Steepologie

This tea tastes really strange. It smells fabulous, although slightly soapy (?) – like one of those really fancy soaps you can sometimes find in spas or something – and looks lovely, but it tastes WEIRD.

I can absolutely smell the apples in it, and the plums. It does not have the overpowering currant flavor of a black currant tea, so if the currants are there, it’s subtle. There is no taste of saffron at all, which isn’t surprising, as although the name says saffron, there’s only safflower – not the same thing. This smells like something I’d want to render down into a sauce and pour over a roast pork loin, and I rather strongly suspect it would go fabulously.

What it tastes like is very difficult to describe. The apple is fairly pronounced, moreso than the plum. The celery is also fairly obvious – more than I would want, honestly. I can’t pick out the quinoa either, but I don’t doubt that it and the celery together are what’s making this tea taste very peculiar to me.

The celery is jumping out at me in the aftertaste, and not in a great way either.

I…have no idea whether to recommend this tea. It’s certainly something that I’m sure somebody would like. I’m definitely not that somebody, however. I don’t think I’m going to finish this mug.

Yup, that’s definitely a currant-flavored tea. Smells like it, tastes like it.

Initial thoughts on this particular advent-of-tea from Steepologie: This tea needs more tea in it. There’s a LOT going on in here, but the currant flavors are the strongest. I could pick them out pretty much instantly, then the apples, and a little bit of the licorice. Handing it to my spouse, he tasted it and said, “This might want sugar.”

I added a little honey, and indeed, all the fruit flavors got stronger – as did the honey flavor, which melded very well with all the others. Unfortunately, the licorice is leaving a pronounced aftertaste in my mouth – not a pleasant one, alas. Also, the tea flavor is being completely drowned out by all the fruit. I think if I were to drink this one again, I’d cut it about 50-50 with a black ceylon, because it doesn’t need anything as malty as an assam or a yunnan. But if you want tea (I want tea) this one may not be for you.

If you want fruit, though? Yup, this one’s fruit all the way down.

I got a proper full sample of this tea – enough to brew an entire pot. So I brewed it!

Yup, that is indeed a Juniper Ceylon all right. The juniper flavor is nice and strong without being overpowering, the ceylon is perfectly acceptable, and now I have a tea for when I’m missing the juniper syrup that Starbucks made for exactly one holiday season and then discontinued (stinkers) and also don’t want to get punched in the face with sugar. Quite pleasant.

I’ll keep a small tin around; not going to be an every-day tea, I think, but definitely one I’ll keep fro when I want to taste the smell of the woods in my mouth.

Oh, how I want to love this tea, and…it didn’t happen. But it might not be the tea’s fault.

I love juniper. I love the smell of it, I love the zing it adds to things. (I love how it’s rot-and-insect resistant and can live for at least 3000 years and maybe 6000 years.) So, this tea? I wanted to love it. And when I saw that I’d gotten a bonus packet of it in the advent calendar, I was ecstatic.

Unfortunately, the Steepologie advent calendar only gave me a small sachet of it, and like a complete doof, I steeped in the 16 oz tumbler that came with my advent calendar – which was probably too much water.

The smell was there – but not strong. The taste was plain tea. No juniper flavor at all.

My reaction could be summed up as a Luke Skywalker scream of, “NOOOOOO!!!”

I’m such a fool! And I don’t have any more of it to bulk it up. :-( Suffice to say, I need to buy an actual sample of this tea (none of this sachet nonsense) and try again. And if that doesn’t work, I will take the second half of the sampler and mix crushed juniper berries into it to see if that fixes the problem. But in the meantime, this tea remains unrated, and I’ll be over here kicking myself for being stupid about how much water to use.

Steepologie Advent of Tea Day 14: This tea would smell like lemon-scented cleaner, except the basil in it adds a very strange meld to it in my nose, and keeps it from smelling that way. Actively holding the mug to my mouth and sniffing makes the basil scent clearer, but it is still strongly overpowered by the lemon in general.

