Featured & New Tasting Notes

Steeped 3 minutes…not enough…so I am waiting another 2 minutes…this Primula Bloom looked different prior to blooming compared to the others I have tried from them so far. This one was more narrow and a tad longer prior to the bloom. OK…after it finally bloomed I must say it is one of the most wonderful blooms I have seen so far!!! No scent, however. The color is that of a dark green looking or a light oolong looking color. The taste is much more pleasant than the Floral Passion…Thank God! It’s floral but a little sweet for a nice blend of the two. It’s on the lighter side and NOT Bitter. I like it eventho it’s not very strong.

Not bad, but it seems like it has too much going on. Here are the ingredients: red clover, peppermint, green tea, eleuthero, alfalfa, cranberry flavor, nettle leaf, and lemon flavor. The peppermint is overpowers just about everything else.

This smells citrus and peppermint to my nose. I steeped I’t for a few minutes. This taste like citrus more then anything with some peppermint. Good.

I read that you should take this with sugar, I did and I regretted it. I suppose I must add too much or my palette just doesn’t agree with it, but so far I’ve never enjoyed sweetened tea. Regardless, this is a powerful lavender. The smell is unbelievable and the taste lingers around in your mouth well after your last sip.

Backlogging this – I decided to try steeping this at a gentler temperature, more like a white tea,as the base is white tea, green tea and herbals. It really did not provide a satisfactory steep. The same tea that tasted delicate and flowery when brewed at boiling temperature tasted weak and watery when brewed at lower temperature.

Ok, take two.

Smell of leaves dry…amazing.
Smell of leaves wet…still pretty fantastic.
The tea steeps up all nice and dark…still smellin’ fab.

The taste is just not there! I can taste the angel food cake and bavarian cream flavors just fine…but that’s it. NO STRAWBERRY! And I see big ole hunks of strawberry floating around! If this tea was labled as “White Angel Food Cake” it would be spot on and I would be fairly impressed. Also, this go round, I steeped the heck out of it. Like 10+ minutes while I walked around the office making sure everyone knew it was Friday. Which it is. Which means that I will have a box full of tea at the foot of my door when I get home from work. Which is SWEET!

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend full of tasty teas!

I normally make my tea right before I leave for work, but this morning DH had to leave early, so I did it right after getting out of bed. Not the best plan since I was basically still asleep, just ambulatory.

The choice of this tea today was influenced by 2 things: 1) I didn’t have it yesterday and 2) it was on top of the front stack of tea. Yes, I have very demanding prerequisites for my tea first thing in the morning.

I did manage to put the right amount of leaf in (though it was a close thing – forgot I had to measure and just started spooning leaves into the pot – it took a bit for my brain to kick in this morning) and remembering that this tea tastes lighter than the dry leaves smell like it should, I added just a tiny bit of sugar and milk (though the thought process of ‘lighter = more or less milk?’ took quite a while).

So even though I was still asleep, I did manage to brew this tea without any big screw ups. Yet this tea is still very light. Or rather, the lemon flavor of it is. There’s a lemon scent to it (thankfully not like a cleaning product lemon but a lemonade lemon) but just a hint of the flavor, mostly at the tail. It’s a soft tea, not very bold. Sort of plain if not for the light lemon flavor which, since it is so light, really just adds a bit of a fresh taste to the tea. Not a lot of depth of flavor (though more dimension than some flavored teas – Adagio’s Blackberry, I’m looking at you).

I’m not in love with this tea but I do enjoy it. I think I would enjoy it more if the dry leaves smelled differently – it’s SO strong! The superlemon scent hits me as soon as I open the tin so I end up anticipating that scent to translate to flavor in the liquor. But it doesn’t. Which is probably a good thing but then the light flavor become almost confusing. Nice. But confusing.

After all these experiments with questionable tea bags (I said three out of five, earlier but it’s really just four) I still have one left, the supposedly plain white (Ha!) but I’m going to save that for later. I’m in bad need of some proper tea. One that I can drink more than a cup of.

