TeaGschwendner

I got to try this tea courtesy of Erin (she rocks!). First off I’m having a stuffy nose this morning so I cannot tell much about the smell other than it probably smells sweet.

The taste I’m getting (like others have said) is not really banana in peel the fruit banana. What I am getting is Banana Nut Bread and that’s not a bad thing it’s actually quite nice. I like this tea the black tea base has a tad bit of astringency but hey I just recently finished a cup of Florence so whatdya expect.

If you think you might like Banana nut bread flavored black tea give this one a try sometime. Thanks Erin!

Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!
I am rather shocked at how much I like this…but I do
YAY!

First, I must say…this is my FIRST TeaGschwendner Tea and I am MORE THAN excited!!!! 2nd…special thanks to MandyB for sending this my way!

I cannot express how awesome this smells! If a smell could be iridescent this would be it! I could smell cranberries but then a little mango…oddly enough I was getting an overwhelming grapefruit type smell from across the room…not sure why because it’s cranberry and mango but I am NOT complaining in the slightest because this is one of the most awesome smelling green teas I have ever smelled! It doesn’t even lose that much of the smell once infused! Brilliant!

It’s light yellow/green in color and very nice to sip. It’s refreshing and juicy and thirst quenching and fun! The Cranberry and Mango couldn’t be dancing a more perfect dance with each other.

Honestly…by drinking this tea…it has made my day MUCH better!!!!

YAY!

Does anyone know how to break the seal on a 65 ounce jar of marinated artichoke hearts?

I’m going to have this tea this morning because I am groggy and shaded greens are always a nice kick in the teeth both taste wise and in terms of stimulants.

We may have a late night, so I’m getting a bit of caffeine before we head out.

I have a new teapot. If you find your way to my facebook, there’s a picture. We went to the Houston Japanese American Festival in Hermann Park where I met a well preserved octogenarian who makes pottery. Included in her collection of wares was a delightfully quaint half liter tea pot, glazed a white satin finish with a new leaf green wash. It has actual wabi sabi, as opposed to carefully calculated flaws you find in some mass produced work. The handle is high, and fully integrated. Most important of all, it has a wide, open top with a snug lid. No more rummaging about to fish wet tea leaves out of narrow pot tops. No more balancing plates on top of Pyrex™ measuring cups.

This green tea is perfect for today. I got to watch most of a matcha-do ceremony demonstration in the tea house in the Japanese garden in Hermann Park during the festival. It made me crave shaded green. The weather is off again on again sun and rain, but warm when the sun is out. The live oaks have put out all their new growth and are a shockingly bright shade of green, kind of like what’s in my cup. We had brunch in an absurdly upscale bistro garden where I ate some of the best poached eggs over spinach and potatoes I have ever had in my life.

We just wish the rain would blow over so we could go out and test drive Liz’s new bicycle.

SECOND STEEPING:

This cup is more bold/less soft than the first steeping, but surprisingly the notes are nearly the same. I expected a second steeping of a shaded green to be a complete disaster, but this is a very good cup of tea. A teensy bit bitter, but nothing unpleasant. The green veggie notes are more pronounced and the non-green notes have faded, but this tea started off with such a good balance that this is not a problem.

The dry leaves of this tea have some very unexpected high brightness to them.

The wet leaves are powerfully dark green, but not muddy.

The cup is a vibrant yellow green color and smells more like the dry leaf than the wet.

The low temperature and extremely short steeping time means this is a tea about which one ought be paranoid about over-steeping by even 15 seconds, let alone more. This stuff will get into kale and kombu territory quickly, I think.

I seem to have timed it right, because the cup is surprisingly soft, but not weak.

This is one of those teas that makes you want to act like you’re in a Japanese movie for the whole day. Something meta-physical with deep symbolism in the cinematography. Traditional tea ceremonies juxtaposed with neon loglo and racer motorcycles. Seedy night clubs and Shinto shrines. You do everything in swaggering slow motion in a slight drizzle, but are kept centered and focused on your task by the carefully wrapped flask of this tea you always have with you. Some things in the land of the rising sun will never change. A flock of birds startles across the sky.

Baby spinach in a lemon vinegar, fresh hay, and something almost like candied ginger without the bite.

Steep Information:
Amount: 6tsp
Additives: none
Water: 1 cast iron teapot full of filtered boiling water
Tool: Cast Iron Teapot with Mesh basket strainer
Steep Time: a little over 5 minutes
Served: Hot

Tasting Notes:
Dry Leaf Smell: Berry, Woody
Steeped Tea Smell: Berry, woody, hint of pepper
Flavor: sweet strawberry, woody
Body: Medium
Aftertaste: pepper
Liquor: deep dark reddish-brown

Swap from Meghann M

This was a very interesting tea, a nice smooth fresh strawberry (not sweet like a pie or candy), with a hint of rooibos, then an aftertaste of light pepper.