The taste reminds me of the lemon-basil shortbread my father makes around the Christmas holidays sometimes. And because of all the lemon (and because it’s an oolong) I’m not adding milk to it, so there’s a tangy mouthfeel to it that I don’t normally have in my teas. The acidity of the lemon, however, is leaving my mouth slightly puckered after drinking. Not in a bad way, but definitely in a “you have encountered citric acid” way.

I’m not sure I like it. I don’t think I actively dislike it, but it’s not a tea in my usual frame of reference. (I freely admit to having been tainted by my heritage, I drank nothing but cheap black ceylon with rose petals in it growing up.)

I think this tea wants to be paired with something like a good strong Pho soup, or possibly hot pot. It’s not the sort of tea I should be drinking while eating oatmeal or even biscuits. Or, y’know, I could pair it with my father’s shortbread, except he’s 9+ hours’ drive away and I don’t know if he’s made any this year.

Regardless, not the correct tea for me this morning, but not a bad “nope, throw that out” tea.

:shrug: I could smell the caramel, but I couldn’t taste it. The tea taste wasn’t particularly interesting either, and I couldn’t taste hazelnut or almond at all. This one left me going, “meh,” which oh well.

The nose on this is delightful. I can’t think of any other tea I’ve tried that actually smells like pistachios, which for the record, I do like. (Pistachio ice cream was a favorite as a kid.) The flavor is less strong than the nose, but it is still there. The peony is also probably there – except I don’t know what peony tastes like. ;-) It also rebrews nicely – the second cup was almost as strong as the first.

As a pu erh, it’s fine. As a tea, it’s fine. It doesn’t grab me by the lapels and say, “Oh, yes, THIS,” but that’s rare anyway. It’s a proper brew, at least.

If those coconut chips are sweetened, it would make the inexplicable sweetness of this tea make sense. But it’s possible they aren’t, and it’s just a sweet-flavored tea. Either is possible, neither is bad; the sweetness was thankfully not overpowering. Just enough to make the tea taste of strawberries and a bit floral, which was nice. (There have been too many punch-me-in-the-nose teas recently.)

This was an unexceptional but enjoyable tea for my morning. The fact that the strawberry leaves actually tasted of strawberry was quite pleasant, and the fact that I could also taste the tea in there was delightful. I won’t be seeking it out to keep in the cabinet, but I am happy to have tried it.

Sadly, it rebrews weak, so this is a one-and-done with the leaves. Oh well.

Steepology Advent of Tea calendar: Berry Delight

This tea brews up almost the color of a dark red wine, and the nose is very strongly elderberry and black currant (at least to me) which always makes me think (fondly, to be clear) of the cough drops and cough syrups I used to be given by friends from the U.K.

Unfortunately, the moment it’s in my mouth, all I can taste is the hibiscus. I wish companies would stop sticking it into teas like this one – they’re advertised as berry teas, and they don’t actually need the hibiscus in them at all. And for those of us who taste hibiscus very strongly, it completely overpowers everything else. I’m sure that if I added honey, I could mellow it out – but I prefer to drink my herbals unsweetened, because if I’m drinking them, it’s usually late in the day when I don’t want sugar at all.

Hard pass on this one. I poured out the remainder of my cup. :sigh: Oh well, on to the next herbal.

Steepologie Advent of Tea: Day 7 – Cafe Latte Tea. Well, that does indeed taste like the additions to a cafe au lait. The hazelnut and cocoa are quite strong in the nose, as well. I am particularly tasting the cocoa nibs near the back of my tongue, and only when swallowing, which makes me think that the hazelnut nose is overwhelming the cocoa except when some can get in the back door, so to speak.

It’s a pity that this tea is hitting my mouth with an unfortunate aftertaste that I suspect is something to do with the hazelnut pieces. I find that the aftertaste is strong enough that it’s also mixing with the individual sips of tea, so I’m losing the taste of the tea to the aftertaste. :-/ This is not what I want my tea to taste like. And it’s definitely not what I want my mouth to taste like.

