Featured & New Tasting Notes

Wow! This stuff is strong, just like chai should be. I definitely enjoy the spice on this tea and its full body, however, I think next time I’ll add creamer. I also like that it isn’t too drying on the palette.

I have found a new favorite holiday black. This and the Candy Cane Lane tea will be my two primary holiday teas next year. Great stuff!

Silky Green is my absolute favorite tea from Bird Pick! It has a wonderful milky aroma and the leaves are furled similarly to oolong tea. The first brew, which isn’t my favorite has a light buttery note, and with consecutive brews, becomes more flavorful. The tea develops a creamy and almost perfect buttered-toast like flavor. It’s also very smooth on the tongue and doesn’t leave your mouth dry. Be sparing with the leaves, they unfurl quite large.

I’m getting down to the bottom of my sample packet sad face so it’s mostly the little crumbly, broken bits now. I’m really hoping a get a strainer with a finer mesh for X-mas, I’m sick of picking leaves out of my teeth!

Because of all the broken bits I reduced the steeping time a bit too, but the tea seems to have taken it pretty well – it still goes down smooth as silk. Interestingly I’m noticing a very faint hint of smoke scent/flavour right as I first sip. It’s nothing near Lapsang or even Russian Caravan strength, although I’ve heard that all chinese black teas are bit smokey so it could be one of ‘the eight’. ;)

Okay, so can I say this was an absolutely DELICIOUS tea experience. Seriously. Auggy, you just brightened my day by twofold just by allowing me to taste the amazingness that is this cup of tea.

First off, the try tea is gorgeous. All sorts of browns and russets, mixed in with the eye-catching orange-red safflower blossoms. Nice slivers of almonds and a smell to die for. Seriously. I’ve actually been saving this tea since Auggy sent it to me, because I had a feeling that I would fall in love with it. And I’m one of those save-the-best-for-last kind of girls.

The leaves did a little dance (but not by much, really, since they’re kinda tiny), and I had a cup of absolutely amazing smelling tea in front of me. Seriously. This smells buttery and bake-y and almond-y and cookie-like. There’s the cinnamon mingling with a tea smell and the entire thing really does smell like an ALMOND COOKIE. Well, that would explain the name, then, right?

First sip gave me a little shiver of happiness. MMMMMM. You get the tang of the tea, followed by the sweetness of the cinnamon, which then mingles into the almonds. And somehow, on the swallow, this produces an amazing likeness to almond cookies. I don’t know if any of you shop at Italian bakeries, but if you do, try the pignoli nut cookies. They’re made with pine nuts (aka pignoli in Italian) and the cookie itself is made with almond paste. They’re soft and chewy and delicious. Sweeter than marzipan and sugary, with the absolutely amazing taste of pine nuts. I grew up eating them. They’re the epitome of an awesome almond cookie, and this tea really just brings all those feelings to the surface.

The flavor dynamics and balance here are absolute perfection. I really couldn’t ask for a better-tasting cup, especially after my very bizarre experience with lapsang souchong this morning. Yay for delicious dessert tea! And yay for Auggy and her wonderful samples!

A friend of mine who lives in Hawaii (lucky girl) sent me a special Hawaii-only Lupicia package of tea, full of flavours they apparently only sell in their Honolulu store. So if you’re wondering why you don’t see these offered elsewhere (or on their website, with a couple of exceptions), now you know. :)

At any rate, upon opening the package, the first whiff is kind of ashy. Not in a bad, “oops, I burnt my house down, my bad!” kind of way. It’s sweeter, like when you toast marshmallows over an open campfire on the end of a slightly green branch. Anticipatory burning, yes.