I am enjoying my cup, I don’t think I’ll buy it again, but I am very much enjoying this.

The kept saying Rooibush, I am assuming this is the same as Rooibos.

Post-Steep Additives: none

This week I discovered rolled rye instead of rolled oats. Rolled rye doesn’t come out like kindergarten paste. This is win.

Second steeping of yesterday’s leaves. Who knew it could be 73 degrees out with 90% humidity and feel like walking through pudding?

A pool party at the church
G’d up and others barbecueing
Ain’t no telling what your daddy and your momma doing
Chewing on these baby-backs popping bottles with these macks
Everybody swimming, backyard full of women
I’m entertaining folks
Gave the lil’ homie twenty dollars just to shine my hundred spokes
Coke with the Hennesey tends to be the remedy
Family and friends to me
Everyone pretends to be kin to me
I can’t wait until the Fourth of July
to pop some fireworks with my kids
and fly some kites high in the sky
See, it’s the family reunion
And down at the church house, they giving up the annual communion

It seems we made it to another summer
Yeah we came and come up
213 is more than friends
Yeah, we like blood brothers
Riding this ‘til the wheels fall off
Can you dig that?
We got this summertime anthem for y’all
We did that

We made it through winter
We made it through fall
We made it through the spring time
Tough times and all
It’s good to see
I love the summer
I’m riding with the top down
Let the wind blow
Chillin’ with my love
Partying fo’ sho’
It feels good to see
I love the summer
Everybody if you with me sing

We got the game on lock
On the paper chase, can’t stop
On a roll, still hot
Gotta be top notch
I like the girls ‘cuz they hot
Plus I know what they want
They want the game that we got
Hold up baby girl I think not
I like the nasty girls from around the way
Hoppin’ in my gray drop-top Mercedes
Shouts go out to my sexy ladies
Just in case your man is hating
Tell your boy he better chill (Summertime)
Tell your boy he better chill (Summertime)

We made it through winter
We made it through fall
We made it through the spring time
Tough times and all

I’m addicted to the sunshine the way it make these women dress
Tank tops, flip flops, make this fella love the west
Different spots, even though different, it’s still crackin’
In Jamaica, Queens I sit back, live and collect the cabbage
It’s an affair that every state can relate to
And if you do what I do, then go on and follow suit
From Chi-Town to Diego, all the way back to NY
Stay fly, and never miss a piece of sunshine
When I’m at the church I barbecue for my kinfolk
Watch lil’ Elijah and lil’ Warren run the football
Got tea ta drink, but most of all the spirit
And it’s a blessin’ that the world wanna hear our music
The summer is an inspiration as much as the fast
And to my my fella Snoopdewoop, I love you fam’

Riding this ‘til the wheels fall off
Can you dig that?
We got this summertime anthem for y’all
We did that

We made it through winter
We made it through fall
We made it through the spring time
Tough times and all

Yeah, another summer
Kanye West good looking on the beat, nephew
213 reminding y’all put your guns down
Well spent summertime, let’s enjoy ourselves
We just wanna celebrate
You know what I’m talking about?
It’s too hot for all that
Yeah 213
Moving mountains y’all haha
All the time, yeah

Boy howdy do I like this tea.

I’m eating barbecued pork that I made from local, sustainably raised pigs, and sipping this tea and feeling very sort of rural Mainland China. Pork and oolong, right? ;-)

The spice and smoke in the meat is hiding the smoke and roast in the tea and bringing out all the sweetness it has. This is a perfect pairing and it is allowing me to ignore this terminally boring conference call on which I am stuck.

The dry leaf smells like warm fruit in a humidor.

The wet leaf, I kid you not, smells like beef, brown gravy and egg noodles.

The cup smells like brown beer. It is not as dark as yesterday’s golden pekoe, but is certainly closer to amber than to goldenrod. Let’s call it chestnut?

This is one of those teas that is too open, in dried form, to measure by volume, and so there’s a chance I didn’t use enough, but I actually felt like I might have put in more than I needed, really. The opened wet leaves take up about 1/3 of the pot, which with big, full leaves, is about normal for me. This may be a tea that is just all in the nose not on the tongue.