I am probably going to pour half this tea out, and not resteep, and go find something strong and unflavored-by-things-not-tea to clear my mouth out. It’s a pity, because I really like hazelnut, and I really like cocoa, but whatever they did to the ingredients before they went into this tea is really not doing it for me.

Another Steepologie Advent of Tea – this one was tucked in on Day 4 with the Peppermint Bark, which is good because today’s tea is a Rooibus, and yesterday’s was an herbal, and I am in dire need of caffeine right now.

I like jasmine tea – jasmine oolongs are one of my favorites for when I have Chinese food. (I learned to love them while eating out, when you couldn’t get milk for your tea, and I continue to drink them without milk.)

This one, being a black tea with added jasmine, I adulterated with a bit of milk, and it came out just lovely. The jasmine flavor is quite strong, but there’s an odd aftertaste that I can’t place – possibly the milk? I’ll have to try resteeping the leaves and drinking it straight.

I won’t be seeking this one out since I have to mail-order my tea from Steepologie, but I would quite happily drink it again. Definitely on the list of “yup, this one is worth it.” And if I’m ever in the store and am looking to just get a cuppa, I’d be happy to have this one.

Day 4 of the Steepologie Avent of Tea Calendar. (I actually got two samplers on Day 4, and didn’t drink either of them on the day of, because my refill box from Adagio arrived and I was absolutely going to drink some of my Chestnut, having had only an empty tin of that for almost a month.) Yes, this smells very, very much like peppermint bark. The aftertaste is also like peppermint bark – peppermint and chocolate.

During the drinking…there’s less flavor. I’m not sure if I didn’t steep it long enough or hot enough, or just didn’t have enough in the sampler (I brewed 24 ounces of water with it, so it might be a trifle anemic) but the flavor of the tea while it’s in my mouth is quite mild. The peppermint aroma almost overwhelms the taste of it.

If I wanted to drink a candy cane, this is the tea I would go for. I don’t, so I won’t be buying this one. But I’ll finish my mug, so that’s fine. If I were going to buy this tea, I would want to put more black tea in, to perhaps dilute the peppermint a bit and give it a bit more body – but I am the sort of person who likes her tea to be thick enough that people mistake it for coffee some days.

Ah, I knew there were probably going to be some herbal tisanes in this Advent Calendar from Steepologie,. This one is a pretty standard floral/mint herbal, with bonus eucalyptus leaves. And it does absolutely nothing for me.

Herbals are often hit or miss for me, because I want my hot leaf juice to have the taste of proper tea, but I do like herbal tisanes from time to time. However, they’re usually the spiced/cocoa-shell varieties, and this one has no spice to it at all. It’s a bit like drinking what lotion smells like.

For someone who enjoys mint or floral herbals, this tisane is probably quite good. I am not one of those people. So it goes.

Steepologie Advent of Tea, day two!

I am not really a mint tea-seeking person. That’s just a general thing. But my grandfather was very fond of gunpowder green tea in the morning, so I was already predisposed to like this one a bit more than I otherwise might.

So. Very minty. Not unpleasantly so, but it’s a very single note. (Unsurprising, it’s just spearmint and green tea.) I have no objections to it, but it’s also not something I’m going to seek out.

I can definitely see why Steepologie has a recipe for making a mojito with this tea. However, since I’m a morning-tea person, that’s not really going to be something I want to do. I’m going to go brew myself a cup of assam so I can have my proper caffeine-and-tannin fix for the day.

(I would like to observe that we do not appear to have MINT!!! as an option for “what flavors and scents do you notice,” so the flavors and scents don’t really adequately cover the level of “yes, this is mint tea” that I want. ;-)

Picked this up instore during a trip to Nashville. I’m feeling uncertain about this tea. It smells lovely and has puerh in it, which is fun for a blend. I smell a mixture of almond, honey and vanilla. The flavor is a little lighter than I’d like and isn’t as exciting as I had hoped. I’ll have to play around with steeping parameters to try to get a more satisfying cup out of it.

