EnjoyingTea.com

SIPDOWN!

I’m sitting here trying to settle my stomach and trying to talk myself into cleaning the house…blah. Anyhow…I finished up this little bit from my stash and the fruit flavors are gentle and delightful. If I try real hard I can pick out the currants and raisins just a little bit more than the other flavors but not by much. These ingredients are in great harmony together!

This is just fun to look at! The scent is nice, too! It infuses dark for a rooibos. I can taste the natural sweetness but can also taste the blueberries and currants and they are juicy and yummy.

Backlog:

A really fantastic Silver Needle. Sweet with a lovely delicate quality. Fresh tasting with mellow vegetative tones.

Here is my full-length review of this tea: http://sororiteasisters.com/2013/02/21/silver-needle-white-tea-bai-hao-yinzhen-from-enjoying-tea/

Very nice! A lovely sweet flavor with faint floral notes. Delicate and smooth.

This almost tastes like a yellow tea – almost, and by the color of the liquor, it looks a lot like a yellow tea.

It has a light, silky mouthfeel to it. Very luxurious… it’s like I’m being pampered by my tea. I like this one a lot.

I had tacos for dinner tonight, and this is just the ticket to help soothe the tummy.

A very fresh, pleasant flavor – minty, of course. Nice.

This tea has a very nice strawberry flavor: sweet and just slightly tart. YUM! Very much like a fresh strawberry.

The black tea base is smooth and mellow.

This tea hosts no real surprises, it is what it is – Strawberry and Black Tea. And it’s very good!

This is a very smooth Ceylon tea. Not quite as bold as some breakfast blends I’ve encountered, but where it lacks in robust gusto it makes up for in delightful layers of flavor. Lovely fruity notes, a hint of floral… very nice.

My first cup of this tea I tried first without sweetener, and it was nice. Mellow and smooth. A little sweetener brings the aforementioned fruity tones into focus. The second cup (which I’m enjoying now) I decided to add a little milk and honey to see how it would fair as a “traditional” breakfast tea – and it’s so so so good like this. Creamy. Pleasant. A very good breakfast blend, indeed.

Steeping time: 7 3/4 minutes

I got so caught up in making my breakfast I totally lost track of time…and I can’t even say it was the kids this time! I really need to buy a timer. But for all that there isn’t NEARLY as much bitterness in this as I had expected from the over-steeping!

This is definitely a fruity tea, but having never tasted a passion fruit I hardly consider myself fit to judge whether this tastes like one or not.

I love the color of this tea liquor. It is a gorgeous deep red that mellows to a spicy-orange with milk. The dominant flavors are the lemongrass and pepper. I did oversteep this a bit but the resulting mild bitterness was smoothed out when I added honey instead of my usual sugar.

The liquor is a bright yellow-green and has a sweet, nutty, vegetal flavor with a thicker mouth feel than most green teas. This would go perfectly with the goat’s milk cheese my dad brought back from Holland last year, pity that it is long gone (and would be moldy and disgusting by this point even if I had any left!)

Sample courtesy of Tea Bird!

Delicious and beautiful!!! I’m tasting all kinds of sweet berries and interesting flavors which I can’t put my finger on – I think I’m tasting some lavender but it’s so harmonious with the rest of the flavors that it’s hard to pin down! Very unique – I love it! Thank you Tea Bird!!!

After 36 hours of illness I am feeling well enough again to have my tea but I figured it would be better to err on the side of caution and stick to something a little gentler.

The color of the liquor reminds me of “green” twigs that have had the bark stripped off. That pale pale blond with just a hint of green. And the taste, mmmmm, just what I needed. Sweet, vegetal, a hint of nuttiness every now and then. Definitely what I needed this morning.

I had a sample of this that’d I’d enjoyed hot, but never logged. When we had an 85°F day this week I decided to cold-brew the rest; about 8 tsp tea into a half gallon of water. It turned out great; the black tea and the rose both come through. No astringency, lightly sweet, floral. Tasty on its own, delicious with a bit of simple syrup.