So I turn to this new discovery of mine. Yes. It’s still awesome.

A surprisingly light and fruity tea. No hint of bitterness to the cup.

Opened the package and it smelled wonderful! The spices (and cinnamon) are just right, not overpowering. Slightly sweetened, with milk, this is a treat for a rainy day.

This has black tea with carmel pieces. You can see the carmel pieces in the black tea. I steeped I’t up. I smell the black tea and a buttery carmel note. This tastes like a nice black tea with some buttery carmel. This I’s pretty good.

Opened a new bag today and found it (based on the first sampling of it) to be disappointing. If I were blindfolded I’d say it wasn’t the same tea. I’m not sure what happened but it wasn’t a great taste, the maltiness I’m used to in this tea wasn’t there. I’ll hope for better results next steeping.

MY 1st EXPERIENCE W/ MATCHA! I had this at a new cafe my mom and I tried for dinner last nite… AMAZING! light and a touch grassy topped w/ a light froth that did not collapse when my lips touched it much like cappuccino or beer foam does. There was a little bit of delicious grassy sludge as I lovingly called it that I washed down w/ just an extra spash of water. Lovely. My new addiction.

My first oolong, and I have to say, it was quite delicious. I had this in the teabag format. The flavors were very soothing, extremely smooth, and the mouthfeel was not astringent at all. It’s a quiet, mild cup of tea, one that I could see myself drinking on a somewhat regular schedule. Was it anything to rave about and call the relatives about? No. But there were some complexities that I can’t even begin to describe (as a newbie tea-drinker), and it intrigued me. I’ll be having another cup of this soon!

One of Stash’s most memorable black teas, but you have to be in the mood for it. It seems better as an afternoon or dessert tea than a morning or “I gotta get going now” tea.

It’s an addiction, buying tea, is. I can quit any time! wild eyes
I have my prejudices and snobby opinions about the sort of tea you buy at the supermarket. The cheap mass produced teabags containing second grade tea at best. It’s very rare that I actually get some, but every once in a while I find myself in front of that shelf in the supermarket just to see if there’s anything new. A flavour or a combination there of that I haven’t seen before and I suppose it’s an okay way of checking if it’s worth trying it out at a better quality. I don’t know where in the world this brand is available, but it and Lipton are probably the biggest supermarket brands here in Denmark, and not one I’m usually all that impressed by but good enough in a tight spot. My main peeve with them is that if you read the brewing instructions on the box they insist on boiling water regardless of the type of tea. I don’t care what they say, I absolutely refuse to pour boiling water on green or white, the end.

Anyway, they had this sampler box of whites. And curiosity overwhelmed me. How much of a mess have they managed to make out of the delicate, valuable white tea? I figure if it’s awful, it’ll be good enough for the travel mug in the morning (and easier to prepare in a hurry) than my more expensive but better quality whites and greens.

It smells heavily perfumed and a lot like jasmine actually, which prompts me to see if there is a jasmine variety in the box. Guess what, there is.
Dear teabag producers. Jasmine scented tea is NOT a good choice to put in a sampler box, as it will turn everything in the box into a jasmine scented tea. -Me.
I can find the smell of grapes and pear, but it seems sort of synthetic.

I can pick up the pear in the flavour and it tastes natural. I can’t really find the grapes and the tea on which it was based does taste white, but also very bland and dull. I should like to know exactly which white tea this is supposed to be. It doesn’t help that these bags are not packed individually in an air tight way so it has picked up some of the jasmine from that other one in the box. I expect the variation with jasmine and orange blossoms will work a lot better than this one.

I have to say that it’s possible that I feel about pear the way I do about peach. I love the fruit, but I don’t much care for them in tea. Still, the tea as a whole totally lived up to my expectations.

ETA: I just added this tea and rated it 41, but on the tea’s profile it says 61. How does that work?

I ordered this tea at a local tea house—how could I not select a tea named after one of the world’s finest cities?

