2036 Tasting Notes

41
drank Golden Chai by Numi Organic Tea
2036 tasting notes

A bit better with milk and sweetened up a bit, but doesn’t have the depth of flavor of the Tazo. Usually Numi’s subtlety is a plus when compared with the sometimes stark Tazo flavors that don’t blend so much as each scream independently to be noticed, but here it’s a detriment.

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

89
drank Ginger Pu-erh by Samovar
2036 tasting notes

I know I’m starting to sound like a johnny one note here. Or perhaps as though I’ve had a thorough brainwashing prior to induction into the cult of Samovar. But I am now officially… what is it? I’ve lost count. I think it’s six for six, or maybe I’m up to seven for seven. Perhaps I should just say I’m batting 1000. Or bowling 300. To sum it up, when it comes to Samovar’s offerings, I haven’t met one I wouldn’t buy again and the trend continues with the ginger pu erh.

In the sample packet, the aroma has a surprising chocolate note to it. Chocolatey, spicy, leathery. As with other Samovar teas I’ve tried, one of the most interesting things about it is that it isn’t fixed. It’s like shifting sand. Sometimes the chocolatey smell is primary, sometimes the leather, sometimes the spice. They each swirl forward and then recede, shift, do it again.

The rinse awakens and makes more powerful the ginger and orange scents. The ginger is spicy-sweet, not at all harsh. After steeping, the aroma evens out again. I found the chocolate again, and another surprise, a coffee note, along with leather, earth and spice.

The color of the liquor is very like how I remember the orange pu erh looked. Deep, woodlike. I think I said mahogany, can’t recall — it’s not the black petrochemical look of the Numi pu erhs. It’s deep, but translucent.

This may be the most successful use of ginger in tea I have experienced. Of course it is the only use of ginger I’ve experienced in a non-green tea except for in chai. What makes it successful is that it is part and parcel of the blend. Though it is definitely a focal point, it doesn’t blot out the other flavors. The orange is present, taking a far back seat compared to its role in orange pu erh (as it should), and the pu erh itself is deliciously smooth, rooty, and wet-earthy.

And with that, I can hit the free shipping number without waiting for Breakfast Blend and Chai to come back in stock. So I’ll be placing an order today. But not until after I’ve held this one’s hand through its remaining steeps.

Note: I am definitely going to have to recalibrate my pu erh ratings. Samovar’s are qualitatively better than Numi’s to my taste (even the Numi chocolate). But I will probably wait to do it until I’ve tried some other types of pu erh.

Preparation
Boiling 2 min, 0 sec
Cofftea

I’m not sure I could compare their chocolate pu erh to anything since I haven’t found another chocolate pu erh. That’d be kinda like comparing a flavored matcha to an unflavored matcha. Just my opinion:)

__Morgana__

It’s the overall quality of the blend and the tea I’m comparing, not the individual flavors.

Ricky

I have this! Sounds delicious!

__Morgana__

It is. I like the orange just a wee bit better, but I can definitely see being in the mood for this instead sometimes.

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

85
drank Passion by Tazo
2036 tasting notes

Let’s start with the name. I’m a sucker for evocative names, and how can you argue with Passion? Who doesn’t want to feel that? It would be a real bummer to hate something with this name.

Second, the look and smell of the “full leaf” sachet bags is quite pretty. And the color of the brewed tisane is pretty amazing. Deep reddish purple, very wine-like.

But rose hips and hibiscus. I was afraid, I was very afraid. Because they can really ruin things for me, but somehow they worked in this.

I’m sure I have had passion fruit or at least its juice, but I can’t as I sit here remember what it tastes like. I made this with two bags in about 14-16 oz of water and unsweetened, the dominant taste in the infusion was of unsweetened black cherry juice. A surprising discovery as there is nothing cherry or even berry listed among the ingredients, but a pleasing one.

I decided to sweeten it up a bit to see what difference that made. OMG — grape juice! Seriously, it’s just like warmed grape juice, with a slight raisiny note.

Its shapeshifter qualities make this drink quite interesting, and while it’s not something I would make a daily habit of drinking, it’s unique enough to earn a place in my cabinet, at least when the cabinet isn’t full to bursting with things I like better.

Preparation
Boiling 5 min, 0 sec
AmazonV

it makes great iced tea

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

87
drank Organic Sencha by Den's Tea
2036 tasting notes

Number 2 from the Den’s sampler — this was what they put in for the variable, seasonal tea. It’s leaves are lovely and delicate, almost feathery, and very green. They smell juicy and vegetal, like the unflavored Chinese greens I’ve tasted: a mix of cabbage, spinach, asparagus and butter, but there is also a fresh, field-like note to them. I hesitate to call it grassy because some people view that as a negative. Bucolic would be an apt substitute. There is something else as well, a slight marine scent. It’s interesting to me that this can coexist with the pastoral one. It’s rather like what you’d expect to smell if you were standing in coastal farmland.

