Rare Tea Republic

If I could describe this tea in one word, it would be creamy. And not just for the first infusion, but at least the first three. It continues to have a thick mouthfeel in every infusion.

It is a very pleasing tea, that feels like a mix between a white, oolong, and even green. The taste is subtle, but combined with the creaminess, it is very enjoyable. The first infusion has the best/longest-lasting aftertaste, but with long enough steeps, the tea holds up very well. I think while I wouldn’t go back to buy 50g of this, I’m glad to have sampled. This was the last of the samples from RTR. I definitely have enjoyed their teas and when I’d like Darjeeling again, they’ll be at the top of my list.

I have to admit I’ve been curious about this tea, well at first on Twitter they said the tea would taste like bacon which kind of turned me off for a while. Then I decided to go ahead and try it, perhaps it would be like a lapsang. So – I just got a sample.

Also I wasn’t sure how to prepare this, but the instructions said 4 minutes at 200 F so I thought I’d at least try it they way they suggested. I did use a lot of leaf though, the whole sample which was about 1 tsb. went into my cup, although they suggest 2 tsp. for this tea so I am not that far off the mark.

Wow, this such a very interesting tea, I’m so glad I tried it! My wet leaves definitely smell like wood smoke but it also has a sort of tart & tangy aroma like salt and vinegar potato chips!!!

The aroma of this tea is very barbeque-y. I have to say this does seem reminiscent of a lapsang but it also has some very interesting malt, cocoa and woody notes and there is a slight vinegary tartness in the finish. It definitely seems kinda bacon-y, the flavor reminds me of applewood smoked salt. It doesn’t seem like any other oolong I’ve had before.

The first steep at 4 minutes was a bit too strong for me; I probably should have gong-fu’d this from the very start. I did a second steep at 2 minutes and this is a much better cup for my palette. The slightly sour finish is a bit weird for me but this is one of the most unique teas I’ve had in a while. This is one tea that seemed to benefit from me adding a little agave nectar to it.

I don’t think I want to steep this again now because I might be up all night, but I imagine you could get 3-4 steeps at the shorter steeping time.

If you like the rugged complexity of pu-erh teas or lapsang you should definitely try it! I do not love it, but it was fun. I’d imagine this would be way too intense for some people’s palettes though.

One of last Darjeeling 2011s in my stash. Gotta say it was a good year. Thankfully, it’s ending on a good note with this one. While not as strong on the spice-‘n-grape profile as others I’ve tried, this was a very even muscatel mouthfeel from start to finish. It is quintessentially Darjeeling with none of the weaknesses.

Full Review: Pending on www.teaviews.com

I am finishing off the last of this sample tea today…

I’ve said it before but it’s too bad that Rare Tea Republic has gone away. I especially liked their white tea selections – now what ever shall I do? This tea is custard-y and pudding like It reminds me a bit of rice pudding. I like it!

I got a sample of this and decided to break out the gaiwan to have a couple of steeps that way.

This is a very unique and lovely white tea, I definitely like all the white teas I’ve had so far from RtR. The leaves are BIG and slender!

This is definitely sweet, especially in the aftertaste. I definitely agree with the custard sort of description and it also reminds me of sweet buttered corn, nice! The one thing that disturbs me a teeny little bit is I have gotten a slight chlorine smell but maybe I am imagining things. My gaiwan steeping is probably not the most optimal for this, me thinks…

So I tried steeping it again in my Finium tea filter around 190F for 5 minutes. I thought perhaps that was too much but that’s what the instructions called for and these leaves were already steeped twice. Now the curious aroma is definitely gone and the light sweetness is still there, hmm. yummy! I don’t think I like it quite as much as the Sandapku or the Himalyan white but it is still rather yummy. A sweet pudding indeed. :)

I was not planning on ordering any more teas for a while but after seeing the free shipping code I thought I’d check this out from RtR.

