1299 Tasting Notes
So I finally tried this as a Chocolate milk latte like Variatea makes.
Prep: I very loosely used the measurements of the David’s Tea Eggnog latte recipe. Instead of doing chocolate milk I used 80 percent chocolate soy protein shake and 20 percent real chocolate milk to make it a bit healthier. I also skipped adding the regular milk like that recipe calls for.
It turned out delicious it was very rich and creamy with just the right amount of sweetness. The tea added some floral and coconut notes. There was no sunscreen/ lotion flavor to be found. I think this is how I’m going to be using up this tea. I’ll probably try it as a chocolate milk cold brew as well at some point.
Preparation
So I feel like in my A Quarter To Tea reviews previously I’ve been pretty harsh/Haven’t done a great job of getting my thoughts out correctly. I really like pretty much all of the combinations I’ve tried so far. They are very interesting and leave me craving more. I think it took me awhile to get used to them they have a sort of delicateness. That I can’t explain in the taste that I wasn’t used to. I’m learning that I like really strong flavored teas and delicate ones too. The flavors seamlessly blend together.
I was craving a cup of this one that I actually have a good size bag (whereas all my other cravings were ones that I only had purchased tiny samples of) of even though it’s almost gone. This with the tiniest bit of honey really hit the spot tonight. This company’s teas really are blended beautifully.
Preparation
This was a sample from my Black Friday Harney & Sons order during their free shipping on all orders event.I still haven’t opened any of the sample pouches I bought from that order. Since I’m trying to sipdown other teas first. So this is really my second tea that I’ve ever tried from them so far. It was a free sample from the order. All of the 3 free samples from them came in sachets.
I brewed this hot with no additives.
Tasting Note: This is pleasant but not what I expected at all. I don’t taste the pomegranate at all so the name is definitely misleading. Its creamy and quite sweet with strong honeysuckle notes coming through. It’s slightly floral tasting. It’s definitely not a fruity oolong whatsoever which is what I would expect if I hadn’t read the tasting notes before brewing this up. There are also some lovely buttery & grassy notes similar to a sencha. This tea needs to be renamed in my opinion. It’s a lovely tea but the name doesn’t fit it whatsoever. This reminds me a lot of Steven Smith Teamaker’s Jasmine Silver Needle tea that I love so much but it’s less complex, less floral, and lighter tasting.
Flavors: Butter, Creamy, Custard, Floral, Gardenias, Grass, Honeysuckle
Preparation
Warning: mini rant below
I’m pretty sure that this is the right source since the leaf looks the same and the other tea’s from the company are from here or Culinary Teas.
I got this tea down at the beach and couldn’t decide between this one or the Irish Cream. I asked a family member which one I should go with and of course my impatient grandfather just said go with that one while pointing to the Caramel Pu-erh. So I went with this one. I’m the type of person who weighs the pros and cons and found that they were tied when picking between these two teas. I definitely need someone to come into my life who has great reasoning and can make these types of decisions for me.
Prep: I used one Teavana perfect spoonful. Steeped this western style using 9 oz of boiling water to be exact for 3:15 minutes covered. I used no additives as this tea is best without any milk or sweetener in my opinion.
Steep #2: 6 oz of water for maybe 7 minutes
Steep #3: 4 oz of water for maybe 12 minutes
Taste Wise- This is sweet in a burnt sugar sort of way. It definitely has a syrupy sweetness of sorts to it but I wouldn’t necessarily identify it as caramel. The Pu-erh base is earthy, mineral-y and perhaps slightly fishy but that might just be because the dry leaf smelled somewhat fishy. It’s an interesting tea for sure. I didn’t pay a ton of attention to it while drinking it so this tasting note will be expanded on in the future.
I definitely would like to explore some higher grade pu-erhs but unfortunately western steeping is often more convenient for me. I’m holding off on rating this for now until I try it again. I enjoyed it but it was a bit bizarre and I’m not in love with it.
Flavors: Burnt Sugar, Mineral, Sweet, Wet Earth
Preparation
I believe that most of the teas from Culinary Teas are also Metropolitan Teas. Metropolitan Teas is a wholesale company – that is, they don’t sell retail. They sell retail products – wholesale – to retailers that will sell their products but they do not have a retail outlet of their own. (At least that’s been my understanding over the course of the many years that I’ve been involved in the tea business.)
