Kusmi Tea

It took me some time realising that I actually reallly like this tea. In fact, it is probably one of my favourite tea’s in my stash since it has a very layered flavour. The smell is delicious as well. I particularly don’t really taste liquorice but more of an overall spice blend. Also like the sencha tea that is the base of the blend. I am on my second tin.

I get the soapy part people are talking about. According to the packaging it should be brewed at 80. However, the hotter the water is, the less soapy flavour comes out.

Thank you to Kawaii433 for sending a bag of satchets of this blend to me! I was very excited to finally try a Kusmi blend. I don’t think this one is for me, though I’m very grateful to have tried it. I’m not getting any pineapple. Only a strong mint and maté flavor, which is a bit assaulting.

Preparing another tea to help me finish my day. Just comeback from helping a neighbour and did some grocery, very cold temperature (-22C).

Loose leaves put inside a tea bag then poured in a tea glass. A dark-red brown opaque liquor. Smell mildly like bergamot.

A little bit malty with a medium bergamot flavour and I can definitely taste the black tea. A smooth earl-grey blend, with a hint of orange finish taste.

WATER USED: Nestle Pure Life

Loose tea put inside a tea bag then served in a glass vessel — a dark clean and clear gold liquor.

Smells: sweet, cookie, citrusy and spicy

It start with a sweet cookie flavour then the grounded black pepper appear. After a few sips, the cookie flavour is weaker and seem to change into cloves. Now, it is a mix of cloves, cookie and spices flavours. A well balanced smooth chai with a hint of a woody flavour.

WATER USED: Nestle Pure Life

First stepping 1:40 and second steeping 2:10, Definitely taste like raspberry with a very slight touch of bitterness. The rose flavour increase over time as you drink the tea. It feel-taste like as if I was walking in a forest — there is a taste that I have difficult to pin point maybe like a rainforest kind of.

A night under a full moon, I feel relaxed and drifting in dreams. A warm gentle breeze on my skin, walking into a forest hearing piano notes. The infinity, I don’t want to wake up.

WATER USED: Nestle Pure Life

This tastes slightly like minty apple. Very fresh. Very green. Not sure what else but as far as detox teas go, this is nice. Thanks for sharing Roswell Strange!

So I found myself really craving Milk Oolong for my afternoon tea today. I was just going to just brew it western style like I usually do since gong fu is such a hassle for me and the opposite of the relaxing, focused tea experience it should be, but I had a 5g sample of this leaf from the Discovery Traveling Teabox (thank you to Skysamurai for organizing and all participants for sharing their tea!) and wanted to use it one go and that was a pretty ideal amount for a single gong fu session. One of the reasons I dislike doing gong fu is I have to haul my kettle out of the kitchen into my dining room (and hook it up with an extention cord) and then I just find pouring with a gaiwan a chore that is uncomfortable on my hands, but I got this cute little teapot that holds just under two cups (I could comfortably max it around 480ml?) from my Mom for Christmas. So what if it isn’t exactly traditional? It isn’t like I have to completely fill it, and it is comfortable, right? I filled a giant thermos with boiled water so I wouldn’t have to run back and forth to the kitchen to the kettle or have to haul the kettle out of the kitchen onto the dining table with the extention cord, and just decided to use the little ceramic glazed pot from my mom to steep in, making sure my leaf-to-water ratio was consistent. No burnt fingers! This may have been the nicest gong fu brewing session I’ve ever had…

4.86g / 80ml (ceramic teapot) / 205F / rinse|25s|30s|35s|40s|45s|50s|60s

From the aroma of the tea, I picked up butter, cinnamon spice, steamed vegetables, and floral lilac. The first steep was the most prominent with a buttery flavor, and tasted of buttered vegetables, lilac, honey, and quite sweet and creamy. The second steep brought out a stronger floral flavor, though the vegetal note became stronger toward the end of the sip; the buttery taste was not as strong as the first infusion, but present in the aftertaste. The buttery note continued to become a bit more subtle in subsequent infusions, and the vegetal and floral notes became a bit stronger. The third steep brought out an somewhat earthy/mineral taste to the vegetal note, which had a strong spinach/artichoke taste. By the fifth infusion I found the tea starting to weaken a bit, but the buttery notes were again starting to taste a little more pronounced as the floral and vegetal flavors were loosing their oomph, and I also tasted a nuttiness coming out in the leaf. As I started the taste the leaf giving out and was filling up on tea, I chose to stack the last few infusions to drink a larger, more buttery final cup. It was an overall satisfying session that hit the spot for what I was wanting. Thanks for the share!

