow since it’s bound to be a stressful day. But North Winds was supposed to be smiliar-ish and since I had gotten that in the three tea sample pack that I had bought, I figured what the heck.
So I was kinda confused on how to make this. The package said use a 1/2 tbsp for an 8oz cup but everyone here seems to say use a full tbsp for their 8-12oz cups. And since there was just the tbsp in the package and I usually make 12oz-ish cups I just dumped the whole thing into the infuser. Kinda bummed that I can’t make another cup, but I guess I should’ve just done the 1/2 tsp for an 8oz cup. Oh well. Hindsight right? Lol.
The brew reminds me strongly of Laoshan Black to be honest. It’s got that same sort of roasty, chocolaty sort of scent that I remember from the Laoshan Black.
Taste wise I get a very heavily roasty sip, with a bit of sweetness in the sip. I don’t really get fruit when I get that sweetness though. Mild-ish astringency. I could see if I drank alot of it that the astringency might get a bit much after awhile. It’s mostly just a roasty sort of brew to drink for me.
After adding a bit of Truvia, the roastyness has backed off a bit and a more chocolaty sort of note has come up. Very nice actually.
Since I used my whole sample for this cup, I’m going to give resteeping this a second try at least. Just to see if that makes a different brew.
But I’m not sure if this is a reorder for me. I’m honestly not too enamored of teas that are so roasty tasting. But it’s certainly still a nice cup of tea to sip at.

When I was in grade school my friend Ginger and I used to harvest wild edibles and make pine needle tea. This tea smelled like our old pine tea but its much more subtle in flavor. I suppose we had straight fresh needles and these are dried so you lose the turpentine and sap tastes which is a very good thing. I found it surprisingly floral with a light pine mist (reminds me of midway up a piney mountain on a hot summer day). I will definitely be getting more of this but I also have 7 different types of pines right outside my door and it got me to wondering what it would taste like if I harvested some of their needles (torrey pine? black pine? ) I’ve only had white pine before. Of course I’m not a master blender so it wont’ get the floral part.

This is liquid dessert! With the perfect hint of vanilla, chocolate and cherries my only downside is that its caffeinated so I can’t drink it every evening before bed!

The first infusion of this is still my favorite.

I saved my leaves from last night and had two more infusions from it. And I never heard my timer on the third one so I have no idea how long it steeped for. But it still tastes good. Not bitter.

Still sick. Head is so stuffed. The lovelies on the steepster chat recommended a strong black tea. I picked this one.

Good choice.

Rich, strong, dark, cocoa, creamy, malty, sweet, delicious.

comforting.

Hopefully the caffeine doesn’t keep me up all night. We’ll see.

But it is making me feel better, even if my head is still stuffed beyond belief and I think I’m going to sneeze again.