60 seconds at 160F got me a gentle chartreuse colored liquor with extremely fine solute suspended in it. The aroma was very like that of the dry leaves, though milder.

The taste is fresh and pleasant, vegetal but not as much so or as buttery as in the Chinese greens I’ve tasted. Though I haven’t tasted that many green teas and certainly have not knowingly tasted a sencha before, this is what I think of when I think of what a green tea tastes like. It’s a sort of Platonic ideal of green-teaness, which is a cool association, though I have to wonder why I have this archetype in my head when I have no experience to back it up.

I was relieved that it wasn’t bitter or grassy (in a bad way), and I think it’s the sort of taste that will grow on me. Though I’m naturally drawn to the big, bold, robust flavors of black teas, there are times when you want a sauvignon blanc rather than a big cab.

Preparation
160 °F / 71 °C 1 min, 0 sec

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

87

Den’s tea sample numero uno. I’m fascinated by the suggested temperature and steep times in the pamphlet that accompanied the sample “kit.” 15 seconds. Boiling. It’s intriguing enough that I have to follow it at least for the first try and see what happens. I just hope my reaction time is quick enough to be able to get the filter out in 15 seconds. Heh.

The leaves are uniformly brown but have gradations from a light milk chocolate color to a dark chocolate color. And they smell like…. toasted rice! Really toasted rice. Like the kind of toasted that sticks to the bottom of the pot and starts to carmelize when you don’t get the water/heat ratio exactly right. Fortunately, I’ve always loved that smell. :-)

At 15 seconds I get a liquor that is a tawny golden yellow, and a toasty aroma reminiscent of some oolongs but less intense and less full. The flavor, however, is surprisingly green! There is a roasted, nutty note, but mostly I taste a celery-like, sweet green flavor, with a bit of a rice-like flavor mixed in which I think is mostly coming from the aroma.

The second steep (20 seconds), brought out a slightly deeper, less green flavor, but I preferred the first steep. Next time I’ll go 15 seconds on the second as well and see what happens.

Like this one. Like.

Preparation
Boiling 0 min, 15 sec
Jillian

I take it you got the novice green tea sampler too? I’m working my way through mine right now – it’s good stuff. :)

Ricky

Woah everyone’s having Dens!

__Morgana__

Yes, it’s an epidemic!

Shanti

This sampler sounds so neat! Did you get an extra sample of sencha in your order? I want to try the Apple, Grape, and Orange senchas, but am thinking maybe I’ll just cross my fingers and hope they send a sample of orange sencha my way?

Cofftea

Shanti, you may not get a free sample of orange for a while- it was the free sample last month (or was it Feb?) so it may not come around again for a while.

Cofftea

Morgana- Japanese greens are now my favorite- partly because they all have different steeping parameters. I’ve yet to find out if other teas (Chinese greens, for example) are all prepared differently.

__Morgana__

@Shanti — looks like I got Organic Sencha as my lagniappe. Not sure whether this is what they’re giving as the “seasonal” choice with all the intro packages though.

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

56
drank Kamiya Papaya by Teavana
2036 tasting notes

One of the teas of the month for March from the Teavana Classic tea of the month club. I am not going to tell you how many tea of the month clubs I have joined in the last couple of weeks. I can’t even think about it too long without a minor freak out. I am fairly sure you’re only supposed to join ONE tea of the month club. But they all look so incredibly interesting. Sigh. I keep telling myself that at least tea is good for you and pretty harmless as addictions go…

This is not a tea I would have chosen had it not been part of the tea of the month club. I’ve been a little wary of flavored oolongs for no really good reason, other than I’ve really enjoyed the tastes of the unflavored ones and I’ve not become a fan of flavored greens. Oolongs seem to have a lot of personality on their own, even moreso than greens, and like greens seem to me to have fairly nuanced flavors that can be overshadowed or even poisoned by attempts to introduce other flavors into the mix.

If I’m remembering correctly, this is my first flavored oolong. I put about twice as much of this in the infuser as I would ordinarily as I was afraid the tea part of it would be too weak otherwise; it has that Teavana cornucopia of fruit thing going on and I thought the chunks of papaya and pineapple might result in too little actual tea going into the cup. It’s very pretty, with full tiny rosebuds strewn throughout. The tea is dark and brownish and resembles the Formosa fine grade I have from Upton though with slightly larger leaves. The dry tea smells fruity, floral and slightly pungent.

