Culinary Teas

I bought an ounce of this to make iced tea out of and you certainly can’t beat the price I paid $1.76/oz. A 4 hour cold steep was just long enough to bring out a hint of pineapple-like flavor. I think this came across more sweet than a genuine pineapple so I’m glad that I went with such a short steep. Generally I cold steep overnight and I think that with this tea it would have been a mistake because the pineapple would have been overpowering, rather than delicate and just slightly noticeable.

This tea isn’t half bad. Thanks for sharing it with me CK!

Definitely stronger on the tea front and less intense on the spices arena.
it could just be the scoop i pulled from the bag, but having a not so powerful spice flavor is a good thing for me. because i’ve had times when i had a WAY too spicy chai and it kinda scarred me against liking them. i’m just starting to recover i think. mostly thanks to getting to try some good chais like this one!
now that i’ve tried this tea straight i’m REALLY looking forward to brewing it in a hot pan with almond milk and agave Mmmmmm.
Thank you TastyBrew! delish!

I’ve had this sitting on my counter for the last month because I had the intention of using it for iced tea. I just haven’t been in the mood for sencha lately so it sat longer than expected. I finally cold steeped this over night and have been drinking it all day long while I was out running errands.

So far I’ve been really impressed with my order from Culinary Teas, I see many orders in my future. I’m a bit on the fence about this one though, but I think it is mainly because I don’t really care for sencha. This had a nice slightly sweet, slightly tart flavor. It didn’t quite come across as a strawberry, but more a generic berry flavor.

I’m not sure this will be a repurchase for me, but I won’t have any problem finishing off the 4oz package that I purchased.

After oolongs and blacks I decided on something light. So this one came out of the untried bin for the day.
The dried leaves are fuzzy and a pain in the butt to try to measure out. I think that’s just a characteristic of white teas since I had just as much trouble measuring out the whites from Butiki. Lol.

Steeped this for the 2 min minimum for starters and I’m wondering if I should’ve either let the tea steep longer, or increased the amount of tea I used (which was approx 1.5 tsp near as I can figure). This tasted very light overall. Lightly vegetal, lightly tea flavored. Though it had a nice crisp taste. Just not much other taste overall.

As this one was steeping, most of the leaves were a nice light green, but I noticed a few that were yellow-y and brown spotted. Is this a common thing in white teas? And should I try to spot them before steeping and pick them out?

The package says that this should be steeped 3 – 4 times, but I’m very doubtful since after a second steeping, this one had even less flavor than the first. It just tasted like hot water with a bit of extra something.

Maybe it’s because I’m not used to flavor of white teas that this tastes so light overall. I’ll have to try this again when I’ve been either off darker teas, or off tea altogether.

So I open this and it smells like chocolate. Which was strange. I had to go back and take another inhale just to be sure. Lol. It’s got another layer to it, but I can’t think of the word to identify it right now. Maybe an earthy kinda of underscent? I dunno.
Brewed this for the minimum time since that’s usually how I brew all my black teas for the first time. I’d rather have it a bit weak, but still tasty than stronger, but bitter or undrinkable.
The cocoa-y taste comes through in the brew and is very nice. So does that underscent, but not in a bad way. Maybe it’s the maltyness? I’m not how to exactly identify what ‘malty’ should be, so I tend to guess. Lol. Adding a bit of truvia brings out the cocoa a bit more, but it’s still nice and smooth and woodsy/malty/etc.
Drinking this its got a fuller mouthfeel than I’m used to while drinking a tea. Almost like I’m eating something, rather than drinking it, but not like when you have soup. Kinda like, uhhh, a mouthful of a burger or something like that. Which is a really really weird thing to say in a review for a tea, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind while trying to describe this.
Hope that doesn’t put anyone off this tea because I think it’s a very nice tea. Nice enough that I’ll very likely reorder this one in the future when I run out.

Edit – Second Steep – Same Temp +1 min extra – Still kinda cocoa-y, with that malty/woodsy undersmell/taste whatever. (Yes, I lose my words the later it gets…it’s after midnight right now. Lol!)
And it’s gotten kinda sweet. Adding just a bit of truvia makes it even better, even as it sits here and cools. I’d try for a third steeping but unfortunately it’s way too late for that. It was too late for a second steeping, but I wasn’t about to let at least that go to waste. Lol.

Momo box tea!

My highly trained sister cold-steeped this one when she finished off the prairie berry icedtea thismorning. This one is very artificial in a way I can’t make up my mind about. It’s almost like a chocolate liquor with xanthum gum flavoring. I can’t really taste the base over all the flavoring I might add some coconut milk to the second half of the glass. That is only if I can move from where I am- so sore from kettlebell class last night!

