Ku Cha House of Tea

Advent Calendar from Kaylee: Day 2

Mmm. So smooth and light and almost creamy! It’s sweet, almost honey-like, with just a smidge of toastiness. Really nice.

Sipdown. This is one of the older teas in my cupboard. Bought it in 2015 on a trip to Colorado to see my brother, I don’t think I really knew what I was purchasing. It was pretty early on in my loose leaf tea journey.
Pretty green & vegetal tasting with a little bit of sweetness. It feels like there’s a lot of movement with this tea as I’m drinking it. Creamy towards end of the sip. I like the end, but the vegetal flavor kills it for me. Just not a fan of those.

This tastes a lot like the Keemun Snail I got from a couple other tea distributors. Earthy, smooth, well rounded. Not tannic. But at the price, I think it’s not that much better than the other brands! it’s like $20/oz…

Spicy, with strong notes of cardamom and chili and black peppercorn.

I adore this tea. It’s smoky and dramatic, like sipping a caffienated Laphroaig.

This is a lovely tea. Medium color, smooth and earthy. Mineral body and a nice touch of huigan at the finish.

The sweet milkiness is coming through so intensely that it overwhelms every other flavor. This is a great oolong for beginners (my 13 year old sister absolutely loves it) but the leaves have very clearly been steamed with milk. This masks a lot of the delicate, natural flavors found in the leaves of pure high mountain Jing Xuan oolong, aka “real” milk oolong.

It was not quite my style, but it is still a good tea. It is light and friendly, good for your friends who are not into strong, bitter black teas.

This tea is flavourful and warming, excellent for a cold day. It is strong and has a natural sweet flavour along with its spicy kick.

Excellent for any time of year! Delicious, satisfying, and woke me up for my morning classes.

I have been drinking gyokuro once or twice a week for about 14 months, but Teavana has been my only source until now. While I really like the Teavana gyokuro, and it is one of my favorites, I definitely prefer this one. It’s stronger, grassier, and brews dark green. It is very smooth, but not quite as sweet. It held up to 4 steeps easily. I let the water cool down, but I definitely overleaf and oversteep…that’s how I like it. :)

I probably should have bought this tea in bulk while I was in Fort Collins, because I thoroughly enjoyed the 2 pots of tea I had there. The tea was very sweet, with a honey flavor…incredibly smooth. It was a little lighter than I expected, but the mildness was nice as it brought more attention to the natural flavor of the tea.

I grabbed this one, along with a few other teas, while I was in Fort Collins, Colorado last week. The strength is moderate, and it is sweet for a Keemun, with just a slight hint of smoke, but less than most Keemuns I have tried. I prefer slightly stronger Keemuns, but this is a great everyday tea, which is good since I’ve been drinking Keemun every day. :P

This was the tea that got me back into drinking tea. I stopped drinking coffee back in November, 2015, after running out one week and noticing that my anxiety dropped like a stone without. I’ve been careful about caffeine since. I stopped in Ku Cha on a whim and puttered around before settling on this TGY superior.

I’m very, very new to tasting tea, so most of my experience comes from tasting wine and spirits, forgive me if I misstep here. Dry, the tea is clean smelling, dry-but-not-dusty vegetal, with some overt notes of jasmine and honeysuckle that just sort of peek through without being POW in your face jasmine or anything. Wet, the tea smells much more complexly floral, without a focus on any one specific flower. The vegetal scent is still there, but it’s clean, rather than forest-floor, almost like fresh cut romaine or something. New is the scent of honey, a clean one like Tupelo.

The taste is wonderful. It’s thick without being creamy. Floral and clean without much of what I’d associate with either Jasmine or green tea. This is my first oolong, that I know of, so maybe it’s more typical of that. On the fore, it’s mostly floral, jasmine, lilac, and honeysuckle. In the mid, it settles down into a very clean cut grass and vegetal flavor. The aftertaste is very, very sweet, without being cloying, almost like someone put honey in it.

I brew this by the pot and fairly weak. It’s good strong, no doubt, but I find that it starts to pick up some astringency I’m not as big of a fan of. I can get a few brewings out of it this way, too, though I’ve yet to go beyond three.

Glad to be back in tea land!

I really tried to like this tea, but the vanilla just leaves an aftertaste I can’t get used to. The black tea seems average, and the vanilla makes it floral, but not natural tasting. I do like the other teas I got from Ku Cha, so I won’t judge this tea house by this one tea I don’t like

Ok green tea. Can be bitter if oversteeped.
Can be steeped 3-4 times.