After reading Scott B’s note on the bitterness I decided to steep this at a slightly lower temp and came up with a medium bodied orange color. I thought I would be brave and at least try it plain once before deciding it needed anything.

I am getting some light fruity notes and a bit of sweetness. I definitely think there is some astringency in this cup but so far it is not overwhelming me. Dried plum, maybe. I’m not even sure I know what mace tastes like but it’s got a spicy element of some kind or another. It does remind me a bit of a second flush darjeeling. Just like Scott, as my cup is cooling off I am noticing the bitterness even more. Ick.

I will need to try this with some soymilk to see what happens…

l’ve been wanting this for six weeks, but I was waiting for RtR to get in a couple of FF Darjeelings so I could do just one order. Well, RtR had a free shipping promo this week and, alas, they never got the Darjeeling I wanted so I just placed my order. I’ve got a problem with the way RtR gives out free samples, but I’ll deal with that in another review. Otherwise, their shipping is very fast, packing is good and no complaints with my order. The tea is packed in re-sealable pouches that are foil/mylar on the inside and brown kraft paper on the outside. BTW, RtR is a division of RoT-they even ship from the exact same address.

This is my first Kenyan tea-I’ve heard they are very high in caffeine, so I’ll probably only have one cup today. Dry leaves are very dark brown with a couple light-medium brown leaves (tips?). They are short-medium in length, and tightly rolled. I do smell the cedar in the dry leaves that RtR promises, but little else specific. Something fruity. Maybe the dried plum they mentioned. It’s a pleasant aroma.

The brewed leaves actually brighten up a touch to a dark olive green and medium brown. The liquor was copper before I finished putting water in the cup and turns mahogany brown when fully steeped.

Taste is brisk with some bitterness in the aftertaste. I detect some sort of floral note, which is definitely unwelcome in a breakfast tea. Makes me think someone dumped a few oolong leaves in this-but it’s not a blend. The floral taste is not dominant, but it’s off-putting. The flavor overall is kind of unusual and I’m not sure how much I like. it. Bitterness is really increasing as this starts to cool, so don’t let it cool too much because it will become undrinkable.

I’ll give this a preliminary score-subject to change after further cuppings.

This has a semi-juicy beginning sip and ends slightly smoky. It’s woodsy in the middle and that seems to be the primary taste on the tongue and as you swirl around in your mouth. There is a bit something else I cannot quite put my finger on…fruity, maybe. Regardless this tea will make you think, appreciate, and enjoy!

So far, my experience with RTR’s teas has been great. They’ve almost all been delicious, above average (as far as I know, which isn’t a lot), and their descriptions are really accurate. They don’t go over the top in telling you the 50 different flavors you’ll find in a tea, and yet, none of their teas are one-dimensional, either.

I had to order a sample of the 2nd flush of the Temi, since I ordered the 1st flush, so that I could compare the two.

I’m not sure I can pull out the baked sweet-bread aroma, but as soon as I decanted, the teapot smelled richly of caramel, and even a bit of chocolate!
The taste of dried plum is also present (zwetschge schokolade gefaellt mir sehr), and ‘layered’ is a great way to explain it, as the notes of caramel and plum appear and disappear throughout the sip. I wouldn’t call it sweet, but somehow, it is clearly caramel.
The 2nd steeping seems to be bringing out the chocolate aroma, as well.

Between this tea, Thurbo 1st flush, and Tumsong 2nd flush, I have three great Darjeelings I’d enjoying having around. To my surprise, two of my favorites are from the ‘lowest’ quality harvests! It’s fun to discover something new.

This really is reminiscent of a Wuyi Rock Oolong.

It’s sweet, woodsy, and like dark fruit (think plum without being sour at all, or almost like peach). The texture was thick. Their description of it having a “mineral quality” is spot on… it is very enjoyable.

Personally, this isn’t the one I’d choose out of the lot from RTR to have around (since I don’t usually have but 1-2 loose black teas around at one time anyway), however, it is really good. Perhaps the most complex and longest lasting of all the ones I’ve tried (even the 3rd steeping was pretty flavorful).

