Zen Tea

I’ve been wanting to get this in the fridge as a cold steep for some time, but somehow couldn’t muster the effort to do it. When it’s chilly out, I find I would rather have something warm in my hands to drink.. especially now that I found loose leaf teas late last year. Actually, this is one of my first attempts at cold steeping.

I do have cold juices in the fridge, and the occasional soda, but I don’t find that I make much tea in the winter months… and this winter just seems to linger on. I think that another reason I don’t often make iced tea in the winter is because I always add fresh spearmint from our garden in the summer and it just isn’t the same w/o it. Maybe I’ll have to dry some this year so I have plenty to add to teas next winter!

I cold steeped this one a few days ago in the fridge for the day and strained it in the evening. I took a bit out to try it myself and sent the rest with Hubby to work. Last night he came home and was asking if we had more of “that tea”. Of course, he was speaking of this one.

Cold steeped this one comes across as sweet, lemony, and refreshing… I added my normal touch of sugar to this one. Nothing acidic or tartness in this one. Just smooth and refreshing. This is my first try of bamboo tea, so I couldn’t pick that out. This would be a nice summertime drink.

I went online to Zen teas website to see what all they offer and see what the cost of this one was and it wasn’t currently on their website, although they did have one w/lemongrass and cranberry that sounded like it might be a nice summer blend. I am coming around to citrus in tea… Thanks to a few kind people sending samples my way!

I have another bamboo one to try cold steeped and we will see how that one turns out. Hubby is ready to explore the cold steeped blends on his days at work… So, I’m going to have to figure out a system to have them ready for him. He usually leaves when I’m still sleeping, so would need to have them ready for him to grab and go w/o straining them himself. I’m thinking I will steep them during the day and strain them in the evening after dinner. I will likely be shortly behind him in my interest in cold blends and will try what I send with him daily to get a taste for what we might want to order for larger batches this summer.

My first chai, thank you MissB. Before this cup I was hesitant to try chai. When I had asked a friend about it they only told me that chai was “spicy”. Ask the boyfriend, I don’t do spicy well, which is unfortunate because he is a big fan of heavily spiced, Cajun, type foods.

I added a small splash of milk. This seemed to bring out a cinnamon flavor. Very enjoyable for my lazy morning.

Sipdown! I used a little too much sugar, by accident, so it is a little sweeter than I prefer, but this is so the right tea for me right now. Loving this last cup of it. I had been thinking on saving this to cold brew in the summer, but I think I have enough teas to do that with, or will have. And I can always look at ordering some later anyway. So thanks to OMGsrsly for sending me some. Upped my rating some as it is a nice tea.

Gave this one a go tonight, since I wanted something calming, and oddly, like the last time I made this, I had a headache, and thought this would be good. It was another stressing day. Things happened that created some closure for me in a specific way, and while the closure is good, it was also a bit sad. It’s hard to explain without going into all the details, but basically, I’ve been a semi-emotional wreck today, and I’m sure the headache is part stress, part hormones, part sinus…

So I did not oversteep this one tonight. It’s pretty tasty. I am still getting mostly lemongrass and ginger, but I can pick up the carrot and apple some. I do like this though I don’t know of I’d go out of my way to get some, when I can get other herbal blends I like as much (or better) locally. I have one serving left of this, and I think I will cold steep it at some point.

Thanks again for the sample OMGsrsly!

I’m super stressed out right now. I found out some bad news about a co-worker today, and I’m really wound up about it, since I actually care a lot for this person, and their situation is terrible right now. I came home after chatting with them on their (late) lunch break, but I ended up trying to take a nap to relax and hope my headache eased with darkness. Unfortunately, I’m still wound up and my head still hurts. So I’m hoping this tea offers some solace, at least for a little bit.

I, uhhh, accidentally steeped this the full 24 minutes my dinner was cooking in the oven for (not that I feel like eating). Thank goodness it’s herbal. It’s actually still ok, but maybe a little lemongrass-y. It is pretty tasty though. I hope my stomach will settle a little from the ginger.

