Featured & New Tasting Notes

I haven’t been drinking tea much over the last week. My 2 year old cat very unexpectedly went into the hospital, and in a matter of days passed. She hadn’t had any other medical issues, and suddenly lost her appetite and became lethargic. What I thought would be a pretty routine trip to the vet, revealed a mass in her abdomen. Exploratory surgery revealed one of her kidneys was completely destroyed, and had to be removed. Everyone thought she would recover, being only 2. However, her body slowly failed over the course of a few days. She was put on oxygen, we were called, and she passed within 15 minutes of us being there.
Everything seems pretty empty and sad. My cats are my world, especially my baby Remi. She was so happy, so loving.

Apologies for the personal tangent, I’m trying to get back into doing things I enjoy (like being on Steepster).

This tea was really satisfying. Really deep cherry notes, and some chocolate maltiness. I only got 3 steeps out of it, before it turned a bit more leathery than I wanted.

I am sad about this one… prepared it twice in 3 days, but not impressed for first try nor second attempt.

Rather than almonds I notice only marzipan. I know that marzipan is only from almonds. But it is too sweet somehow, and base teas… well the black tea is boring and roasted green tea (hojicha probably) is not present at all.

I was expected maybe more other nuts as well; not only almonds.

Yesyesyes I LOVE this one! Having only drank it once before this sample from VariaTEA (thank you!) got lost in amongst my stash until I went on the hunt for a blackberry tea and stumbled across it again. The scent of the dry leaf is absolutely intoxicating, and it only gets better as the tea brews. Huge chunks of waffle and whole blackberries make it visually stunning, too, and the whole experience is rounded out by the incredible flavour. Even after following the recommended steeping parameters of 5 minutes at almost boiling, there is very little astringency and the black base comes across as very smooth with a honey-like sweetness that really compliments the blackberry note which is strongest overall. The maple is noticeable throughout the sip too, and the fluffy golden waffle comes in at the end, which surprised me. I didn’t add any milk this time, as I was enjoying the bright juicy blackberry notes too much, but I did add a drop of maple syrup and it amped up the waffle comparison by a notch. I just about guzzled my entire mug down, and am about to go and resteep the leaves even though I had planned to move on to another tea next! I think this is the only tea I’ve tried from The NecessiTeas, and it was an excellent introduction. I’ve added it to my wishlist already, checked out The NecessiTeas website to make sure they ship to the UK (they do!) and might be eyeing up a few blends I want to try once this comes back into stock and I’ve got through a sufficient chunk of my current teas.

This gives me Butiki’s-little-sister vibes, which is very exciting.

ETA: The base doesn’t hold up to a second steep, but that’s okay. The blackberry has faded too so now it’s like eating a jam donut.

Lovely bit of Gongfu from yesterday afternoon/early evening, after work.

It was good to revisit this sheng, especially since I have a little less than a kilo of it. I haven’t had as much pu’erh lately as I typically do, in favor of other tea types, and I was craving some a lot. It’s still so sweet and fruity with really juicy pear notes, though I felt as though this session had more body and texture to the mouthfeel; a pleasant sort of light astringency over top of a syrupy thickness. A greener ‘edge’ to the flavour overall, as well. Still loving this, and very happy with the value of the quality vs cost! It’s cool seeing those subtle changes to the flavour over some passed time.

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_4nScyg-JR/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BReaAIkw79k

Nomnomnomnomnom. Thank goodness this tea still tastes as good as ever! After a day of mostly duds and disappointingly-ageing teas, I am ending on a high note. I even convinced my dad to try it! His first cup of loose leaf ever! He said he’s not keen but he can drink it, which is as good as I could hope for – my father is a very fussy man. I added milk before I remembered I prefer it without, but all that really did was bring the coconut out slightly more over the caramel praline goodness. Adding sugar really makes this one pop. I’m almost out and I will be very sad to see it go, but I need to drink it while it’s still good. The faded teas I had earlier have scared me into action.

I’ve had this for forever but like many others, I haven’t written anything, just rated it. It’s very sweet like some of the other David’s Tea that I bought. I have only bought four so keep that in mind hehe. I have to do a fast rinse before drinking it for my taste buds. After a flash rinse. I brew it as recommended.

The banana is very creamy, that’s what I taste in the beginning. If I don’t rinse, I don’t taste it much but more sweetness. Then at the end of the sip, I get a quick grapefruit note. Neither is really that strong. It’s well-balanced. It sounds like a weird mixture but it doesn’t taste weird and the notes are well separated… meaning I didn’t get a weird muted mix but two distinct flavor notes. I love banana and I love grapefruit so this has always been a nice cup of tea. When I make it cold brew (I still have to do a flash rinse before), I don’t really get any of the citruses but more banana.