Of all the teas I recently got from RTR, this is the one I chose to actually get 50g of, rather than just a sample. People here seemed to really like it, and I wanted to have at least one Darjeeling around for a bit, rather than only samples.

After several cups, I found this works best with a 1g/1oz ratio….at least, today I went with that and it definitely yielded the best cup thus far.
I bet it would be hard to get this tea to be overly astringent, or even bitter at all.

It has a very refreshing astringency, a flash of juicy-sweetness, and definitely a hint of pineapple (I was paying attention for these things, since it was mentioned several times). It has a nice aroma and is really a great black tea.

I’m probably rating this the highest of the teas I’ve had from RTR so far, but, I’m not sure if it is my favorite. That would probably go to Thurbo 1st flush (or to their Tumsong 2nd flush, surprisingly). However… I still have two more to try, so we’ll see!

I have very little experience with white teas (not none, but almost)… however, here goes…

The tea buds themselves look amazing. They are large, covered in fur, and a pretty silvery color. They don’t give off a lot of aroma, but you can detect something sweet.

I dumped about 3 tsp worth (probably 3g, which looked like a ton) of leaves into the warmed teapot and set the lid on it for a moment to deal with something else. When I was ready to pour the water over them, I opened the lid again to smell, and it was amazing – just like grilled asparagus or another grilled veggie! It wasn’t smokey, but somehow it had a grilled-like-veggie aroma. That was probably the highlight of this tea for me, actually.

Later, once I had poured the tea into a cup, I could definitely also detect dried apricot (as they describe) as well. None of the grilled-veggie flavor or aroma made it into the cup. The flavor of the tea itself was very mild. It was indeed smooth, but even after drinking through the 6g sample, I’m not sure I could describe the flavor very well, because it was extremely light.

Overall, while it is subtle, I enjoyed it enough simply because of the aroma that came from the warmed needles and the liquor. This may be a really enjoyable white tea for someone… but it wasn’t an experience that made me wonder how I missed white teas all this time.

Thank you so much for sharing this precious tea with me Azzrian!
It’s so… sweet!! I added NO sugar, but it really tastes like I did! Wow.
I love how light it is, and slippery. Yes this is very good tea!
When it is hot, I taste a jasminey sort of floral/fruity note along with the hay Azzrian mentions. It’s nice and crisp to, while the sweetness runs deep into the flavour, lingering long after the swallow.
At first, I wasn’t in love with this one but as it cooled… well sometimes love burns slow! ;)
Lately though, my affair with whites has cooled. There was a day when I was all over them. Now, as much as I do enjoy the occasional cup, it isn’t often I crave one.
I could make an exception for this though. Yup, I deem this the great white tea!!
On a side note, I love that the leaves are fuzzy. Like pussy willow! :P
Edit: after many sips, the sweetness seems to have built up in the aftertaste. I feel as if I’ve just downed a teaspoon of syrup. Oh my!! (I love you George Takei)
I wonder how this would fare iced…

This was a delicious black tea (from Nepal), very similar to the other Darjeelings from Rare Tea Republic.
I think I noticed, as they described, rosewood, and a definite sweet-fruity taste as well.

However, what surprised me is that it really does taste a little like butter! I wasn’t really sure how that exactly would come through in a tea, but it did. Between the smooth, fruity-sweet, and butter quality, this was among my favorites from RTR. I wished I had more like 1oz (at least) instead of just this tiny 6g sample!

Definitely noticed the flavor and heady aroma of rose in this tea. It was pretty intense in this floral quality, kind of like an IPA, without the bitterness.

It left a very nice, semi-sweet rose and almost vegetal aroma as an aftertaste as well. I use the word vegetal here for lack of a better term – not like sencha – but it’s probably what they call ‘evergreen’ in their description. To me, it was related to green vegetables, but not like pine.