Thanks to OMGsrsly for letting me try this one. It’s pretty tasty, aside from my results of over-steeping it.

Is it possible that I’m getting past my dislike for green oolongs? Are they finally growing on me? or have I just had a couple of examples lately that are more to my taste?

This is ok. It’s not in your face floral – it’s mild and gentle. I can drink this.

I don’t think green oolong will ever be a favorite of mine, but I’m starting to appreciate it a little more.
Thank you TheTeaFairy for sending me this sample.

Backlog.

Beautiful straw-grey, long and swirly leaves brew into copper-brown liquor of a VERY tantalizing aroma. It sure is fragrant, they got that right!

And the taste… It tastes like the sweetest Chinese black tea you can imagine, but it is even more graceful and delicate. Which doesn’t make it less full-bodied. Every sip is smooth. And SO sweet. The flavors I detect are fruit tree blossoms, perhaps very sweet melon, maybe even a perfectly ripe avocado.

It has this other flavor to it that is hard to describe but that embodies “tea flavor” in general. It’s like tea flavoring in drinks or sweets, except it is perfectly natural. Imagine that a tea plant can actually grow edible apple-like fruit. They would taste like this tea.

This could be one of the best teas I have had so far. It is also my first yellow tea. I wonder if they are all this wonderful?

I re-steeped it three times and all the steeps were delicious, although on the third steep it seemed to have lost its ethereal blossom sweetness and started to get a little bolder instead (still not astrigent at all).

It seems like Zen Tea have it on sale right now and I am so tempted to get a massive amount of it… But it will have to wait.

I put this one in the big thermos to take with me to work today. I couldn’t find the little one I usually bring with me, my co-workers were amused at the size of today’s thermos.

I swear this one is impossible to oversteep- which makes it good for the larger thermos. It was literally brewing all day, and when I got my first cup about 4 hrs later, no bitter tannins to be had. I did however finally find that coconut bakery aroma that everyone else was talking about. The liquor at 4 hrs was a lovely clear maple type of color. It darkened a bit throughout the day, but still never gave off an oversteeped taste.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, and I’m pretty sure the wrongness is on my end and not the tea’s fault.

The dry smell: Coconut milk- the kind we like to use for Vietnamese desserts or curry, with no added sugar. Yum. The leaves were quite large and fluffy, which made me use heaping teaspoons each time. It kind of made me wish for a weighed measurement recommendation, but then again I haven’t a scale so that would not have helped me much anyways.
The brew aroma: Roasted coconut. What? Still very exciting but it’s interesting how that takes a turn. Not aged roasted coconut though, like very young roasted coconut that’s been toasted for a little bit. If you took coconut flesh or juice from a young coconut (still in the wood) and stuck it in a convection oven to make coconut chips. I’m not sure where the cakey smell is supposed to come into play. It definitely doesn’t have that heavy coconut macaroons or even maracrons smell that I associate bakery coconut with. It doesn’t have that coconut jelly cake smell… which is layered flavors of agar if you’re not familiar with it. The aroma does become more creamy as it cools, but oddly the creamy that accompanies adding dairy cream/milk or creamer to your tea and not the coconut milk type creamy.

The base smells/tastes like a green oolong. It’s a beautiful whole leaf that creates a light green liquor. It’s also very very light in flavor. Despite how light the flavor is, it doesn’t veer into green, despite not being a roasted oolong. The flavor is fresh light and I would say vegetal? It goes well with the coconut aroma, which doesn’t translate to the taste very much at all. It’s very much a dual experience, where the tea is giving off the aroma of a young but creamy coconut, veering on the side of coconut juice, but the taste and mouth feel is such a light oolong that it’s bordering on warm oolong tinted water. I wondered at the fact that it didn’t change much though from steep to steep.