While I wait for a restock on my favorite Chocolate Tea (Harding Spring, from Trailhead Tea) I grabbed a small bag of this to try, thinking that perhaps a rose chocolate might be a nice switch from an orange chocolate.

It’s a perfectly serviceable black tea with some chocolate flavor to it, but I can’t really discern much rose in there. I will finish this sample bag, and feel no compunctions to buy more. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there is no sit-up-and-demand-I-drink-more to it, which means I don’t need to keep it in my cabinet.

A friend gave me the Steepologie Advent Calendar this year. (Thank you C!)

First day: Majesty’s Chai. Still one of my all time favorite chais. This calendar is off to a great start. Yum.

This is the chai that I grabbed by mistake when I thought I was pulling the Mt. Everest Blend off the shelf, which explains why I was inexplicably tasting clove – and a bunch of other delicious stuff.

And by delicious, I mean, I might have a new favorite chai. This stuff is fabulous. The clove might be a trifle overpowering, but everything else blends together in an amazing taste combination that is right up there with my lamented Coconut Chai from Zhena. (And Steepologie has a coconut chai that I will be trying, at this point, it’s just that the store was out when I ducked inside to snag a bunch of 2 ounce samples.)

The fact that there is pepper in this chai (some of them leave it out) is – I suspect – what really makes it for me. I like the chai blends to be both fierce and smooth, and a lot of them just go for smooth. The oolong is an interesting choice for the tea base, because it’s making the whole thing a touch more floral – again, a plus for me.

I will be ordering more of this. It will be replacing my base chai tin on my shelf, when I finish that one off. Highly recommended.

Oh, the sadness that is discovering the tea you drank is not the tea you thought you drank! Alas, poor Mt. Everest Breakfast, you are suffering for my failure to read the label, because you are a perfectly reasonable English breakfast tea that doesn’t have the glory and shine that is the Majesty’s Chai that I drank, thinking it was you.

This tea is a breakfast blend. I love Yunnan, and I love Assam, and sadly, the two combined in this tea to not be a force multiplier of each other, but to instead cancel out the distinguishing notes that both teas have and leave me with…a breakfast blend.

I will not be buying it again, because I do not need a breakfast blend. If I’m going to pay for Yunnan leaves, I want it to be Yunnan-flavored. If I’m going to go drink Assam, I want it to be Assam. I don’t want a blend of the two that tastes merely tea-flavored.

(Oops! I opened the wrong bag. This review will be updated shortly to reflect the correct tea, when I get a chance to try it. No wonder I was tasting clove!)

I like Bourbon. I like Chai. So when I spotted this one, I decided I was going to try it.

Since I’m currently lacking my handy-dandy electric kettle, I had to settle for making this one with nearly-boiling water; I suspect it would do better with slightly less hot water (something in the 185F range). I also made it with just a splash of milk.

Verdict: Quite good, and it grew on me the more I drank it. The lapsang souchong, which ordinarly would be a turn-off for me (I like smoke, but not in my tea, go figure?) accented the apple and the honey in ways that I had not anticipated. My usual preference for a gingery bite was also present. I found myself wishing I had a good sharp cheddar and some crackers to pair this one with, but I’m out of crackers at the moment. I will probably try it again when I have access to those.

There is a distinct aftertaste that I’m less fond of, and suspect would also do well with a cheddar; after thinking about it, I suspect that’s the anise. (I like licorice, so it’s not a problem, but those who don’t should be warned.)

All in all, I probably won’t go out of my way to buy this tea again, but I will enjoy drinking the remainder of the 2 ounce container I bought of it, and I do not regret the purchase at all.

A little bitter, a bit too much star anise for my liking.

Late starting my Christmas advent calendar and I wanted to like this one, but it is too spicy. The chili pepper flakes are strong, and waiting for it to fade out was wasted time. From what I can taste, the chocolate flavor is nice and mellow. I can’t finish the cup…kind of a shame for me.