It brews to a light yellow, and smells of sweet, tropical fruit and cinnamon with an undercurrent of toasty rose. It actually smells much nicer than I expected it would. The fruit isn’t overpoweringly sweet and it has a clean, fresh smell.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the taste. I’ve not had great luck with pineapple flavoring in green teas, but it works fairly well against the backdrop of the oolong. The pineapple itself isn’t bitter, which helps quite a bit. The papaya and orange smooth it out some as well. The cinnamon, fortunately, plays a minor role in the flavor portfolio as it could easily stamp out the other flavors if it had been any stronger. As a tropical/pineapple blend, this is more successful than others I’ve had with green bases, and it gets points for that. I’m not discerning the oolong flavor in the mix on the first steep, but I expect this is something it will take a few tries to identify. (I’m finding that it often takes a few tries of a tea for me to really get it. It’s sort of like muscle memory in the palate, it takes a baseline taste or two before I can really start tasting the nuances.)

I was curious how well this would stand up to multiple steepings. With oolongs I’ve been going at least four, sometimes five or six. I wondered whether the fruit would become soggy, tasteless, or bitter, or just give up the ghost altogether. The first two steeps were pretty much the same. The third was interesting. By this time the fruit flavor was receding and mellowing, but not disappearing. The taste became more buttery and the tea silkier in the mouth. By the fourth, the tea was discernible if I tried really hard to taste it.

I suspect this will be different from cup to cup as a lot of these chunky mixes are, depending upon the amount of each type of fruit and tea that ends up in a particular steep. Though it’s not something I would have sought out and probably won’t seek out again, I can tell I’m going to enjoy drinking it while I have it. And it may even grow on me.

Preparation
195 °F / 90 °C 3 min, 0 sec

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

79
drank Starry Night by The Jade Teapot
2036 tasting notes

I feel Erin’s pain. My sample didn’t have any stars either, and that was the main reason I wanted to try this. I wanted to see the stars.

That said, this is quite tasty. The tea base is smooth and deep, almost a little chocolatey. The vanilla is substantial and rich, and smells and tastes natural and of high quality. I have a number of vanilla flavored teas at the moment and I may readjust the rating after I try more, but so far if I was to order one of the teas I sampled from The Jade Teapot, it would either be this or the White Peach. Right now I’m thinking more likely this, simply because it’s an oil painting of a tea.

Preparation
Boiling 3 min, 0 sec
SoccerMom

And who doesn’t love oil paintings! :))

LiberTEAS

I have not tried this tea so I cannot comment knowing this for absolutely sure, but I think that with this tea, having the stars are absolutely essential since they are also tea leaves and would thus contribute to the tea in some way. It’s too bad that your sample did not have any of the stars. If you have not yet tried them, I recommend trying these stars: http://www.redleaftea.com/green-tea/golden-star.html

__Morgana__

Thanks for the info, I will give that one a look!

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

76
drank Gyokuro by Adagio Teas
2036 tasting notes

This is part of the “green savant” sampler from Adagio, which I find an amusing name. I don’t consider myself anything close to a green savant, or for that matter any type of savant, but I got this sampler because it had two kinds of green tea I’d been wanting to try, gyokuro and dragonwell.

For my last caffeinated round tonight (I can already see a sleeping pill in my future) I chose to taste this. I am not going to rate it because (a) I’m not sure I prepared it correctly and (b) it’s my first gyokuro and I want to compare it to others before I give it a number.

After reading up on gyokuro on the net, I made this at a very low temperature after preheating the cup, with about a tablespoon of leaves, and steeped for 2 minutes.

The dry leaves are a gorgeous color. A very deep, intense, almost emerald green. They are fine little things. If oolong is dreadlocks, this is baby-fine hair. They smell like sweet, cooked spinach with a pat of butter melted over it.

The liquor is a light greenish color. The hue is pretty close to lime. There’s some sediment in it (the smallest of the fine leaves are close to powdery and they were too fine for my finum filter).

The tea smells like the color green looks. Seriously. If someone put this under your nose and asked you what it smelled like, I’m guessing you’d say “green.” There’s the spinachy note of the dry leaves, but also something that is mown grass-like. In any case, it is verdant, more in the sense of field than jungle as this verdure is fresh-smelling and airy. The mouthfeel is thick and soft. It’s thicker than brothy; it’s milky. Very smooth.

The taste is slightly sweet, slightly not sweet. It’s not bitter, but it has a tiny downswing right before the finish that could be bitter if it was any stronger. But it’s not true bitter of the sort I’ve experienced in green teas before, where it’s downright yuck. This is much more complicated and interesting than that. I am going out on a limb here and guessing this is the taste that is called umami, but since I don’t know whether I’ve tasted umami before I could just be talking out of my… And then, in the aftertaste, this sweetens up to a pleasant vegetal memory. It leaves a fresh taste and feel — the same kind of feel you get after chewing Clorets, but far less crass.

