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I survived day 1 of only tea-derived caffeine, successfully powering through the day on nothing but a single cup of black tea and pure vibes.

After another night spent feeling under the weather, I met Day 2 rolling out of my slumber in search of something indulgent to accompany my reading of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I settled on this Oatmeal Raisin Cookie blend for a much-needed boost, and oh. My. God.

Despite its delicate, amber coloring, the aroma coming out of my cup is so insanely raisiny it’s like diving into the congealed gummy center of the most fabulously flavorful raisin you have ever tasted and bathing in its cinnamon sweetness. It’s a smooth, syrupy cup reminiscent of curling up in a blanket watching sunny autumn leaves and going back to sleep. I feel like the pat of butter on a warm stack of fluffy pancakes, slowly melting away.

After the week spent me like life was a slot machine, I haggardly drew the conclusion that my lifestyle – currently characterized by sleeping like garbage, going to work at 4AM and chugging 400mg caffeine in energy drinks before 9AM just to make it to noon – needed a reboot. What I mean to say is that energy drinks are expensive and I dropped a pant size in a week, so a friend has pressured me into DAY 1/7: no caffeine excepting whatever I get from tea. After passing an insomniac episode all night playing a PC game called “A Night in the Woods” (a cute, cartoonish side-scroller centered around a feline protagonist in a story with an intriguing balance of wholesome mediocrity and unexpected darkness), Day 1 has met me with a weird start.

Escaping work early, I decided to finally check out a nearby tea shop and foolishly thought I might find a couple teas that could pique my interest. The moment I stepped in, I was quickly overtaken by my folly in underestimating their selection. There wasn’t a single tea I didn’t want to try, and I fear the old adage against shopping while hungry also applies to shopping while under-caffeinated, because I shelled out for a bag full to the brim with goodies and a freshly brewed cup of their Karma Kahwa blend for the road. Does it constitute a relapse if I haven’t gone a day without caffeine yet?

Unfortunately, the ambush-like stealth of Tin Roof Teas’s formidable selection forbids this tea being on their website (I think it may be seasonal as well), so I am attempting to conjure the ingredients from memory and taste. Clove is easily the foreground of this flavorful tea with a colorful supporting cast of spices like cardamom and cinnamon lending complexity and complementary sweetness in the background – the almond is there if you look for it and rounds out a festive, dessert-like profile. A little bit drying, this tea was the perfect accompaniment to a sunny but cool day uncertain of its seasonal loyalties and meteorological temperament. I wonder how it tastes with a shot of espresso in it…damn it. Focus on the mission!

Okay haters.
Maybe this tea has wandered into the wrong cups before, but not this time. Though the aroma, equally malty as smoky, had me in suspense for a moment, the steep makes up for it. Too many bourbon barrel-aged stouts gave me a different expectation- is the whisky in the room with us now? What I got is, I think, much better. This is essentially a down-to-earth smoked lapsang souchong with a wholesome (oaky?) richly smoked profile talked down by honey and the maltiness of the black tea underneath. Though I often like my smoked teas stronger and more monstrous, I was really pleased with this one and the smoke evades that chemical taste so often found in lapsang souchongs (which I admit I love).

Though whisky is not one of the prevailing flavors here, this tea still gave me ideas. To complement the warm smoke filling my nostrils, a few dashes of angostura bitters were an eager accompaniment to add a faintly spicy undertone, and I think this might be the way to go.

After a long, quiet morning filling in for the regular barista, I got home and decided to finish off the last of my Peaches & Ginger tagalong. When I steep this one at work, I taste a little more of the ginger, but making it in my apartment I find that the ginger is just a murky pair of socks in the shoes the peach walks in on – a smooth, sweet undercurrent echoing distant stories of spice is all I detect, but the peach comes through juicy and aromatic. In all likelihood, a little extra steeping time wouldn’t go amiss for this one. Good body and extremely fruity in spite of everything – I’d even go as far as to say the same for the tea.