Upon pouring the recommended boiling water over it, the water instantly turns a nice, rich gold. Within a minute of starting to brew, that gold deepens into a rich, luxurious amber colour. The amber deepens as it steeps, but it never becomes a flat brown. Instead, it’s got slightly warm, reddish undertones, like a really nice single-malt scotch. Or John Simm’s eyes, if you like (and I do). Hee. ;)

The aroma as it steeps smells less like burning and more like something sweet and yet slightly sour…not-quite-ripe mango, maybe? There’s an undertone of the aforementioned pleasant burning smell, but it’s overlaid by sweetness. Not overly-sweet, though. (I’m worried I’m making this more confusing in my attempt to clarify. It’s a bit like dancing about literature. XD)

First sip is smoky oolong all the way, but it’s held in check by something sweeter and slightly floral and perfumy that lingers after the oolong is long gone. As the perfumy smell lingers, the burning aroma comes back, and yes, it’s definitely reminiscent of a volcano. In a good way, I promise. It’s smooth, slightly dark in taste, and quite nice overall. :)

I’ll probably go for a resteep later, so stay tuned. :)

This tea is a wonderful black tea that is smooth with chocolate notes. I use 3 pearls per pot and that does well.

This oolong is mellow with a little floral touch. The peach flavor is subtle. Overall a really tasty tea.

I have steeped the Ceylon leaves again. The wet leaves smell more strongly of dusty cinnamon when I removed them from the tea as well as of dried old paper. The tea smelled of dust, paper, and old under its natural tea-y smell. It still tastes good, but much weaker. I will steep it longer the second time next time. I don’t think it will manage a third steep.

Very dark amber in the cup. With most teas, the bottom of the cup can be seen – not with this, it is very nearly opaque. This tea tastes exactly as most people describe, strong and earthy. This is a tea that one generally has to get used to – it will be an acquired taste for most people.

The “earthy” taste – some people just call it strange – comes from a unique ingredient that appears during the curing: fungus, bacteria, or mold. Anyone who has ever scraped out the deep blue veins from a strong Danish cheese and licked the mold off the knife is going to recognize the source of the “earthy” taste in Pu-erh immediately.

Extremely old (40-50+ years) Pu-erhs are known to have visible strands of blue mold. Even on younger Pu-erhs, the mold is still present, just not visible. It is that fungal growth that gives it the unique taste.

The age of a Pu-erh is important when thinking about the tea, Golden moon does state what year it may be from but they describe the ingredients in the tea as: Aged Chinese Tea from the Last Century. Pretty vague, but given the price, the tea probably a recent vintage from the last 2-3 years.

We brewed this for 2 minutes, 30 seconds using boiling water.

i love any blend with ginger, but for a pure therapeutic ginger soother, i choose traditional medicinals.

It’ll do. I’d rather spend money on a better chai, though, if I’m going this route. More middling than any other Twinings blend I’ve tried so far…and I’ve tried a lot. Kind of disappointing in its mediocrity. At least it doesn’t suck.

P.S. Yes, Andy, it’s chai. XD

I love this tea — I got it to try a different Chinese tea than my normal types and went for the generic Keemun (figured I’d start at the bottom), and I am very pleasantly surprised. It’s a perfect morning cup for me; plenty of flavor but not overly astringent.

Its perfect for the winter months – the blends of cinnamon are incredible – needs no sweetness- check this out even if you aren’t a tea drinker.

The curled emerald green leaves of this tea have a lovely sweet smell to them before brewing. The bright golden liquor smells lightly of fresh greenery, with a taste to match. Just a small amount of sugar brings out grape and plum notes that dance on the tongue.

After picking up a few tips from the forum, I took their advice and used 1tsp or just under of leaves, dampened with cold water, then added boiling water. I added cinnamon (prob 1/2 tsp) and it tasted okay. On the four steep, it’s tasting nice even without the cinnamon, but it’s only very weak now. It’s still not my favourite, but it’s a big improvement on what I had before and I will probably finish the 50g I bought before I retire (in 35 years’ time)

My cousin donated this for me since I don’t have tea at my parents’. I’ve never had a black flavored tea before. It’s much more fruity than black teaish.