So I wanted something mellow and different but still familiar, so I grabbed this and cut open the bag. The first smell I was hit with was an alcoholic vanilla scent. Kinda like that smell you get when you smell the vanilla in the bottles from the store, but without that sweetness to the scent. So right off I was very doubting of this. But I brewed on.
I always go with the lower suggested steeping time, so this when for 2 min in my ingenuitea before decanting.

Smell wise the brew wasn’t bad. Nice creamy vanilla scent so I took an optimistic sip….and just about spat it back into my cup. Oh! Oh EWW! It tastes like when you lick the measuring spoon after measuring out vanilla extract without really thinking about it, expecting sweet vanilla flavor and only getting a sharp alcohol taste. BLEH! I even tried adding some sugar and I’m sorry to say that I only wasted the sugar.

Maybe the batch I got was very fresh made and the alcohol fumes of whatever flavoring they used didn’t have a chance to air off. But whatever it was, I’m not up for giving this a second chance. So Out Out OUT for this!

This is a first-flush Darjeeling that isn’t on Culinary Teas’ website…can’t vouch too accurately for the age of the unopened package, but probably easily 2 years. It had just been neglected; I don’t reach first for Darjeelings too often.

Score one for proper packaging and reasonable storage…first whiff of the pouch had a delicious tangy/musty scent. (Only in Steepsterland does musty smell good?) Steeped at 5 minutes, it was grape-juicy good, minus the fruit. (Only in Steepsterland would people read that description and get it.)Not too astringent. A welcome change of wake-up pace.

Ok there’s a bit of tea in the package but this is a sipdown anyway, the rest of it can go to the garden and make my plants happy.

And hey this is my 1100th note! I haven’t been drinking a lot of tea lately because I just feel like MEH. But the rest of this week nothing is going on so I’ll probably just sit and drink tea. Except during hockey. Tea has turned to booze during those hours. It’s the only way to survive.

So this is from TeaEqualsBliss a bit back, it looks to be an older tea so I don’t mind only getting one cup out of it. Unlike other stuff in the box this has been in, it is a pretty sturdy bag.

It’s nothing special. It’s pretty sweet, bit of honey flavor to it, but there’s not much else there. It doesn’t have the qualities I really love about Yunnan teas but I think this might be a product of age. Still, not bad, but it’s just slightly flat.

I’ve had this tea first thing in the morning for the last week. And it’s a very tasty genmai cha. When I make it straight I don’t detect much matcha (which is what I want first thing the AM). To make it perfect, I add a 1/2 tsp of the culinary tea matcha powder. When it’s time to resteep I just add a little more matcha. I think this is the way to go with the genmais + matcha. I’ve found that very few of the genmai+matcha have enough matcha for my taste. The only brands that have enough matcha from the get go are american tea room and rishi. They actually look like the picture listed for this tea. Nonetheless, this is still a good tea. With altering, super good.

From tea box B.

Last night my mom suggested I try to see if Sebastian would play with these plastic balls with bells in them. The first parakeet I ever had, Beaky, started playing with us when my mom and I rolled ping pong balls on the floor.

I took Sebastian over to my bed so I could kneel on the floor and hopefully that’d make him feel more comfortable. I set him on the bed. I start shaking one of the balls near him, and he just jumps on that hand. Soooo…guess not. But hey, he likes my hand! He then eventually flipped out and this ended with him climbing through my hair. I thought he was lost in there briefly.

I have had only one white EG, but I thought this sounded intriguing so it’s my first tea today, another day where I am too irritated to go anywhere. I don’t know what my problem is and it’s driving me crazy. All the tea I drank yesterday didn’t help.

I am experimenting with white tea steep times now, since I liked a tea at just one minute the other day, I tried it with this one. It works, I quite like it better than going for 3+.

At first I wasn’t sure about this, the way the hay notes of the white tea blended with the vanilla was kind of weird. But after letting it cool just a tad bit more, I quite enjoyed it. It’s really light on the bergamot, though it mixes nicely with the white tea.

I would actually like the bergamot to be a bit stronger but since I’m sure the other notes on this steeped it longer than me, it doesn’t seem like that can be brought out with a longer steep. No problem though, that’s just how this one is!

Liberteas Thanks so much for this! This was mango – for sure but also some sort of sugary-sweetner that seemed to throw me for a loop. I think I would have liked it better if it was flat-out mango. I might revisit this again so I will hold off to rate.

Not as veggie tasting as other green teas I’ve tried. Kind of floraly.