Having passed a sufficient amount of my day drawing in my notepad at my desk waiting for work to come across it, my dehydrated carcass has finally pulled itself back to my apartment. This organic assam found its way into my possession as a sample stowed away in my last order and should be a suitable restorative with which to souse my wilted corpse and transmute it back into the vivacious grape it never was.

Though Irish Breakfast was perhaps my original love, this was in the days of milk, excessive sugar, and naivety. That said, my apprehensions find no footing in this nostalgic cup. A dark, malty aroma evokes brown bread and dried fruits, promising a stark breakfast blend, and the taste is the venom you suck out of the wound after a tree bites you. There’s a caramelized and unrefined sweetness in the mouth that decries the taint of added sugar. Mildly astringent, it leaves the mouth reminiscent of a crusty, toasted rusk that I can only imagine would gratefully sop up a dash of milk but which, being without any milk, I find stands pleasantly on its own, if not aching for the complement of a little plum or blackcurrant jam. Glimpsing over Steepster’s flavor profile of this one, I can’t help but notice “leather” amongst those enumerated and must accede there is a character to this tea not unlike strips of pan-fried suede. I guzzle the last swig no less withered than I began but slightly more grizzled – this is a tea I would dip in coffee.

This tea is the current feature in the rotating cabinet of drinks I keep at my desk. Each morning starts with anywhere from 1-3 energy drinks, and eventually the workday dwindles down to a sachet of whatever tea is visiting at the time, but each cup is at the mercy of my best attempt to estimate a reasonable ratio of boiling hot water tempered with cold tap water since I don’t have a kettle with temperature control and am thereby consigned to basic breakroom amenities. Today, however, I pocketed a few sachets to enjoy at home. 1 sachet at 175F forgotten for three minutes and my cup is just blooming with the smell of warm french vanilla frosting finely tapered by a touch of lemon. Light-bodied but faintly buttery, it’s a perfect reminder that work is temporary, but tea is also temporary – tea is just much more enjoyable and maybe after work, you can have cake.

While the rose petals impart a flavor if not subtle then perhaps entirely absent, it’s difficult to distinguish this from the astringency of this tea at the back of the sip. The dry, almost gently peppery sensation lingering in my mouth evokes memories of being at a cocktail bar with a friend and daring him to eat the bitter, aromatic petals off the bouquet in front of us, until of course we were both prompted to part ways unexpectedly early in various states of gastrointestinal discomfort. Unfortunately, this is a betrayal I have yet to receive from Wedding Tea and have not been forced to truncate any workdays with thanks to it.

I purchased genmaicha as a huge gamble due to my dodgy past with Japanese green teas, which I’ve come to see as the rough neighborhood I’m frequently chased out of by prowling vegetable notes and buttery flavors – a statement of preference rather than quality. That said, though my relationship with drinking veggies is unstable, my standing when it comes to rice is certain, and if there’s one thing I like more than rice, it would have to be the premium, charred rice crust I get to chip out of the bottom of the saucepan after I make rice for the simple reason that I do not know how to make rice but insist upon doing so. For this reason, genmaicha stood out as a dubious beacon of hope, but a beacon of hope nonetheless.

A whiff of the leaves did nothing to quell my reservations, evoking a somewhat grassy profile that was faintly dry and saline but unmistakably vegetal. Still, the splintery green leaves were richly interspersed with promising, amber nuggets of puffed rice and even some small, white popcorn-looking morsels that renewed my interest. The dusty breath exuding from the tin conjured a colorful suggestion that the best may be yet to come, specifically because the best is possibly locked in this bancha’s stuffy basement begging to be let out. So we return to the sketchy kitchen scale for a rough estimate of 6 grams of leaf (4 tsp volumetrically) dosed in 12 oz of 175F water for 3 minutes. The smell of the tea as it steeped is where everything changed – this was the puffed rice tea of my dreams.

