Greg Zink Send Message

Pretty remarkable (and difficult to describe) combination. The aroma is incredible, possibly the best-smelling tea I’ve got. Flavor is strongly mint, but clearly there’s a melange of other flavors and aromas here that sound so discordant together but blend into a lovely and particularly soothing combination. This is a favorite.

Really incredible aroma that is peaceful and soothing. I love that. Flavor is pleasant but muted, even playing with steeping times. Mostly chamomile I think, with some brightness from the mint. It’s nice but doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the smell.

Yuck! Not for me. The lime flavor in here just does not taste right, even though I’m sure it’s real. I tried this hot and iced, and either way I struggled to finish a glass. Sorry Stash – this was a neat idea but I just couldn’t do it.

Hot, this is a decidedly average tea. Smells like blackberry, tastes like generic black tea. However, I made some iced and it is great! Some of the best iced tea I’ve had. Somehow that preparation brings out the flavors much better and it’s a very refreshing drink. I thought I wanted to just get rid of this tea, but now I may have to buy it again!

Seemed like kind of a bland, generic oolong to me. Perfectly decent for drinking with a meal or mindlessly at work, but nothing particularly noteworthy to make it distinctive or a favorite. There are oolongs out there that I like better and will buy instead in the future.

I really like the idea – to preserve old-growth tea “forests” by harvesting their uniquely-flavored tea leaves. But this was simply not the tea for me, unfortunately. I’ve stated before I’m not much of a black tea drinker, but I do typically like Earl Greys. This one, however, had a far too dry character, and much too little bergamot to be among the few black teas that I enjoy. I hope others like it to keep the preservation project going but I won’t buy it again

UPDATE: By adding a ton more leaves per cup than recommended and steeping it for a very long time, you can discern a little green tea flavor with a slight citrus note. It still doesn’t seem like anything special to me though.

I don’t know what’s going on with this one, but I’m getting almost no flavor of any sort out of it. I have tried steeping per the recommendations from Tao, I have tried adding more leaves per cup, and I have tried upping the steeping time to nearly 10 minutes. Yet every time I somehow end up with what feels and looks like a mug of plain hot water. It’s maybe like an exceedingly light white tea. No sign of citrus flavor or aroma either.

I thought this one was just an odd combination of flavors. I love jasmine, but I think it’s too light a flavor and scent to work in this application. It just gets drowned out by the cinnamon and orange peel which dominate the cup. Then when you do get a hint of it, it feels out of place in what tastes more like a green chai. Not really my style.

Lovely aroma from the lavender, bergamot and vanilla. In the loose-leaf version that I had, I found their impact on the flavor of the brewed tea was a little muted. There’s definitely some floral character, but it mostly tastes like black tea to me. As I usually tend toward greens, this makes it pretty good in my book, but not a favorite.

This has a very unique flavor, which I find hard to describe. There’s an earthy, possibly smoky aspect to it that is unlike any traditional green tea I’ve had before. The flavor is strong and feels pretty complex to me, with what might be some umami notes, but what I think I’d mostly call it a pleasant bitterness at the finish. In any case, it is unlike any tea I have had before, and in a good way. I wouldn’t drink it daily, but it’s a nice interspersion as a change of pace.