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Another Teavana tea of the month for March. (Hmm. Wonder when April’s teas will show up?)

And another I would not have selected were it not a tea of the month club offering. Confession time: I am no longer sure how I feel about rooibos (but don’t let rooibos know, k?).

When I first started trying to become a tea drinker, I liked it quite a bit. I think I liked it because it was (a) different from other drinks I’d had, and therefore novel, and (b) such a good flavor enabler. It may be particularly attractive to recent converts because it forms the backbone of so many interesting sounding drinks that, when you’re first getting your feet wet after less than stellar experiences, sound appealing because it’s almost like not drinking a tea-like beverage. Like Rootbeer Float and Tiramisu. The more excellent loose leaf Camellia Sinensis I drink, the less appeal these frou-frou approximations of existing beverages or foods have, though I remain a sucker for a good flavored black tea.

So say what you will about it, rooibos does have the very endearing quality of being an excellent backdrop. It’s the tofu of the tea world. It doesn’t have a strong flavor of its own, and the flavor that it has is mild and neutral. So it basically takes on the flavor of whatever is next to it. It loves the one it’s with.

Mostly, successful rooibos blends seem to be about the proportion of whatever the other flavor is to the rooibos. At least, I find the more successful ones to be those that sit the rooibos in the corner and don’t let it talk too much.

And that is why I find Rooibos Tropica to be a successful blend. It has a wonderful strawberry/peach smell when dry and is pretty to look at. It looks like dried rosemary dotted with blue, white and reddish-purple flower petals. (I agree with the quiet life, I don’t think there is any red rooibos in there. The ingredients on the bag don’t list it. Maybe they did change the blend.) When infused, the aroma is strawberry, peach, and a somewhat green note which could be from the rooibos, or the flower petals, or both.

It doesn’t seem that sweet to me, though strawberry is definitely present in the flavor and I’m finding Teavana’s strawberry to provide some degree of sweetness to their blends. Without the strawberry, I don’t think it would be at all sweet. If I try really hard I can taste something that seems like peach, and something that seems like orange. But what I find interesting about the flavor is that the ingredients together have some sort of synergy going on, where the sum of the individual parts is greater and different than the whole. As a whole, it’s a tutti-frutti mixture that suggests mango, pineapple, even banana — basically all the fruits you’d find on Carmen Miranda’s hats — even though none of those are identified as ingredients. And the rooibos is sitting in the corner, quietly, exactly as it should be.

So this gets a high rating for being an excellent example of its genre. Tied with the SpecialTeas Rooibos Lemon Chiffon, which I have not had in a while and need to revisit to see if recalibration is in order. However, whether I buy more is still an open question given my current doubts about my relationship with rooibos.

The rapturous tasting notes about this made me want to try it and, on the offchance I’d get lucky, I sifted through my last batch of Life in Teacup samples and voila! Lucky, lucky me. I am all for instant gratification. In this case it was so instant I placed my order right before writing this.

Let me add my own effusive praise to this lovely tea.

Yellow flecked, deep green, twisty, curvy leaves. Not the biggest I’ve seen in an oolong, not the smallest either. They really do have an amazing fragrance. I often have difficulty detecting floral notes even in teas that are scented. I think it was Shanti who said this smells like a garden and she’s absolutely right; it’s like sticking your nose into a gardenia. There may be other floral scents in there as well but I’m notoriously bad at placing floral scents. Lily of the valley maybe?

The brew is a light yellow with a tinge of green and smells like someone poured melted butter over the aforementioned flowers. The leaves unfurl to increase dramatically in size after multiple steeps.

And in honor of laurenpressley’s impending addition, let me tell you what the taste reminds me of.

There’s a little white flower called “baby’s breath,” which is often used as an accent in bouquets. It doesn’t have much of a scent on its own, so until I became a mother I thought the reference was to the milky white color of the flower. Because after all, babies drink milk.