Sipdown (119)!

Finally finishing off this forgotten sample from TheLastDodo which she sent up months ago. I’m drinking it hot while getting ready for work because I woke up a few hours early and had the time to do so!

Not going to lie; other than remembering I cold brewed this the first time around I couldn’t remember what I thought of it at all so I had to go back and read my tasting note for it. Turns out I didn’t really have much of an impression in the first place; I didn’t even initially score this!

However, as I’m sipping on it now I definitely think there are some very interesting, and nuanced things that I clearly missed when it was cold brewed! It’s like this tea has three ‘levels’ of flavour that hit you one after another. The first is very, very short – and it’s just like a punch in the mouth of of sweetness; definitely fruity goji and maybe the jujube too? That’s an ingredient I’m not too familiar with but based on what I’ve read the flavour is similar to what jujube is supposed to taste like. Of course, you can’t forge that there’s a lot of rock sugar in this too which adds to the sweetness.

Then you transition into the second ‘level’ of flavour – savory/herbaceous. It’s got the vegetal notes from the green tea base, and the strong flavor of chrysanthemum but also something very brothy too; it’s very, very borderline reminding me of cheddar and chives and potato. I love it; but it’s strange and I don’t know which of the ingredients is causing it. Then we fade to level three – sweetness again. This time the sweetness is more raisin and ginseng with a pinch of goji, and it’s the flavor that lingers in the aftertaste.

It’s also my least favourite part of the tea; probably because of the raisin.

I’m very happy I tried this hot though; it’s so incredibly different from what I remember the cold brew tasting like, and very unique overall as well! I definitely don’t think I’d buy this for myself because there were certainly unappealing aspects but I’d be curious to try it hot again to see if the flavours I picked up were the same, and I feel like I learned a lot trying it.

Thanks again TheLastDodo!

Thanks TheLastDodo for the sample!

There are a lot of interesting things in this blend; green tea and raisins (both things I don’t especially like) and gojis (which I’m half sure I can’t even taste) for example. There are also jujubes which I remember discussing with Kittenna around Christmas time when we had tea together. It was an ingredient neither of us were all that familiar with; and this is my first time having them. There are also very large shards/chunks of sugar in the blend which I’m not too keen about. I don’t like when my tea is presweetened for me.

I know it’s a stretch, but Kittenna do you remember at all what the jujubes in your tea tasted like?

I wasn’t really sure how to even approach preparing this – so I decided to start by cold brewing it because it’s the easiest/most convenient approach in regard to prep time. I don’t even know. I literally wrote down three words in my reference notes. Not super helpful, past me!

Here’s what I wrote down though: “Musty ginseng. Cranberry.”

I do remember the ginseng being quite pronounced in the flavour, and the vegetal green base underneath it – maybe even some nutty notes from the base. But I’m not too sure where I got cranberry from – there aren’t any in the blend. I suppose it’s possible I interpreted the goji and cranberry flavour, though I’m skeptical of it. Another explanation would be the jujubes, which I’ve got no familiarity with. Does anyone know what they’re supposed to taste like? I have this foggy recollection of the server at the tea house Kittenna and I went to comparing them to dates? But it’s been so long, I can’t remember if that’s an accurate memory or not.

Either way, I wasn’t big on this one. I’ll try it again hot though – I really want to give it a fighting chance because it does seem so unique and different to me.

Made two cups from one teaspoon of tea… first one was great, a nice smooth jasmine. Second cup was alright, a little weak given I’d steeped the first one for a couple hours in a tumbler first, but seems like it’d otherwise hold up well. I’ll have to try the two cup thing again sometime when I use a teapot or something instead of the bag, but I just wanted to have some hot tea on my way to work.

First time I tried a gunpowder green I was in love, and this, being a loose leaf instead of a packet (first one I had was Numi’s), is so much richer and complex, which I love.

Although it’s a green, the color you get after steeping is generally pretty dark for a green. It’s pretty much a rich red-brown.

The scent is not overpowering, at least not to me, it’s just a hint of smokey flavor when the cup is close to my face. I think the smokiness of the scent is more prominent early in the brewing process when the water is hotter. It has a pretty smooth taste, not much bite after a long steep, but it’s fairly rich for me, so I only have it occasionally when I want something that feels a little more ‘filling’.

It’s very much a ‘comfort tea’ to me, to be enjoyed while wrapped up in some blankets relaxing in a comfy chair. Or, as is often the case, to be enjoyed in lieu of being able to do such things as I’m at work.