P.S. I wish I could change my profile. It’s really old and things have changed >.<. After I made it, I never was able to edit it (maybe once?) other than my picture. Tangent, I know. :P

Picked this one up because I like the idea of a chocolate flavoured matcha – and I don’t think I’ve ever had a good one, so here’s hoping!

This matcha smells rich, buttery and like milk chocolate in the sample packet but all whisked up the cocoa note is very weak. Though, the texture is super silky and the flavour quite creamy in addition to the overall strong umami profile – I feel as if the base matcha used is actually a nice quality but the flavour is just really lacking for me.

If I was blindly served this, I might enjoy it but I definitely wouldn’t know it’s meant to be chocolate flavoured…

Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_xBfAZg7Mj/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnMgGVZmqb8

Sadly I think time has been less kind to this than to some of the other Butiki blends I still have kicking about. My palate is contaminated with the garlic butter king prawns I had for dinner, though, so maybe it’s just being overpowered. My mam surprisingly seemed to enjoy this one, she said it was ‘not bad’ and it got an eyebrow-raise of surprise, which is high praise from her! This is all the more surprising because, like me, she is not usually a green tea fan. The jasmine and anise are still noticeable, though soft notes in a delicate cup, but the pear was mostly lost to me this time. Brewed in my IngenuiTEA to Stacy’s instructions, I’m going to try resteeping the leaves at a higher temperature and with less water to try to coax out more of the brilliance that I know was once there.

EDIT: I resteeped the leaves in less water for 5 minutes at 88 degrees C/190 F and the anise note is much stronger this time around, while the jasmine has faded into the background and I can actually taste the pear now. Still no astringency from the base, which I forgot to note the first time around. Overall I would say this is a more robust cup than the first steep, though still a shadow of its former self.

EDIT AGAIN: I steeped the leaves a third and final time, and the balance of jasmine, anise and pear is much more even now. This time I used boiling water for 8 minutes, and was actually somewhat surprised that the more delicate notes are still present in the cup. There aren’t many teas I would steep more than twice Western-style, but for Butiki I keep going as long as the leaf lets me. I get the feeling that I could probably eke out another very delicate cup or two, which is impressive considering the age of the tea and how mild the first cup was. I’m half tempted to try it and keep going, but it’s just not quite enjoyable enough at this stage in its life, and I’m going to have to drink something else if I’m going to hit my target of a sipdown a day! I only have enough leaf left for one more sitting with this tea, so maybe then I’ll see how far I can get with it.

Thanks so much for the excellent swap, derk! Some amazing teas that I have wanted to try in that package, including the first I’ve ever been able to try from August Uncommon! So very thrilled for that.  I tried this a few days ago, late on the tasting note, but I was drinking this from derk and Yeti from Annie and was feeling quite tea spoiled!!  I’m grateful to Steepster for all the tea buds and the oceans of tea I’ve been able to try over the years because of those tea buds. 
This is GOOD.  A great tea to have on hopefully one of the last colder days of the season.  Apple, yet also savory from the clove and fennel on a lighter black tea base. I love to find an occasional fennel tea.   I debated using two teaspoons for a BIG mug to finish the sample off but I’m glad I didn’t, as the flavor is certainly full and lingering in the mouth long enough to only use one teaspoon. Now I have the extra teaspoon for another day. A great introduction to August Uncommon!
Steep #1  // 1 teaspoon for a mug // 22 minutes after boiling  // 2 minute steep
Steep #2  // 3 minutes after boiling //  3 min steep

Sipdown (289)

I was having cheese on fig and olive crackers so I decided to pull out this tea. Alas, I’m mostly getting fruity cinnamon and not much else.

Sipdown (290)

This is another tea from Sil’s latest drop off. Thank you!

I pulled it out, honestly because I thought it was thematic to go with the tea photo I thought would be cute. Now that I am not moving between 3 houses and other places, it is hard to diversify my #365daysoftea photos on instagram so I try to change them up when I can. Yesterday was a fun day at home as my sister and I set up a gender reveal surprise for her husband. We were limited in what we could do to what we had around the house so we ended up with a chalk drawing in the backyard and blue file folder confetti. We filmed the surprise and that allowed them to make a cute virtual reveal video in lieu of the gender reveal party we were hoping to have prior to the virus. So now that they announced publicly, I thought it would be cute to incorporate yesterday’s fun into today’s picture and this tea just seemed like the right choice. Check out the picture here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_sxtNkg2Gg/

As for the tea itself, it’s not my favorite. It’s a little bit of a spice flavor, though not so much a spicy kick. There is also a cacao flavor that is quite strong and is coming into conflict with the fruitier notes in the cup. It’s fine but 52 Teas has many more offerings I’d reach for before this. As such, I am ok with just the one cup.