Much better in a small teacup. The large mug experience was lacking.

Maybe I’m too used to dark oolongs. I was expecting a much more robust and full flavor out of this one, but I’m not yet terribly disappointed. What I’m mostly surprised at is that I brewed at least four or five Ingenuitea ‘pots’ today- I went through my kettle’s 3L of water, I know that much, at least two of which were after 8pm, and I don’t feel very caffeinated at all. Slightly sleepy even.

I’ve not been enjoying alot of teas lately, goodness knows why, unless it’s a particularly full or heady brew, or dripping with honey. Take this review with a grain of salt.

GCTTB Round 6

So, I’ve tried this one before but it’s been a while so I figured a revisit was in order…

Skimming through my tasting notes of it, and it looks like I’ve never really had a consistent cup of this – and this was no exception. While I enjoyed it thoroughly my tasting notes from this brew don’t really align with my notes from previous tastings at all. While it’s nice to be able to get something new from a cup you’ve tried multiple times, consistency is something that definitely has value too.

Anyway; mostly malt notes which was the most consistent thing from other tasting. Other than malt, I thought there were red fruit undertones to this cup as well as some cinnamon and wood notes in the body of the sip. The finish was clean, but had a touch of lingering malt to it.

Like I said, enjoying and I’m happy for the revisit but it was good that this allowed me to look at previous tasting notes and see that this tea lacks consistency, for me at least.

Sipdown (198/200)!

Dexter’s package almost pushed me past 200 blends. Almost – but not quite. Thank God. I’m not ready to be back over 200 again…

Anyway, I brought this in a timolino to work and then mostly forgot about it all day. In fact, I didn’t start drinking it OR my other timolino tea until after I’d gotten home. I think that might be why this has an especially dry/astringent finish to the sip. Otherwise, it’s pretty good though.

In my first tasting note, I made lots of notes on the flavours so I wont go into much detail since it’s pretty much the same thing – but I do get more “floral”/sweetness in this timolino worth. Ultimately, a very neat experience which I send many thanks to Cavocorax for – but not something I’ll seek out again when I have plenty of other good, straight blacks available to me.

Couldn’t make this pop up in the search bar (even after hitting enter) so I searched my cupboard for it, and while doing so found a Butiki blend that I no longer have but which wasn’t removed from my cupboard apparently, so now I’m at 196/198! Yay!

Anyway, I did get around to resteeping the leaves, and I must say I think I like the resteep a bit better; it still has a little malt to it, but the chocolate/caramel notes are much more present and intense, and there’s a very faint baked bread taste. However, at the end of my cup this started to get bitter and gross.

Despite liking the resteep more I wont push for a third resteep ; I’m not really feeling this one too much now. Two cups today was enough to hold me over for at least a little while. Definitely need to be moving on to something fruitier for my next cup, though!

Thank you Cavocorax for throwing this in as an extra is the sample package you sent me! I never would have thought to ask about it, but it does smell really interesting and I’ve been curious about trying it since getting it; there was just a few other samples/teas I wanted to get out of the way first.

Now that it’s steeped up I’m finding it really interesting; much more so than before. The most prominent thing that I’m picking up is the maltiness of the blend; I really love that quality in tea (yay for trying enough straight teas to figure out my preferences; malt and baked bread notes!). If this tea were an onion, the malt would be the first and largest layer. Underneath that I think would be a layer composed of sweeter chocolate and caramel notes, and then the layer under that has this borderline smokey quality to it. I can tell immediately this is a tea I’m going to want to resteep because I’m sure that subsequent steeps are going to shift the layers and reveal more things.

So, I’ll probably do a second tasting note for my resteep; I don’t plan on resteeping right away; I’d like to finish my other cup of tea, watch some TV, and maybe have a short nap first. But I will resteep it at least once more today!

