Tea Palace

Sipdown, 132, and backlog! I have been quiet because I am traveling again. I made this as a cold brew and took it with me on the road while we drove all day yesterday. I think that cold brews can sometimes extract more flavor out of old teas, and this was definitely the case here. Cold, this was super passion fruity and nicely rosey. Quite delicious, and a great end to this tea!

I think the splendor of this one is fading. The flavor is no longer rich, but thin and most of what’s left of the fruitiness is the tartness and a slight bitterness. Oh well, it’s two years old and almost gone. Taking the rest of this one home to cold steep.

Some teas age better than others, although most (excepting puerhs of course) seem to fade at about 2 years. I sorted my cupboard by date added and it looks like I need to get moving on some old Harney (because they do fade pretty hard after 2 years) and a few others. I have some Dammann teas that are 2 years old now, but they are miraculously still lovely.

I tried to post this earlier but then Steepster came to a crashing halt. This morning was another eaaaarly morning, and I was craving rose. For some reason I feel like I don’t have enough rosey black teas in my stash right now, but that will change as soon as my Harney order arrives.

Luckily I still have this one, which is nice and rosey and includes a lovely passion fruit flavor. This is definitely one I would consider reordering from the Tea Palace, even though they are in London!

This tea is just so tasty. Passion fruit and rose are some of my favorite flavors, and I love them together. And this tea is really well done, with authentic flavors for both on a nice, mild (but not boring), lovely ceylon base. One that is definitely on my cupboard essentials list, despite the fact I don’t drink it all that often (too many other teas! :P)

I was in a rosey mood this morning, so I went for this one out of my stash. I feel like I hoarding what is left of my plain rose black tea (not much) so that I don’t run out before I can buy more (it will be a while). I thought maybe I could find a nice rose congou in china, but I didn’t have any luck. This is a nice tea that will give me a hit of rose along with some tasty passionfruit.

I love how the combo of passionfruit and rose almost make lychee… fruity and floral! Lychee has such rose notes anyway. And I am also currently out of lychee black, so this is kind of satisifying that urge, but also kind of making me want more lychee black. :P Nevertheless this is super tasty on its own merits. I’m really loving the black tea base on this one today.

What? Valentines day is over, you say? Oh, but the parade of rose teas continues. By tasting through all of them I’m getting a sense of how the “rosey” part of my cupboard should be stocked, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

When I think about it, this tea isn’t too far off from the Shalimar Oolong I have. It’s rose and passion, except it’s on black tea instead of oolong and the Shalimar also has mango in the mix. I’m happy to report that the weird metallic taste I was getting last time is gone, thank goodness. Just tasty juicy passion fruit with a nice rose, all on a tasty black base. I think this one is a little tarter than the Shalimar Oolong, and I’m honestly not sure which I prefer. The Shalimar is certainly more easily accessible, this one being brought back from London. All the same I would probably pick up another tin of this the next time I’m in London.

Hmm, something is up with this one today. For some reason it tastes kind of metallic, which seems more like it’s a problem with the water or something than with the tea itself. I hope so, because I love this tea… passion fruit and rose together, yum! The way these go well together made me think of combining passion fruit and lychee, since lychee has those rose notes as well as some citrusy-type notes. I just ordered some passion fruit tea from thepuritea (yay cyber monday sales… through some weird math I ended up saving 55% on my order), so I will probably try that with Harney’s lychee when it gets here!

Another one of my sample teas from Tea Palace. I love passion fruit, and I love rose, so a combo of them both in a tea was something I had to try. The dry smell of this tea is intense! If you unwittingly stick your nose too close, it’ll almost sting your sinuses with the tart-sweet smell of passion fruit. There’s a number of whole rosebuds in my sample, and I put one in my brewing basket today. The brewed tea also smells very much like passion fruit, but definitely more subdued. The rose is something you pick up in the background, as it can hardly compete with the passion fruit.