Thanks very much, Meowster!  For a Darjeeling, I would never guess this is a Darjeeling by the flavor profile.  It tastes much more like a straight-forward black tea.  I like the “gold and silver tips” in the description – I agree! The dry blend has very small leaves but the resulting flavor is mostly sweet and fruity quality while still having that brisk black tea characteristic.  Like rye bread, but on the lighter side. One teaspoon is enough! It’s a good tea but not a tea that really fits a Darj craving. Wish I had more to say! But this is an enjoyable black tea if I’m not expecting a Darj profile.
Steep #1  // 1 teaspoon for full mug // 20 minutes after boiling  // 1 1/2 minute steep
Steep #2  // 5 minutes after boiling //  3 min steep

WAIT a minute… why the heck was I expecting Darjeeling from anything about this? Now I’m confused. It’s not in the name or description… sigh. This is possibly not a Darjeeling at all then… which explains LOTS.

I am a fan of this one. Davids tea needs to make their version more like this one and i might actually buy some haha. Wish i’d picked some of this one up now because it’s a really nice pineapple tea. I think the base tea really does it for me when balanced with the pineapple. Nice job anne! thanks for letting me try this variaTEA!

So I’ve alluded to my living situation before, I think, but basically in Fecember, my brother and I left my mom’s house and moved in with my sister. I was at school half the week and then corona happened so I’ve been at home with my sister for 6 weeks while my brother and brother-in-law have been going to work. So that’s 4 adults between the ages of 28 and 31 living together. One is pregnant and all of us are not thin so we can eat. So menu planning is essential to make sure we actually have enough food in the house. Initially we used to only plan dinners from Monday-Friday but then weekends and lunch time we’d sort of just be lost or trying to hobble things together so we started planning for lunches and dinners on Monday-Saturday and we assume leftovers will get us over Sunday.

While some lunches are just us cooking extra of our dinners to have for the next day, some days we plan specific meals. Those are typically on the days my brother is home for lunch since he can be weird about leftovers and he eats a lot. Today’s meal was literal BLTs with no bread (except for my brother who wanted bread and mayo), mostly because my sister’s pregnancy craving is bacon and she needs to be low carb.

So I broke out this tea to add a little extra tomato to the meal. This is one I won and I really didn’t know what to expect. I think I always work myself up for these out of the box blends and then I’m always surprised by how normal a flavor it is. Like this was drinkable and like something I’ve had before. I get basil in the smell and a touch of drying that sometimes comes with fresh herbs. Tomato adds a little sweetness and then the black pepper adds a touch of spice.

It’s not a bad tea. It’s just not what I look for when I have tea. For that reason, the rest of this is going into my swap box.

taking a break from not working (no my ID still isn’t set up) and entering tea in to my cupboard to have more tea. I have a few of these tea bags so figured i might as well dive in. This is a relatively smooth, slightly astringen black. But i’m ok with it because it’s different! yay! My cupboard started at 13 before VariaTEA’s samples….i’m currently sitting at 50 and still have many, many, many more to add lol let’s see where we end up!

Good morning from the west coast.  

A gentle green tea that can be had upon waking without causing an upset stomach. I enjoyed the entire sample from tea-sipper over the course of last week as grandpa-style brews before eating breakfast.  Clean, sweet, beany-vegetal, nutty and toasty as long jing is known for.  Impressions of cream, grain and apricot. Never astringent.  It did, I think from the amount of loose trichomes, tear up my mouth a bit.  I remember having that issue with long jing in the past. The effect on my mouth cleared up after 2 days of sipping.  The calming aroma and flavor more than made up for that effect.