This was a nice introduction and I’ll enjoy exploring this one some more, and others on its heels.

Preparation
140 °F / 60 °C 2 min, 0 sec

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

72
drank Decaf Chai by Tazo
2036 tasting notes

It’s a sorry second to the Samovar Masala Chai, but I have found myself craving it since I can’t buy the Samovar (it being out of stock and all) and I’ve been consuming it in mass quantities over the last couple of days with milk and splenda. So I’m giving it a little bump for being its little comforting self.

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

68
drank Zen by Tazo
2036 tasting notes

Little by little, my original stash of what seems like thousands o’ tea bags that I bought to try to turn myself into a tea drinker (before I started reading up and realized that was not the best way to go), is diminishing if not yet dwindling. This is among that group, and one of the first I bought. I think it was part of the second wave of splurge, after the original Bigelow/Twinings purchases. It’s in one of those spacious rectangular tins that the full leaf “sachets” come in.

The sachets, by the way, are pretty nice. I feel confident I’m not going to taste paper, I can see the leaves, and there’s lots of room for them to swim in once they hit the water without being too compressed. They do expand to fill the bag and bump up against the sides a bit once they’ve steeped fully.

I expected to like this one quite a bit as it has a reputation for being one of the tastier Tazo blends. But I think I may have to come to terms with the fact that I am not generally liking flavored green teas. Green teas on their own, yes. But I haven’t yet found a flavored green tea that really sends me. This one smells quite nice, a little minty, a little green, and a tiny bit of citrus if I really try hard.

While this is a significant improvement over the Orange Blossom by Tazo, I like their China Green Tips better as a green tea. I can taste a grassiness in the Zen, but it doesn’t have the sweetness and succulence of the Green Tips. And I like Refresh quite a bit as a mint tisane. The combination of peppermint, spearmint and tarragon really works well, and is much more interesting to me than the spearmint present here. In fact, Refresh is still the frontrunner in my Tazo experience and I plan to buy more of it (loose this time) when I run out of the bags as I’ve not been able to duplicate the blend using my own peppermint, spearmint and tarragon.

This isn’t bad, it just isn’t as great as I’d expected, and it’s not something I’ll feel compelled to replace when I finish. I could see having it every once in a while when something I like better isn’t available.

Also, I should say that it steeps well at a longer time without bitterness, but there’s not a noticeable change in flavor between 1.5 min and 3 min.

Preparation
175 °F / 79 °C 1 min, 30 sec

Login or sign up to leave a comment.

Profile

Bio

I got obsessed with tea in 2010 for a while, then other things intruded, then I cycled back to it. I seem to be continuing that in for a while, out for a while cycle. I have a short attention span, but no shortage of tea.

I’m a mom, writer, gamer, lawyer, reader, runner, traveler, and enjoyer of life, literature, art, music, thought and kindness, in no particular order. I write fantasy and science fiction under the name J. J. Roth.

Personal biases: I drink tea without additives. If a tea needs milk or sugar to improve its flavor, its unlikely I’ll rate it high. The exception is chai, which I drink with milk/sugar or substitute. Rooibos and honeybush were my gateway drugs, but as my tastes developed they became less appealing — I still enjoy nicely done blends. I do not mix well with tulsi or yerba mate, and savory teas are more often a miss than a hit with me. I used to hate hibiscus, but I’ve turned that corner. Licorice, not so much.

Since I find others’ rating legends helpful, I added my own. But I don’t really find myself hating most things I try.

I try to rate teas in relation to others of the same type, for example, Earl Greys against other Earl Greys. But if a tea rates very high with me, it’s a stand out against all other teas I’ve tried.

95-100 A once in a lifetime experience; the best there is

90-94 Excellent; first rate; top notch; really terrific; will definitely buy more

80-89 Very good; will likely buy more

70-79 Good; would enjoy again, might buy again

60-69 Okay; wouldn’t pass up if offered, but likely won’t buy again

Below 60 Meh, so-so, iffy, or ick. The lower the number, the closer to ick.

I don’t swap. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that I have way more tea than any one person needs and am not lacking for new things to try. Also, I have way too much going on already in daily life and the additional commitment to get packages to people adds to my already high stress level. (Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.)

That said, I enjoy reading folks’ notes, talking about what I drink, and getting to “know” people virtually here on Steepster so I can get ideas of other things I might want to try if I can ever again justify buying more tea. I also like keeping track of what I drink and what I thought about it.

My current process for tea note generation is described in my note on this tea: https://steepster.com/teas/mariage-freres/6990-the-des-impressionnistes

Location

Bay Area, California

Website

http://www.jjroth.net

Following These People

Moderator Tools

Mark as Spammer