ABC Tea

I bought this at a local supermarket. It was fairly cheap, and it didn’t taste how I expected ting-tung to based on reading about it. It’s not bad though. It mostly tastes lightly sweet/charcoal, with a light bitter aftertaste. It smells a bit of rice or maybe dry grass, but I tasted neither of those.

This tea doesn’t really taste of anything too strongly. It’s a pretty weak green tea, but I like it well enough. I bought 5 pounds of it for around 15 cents per ounce, so I have quite a bit to go. It’s definitely cannon fodder tea, I could drop almost all of it on the floor and not be too disappointed about the loss. It is also hard to brew wrong, keep the time under 3 minutes, and you’ll get consistently not bad tasting tea. I usually drink this each morning before work, its easy to brew, and I’m not worried about running out for the foreseeable future. This tea is absolutely nothing special, if someone wants you to spend more than 50 cents per ounce tell them you’re not interested.
Edit: Also it has a lot of twigs in it, or at least a ton more than I’m used to.

Im not sure if this is a black tea. It’s probably oolong. The color is darker than a green tea’s definitely. I like how it does not easily get bitter. It has a sweet rose scent and the flavor is equally so! The rose tastes so natural in it. I really like this tea :)

my first steep: hardly tasted anything. astringent feel – i guess it needed a rinse :)

action: boil the leaves in pot of water, added another teaspoon of leaves, steeped longer

2nd steep: i can taste something. it is not bitter. so longer steep is good and not harmful :)

Thanks to yssah for this sample. I am on such a rose black kick lately. I now have several 1ish cup samples of rose black but I think I am going to save the rest until my rose black from In Nature tea comes and have a rose tea taste-off. This company seems to be a wholesaler only as there is no information on purchasing their teas from their website.

Also my nose has decided that it is a faucet lately. It’s not stuffy (good, so I can still smell the teas) but it is very sneezy and runny. Could be allergies, I guess; it’s been a long time since I’ve lived this far south and maybe my allergy antibodies are all off. Time to get some local honey at the market.

This tea brewed up kind of pale for a black tea but I am pretty sure it is a black. It smells kind of odd; like roses, I guess, but also a little chemically? Actually I know what it smells like but I don’t want to admit it to myself because I will never be able to drink the tea. I have never associated that smell with roses. The flavor is sweetish but yeah, chemicals. Weird! I have never expienced that with a rose tea. I guess this is an unexpected sipdown because I won’t be drinking more of this. So now I can say that the scent I am reminded of here is old alcohol-preserved museum specimens (animals, I mean, generally lizards), which I used to work with ages go. Incidentally it is also the scent of the heinous Chinese liquor baijo. Not what I was expecting this early in the morning!