The aroma of chocolate is keenly sweet and the hints of hazelnut provide a dignity that does not take away from the chocolate but rather adds a grace note. It makes the tea less of a dessert tea and more of a scholarly treatise on good blends.

I drank almost the entire cup with great pleasure; at the end I experimented with a tad of sugar and milk and they seemed to obscure and not bring out the flavor. I won’t add milk again. And the sugar is not at all necessary.

Overall, I’m impressed and plan to purchase this in one of the handsome Harney & Sons tins.

This is one of my favorite “easy” teas. I always keep it on hand. It’s a great tea for a cold or sore throat. It has an amazing sweet flavor and I only add a little bit of sugar, but it almost doesn’t need any.

So recently discovered that a friend of mine is a tea fan, and she gave me a two bags of this and a bit of unidentified loose green as a way to cheer me up. My pet rabbit was recently discovered by the dorm RAs, and was promptly kicked out, which makes me terrible upset BUT she will take care of him for me till summer. So all is well once again! And now with added tea.

So this is one of first hot oolongs that I’ve had in sometime and it was as delicious as I remember them being. The tartness of the pomegranate melted into the light taste of the oolong. I really like how delicate and light the tea was overall. Downside, kind of bitter and doesn’t re-steep very well. Very pleasant, but may not something I buy with my own money.

Delightful aroma, both dry in the tin and brewed in the cup. Classic earl gray with pleasing berry overtones.

One must be extremely careful not to steep this too long. It can’t handle a typical 5-minute black tea steeping, despite being mostly Earl Grey. I typically do 3 minutes, and even going to 3:30 I notice some bitterness creeping in.

But when you do it just right, it’s a wonderful cup, and the only Earl Grey blend I’ve ever found that doesn’t ruin the Earl Grey-ness of its base tea.

Prepared in Adagio IngenuiTEA teapot.

I received this in a tea swap today. First time I I have tried this tea AND this company! Thanks Karen!!! This is full of spices! I’m steeping now. Some of the spices are floating to the top of the steeper/holder. I see a chunk of ginger switch kind of frightens me. Oh well, I’m game! The color is a true brown. Not much else to say about the color. I have to sample a sip more than once to make up my mind. I did use a little less of the blend because of the scent I thought it would be too overpowering. BUT I really don’t think it is. It blends well. I think it might be the hint of peppermint to offset the other spices. I never add anything to my teas…no milk/sugar…nothing so all my reviews are based on the true taste and this is a nice middle road for a chai. If you have had bad experiences with chai before give this a try if you are looking for something way over the top and spicy this may not have enough kick for you…but if you add milk or other things to it it just might work regardless…depends. It’s not bad…I like it.

My boyfriend brought me a tremendous amount of Chinese teas in teabags to sample. Ten Ren’s Pouchong was one of them. I’m a relatively new tea drinker, without much experience in any particular tea, but I’m aware that pouchong falls somewhere between the greens and the oolongs.

This tea has an almost floral fragrance on the nose. The tea itself steeps to a goldenrod/yellow color. The flavor? Very mild. It goes down smooth, with a slight, green, vegetal flavor at the beginning, that develops into something richer (I assume this is the oolong flavor, although since I’ve never really had an oolong tea, I can’t be entirely sure). My cup was gone in 10 minutes. I do think the tea got a bit astringent towards the bottom of the cup (some dust managed to escape the bag and congregated at the bottom of my cup), but the entire experience was mild, pleasant, and delicious!

Eyes the level in the tin Damn we’re drinking this tea at an alarming rate, I guess it’s the tea’s own fault for being so incredibly delicious. ;)

I’ve prepared this the last two mornings – short on sleep and not ready to face the day. This tea has a strong dark color, and a smooth, malty, smoky taste that makes it easier to face the day. I usually want my morning cup to be brighter and more cheery, but this is a good tea to relax with.

And I still think watching the tea balls unfold is great entertainment. Or, at least, as much entertainment as I am up for this morning.