I had this for the first time at an amazing little tea shop in upstate NY (which I now have to find and rate among the Places). I didn’t buy any in bulk there, foolishly, so I hunted down a company online that seemed to carry the same blend. Yes!

So, this is a very soft berry rooibos tea with a few floral notes. You can see all of the flavors in the ingredients, which I love: currants, blueberries, rose petals, and lavender. The lavender isn’t so much a flavor as an aftertaste, an almost menthol tang, but it all comes together surprisingly well. This is a unique tea, that I have to be in the right mood for, but when I am it’s delicious!

This produces a cup of liquified burnt rubber…

I guess I may not be fair in scoring this, as I felt the need to write notes on teas I have not enjoyed. I got it as a free sample from EnjoyingTea.com with a purchase of a teapot.

You may know from my Marco Polo (Mariage Brothers) note, I am not a fan of flavoured teas. And this is one of the teas that has fueled my crusade against flavoured leaves.

The leaves are somewhat of quality: broken to full with contrast of browns and blacks, it has cornflowers added to it. I brewed this at boiling for five minutes in a 20 oz. white teapot. The resulting cup was that simply of liquified burnt rubber, I cannot pull myself to explain what the body was or any other tasting notes than that of liquified burnt rubber.

I threw the remaining leaves in the compost…

Again I say I’m not being quite fair here, but my experience from this tea is clearly that of my score. If I do try this again, for whatever reason, I would try brewing it at a lowered temp, and try some additions to it.

Steep Information:
Amount: 3 heaping teaspoons (very hard to scoop from that little tin when it was so full)
Additives: none
Water: 1 teapot full filtered boiling
Steep Time: a little over 2 minutes
Served: Hot

Tasting Notes:
Dry Leaf Smell: black tea, chemical
Steeped Tea Smell: black tea, maybe banana
Flavor: black tea, bitter, a hint of banana
Body: Medium
Aftertaste: fruity, bitter
Liquor: translucent orange-brown

I have my head cold still, perhaps this was over brewed? regardless I can’t find the banana and there is this weird fake chemical tinge to it. I am glad this was a small sampler.

Next time I will have to try less leaf and / or less steep time.

This time around I ended up tossing the rest of the pot after the first two cups.

The leaves themselves look full and high quality, but the flavor has that odd chemical tinge I am not liking.

Post-Steep Additives: none

Sorry but this smells really gross…like dirty socks.
It’s very dark brown in color.
Thankfully it doesn’t taste like it smells!
It’s Bold but not bitter and it’s an even taste that starts and ends the same. It’s probably one of the better loose leave blends of pu-erh that I have tried so far…if you can get past the stench! I only infused for about 2 minutes as others I have tasted I don’t like oversteeped thus far. I am far from an expert on pu-erh but this one is ok in my book.

PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON!?
:)

Sending the rest to a friend…

I’m upping this rating because I drastically over infused the amount of pearls and it never turned bitter, funky-grassy, or stale-floral and that means something to me! I think that is why I have problems with some Jasmine Teas…not this one…this is very forgiving and more gentle but quality Jasmine!

Pretty much the same as the last time I tried it…fairly good.

Extremely Floral
Fun to watch un-pearl
Semi-mellow Jasmine taste

I shared a small pot of this with my son. No rinse before the first steep, which was mild and unremarkable, with only a slight lemon scent and very little lemon flavor. The second steep was no better, yielding only a little of wood, caramel and honey tastes, and a dearth of aroma. It was the thin body, dry mouth feel, and unpleasant lingering astringency which put us both off the most. Very disappointing.

I love it! If you follow the directions and steep the way they suggest it is the perfect blend of sweet/tart:) I did not need to add anything to it. It tasted yummy just the way it was rite out of the pot!