Thank you, tea-sipper :)

The garden is fully planted. Between the perennial growth and annual plantings, we have:

mandarin orange, lemon, loquats (too young to flower), pomegranate, pineapple guava, strawberries, blueberries, grapevines, honeydew, watermelon, avocado, native currant, quince, banana (it flowers but never fruits)
mints, parsley, thyme, oregano, bay tree, thai basil, cilantro, sage, borage, lemon balm, chamomile, lavender
chives, garlic, leeks, green onion, bulb onions, turmeric, ginger
arugula, chard, amaranth, bok choi, artichokes, fennel
yellow squash, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, pole beans, beans for drying
sunflowers, roses, jasmine, honeysuckle

And those are just the edibles with multiple varieties of many plants. I don’t even know the extent of our flowers and succulents. I do have 8 or 9 Bay Area native trees and shrubs I’ll be planting today.

First tea of the day today and honestly a really excellent choice – quite smooth and creamy with a lovely soft lemon that feels like it’s coating the inside of my mouth the same way the sugary glaze on a lemon cake might. Not too sweet, but sweet enough to feel like a special treat for the beginning of the day…

This blend from the tea box advertises itself as being a non-caffeinated substitute for coffee, yet the main flavor and ingredient is anise?? I mean I like anise in general, but it’s a little weird in this context. I’d rather have a Traditional Medicinals anise-based tea than this one. Everything is ground up very small to be the texture of coffee, which comes out of even my infuser with the tiniest holes. This blend just makes a super murky cup that tastes completely like anise and leaves me confused.

Another tea from the box! This blend has that same fake lime flavor that lots of lime teas have, and I’m not a fan. So if you like other lime teas, it’s likely that you’d like this one. It wasn’t super chemically or anything. It was perfectly drinkable, just not to my tastes. Lime flavored food is fine, but I’ve only found one lime flavored tea that I like, sadly.

I’ve been trying a large amount of rooibos teas lately that I expected to dislike but ended up loving. “Surely this can’t be as good as it sounds,” followed by a recoil at the weird medicinal smell of the tea when the bag is opened, and some grouchy muttering when taking a begrudging sip of a tea that actually tastes like liquid dessert without any sweetener. (Case in point: I nearly wretched while making a thermos of chocolate hazelnut rooibos to take to work, but it’s astoundingly delicious to be sipping on right now.)

This one smells aggressively medicinal with a hint of orange peel and some dust in the bag. Pretty sure the dust aroma is from the bee pollen and chamomile. The aroma is even more perturbing when it steeps. However, let it cool down a bit and it tastes like a creamsicle. Sweet tangerine and orange with a kick of honey and whisper of vanilla. It took effort to not chug the rest of the mug when I made it last night. I’m now on the 5th rooibos blend in a row that has far exceeded my expectations and it’s starting to frighten me. Sooner or later, one of these has to taste like cough syrup and mud, and the chance of that happening is growing steeper with every cup.

This was pleasant surprise.

I took this tea bag with same thoughts about last ones. It won’t be tasty, it will be maybe very spicy, it will be hardly any good tea base.
NONE OF ABOVE
I used even warmer water than they recommend. On the bag is 100°C, I used 90°C, they have on website 75-80°C.

Hardly any matcha? Well, it is in paper bag and some green tea dust is actually going off the bag. So, some matcha is apparently in. It was very spice present too, when dry.

I put the bag in the cup, let it in for minute and half (yes, that short — mostly because of higher temperature and I did not wanted too strong, buttery cuppa)

It was mostly cloves I noticed, but as well ginger and bit of cinnamon. The base was present too! Especially it was quite grassy and not buttery at all. There was little dust of matcha on the bottom, so I was whisking the cup with a teaspoon.

I won’t classify it as a matcha actually. But as green tea with chai? Pleasant surprise!

On the other news:
My granma is going home today afternoon. Actually in the time I am writing this line, she will be in our car and my brother drives home!

Cold Brew Sipdown (294)

Last time I had this, it was like cough syrup. This time it was like bad medicinal rooibos. Normally with caffeine free teas I drink the bad ones just to get the hydration but this was so bad, it got dumped.

What also got dumped? Another cold brew bottle. This time my little one. I fell over while drying…twice…and cracked. So that’s two cold brew bottles broken.

Sipdown (295)

I wanted an easy sipdown this morning so I reached into my Sipdown Box of single servings and pulled out the first tea I touched. This was that tea.

It is sweet but also a bit astringent. It is nothing special so while it was tolerable while I had it, this was a welcome good bye.

Hello, new favorite herbal! I’m a sucker for good lemon flavors and this definitely counts as that. Lemongrass, lemon myrtle, and lemon peel on a light honeybush background with hints of orange. Mmmm. Perfect as a hot cup of tea in the late afternoon. Eagerly awaiting the end of the work day so I can curl up with a cup of this underneath a throw blanket and relax.