It was also a bold Darjeeling, so that’s probably from the fact that it is autumnal. It would definitely make a good breakfast tea, too. Not my favorite of the samples from RTR, but I liked it.

Now this is a true Darjeeling. The texture is awesome – incredibly smooth and even somewhat thick. It is so noticeably and enjoyably smooth it’s hard to drink slowly.

The aroma of grape (muscat) is definitely comes through, and I really like it. That is seems to be what Darjeeling is famous for, and for good reason. The flavor is very sweet in the middle of the sip too, a sweetness like honey.

This tea wasn’t an eye opener like the Tumsong 2nd flush, and may actually be slightly less complex . . . but all the same, I was just too busy enjoying it to think through it more than that! This is one of those teas you could drink all the time and never get tired of it.

Being that green tea is my favorite, I typically expect 1st flush teas to be the best. At the very least, the little that I’ve read has given me the assumption that the best flush is the first, followed by the autumn, whereas the summer is kind of there at the bottom.

This tea happily changed that assumption for me.

It has a refreshing apple-like aroma at the end of the sip, and it reminded me strongly of the way I imagine apple hookah smells (without the smoke). Similarly, it had an intense quality that I will describe as the way rosewater tastes, without the rose/flowery aroma. RTR describes this tea as having a strong jam and sap aroma, or pine needles, and perhaps that how they describe the same flavor I’m calling rosewater.

I very much enjoyed this sample, and this would definitely go into consideration as a good daily tea, if I decide at some point to drink black tea more often.

I would probably make a terrible tea buyer/taster.

Funny to say that, after writing reviews on teas for quite a while now, but, it’s always taken me a good while to really wrap my head around a tea and get a good idea of all the nuances. A while meaning at least 1oz. There are exceptions, where I’m able to tell on the first sip, but that’s not often the case.

From this sample I was only able to get about 2 pots, which for my abilities, was a limiting factor.

Anyway, as described, there was definitely a hint of mango in the aroma initially. Reading RTR’s description, I imagined ‘green pepper’ was going to be like ‘black pepper’ only the green kind. However, instead, it was much more like green chili peppers (think hatch or bell). Very unique and interesting, actually. It had a bit of a pleasant sourness throughout – again, in a nice way, not in a puckering astringent way. After it cooled a bit, a stronger fruity-sweetness became clearer, and that fruit sugar taste remained a bit even after I finished.

Overall, this was an interesting black tea, and was enjoyable.

On a separate note…
I ordered a ton of samples from RTR, but one of them I ordered a full 50g instead of just a 6g sample. By accident, they sent all the teas as 6g (understandable – if you see an order with a bunch of samples, get on a roll fulfilling it, and miss the fact that just one of them says 50g). I emailed them, and within 2 days I had an email saying they had shipped the 50g to me overnight… so in the end, I ended up with a bonus 6g. Thanks guys!
Great Service!

While I can’t taste the Walnut notes or the mild astringency, I can certainly taste the muscatel finish. This tea is very sweet for a first infusion, and the aftertaste lingers for about 15 seconds. It doesn’t seem all that complex now, but maybe the later infusions will develop more. As a final note for this steeping, the astringency started to appear as the tea cooled down, but it wasn’t all that strong by the time I finished the cup.

More to come later.

Another sample from RTR bites the dust. This tea wasn’t the most exciting or strongest of the bunch, but it was very pleasant, and I’m pretty sure that I could drink it often and never get tired of it. See previous note for more information.

It’s a bit strange to taste butter when drinking tea, but it’s surprisingly interesting. The taste is very hard to describe given my limited experience, but it is a very pleasant tea. I would write more, but I have a job interview soon. I’ll update this later if I remember.

Another day, another sample from Rare Tea Republic finished. This wasn’t my favorite of the teas that I picked out, but it was still a delightful tea, with a very pleasing complex flavor. Since this was literally the bottom of the bag, there was a bit more tea dust than usual, but other than that, this tea conformed with my previous tastings. See my previous notes for more information.