Mmmmm, yum. Haven’t had more of this tea in the last week until now….I forgot how good she is!! Hail to the Queen!!! Nice blend of blacks giving me my ideal malty and fruitful notes. Added a little milk and sugar and voila – Niiiice! Really delivers a wonderful tasty mugfull. I bumped my original rating up a bit to where it should be! :)

Well, yesterday was an insane tea day – 7 different teas for me and multiple steeps of most of them. So that’s BIG for me. And I liked it. So I decided to carry over the tea bounty on to today. I’m not going to hit 7 – maybe 4 if I’m lucky – but still. Yay tea!

Brewed this up in my handy dandy ingenuitTEA using filtered water from home. I’m pretty sure that makes me a big ole dork, bringing tea water to work, but the water here is nasty and using bottled water makes my tea flat.

For some reason, the leaves smell of fruit. Some sort of berry. I think when I first got this tea, it was sitting up against a plastic bag of black currant tea so I’m guessing the smell soaked into it a bit. Which is weird. But at least it doesn’t carry over to the brewed tea. It smells comforting – kind of like dry grass plus a little spicy and bit of baking chocolate. Plus, I get to drink it out of Totoro so how can I go wrong?

Yep, I’ve definitely got a sore throat which is usually the first warning sign I have if I’m about to come down with a cold or fly virus. This tea, if nothing else feels nice on my throat – I added a teaspoon of wildflower honey for extra ‘lubrication’. ;)

Its taste isn’t really remarkable in any way; it’s pepperminty, but it’s a mild peppermint, not the full-on cold, mouth numbing sensation I usually get with straight peppermint tea. Its also got a slightly herb-y sort of quality to it, though nothing near so obnoxiously ‘good for you’-tasting as RoT’s Get Clean tea.

I have more to add, but initial impressions:

Smells like cardboard but tastes a lot better than that! By far there are more rooibos than black tea leaves in there. I think thats why I smell the cardboard. Plain rooibos smells like cardboard to me. I added a cube of brown sugar and enjoyed this! Not something I’d reach for often though.

I like this both hot and cold. Had 1 of each tonight…YUM!

Caramel and hay in the scent of long, twisted, dark-brown dry leaves. I put a lot of leaves in my little clay pot, so 30 sec was long enough to make tea. A very ‘yang’ taste, but low astringency. Found definite cinnamon and a touch of bitterness in the finish. The golden liquor shifted from allspice and leather, early on, to a deep, pu-erh-like, peppery taste in later infusions. Sweetness was mostly in the aroma rather than flavor, with richness imparted mainly by the body of the liquor. By the 6th infusion, at 2:00 min, with temp raised to boiling, the big leaves were still going strong, with the tea mellowing out to a sweet, faint linen and leather, and the bitterness vanished.

This smells so fresh buttery that my mouth is watering. Literally. I’m drooling.

Tried this at a lower temp to see how that adjusted the taste. Still has the bright, Darjeeling-esque notes of muscatel that I tasted at the higher temp but there is more of a buttery taste to it, too. Not quite as much as the smell, though. Also, the Darjeeling aspect of the tea isn’t as hard hitting as at a higher temp. Now it tastes more like a softer oolong, maybe grown in the same region. There’s still a hoppy note at the end, but it seems to blend better with the softer taste of the tea. Almost gives me flashbacks of the Schlafly brewery tour and tasting from yesterday, but not quite.

I definitely like it better brewed at 195 so far due to the slightly softer taste to the tea and the addition of the buttery taste that, to me, seems to pull the flavors together a little better. I think I have enough for one more session with this and I might go down to 180 just to see how it does there.

Sharing this one with the husband. He said it tasted like an oolong plus herbal but then he’s not really had much experience with Darjeelings so I think the fruity Darjeeling flavor is hitting him as fruity herbal. He didn’t try this one at a higher temp, just 195 so can’t compare that way, but overall gives the tea a 4/5 stars. I think if I could get a little bit more buttery out of it, I’d make it a 4, too. Again, I’ll see how the last bit does at about 180.