Short Sorceress select Send Message

First off, I would like to thank Angel at TeaVivre for sending me these samples. She was incredibly generous in the amount of tea she sent me last month and I look forward to trying them all.

My first steep of this tea was very light in both color and taste. I had difficulty tasting the jasmine, but there was a very subtle sweetness from the peach. What I love about this was that this tea tastes like a genuine peach, and is in fact the only peach tea I can say that about.

The jasmine pearls were just beginning to unfurl in my pot on my second steep, releasing more flavor into this cup. It was noticeably darker and tasted more like a green tea. I still can’t taste the jasmine in this steep, but the peach flavor has gotten slightly stronger. There is also a bit of astringency this time, but nothing that would make this cup undrinkable. 
I noticed that the astringency was much stronger in subsequent steeps. Ultimately I steeped this six times with fairly pleasing results, although I found that I preferred the taste of the cups that steeped for less time. After the first three steeps I started to play around more. I went back to shorter steep times in order to minimize the astringency in each cup.

Since I decided that I enjoyed the cups with a shorter steep time I opened a second sample pack and played around with my steep times. This time I started at 1m and increased my time 15s each steep, so my times were 1m, 1m15s, 1m30s, 1m45s, 2m, 2m15s. I think that for my tastes these times work best for me. I also think that it may be possible to steep more than six times this way and still end up with an enjoyable tea. It was already after midnight when I got to this point so I stopped.

One last thing I want to mention is that this tea is truly amazing when served cold. The peach is less subtle than it was while hot and I noticed the sweetness more.

I had this iced today, it was one of the teas they had for the National Iced Tea day promotion. I’ve had this before, it has been in the sample pots on the counter at our store for awhile now. The samples generally have so much sugar in them that they no longer resemble tea and that was no different today. I was able to get my to-go cup without sugar, I was actually shocked that I was asked how I wanted it prepared. My previous experiences have been that they just load it up with as much German rock sugar as possible and I leave the store with something that resembles Kool-aid. They also didn’t make it seem like I was putting them out by asking for a cup to go, although no one in the store seemed to know about the promotion going on.

I understand now why they put so much sugar into this blend, without it it is mouth puckeringly tart from the hibiscus with just a hint of blueberry. After a few sips I decided this was probably best mixed with something else so I poured it into what was left of my Rishi China Breakfast tea that I had left the house with [it was roughly 14oz of each mixed]. It still has an overwhelmingly tartness from the hibiscus, but the black tea helps cut that a little.

I wish Teavana would cut back on the hibiscus in their blends, I would probably like them a lot more. Sadly, this is another Teavana tea that just isn’t for me.

I also wanted to mention that I had the most pleasant trip to Teavana to date. It was the first time I left the store and didn’t want to strangle someone. I’m thinking that our store has had a complete staff change, I didn’t recognize a single face when I went in this time and they were training 5 new people. Perhaps Starbucks is listening to all of the complaints, I know I’ve sent a few emails to them about this particular location.

I’ve been bugging my swap partners for more EGCs to try and I got a sample of this from scribbles, thanks so much!

I don’t normally talk about the smell of the dry leaves, but in this case I feel that I need to. I almost didn’t make a cup of this because the smell was so off-putting and chemical smelling, it made my nose burn a little. I was all set to have yet another tea from Teavana that I hated, but this one was a bit of a surprise because I don’t mind it, I just don’t think it would be something I would buy myself.

It isn’t the best EGC, in fact, it hardly resembles one at all because it is so strong and lacks the creamy feel that the others I have tried have had. The bergamot comes through first and leaves an after taste that I don’t like. The vanilla hardly comes across at all and I only get a little bit of it in the end. This one left me a little disappointed, but it was perfectly drinkable.