Shanti Tea
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Another NEW item from Shanti! It’s COMING SOON…but I am drinking a cup now! YAY! If you like Lemonade you will certainly have to try this! It’s RIGHT-ON! I’m drinking it hot at the moment but am eager to try it iced! It smells and tastes lemony and there is a bit of a sugary taste to it…naturally! I really think I will be tinkering with this one just to see what the possibilities are but so far so good! YUM!!!!!
Kiwi Lemon! I’ve been waiting for you Ooooooolong! LOL
Anyhow…yes! It’s true! A brand new flavored oolong from Shanti and I am super excited about it!
First sniff – dry – OH! It’s Lemon Pledge…but wait there’s more! I can smell the Kiwi too! How lovely! Very lemon and quite kiwi!
It infuses quite dark for an oolong but I like the color!
The taste is refreshing and juicy! Lemon and Kiwi – of course! it’s a pure delight! I really like this and it’s a very flavorful – flavored Oolong! YUM! NOM!!!!!
Dry smells like BOTH Sweet Milk Chocolate AND Dark Chocolate and Cocoa or roasted cocoa. VERY nice aroma! This one is BRAND NEW and just short of being available for purchase on their website…it says COMING SOON! I’m soooooo excited I was able to try this one before it hit the market! I like it quite a bit! It ‘brews’ dark and the taste is sweet and smooth and I can taste the chocolaty notes but it’s note overly intense chocolate on the tongue. It IS, however, very yummy!
I received this tea in the weekly Twitter contest. I really wanted to love this tea. Sadly, I can’t say that I do. The first time around I didn’t get much flavor out of it, honestly. It was pale in color and very light in flavor. I let it steep for a good 7-8 mins. I used just under boiling water. I couldn’t taste much of anything, accept a slight crispness.
Second go around this morning, same 3 horns. Hotter water, at just boiling, steeped for about 8 minutes. There is definitely more flavor this time around. It is crisp and somewhat peachy, I can kind of get that champagne-like flavor as well, but I’m finding it bland and a little, well, funky and not fresh. I do like peach, and I do like champagne, but for some reason, this tea is just not doing it for me. Perhaps I will send it on to someone else. :)
Well, this is WARM – naturally. Yes, it’s spicy but you can’t really pick out each spice…except for maybe the pepper…I guess I can taste the pepper more than the other ingredients spice-wise.
I’m enjoying that they did this with Rooibos…almost like a Rooibos Chai, even.
This isn’t to shabby. “E” for effort.
Backlogging.
I actually drank this tea all week and it took me most of the week to get the words just right about it. I used up the entire sample over the course of five infusions. So bear with me while I revisit my notes and describe each one.
To start, the leaves smell of faint oolong and a tiny bit of grape flavor. The grape is very difficult to detect, but I love grape and can find and look for it in a lot of things… The leaves are small, dark, curled very tightly, with the faint aroma.
The first infusion was five minutes, hot, no additives. The tea is sweet and malty, a delicious oolong with the slight wine taste finishing off the brew. I mustered two more infusions (5 minutes and 7 minutes respectively) with very similarly delicious results. This was day one.
Day two I added some sugar, hot infusion, five minutes. This was still good, but the natural sweetness of the tea itself and the added sweetness from the sugar made this infusion almost too sweet. Still good, but could be less sweet.
Day three, I put my tea in a travel mug and let it infuse with hot water, no additives the entire 45 minute car ride to work, taking little sips when there were stops along the route. The tea is much stronger now, not a gentle, definitely still oolong, but more malt then sweet when brewed this way. The wine aftertaste is completely gone. As an aesthetic note, this long of an infusion allowed the leaves to completely unfurl into long thick green oolong leaves…
Day four, attempting the 45 minute infusion again, but this time with 1/2 teaspoon of rock sugar. The sweetness is back, but I feel like it is kind of cheating, the natural sweetness is gone and overrun by malt, but the sugar brings some underlying flavor to life. Still no wine aftertaste.
Day five, my last bit of the tea, I decided to go back to basics and enjoy what it actually was, hot, no additives, five minute brew. After having experimented with the other ways I thought I could enjoy the tea, I now know, this was superior. An even balance of sweet and malty oolong, the slight hint of grape, with a crisp and clean flavor. Very well balanced, very delicious.
Enjoy!
Preparation
Backlogging – I won this tea in a weekly trivia contest from Shanti Tea. I really like it. It’s quite mellow for a black tea. It’s not bitter or astringent. The liquor is a light greenish-brown. It’s a good black tea. I am sad that I don’t get any of the strawberry flavor that they mention in the description. Overall though, it’s tasty. I would have given it a higher rating if I could have tasted strawberry in it, or if the description hadn’t mentioned strawberry at all.
Preparation
This tea is somewhere in between light and medium bodied. I did put in a bit more milk than usual, but still, it definitely lacks the kick I usually find in English Breakfast teas. This kind of shows in the color of the liquor as well, since it was a clear copper color and lighter than most breakfast teas. Has a subtle taste with slight notes of fruit maybe, which is barely noticeable though. Overall, this was OK, although I will definitely try it without milk next time.