Then my first son was born. And in those first few days of holding him and nursing him, I noticed an amazing thing. His breath smelled divine. Sweet, warm, milky, buttery. Pure. He took nothing into his body other than mother’s milk. There were no teeth yet, to collect what the mouthwash commercials refer to as “odor causing bacteria.” Just this sweet, lovely baby milky smell.

That’s what this tea tastes like. That, and flowers. What’s not to like?

Methinks it is time to start on my sampler. Here goes nothing: No. 1 of 31

Took a page from Ewa’s book: closed my eyes, thrust my hand into the basket, diddled it around and grabbed. This is what came out. (That was really fun, by the way. I intend to go through the whole thing entirely at random.)

Pretty, pretty dry leaves. Long, twisted, pointy; a cross between olive green and chocolate brown. And the smell! First, chocolate. Then, tobacco. Then, coffee. Then, something green and toasty. All mixing together and swirling around. Bizarrely, the image that came to mind was of tiny, silver, schooling fish swimming this way and that.

I used the whole packet. According to my scale it is enough for 1.5 cups, but my favorite cup for tasting teas holds 12 oz of water, rather than 8. So six of one, half a dozen of the other as my mother would say.

A golden brown, “tea colored” liquor. Lighter in color than I expected. Sweet, chocolate/malt/brown sugar aroma.

How to describe the taste? It’s smooth and gentle, completely without sharp edges. It isn’t full-bodied like the Samovar Breakfast Blend; on the other hand, it is refreshing without being thin. This seems to be the influence of the darjeeling.

It has a taste I can only describe as leafy. It isn’t particularly sweet, though it does have a hint of malt. It makes me think of fall in the Northeast US, when the leaves are falling from the trees, fresh and fragrant. This is what I’m getting more than “floral” but perhaps it’s all part of a Kingdom Plantae continuum. There’s a nice, lingering, quintessentially tea taste. It’s what tea-flavored candy tastes like without the sugar overload.

It’s lovely. I’ll definitely order it. I like Samovar’s Breakfast Blend better, but who says you can only have one breakfast blend? It would be like only having one pair of black shoes.

Still liking this one generally as far as bagged teas go — I won’t repeat myself as to why as it’s in a previous note. Just wanted to add, though, that I’ve noticed that it has a fair amount of astringency. I take it from what I’ve read that astringency is a desireable quality in darjeelings, though I’m not expert enough to know how much is desireable and whether the amount present here is too much.

Ahh. Wednesday. A work from home day.

Which means my overflowing shipping boxes full of recent tea deliveries are surrounding and beckoning to me. Yes, that’s where I’m now reduced to collecting (I won’t say storing because that might mean it would become a permanent solution) my tea deliveries, one for each type from black to white. On second thought, beckoning is the wrong word. It sounds gentle and polite, or at least resistible.

But first, I must not ignore my crusade to drink up the bagged tea to make room for all the new stuff, lest the boxes indeed become permanent. The good news is that though there are still way too many, I’m finding that I’m running out of ones I haven’t written notes on.

This is one. The bag has a deep “black bagged tea” smell, a bit like the Numi pu erh bags but minus the leathery/earthy notes. It steeped to a dark brown. I used 2 bags in 14-16 or so oz of water which likely resulted in a darker liquor than would be typical.

The tea smells much nicer than the bag; it has something similar to that sweet, brown sugary/malty smell I detect in a lot of the black Samovar teas and that I just love.

The sweetness isn’t as apparent in the taste, unfortunately. There’s a tiny bit of sugar in the finish, and a full, malty flavor with some astringency. It seems better than many of the bagged blacks I’ve had. But it lacks the depth and smoothness of the loose blacks that are my frontrunners at the moment. I’d be afraid that steeping any longer than 3 minutes would turn the corner into bitterness.

I’ll finish this up and would choose it over other bagged blacks in a pinch, but there are better teas. I’m spoiled by Samovar and Mariage Freres and look forward to more spoilage as I work through the contents of my shipping boxes.