That makes sense. Thanks for the information. (:
So, I have a confession to make, as for the decision-making. My online friends and I hang out in an old IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server. One of them has a bot on our chatroom that can do misc. things using commands. One thing she programmed Silvie (the bot) to do for me is decide my tea. If I use the !tea command, I get a response like, “Silvie runs to the cupboard and fumbles around with many different bags. She bounds back and presents a bag of Oolong” (with the choices being “black” “green” “white” “chai” “oolong” “yerba mate” “pu-erh” “rooibos” “herbal” “bagged tea” “mixed blends” and “Silvie’s Special Blend”). That narrows my collection of over 400 teas down to a category, and sometimes if I really want to narrow down my choice, I’ll put the teas into an Excel sheet, and use her random number command to select one from the sheet for me, too. I hate to admit how often I do that to select my tea choices! But you aren’t the only indecisive one!
That sounds amazing! We definitely need a feature on Steepster like that, that picks a random tea from our cupboard.
I found an online spinning wheel that picks things and populated it with common types of tea. You can customize it however you like and save the URL. Note that it makes noise when you click to spin the wheel, but you can turn that off. http://wheeldecide.com/index.php?c1=black&c2=green&c3=white&c4=oolong&c5=pu%27er&c6=herbal&c7=rooibos&c8=yerba+m%C3%A1te&c9=chai&t=Tea&time=5
Thanks! (:
This is probably the oldest tea in my cupboard (I believe it’s a year and a half old basically the last time that DT sold this) although it was only opened a month or two ago. I still have a whole bag of this unfortunately.
Nothing new to say it still tastes like sunscreen to me. I think I might try it as a chocolate milk cold brew like Variatea does next time. Since it seems like I’ve tried everything else to make it easier to drink. Since it was in a way a gift from a family member who mixed this tea up with another that I liked I feel somewhat obligated to use it instead of tossing it out.
Preparation
The ingredients in this sound quite similar to Lazy Boy, a Bluebird tea I quite like which is a rooibos base with cocoa shells, coconut, and lavender. That one is very good as a latte with coconut milk. If you pick out a piece of the coconut and chew on it does it seem like it has soured from age? That seems to be the one ingredient everyone says doesn’t hold up with age well.
I didn’t like this tea even before it would have soured. The coconut is as fine as the rooibos so I can’t really pick one out to try unfortunately. I did try it once with coconut milk and still found it to be too lotion-y. I’d send you some of it but since I’m still a bit iffy on if the coconut has spoiled or not. I wouldn’t want to send you spoiled tea.
This came from Tea-Sipper, I bought some of this in her stash sale a few months ago along with some other goodies.
Not loving this one, maybe I need to play around with it some more. I don’t get any of the tasting notes that other’s have mentioned. There was a lot of safflower in my strainer. I wonder if that is what I’m tasting so much of. I get notes of anise, but am missing the cake aspect. The Cinnamon and cocoa shell comes through faintly and more so in the last few sips. For a Sencha it’s not very buttery. Maybe I didn’t store this properly. I’m not sure what treacle is supposed to taste like but I get the impression it’s supposed to be quite sweet which isn’t the case in this cup. I hope I have some better luck with this one in the future.
Flavors: Anise
Preparation
Hmm, this was a very buttery sencha base for me. I remember it being very caramel-like in flavor. I ordered more during the tea elections, but the shipping from the UK is taking forever to get here. * sad face *
That just means you’ll enjoy it even more once it arrives! (: Hopefully the next time I make it it will turn out better.
I found it really buttery, too. Mine also had a lot of safflower – some of it I had to pull apart since it had clumped together so much!
I definitely put a few safflower clumps in mine. I’ll try to break it up next time. Thanks!
I HOPE this one isn’t losing flavor already! I suggest trying a two minute steep… sometimes that brings out more of the flavor while not oversteeping the base tea, especially when it’s a green tea.
I’ll definitely try that! Thanks.
My mom brought me a bottle of this. I hadn’t tried the peach one before.
This one isn’t as sweet as the coconut one but tastes just like those gummy peach rings that I used to find my mom eating all of the time. Although not quite as sweet but still somewhat sweet. It’s not bad per say but I do prefer the coconut one. My mom really liked this one though. I think this one is a lot better when your expecting a candy like peach flavor and not a fresh peach one like I was.