Preparation
http://store.naturalnirvana.com/tahesh.html
I had to look up Shatavari!!!
Anyhow…
Considering this has the ‘dreaded’ hibiscus in it…it has enough other ingredients to shade the overall tartiness of it. Thankfully!
It’s very colorful and beautiful to be looking at!
I could have done without the Hibiscus. And think a little more minty-goodness wouldn’t have hurt…but…it wasn’t too bad! I think I will try it iced next time!
Brewed a pot of this today – multiple times – and like my previous Shanti Tea experience, it is very good. Following infusion instructions, I counted out 20 little “arrows” of tea, dropped them in my basket, boiled some water, allowed it to cool for one minute and then poured it over my tea. I let the tea infuse, hot, no additives for three minutes.
The tea is stunning as described, the little arrows unfurled and showed their green and dark red colors, the aroma is light and crisp, but unmistakably oolong. The liquor is pale yellow. The flavor is clean and crisp, it is mild and medium-bodied, the flavor is oolong, yet not typical oolong. It is almost so faint you cannot even tell that it is actually oolong, yet it is light and sweet and crisp.
Infused two more times with similar results – a clean, delicious oolong tea that can be brewed multiple times with perfectly mirrored results.
Overall this, like my other Shanti Tea (Blue Unicorn) are very light and clean though definitely oolong tea. I enjoyed both of these very much, though as described they flavor is faint and not quite what we have come to know as oolong.
Preparation
OMG. First unicorn, then arrows. Topiary tea! Cinoi, I had promised myself no more tea until the end of 2010 or until I can actually fit it all into the cabinet space I have available instead of cardboard cartons on the living room floor, and you have just single handedly pushed me over the brink of having to order from this company, dammit. ;-)
Sorry Morgana, I know how you feel, I am also on a “no more tea till 2011” kick (hence why my posts are lacking, I am drinking a lot of what I already have and have to finish up)…but I have a few more from Shanti if you want to wait it out for reviews…
MUST HAVE! :) I added it to my shopping list! This sounds…and looks so cool!
Steep Information:
Amount: 8.6g sample
Water: 500ml filtered water, 212°F
Tool: Breville One-Touch Tea Maker BTM800XL (herbal, medium)
Steep Time: 4 minutes
Served: Hot
Tasting Notes:
Dry Leaf Smell: chamomile
Steeped Tea Smell: chamomile, something else sweet
Flavor: chamomile, lemon, mint
Body: Medium
Aftertaste: mint, lemon
Liquor: translucent dark yellow-green
I won this in the weekly (Monday) twitter contest @ShantiTea – they also have contests on their ShantiTea facebook page. I was able to pick out any tea I wanted when I won.
I don’t like that I am unable to find the ingredients list.
I choose this one for the name, and also because I have enough caffeinated teas and needed more caffeine free choices.
This is a ho-hum kind of tea, it’s not bad but it doesn’t stand out in any way.
Images: http://amazonv.blogspot.com/2010/06/shantitea-loose-leaf-herbal-tea.html
Preparation
2nd steeping. I’m still meh on this tea. This time I steeped it for 9 minutes. It does have more flavor this time, but maybe it’s just too delicate for me. I dunno, maybe the allergies are preventing me from tasting anything without a punch. But, I am just getting a little peachyness and not much else. The scent is pretty strong and has an odd strong earthiness to it (for it’s lack of taste). It’s thankfully not grassy or spinachy. I think I’ll send the rest of this to my friend Jim and see if he likes it any better than me.
Preparation
Hrm. Not sure what I think of this one. Withholding rating for now. I brewed 3 horns in 11 oz cup. At 4 minutes (with a 15 sec boiling pre-rinse), it was golden but tasted like water. Stuck the leaves back in for another 2. Now I am getting some flavor but it doesn’t taste like much. Did I not use enough horns? Did I not steep it long enough? Wonder what temp I should have brewed that at?
Preparation
OH NO!!!!! I hope your other attempts work out better! I noticed it suggests 4 to 6 mins – I went a FULL 6 minutes right off the bat. I don’t think I would ever go any less than 6 actually. For my 2nd Infusion I think I went 9 mins.
I used 3 horns for 11-12 ounces and 200+ degrees water
I had no problem getting flavor out of three horns at 4 minutes. Strange. I will not lie, mine were warm from being in the mailbox…might have had something to do with it…
Weird. Trying a second infusion now. Poured out 1/2 of the first infusion. Just didn’t want it.
BUMMER…sorry!!!
That is incredibly disappointing…I am going to try it again soon and report…
It’ll be interesting to see what Jim thinks too. It’s on its way to his house.
2 horns in my smallest pot, water one minute off the boil for 5 minutes and I’m looking in the pot going “what?” The result looks like a white tea. There is little aroma and even less flavor in the cup.
Maybe Kristin’s batch got damaged in shipping by heat or something?
I was grateful for the sharing of samples, to be sure, but I’m just baffled by this tea.
Ah, I just asked you what you thought on your post! :) Yeah, I thought it was more like a white tea too, except with less flavor.
So, as a second attempt I used much more leaf, and kept the water hotter. I also worked the cones with a chopstick to open them faster.
The result is much better. More like a darjeeling.
