236 Tasting Notes
These are really big pearls. In fact, they are much too big to be called pearls. Let’s just go with takgoti and call them balls. It’s a good name for these. They expand into beautiful brown leaves and brew up into a red-black liquor.
The fragrance is slightly fruity with a slight smoky note. It’s a strong tea with a slight astringency and a very slight bitter chocolate taste (I may have oversteeped it slightly). The smoky notes exist within the taste as well. It’s a good strong tea and better than I expected. Not as good as my favorite blacks but I wouldn’t toss these balls out of the room. They have a lot to offer.
Backlogging from Chicago trip:
One of the best teas I’ve ever had. The fragrance was perfect and simply inhaling the tea as it cooled brought pleasure to my senses. Drinking the tea was excellent as well. Even my beloved who thinks he hates teas loved this one.
A note on the tea shop: It was excellent. The proprietor is knowledgeable and very helpful. It is a great sadness to me that I couldn’t spend more time there.
I want to say that we don’t really have a lot of tea shop/cafes around here besides Starbucks and Caribou and Starbucks and Starbucks [and I’m lukewarm on all of those], but that’s probably not true. I’ve gotten so used to just getting stuff sent and making things here and my version of “going out” has consisted of going to friends houses lately. I’d honestly forgotten that you can go out to legit places and physically get tea. I guess I’ll have to venture into DC soon. Though maybe not until the semester’s over. This means that it’s time for research. Google, here I come!
We do not have anything like this Chinese tea shop here in Memphis. That’s why it was such a treat to go to Dream About Tea. One of my friends describes “Tea Touring” in her tea blog and I am always so envious to read about cities that have good tea shops where one can actually try the tea as it was meant to be brewed and hear from knowledgeable people.
Her tea blog: http://teawritings.com/
Fragrance of cloves and a note of apples. It tastes primarily of cloves but there is a sweet mixture of tastes below that strong note of cloves. It is, overall, an average chai. I like it but there are chais I love. This one may improve by being prepared in the traditional way: simmering in milk or by being steeped longer.
It has a strong, odd smell and brews up very dark, almost coffee-level black. The taste is strong with multiple notes of cocoa, malt, and leather. It’s not really one of my favorites (I never really like teas that have a fragrance or taste of leather), but I can see that it is a good quality tea.
Hey! You’re alive! I was beginning to wonder if we should send out a search party. I hope the trip went well!
Pity you’re not liking this tea more. I’ve been brewing it a little short of 4 minutes lately – somewhere around 3:30, 3:45. Maybe that would help? It does have a rather distinct aroma, though.
Trip was fantastic. If you ever have a chance to go to the Chicago Institute of Art, you should seize the chance.
I will likely try it again. I usually try a tea twice to make sure it isn’t just my own weird mood. I’ll take your suggestion and reduce the brew time.
Adagio Teas included this as a free sample and I’ve tried hard to like it. It seems almost disloyal to Libras everywhere to dislike it this much. But it is truly not for me. It tastes artificial and cloying to me. It reminds me of when I was 13 and ate my lip gloss because it smelled like strawberries. The lip gloss also had this strange, artificial, somewhat bitter taste.
I had a friend who used to like to chew on Lip Smackers. Never understood that.
Eating my lip gloss was not top of the chart of Carolyn’s Most Intelligent Moments.
I’d say ‘eww’ but I think I might have tried to do the same once when I was much younger. Stones and glass houses and all that. ;)
I am a big fan of chocolate; does that come through at all in the tea?
Not to me, but my preferred chocolate is dark chocolate. I think this may have a note of that artificial-tasting waxy milk chocolate.
It has a slight smokiness but it’s a good basic English Breakfast blend, strong enough to get me going in the morning.
I’ve often wonder how Stash’s loose teas compare to their bagged teas (which are so-so in my opinion). What do you think of them?
They’re ok. The Stash loose tea has larger leaves than the Twinings loose tea and a bit more complexity in taste. But it doesn’t compare with the wonderful Golden Moon or Holy Mountain or Upton Tea selections. I am drinking it mournfully missing my beautiful Sinharaja.
My box of tea samples from Adagio came today. The samples are all in tiny tins! It is very cute, but I’m not sure what I will do with so many little tins once I’ve finished the tea.
This Decaf Tropics has an excellent flavor and fragrance that makes me think of sunny days on a beach sipping a drink with an umbrella in it. The fragrance is true to the flavor.
The black tea base is ok. It isn’t Lipton, but it isn’t up to the grade of my favorite black teas either. It has more tannins than I like and a slight bitterness. Also it doesn’t have much complexity. (On the other hand, it’s better than most grocery store tea. However, I’ve been getting spoiled with the great black teas I’ve been trying.) I steeped it for 4 minutes. Next time I’ll try 3 minutes and see if that improves it.
Despite my slight disappointment with the black tea, the adept hand Adagio has with the flavoring makes up for the dull tea. It is pleasant to drink and a good bedtime tea. I look forward to trying the rest of the samples.
I like to keep a couple of small tins around so I can dump small quantities for transport. Beyond that, I haven’t a clue. I could probably build a fort, at the rate that I am accruing them.
I always thought that the ‘duller’, less distinct black teas were always used deliberatly in flavoured blends so that it wouldn’t interfere with the flavour.
takgoti: Build a fort! That’s what I need to do then. ;)
Jillian: That makes sense. However my favorite flavored teas feature interesting black teas as well. For example, Golden Moon’s Honey Pear combines the flavor with a very good black tea so that the flavors integrate and are distinctive in their own right as one sips. Also the complexity and lovely notes of the black tea in Upton Tea’s Mélange de Chamonix are an important part of the blend and would be missed if they’d used an uninteresting Ceylon black.
I love Adagio’s little tins! I keep all of them and sometimes there is a little fort of them in my pantry. But they slowly go away because I use them to give people tea samples. Also, when I get bulk tea from the store, I don’t get a ton and they fit in those little tins so nicely (much better than the clear plastic bags I buy them in).
Dragon balls… snicker