So it’s really interesting when the taste is very rosey! And passion fruit, but the rose doesn’t get lost in the mix like it seems like it will from the smell. It’s actually a really great blend of the two flavors, both floral and fruity at the same time without being too much of one or the other. The slight sweetness suggested by the passion fruit flavor makes the rose seem like a rose candy flavor, which I’m definitely down with. Also, the last sips got fairly cold in my cup, and I think it would be great iced. I thought I would decently enjoy this tea, but I didn’t expect to love it this much!

Sipdown, 159.

I brought the rest of this one home with me to have it with milk and sugar; I had just enough for my tea pot at home but too much for my cup at work, plus I decided I would negate any further bitterness in this one by taking it with additions. I have to say, it was comforting and delicious. I woke up this morning with a headache and this tea has done some good in relieving it. It went well with my waffles for breakfast as well. Vanilla, caramel, and a robust black tea. I quite enjoyed it.

So I’ve become pickier and picker about my flavored tea bases over the last year or so, to the point where I only really trust certain tea companies to deliver. However, just recently I have come to very much enjoy a nice pot of flavored black with additions, which cover all manner of sins. I guess it’s good for my potential of getting through some of the older flavored teas in my stash!

Grr, I am having bitterness problems this afternoon. This tea is also bitter for me, unfortunately, also potentially a problem of overleafing, but I would have thought the cooler steep temp would have taken care of it. Oh well. Guess I know better now.

I was going through my tea cupboard and happened to see this one. My sample is getting toward the end but of course I still have quite a few servings left. Actually looking through my cupboard was somewhat frustrating because I saw all the teas I have a loads of just sitting in my cupboard, not drunk, many of which I really love. Sigh. Now all my recent sipdowns don’t really feel like I accomplished that much.

Anyway, onto this tea. Perhaps it was “contaminated” by my previous selection (though I thought I cleaned my infuser pretty well) but I am still tasting those odd darjeeling notes. The caramelly vanilla is great, but the blech other notes, not so much. Well, as it cools the vanilla is drowning them out, so that’s good. Guess it’s time to give my teaware a good cleaning.

I’m pretty excited this morning since I got notice that I bird I saw last weekend on Coney Island may be a Grey-headed Gull, which is only known from one or two records in North America (it’s a South American/African species). Still waiting to hear back from Cornell Bird Lab, but this would be my first confirmed rare bird sighting!

I almost forgot to brew some tea, but once I settled down a bit I chose this one. I neglected to look at my previous tasting note until I already had set my water boiling, so I didn’t realized that I wanted to try this tea at a lower temp this time. Oops! To compensate I decided to try it at a shorter steep time instead.

It seems to have worked pretty well! I’m not getting any bitterness from this cup. It’s vanilla caramely and very tasty. It doesn’t seem to be too weak or have suffered from loss of flavor from only a 2 minute steep. I’ll also try it at lower temp for 3 minutes, but it’s defintely good with these parameters.

Time for a London tea! The Tea Palace shop in Covent Garden offered a bunch of tasting samples, and this was one of them! I thought the sample was absolutely delicious, so I decided to bring some home. This is one of the only tea shops I went to that actually offered sample sizes of their teas; they had cute small tins that held about 30g of tea. They also were having a promotion in honor of their anniversary that if you spent £20, you would get a free sample tin. Which obviously meant that the number of samples I meant to get increased until I hit £20 to get a free one (since I was pretty close already).

The dry leaf on this one is full of yellow marigold petals, and big chunks of whole vanilla beans chopped into the mixture. It smells like vanilla, yes, but there’s also a deeper, caramelly-toffee aroma. Brewed the black tea aroma comes to the forefront, and the vanilla drops to the back a bit.

The taste initially is of a black tea with some vanilla on the side, and I was a bit disappointed thinking I’d need to tweak my steeping parameters because I remembered it being more flavored. But as it cools the vanilla really comes out; this is the tea I remember! It’s very vanilla-y, with a bit of creaminess but not a lot, and that caramelized note is also present in the taste. The vanilla seems thick and rich without being cloying, and the tea has a wonderfully smooth mouthfeel. The black tea is present but playing a supporting role; it has a twinge of bitterness, so I might drop the steeping temp on this one next time. Definitely a fantastic version of a vanilla black tea!