The cup tastes very gentle, hence my concern about enough leaf. A mild roast and dried fruit in the sun. Like trail mix on a hike, sitting on a big, dark rock on the summit. Old, weather worn, but solid, and full of dormant energy. This tea fits today very well. A bit overcast with storms on the way, and a long afternoon of quiet, somber reflection.

Now, I will confess that a week’s worth of singing for hours every night in a church full of incense has made me rather congested. So I could be completely wrong about all of this. ;-)

Also, I discovered that people are willing to take even tea too seriously, after thinking just yesterday how nice it was to have a social networking site where people didn’t go out of their way to pick fights with you. So much for that. If you find me reticent to interact, don’t take it personally. I’m really, really burnt out on this kind of thing and had hoped to just have some fun over here.

Now that I have more teas in the system I’m making minor adjustments to the scores.

I over steeped this by about 15 seconds this morning because I was emptying the dishwasher. Stupid suburban life screwing up tea.

During my early morning quiet time, today, I got a huge hankering for this tea — specifically. There’s something about the balance of an almost Darjeeling quality, almost oolong quality, and the lack of assam keeping it from having too much bite, which makes this tea a marvelously gentle black tea without being thin or wimpy.

The thing about this tea, given that it is a black tea, is that it is very un-British. At least very un-British-during-Imperial-expansion-discovering-tea-and-wanting-it-black-as-coffee kind of thing. This tea is soft spoken and open. It is not a tightly clenched fist of islander paranoia and aggression that needs honey and lemon to be remotely civil.

This is a post-colonial, rural, quiet, taking a break from a day’s labor kind of tea for those who maybe are a bit over the usual rustic green teas.

THIRD STEEPING:

As feared, this steeping looks great and smells great, but is quite weak. Not the tea’s fault, of course, not all teas are meant to last this long. There’s nothing wrong with what I can taste here, I can just barely taste it.

SECOND STEEPING:

Today has been insane. So it took several hours to get to my second steeping.

I am putting 2:30 for time, but that’s a guess. I set the timer for 2 minutes but it took time to set up the pour and make the pour. So it’s a bit longer than 2, but not 3.

The brew is again that deep amber honey color. The leaves still have the same aroma, amazingly enough. So does the cup.

Wow. Completely different cup from the first steep. All the astringency is gone. This is a soft, subtle, open, earthy cup with just only the most lingering hint of anything living (call that green, floral, fruity, sweet, whatever it might be, as opposed to dead things which are earthy, nutty, roasted, &c).

This is a really delightful cup of tea, but it leaves me apprehensive that a third steep will be weak and insipid or bitter and harsh. Worse, both.

Given that this tea almost looks like gun powder green when dry, I was extremely dubious about the two minute steep that TG recommends.

The color of this dry leaf is the kind of thing that makes you “get” why people become obsessed with amber jewelry. You know, the real stuff, the gnarly old stuff with four million year old mosquitoes fossilized in it. The stuff that looks like you live in a world of frozen honey.

The nose of the dry leaf evokes a similar sense of a slowly oozing, encompassing world of honey, and yet, not sweet.

Despite my concerns, the two minute steep produced a deep, dark brew. The color is like amber buckwheat honey (seeing a trend here?)

The nose on the brew also immediately makes me think of buckwheat honey. Also the tiff, sourdough flat bread you get in Ethiopian restaurants.

And yet, the notes on the tongue are not sweet at all! Astringent without being bitter, again, that tiff sourdough tang, not malty, almost hoppy, like an IPA or hefeweizen.

Given the short steep, I expect later steeps to open up some more subtle notes. I just hope I got all the water out of the pot into my cup so the leaves aren’t sitting there oozing bitter tannins on me.

For being a “mere” GOP, this tea has a lot going on.

Btw: The batch I got is clearly nothing like the batch that “teatimetuesday” got. Even the dry leaf looks nothing like what is in his photos. In fact, his photos don’t match the website photo, either, which makes me wonder if he got an off batch.

I loved this one too. Mild, yet green taste, ideal for the morning.

The tea cabinet continues to dwindle. Order from Upton should arrive later this week. My brother flies in tonight, provided Hurricane Alex doesn’t cause problems at the airport.

I’m back to brewing in wide, flat Pyrex containers with a plate on top. It is obnoxious but produces the best results and easiest clean up. I strain into my teapots when steep time is done and so the tea pots don’t feel neglected.

Today was kind of a completely insane day from 8-11am and so tea steeping did not happen in anything remotely like a correct fashion. However, the results were more than drinkable, and the leaves even survived a double steeping without ill effect.

Horray for tea.