Finally let out of its cage, the delectable, toasted scent of the rice has the ball! It’s mowing down any other flavors in its path! It tramples green tea underfoot! It’s broken into the end zone! Or something like that, I don’t know sports. The savory touchdown is nothing short of Orville Redenbacherian and it’s everything I could have hoped for. Though this tea rapidly grows bitter after its allotted three minute soak, as one might expect, the steeped kernels of brown rice are soft and too pleasant to waste and I must restrain myself from eating them all before the resteep.

Are there limits to this ambitious blend? Is there a law restricting me from adding more rice? How much rice can I add before surpassing the threshold of genmaicha and encroaching into congee territory? Tune in next week for answers to all these and more. As always, this has been Monday, and I am your host.

I told myself I would save this tea for another day, but lies wear many robes. This robe looked like a spontaneous trip to Target (where I also told myself I would buy NO TREATS!) to take my mind off the tin of plump, happy buds waiting for me. Inevitably, I would get home and allow an ample three minutes for me to sink back again into the depths of boredom and ultimately give in to temptation. What can I say? I can’t resist a snappy dresser.

In the dry buds I immediately noticed a bright aroma that caused me to say out loud in disbelief, “Coriander? Is that you?”. (I consulted my kitchen spice rack for confirmation – I can hardly recognize my old friend.) This largely dissipates into a nose that is more vegetal and floral as it steeps, but the spark is somewhat retained in the wet, tough buds, which have a strikingly bitter taste. Though the vendor listing predicts a thin, diminutive body likened to water for the steep – by no means a bad thing in my book – its arrival is accompanied by a certain, faint, buttery quality that sits sweetly on the tongue long after it’s swallowed.

Ordinarily I approach “vegetal” descriptors with caution, as they’re not my favorite with respect to teas, but as a recent and a zealous convert to the Cult of Cabbage, I profess to some partiality on behalf of your commentator, and I find it to be balanced and mild otherwise. Perhaps that will change as I let it steep into infinity. Additionally, the flavor of the buds is so pronounced in comparison to the tea itself that it seems unfair to consume them together, so I might strain this one in the future to give it a fighting chance.

For the second steep, time to put the screws on Chinese Silver Needle. I subjected it to 200F and was rewarded with a much more uniformly saccharine profile. On the other hand, the steeped buds persist in being unbearable – blech!

As a tea barbarian, I’ve braved the slings and arrows of young adult life leaning on flavored teas prepared so recklessly and uncaringly as to taste less pleasant and complicated than the concerningly flavorful supply of tap water in which it was made. This is a sure way to forget what tea tastes like, why it should be consumed, or what the meaning of life may be. Changing that begins with two things, and those are, firstly, a tea whose only flavors are the ones god gave it, and secondly, the ultimate symbol of status and sophistication: one faithful Brita filter to moderate the charming savor of PFAs.

The vendor says 175F so that’s what I gave it. It’s just as agreeable at 200F. The actual weight of tea used is anybody’s guess, including my kitchen scale’s, which seems to be notably receptive to the suggestion of minor adjustments to the position of the leaves on it. “3 grams? Or maybe 4 grams. What do you think? I guess it could be 2. 5 grams if you insist.” Assuming the FDA isn’t stopping in for a cup, I imagine that will do fine.

This tea is delicious after steeping for 3 minutes, but it’s also delicious after steeping for 2 days, so there’s that. It brews up crisp and clear, revealing a mellow tint of marigold the longer you let it play. The understated aroma of citrus and spices is a preview of the taste – each sip a gentle cruise over smooth waters scintillating with unexpected sweetness. The whole, unbroken buds are delightfully soft before steeping, like eager little ferrets in silky cashmere sweaters. I never strain these out because they’re a playfully bitter and irresistibly tender little snack, and anyway it would be a crime not to challenge this tea in all its forms through its own veritable Crucible of steeping abuses like a fresh recruit of the United States Marine Corps. I have a feeling this tea would come through just fine if you steeped it in a grease fire.