Thanks Cavocorax! I haven’t decided yet how much like this one and I likely wont until the resteep, but it is enjoyable at the moment and was a fun, layered experience. I wish I wasn’t so tired so that I could maybe be a little more thorough with my description; I feel like this one deserves a more more detailed one.

I’ve really enjoyed coconut green teas in the past and this one is pretty tasty as well. I’m surprised by how smooth and polite the green tea is – it sits nicely in the background and exists solely to provide a comfortable base for the oily, savoury coconut notes.

If you’re really interested in your green teas tasting grassy and vegetal and green then this may not be the tea for you…but if you just want a coconut cup of deliciousness that’ll linger in your mouth long after each sip, well, this one is perfect.

Tasty, wonderful and I’d happily drink it again.

I’m generally a fan of toffee flavoured teas and flavoured whites…but this one falls just a little flat. I think toffee goes better with dark teas, personally, so I came into this a little prejudiced.

With that said, this has these delightful caramel notes that linger after each drink. The white base is mellow and smooth, but I find myself hoping for a little more of something in terms of flavour.

It’s not a bad tea, but just not something that I’m excited about.

Hmm. I steeped this like a normal tea and I think that was a mistake.

It’s not good like this. Tastes like dirt and mate. With a little spice on the side. And it’s making my tongue numb.

:/

I hoped I’d like this, but it’s a no for me.

Thank you for the sample, Veronica. I do appreciate it! This is definitely one I was looking at purchasing.

Oh wow! exam tomorrow…. how do i do this quickly?

gong show week.
nevermind, gong show semester.
bought some zen teas because i’ve had to drop my caffeine… tried a chamomile blend? baaaaaaaaad call!
but they threw this is as a sample.
it’s amazing.

if my exam is half as amazing i’ll be very very happy!
BYE!

Still a smooth and straightforward chai, one that I know will stand up time and time again with mistaken re-steeps as well as purposeful ones.

Gosh I love this stuff. Another huge cup that managed to make it to tonight.. I may need to make more.

Gosh I love this tea, and keep on forgetting about it. Sweet and delicious, I gulp it down faster than I made it.

I’ve had this a good five or six times now over the past two weeks, however with traveling and whatnot, I’ve missed writing down any sort of tasting notes. I do find myself reaching for this at night before most of my other teas, and it stands up well to oversteeping (with zero rooibos bitterness in there – surprisingly). It’s a solid non-caffeinated chai replacement, and I have a feeling I’ll order more of this soon. The tins are so pretty!

I ordered a sample pack of this with my recent Zen Tea order. I am writing this note from memory. I will have to add some notes when I am sipping and writing next time. This has a nice black base, nothing that overpowers the tea, strong hints of strawberry and a slight touch of cream. I had read some notes that compared this to 52 Teas Strawberry Zabaglione which made me a little scared. This to me was a lot more strawberry with a better balance with the black base. I think this tea will be wonderful iced. I really enjoyed this one.

PLEASE NOTE. ERRONEOUSLY I REVIEWED THE HERBAL VERSION NOT THE BLACK BLEND OF THIS TEA (AND STUCK IT IN THE WRONG SPOT). HOWEVER, AS MY FRIENDS HAVE PAID ME SUCH KIND ATTENTION I WILL LEAVE MY REVIEW IN PLACE WITH THIS DISCLAIMER!! ps: miss you all frightfully. xoxo, JustJames

oh my. this review sums up the end of a long week!

this tea is a pleasant conundrum! i frequently enjoy my teas with cream, but if hibiscus is involved that poses a wee problem! this is a bright pink, hibby strong (my fault on that) strawberry cream. the hibiscus waves and almost whacks me, but the cream swoops in and tones it right down.

truly unique. this tea has a split profile— an acidic, hibiscus fueled strawberry, paired with a very smooth cream opposite.

i’m drinking less caffeine these days and by proxy more zen tea (!!!)…. this is an excellent creation! i feel very zen =0)

i steeped for 5, it would have been perfect if i’d steeped for 4.