It’s a proud day today. I gave a cup of this to my housemate. He has had several cups of green tea at work and been very disappointed. They were cheap teabags and my personal experience is that it is very hard to find a good green teabag.

So I let him try a sip of this gyokuro that I was drinking and – wow! – he really loved it. He gulped down his builder’s tea (Tetley) and asked for a whole cup to add to the little sip he tried at first. He even said it was a little bit sweet.

I have been persevering with my housemate for over two years and he is finally showing real signs of understanding tea, and really appreciating the difference between the good stuff and the bad stuff. And he has such good taste in tea: as I have said before, I think this tea is excellent!

The best part about it was the funny face he pulled when he scalded his tongue. I know it’s mean to laugh, but I couldn’t help it and I laughed and laughed and laughed and he stuck his tongue out at me.

I have a picture in my head of what a green tea tastes like. Gunpowder tea, for example, tastes a bit like it, sencha tastes even more like it. Now I have discovered Gyokuro and it seems to me to taste more like a green tea than any green tea I have ever tasted.

It’s delicious, and incredible how you can get so much flavour without tasting bitter. The experience is like a rainforest. You pull the infuser out of your pot or cup and some impossibly vibrant coloured stalks are showing through the mesh. The infuser drips with yellowish exotic-looking liquid. It smells full of life and energy and you can almost hear the animal calls and rustles that you would hear if you were in darkest Paraguay.

It’s a rainforest in a cup. Impressive for a leaf from the opposite end of the world

I got a sample tin of this after having “afternoon tea” – with scones and cake – in Glasgow last week.

The smell is fantastic, real bergamot instead of some undetermined citrus.. it is very fragrant too, I just have to open the caddy to fill the air around me.
Once infused however, it is very light black tea – a bit too light for my taste – although the bergamot flavour is still nicely present. Could have been my holy grail earl grey, if only the tea base was better and stronger (not faster though).

Nutty but a tad too light for a good cup of Genmaicha. It’s not as aromatic as I hoped it would be. I found that my cup of tea ended up with way too much sediment at the bottom so next time I think I’ll give the leaves a short rinse.

A very pretty and unconventional sencha green tea. Extremely light, somewhat sweet, but very, very fragrant. It has rose and blue mallow/purple blossoms. I am tempted to stuff my bra with this tea in an attempt to smell just as pretty (ha).

I visited Tea Palace for the first time in a while the other day and made a purchase. The owner recognised me from the last time I was there and she remembered what I had previously bought (no mean feat as that was a few months ago, and the shop is always busy). After a chat about green teas, she gave me a free sample of the Gyokuro, which I’d read about but never had before. Looking it up on the net later, I was more than pleased as it’s not cheap and has a very good reputation indeed.

As for the tea itself, it really is a good delicious cup of tea – I thoroughly enjoyed it and worthy of its plaudits. I’m not sure about how to brew it though as what’s on the Tea Palace website differs to other sources which states that this is a difficult tea to brew and needs a temperature of about 60 degrees C. Despite that, I brewed it as I would other green teas and it works well enough.

A delicate tea, not for your Builder’s Brew brigade, but if you have a palate for the more subtle delicate teas, this is hard to beat. It’s a lovely refreshing tea and I really love it. Annoyed with myself that I only bought a small caddy of it, so will be visiting Tea Palace again to get more.

Any green tea flavour is annihilated by the overpowering artificial cherry. Quite like diluted cherry essence for baking. Extraordinarily pungent. Not great.

Warm, mild and very smokey. Slightly astringent. Altogether pleasant.

Nice iced. Sweet and delicious.

Astringent with a chemical lemon taste. Bitter aftertaste after 3 minute steep.