I’ve got to catch up with my advent tea logging! Whoops!
I don’t really like chocolate teas, and so this tea works out for me, as I don’t taste too much chocolate.
The spices taste rather bitter to me, so this is not my favorite blend. Not bad to try, but I’m not going to bring it in permanently.

Cold Brew!

It’s weird how this blend tastes like none of its ingredients and also all of its ingredients. Light, semi-sweet and crisp with grapefruit, apple, mint, and grassy flavours. It’s pretty refreshing, and the way everything combines together feels pretty close to one of a kind. I do sort of have to be in a particular mood for it though…

Sipped this earlier last week – in the past I’ve really enjoyed this blend and when I smelled the dry leaf and caught that whiff of fresh grapefruit I was really looking forward to this cup, but something about it steeped was just a little off? It’s hard to describe, but I think it was the citrus notes in combination with the sweet fennel and then the mint? It tastes aged in a funky, bordering on “body odor” kind of way…

Will hold off on bumping down my rating to see if this change in experience is consistent in future cups…

Cold Brew!

This was the brew from today, and while it was nice I thought the flavour faltered a little bit from my recollection of it as a hot brew. To start, it wasn’t really a sweet or distinct grapefruit flavour at all – sure, it was sort of citrus-y but not like I remember it being and not in a way where you could name the citrus you were tasting. The dandelion and mint were both pretty present in the cup, and the mint in particular made it very cooling and freshingly crisp. I also tasted a lot of the greener yerba mate and a hint of the grassier green tea. Light to medium bodied, and balanced aside from the lack of grapefruit…

I stopped by the Kusmi store here in MTL a few weeks ago because I wanted to see if they were stocking the Kusmi advent calendar but sadly it looks like it wont be available in Canada this year – unless you were lucky enough to order it from the USA or international website before they ran out of stock.

I took a bit of a browse through the store though since I was there anyway, and I ended up smelling a sniffer of this tea and it just hit me as a really nice and fresh smelling grapefruit. I then saw that this is a mate blend, and the combination of a super sweet and fresh smelling grapefruit combined with yerba mate was enough to get me to bite! I picked up a tin…

Made a mug of it over the weekend and this is actually incredibly delicious. It’s very fresh tasting and a little bit sweet, with a crisp zest grapefruit note that I would compare to the kind of grapefruit note you’d pick up from a really ripe pink grapefruit or from a cold and refreshing Fresca. It’s also minty, but a sweet and subtle mint that adds a nice finishing note; it’s not the main flavour in the cup but it there and present.

I can see this being a very nice morning cuppa!

Adventaggedon Day 23: Tea 1/8

I was beginning to think this tea might now have made an appearance but I’m happy that it did! It’s one of my favourite EG blends in general, and yet another example of how well Kusmi approaches their white teas.

It was actually the last tea that I steeped up today as I was wrapping up at the office. I was trying to make sure I had dotted all my ’I’s and crossed all the ’T’s since I’ll be going on vacation tomorrow and wont be back there until sometime in the New Year. Were all the dishes gathered in the dishwasher? Did I start the dishwasher? Did I collect all of my mail and put it in my backpack to bring home? Were all the cardboard boxes collected for the cleaning team? Did I have my power cord for my laptop?

And, well, in trying to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything unfinished I over steeped my tea. A lot. I think I would be more bummed out by the bitterness I drew out were it not for the fact I already own a larger tin of this tea. It’s one of the few Kusmi blends I have a tin of, in fact. Even with some bitter edge, the cup was still nice – sort of like hot soothing lime water in the best kind of way one could possibly interpret the phrase hot soothing lime water.

At the end of the day I know the prominent lime note is why I actually like this tea so much compared to other Earl Greys – but hey, whatever works!

March Sipdown Madness

This was an honestly really nice mug of tea, but sadly it still lost its most recent match up with Arthur Dove’s Moonbeam. That was my gut feeling for what I would decide – I think it’s just asking a lot for an Earl Grey/bergamot blend to make it to the end given that it’s one of those flavours that I don’t love and kind of need to be in a pretty specific mood to want a mug of it…

This is possibly my favourite bergamot blend in my stash though, so all things considered it really was nice having it several times this month.