This is Ceylon BOP Item TC50B and it came as “a complimentary sample perfect for Iced Tea” with my last order from Upton. I had never used the refrigerator method before and I tried it with this. Here were the instructions:

Empty the contents of the packet into a clean jug and add a quart of cold water. Refrigerate for 12-48 hours, strain and enjoy.

The margin of 36 hours seemed a bit daunting. I tried it after about 24. It’s a nice, standard black iced tea. I’m not a huge iced tea drinker, but in my view this is better than the usual restaurant fare. That’s mostly where I have iced tea.

My boyfriend, who drinks far more iced tea than I do, though also mostly at restaurants and without a great deal of sophistication (though he does insist that it be brewed and won’t take it if it is from a mix), pronounced it “OK.”

I’d had some success sweetening up Numi’s Desert Lime with honeybush so I tried that tonight with this, which as I mentioned in my last note on this is pretty tart. I stuck two Tazo Honeybush teabags into my oversized mug along with about 3.5 teaspoons (maybe 4) of this. It does make a difference; really ratchets down the tartness to something less puckerful, without oversweetening as splenda seemed to do.

I’d read about certain green teas having a post-apocalyptic, glowing green color — the sort of color that makes me think of some of those post-apocalyptic games I played (can’t now remember, was it Fallout? Half-Life? Doom? All of them?) but I’d never actually seen a tea that color. Until tonight. Whoa. Amazing green!

This is the last tea in my sampler, and the fine, very green dusting of the matcha over the leaves and rice is pretty cool looking. It looks like bright, lime-green powdered sugar over long pointy/twisty leaves. It smells juicily vegetal.

I steeped according to the pamphlet instructions: 30 seconds/boiling. The liquor color is a glowing green, not as lime-like as the dry leaves. More tending toward avocado.

The aroma is classic toasty rice, a smell which to me is somewhat similar to the way the old maids in the popcorn bag taste if you chew on them as I’m prone to do. It’s the primary taste as well, with a fresh green tea underlay.

I like the flavor of genmaichas whenever I drink them. I don’t often sit around thinking that they’re just the thing that would hit the spot, though. This is a good, solid genmaicha and I can see ordering it again, but I think the others in the Den’s sample were more suited to frequent drinking as far as my tastes go so I ranked this one a bit lower than the others.

I’m coming back to this one to try the same experiment I tried last night with the Mint Puerh. Since this one actually has green tea in it as well as pu erh, I’m wondering which version will come out better.

Two identical glass cups, roughly the same amount of water. One steeped green-tea like for 2 minutes at 175, the other steeped pu erh like for 3 minutes at boiling.

The longer steep, not surprisingly, resulted in a deeper color. But even the shorter steep is a deeper color than the mint of yesterday. They’re both orangy-brown and clear, the longer steep is browner while the shorter is more orange.

Interestingly, there is not nearly as much difference in the taste as there was with the mint, and as I expected here. The shorter steep is a lighter version of the longer, and I preferred the longer as the taste of the pu erh was more prevalent. This may have more to do with the water temperature than anything else.

The main difference is that the floral quality I described in my earlier tasting note is more present in the shorter/cooler steep. This makes me wonder whether it is really magnolia so much as the green tea influence on the flavor. While I preferred the taste of the longer/hotter steep generally, I was hoping for a more floral quality from this given its name. As it is, it really does seem like Emperor’s Lite. And I’d probably just drink the Emperor’s Pu erh if I was in the mood for that flavor.

The bag smells of blueberries and sweet white tea, and something that might be cranberry but could just as easily be some other red berry. I got a pretty, deep yellow color at a low brewing temp with a generic, fruity and white tea aroma.

This is pleasant enough and I’ll definitely finish what I have of it, but I can’t rank it any higher than this because I can’t discern any berry in the taste. At all. If it tasted like it smelled, it would at least get into the 70s, and granted, it doesn’t advertise itself as having anything more than a hint of cranberry and blueberry. But I guess in this case I just can’t take a hint…