Tealyra

This lovely oolong came from Virginia. Huzzah, oolongs! (that’s me, every time I drink one). It’s a rolled oolong, which I enjoy for the presentation, with green leaves and some stems. The smell is very creamy and floral and the brew is a light yellow. It has a wonderfully thick, creamy mouthfeel with a creamy, almost buttery taste to match. It’s naturally sweet and you’re thinking, “oh this is nice, sweet cream tea” until halfway through the sip when delicate florals surprise you and lead to a clean, refreshing finish. You get the best of both worlds! I don’t like this one quite as much as I liked the Gui Hua from Tealux, but it was a fabulous oolong.

I must have forgotten to write about this in past tastings even though I just finished a bag. And not a sample bag either! I love these and I will miss them. I haven’t had a lot of lychee teas but this is a great one. With or without sugar, although I prefer with. I don’t like that I’m running out of a lot of favourites all at the same time because it means I must place a lot of different orders. Hard to do when one tries to adhere to a budget or allow only one order per month. Ha! How’s that for discipline?!?

These pearls are so good though. Great flavour, good base. A tea that makes you think about it even when you’re not with it. The pearls are also very cute to look at. Tiny, black aromatic marbles, not too small either. Perfect size! I don’t like stuff that looks like mouse droppings :)

I love tealux purely fir that fact that every tea I’ve gotten from them was good quality and fresh. Even the ones I didn’t particularity enjoy. This batch is no different. Everything from order smelled fresh and delicious, and the leaves were a great color.

Actual review: this tea. I don’t know if it taste exactly like butterscotch but to me this tea taste like a honey/cinnamon bun. Sweet without any sugar and just gorgeous in the pouch to boot. I love that it has a more delicate, vegetal base of white tea that keeps it light and refreshing. I steeped it overnight the fridge and not a hint of bitterness. It was also a hit with the family but this going in my “selfish” stash.

TTB&C 2

So good! This oolong is more on the grassy side with some minor flowery notes. The mouthfeel is not exactly creamy although it might get there with the next steep. Very refreshing and “green-tasting”, perfect to sip on on a rather warm afternoon here in PA. I am ready to make another infusion!

grabbed this with the father’s day discount….. soooooooooo worth it! proper review will have to come later…. essay calling!!!! (48 hours from now i’m free for 5!) that didn’t used to be a big number….. somehow that changed?

LYCHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Welcome to the dark side.

The leaves of this oolong are some of the darkest I’ve seen. And so is the brew, a beautiful deep amber.

This type of leaf opens a little but never really unfurls. It’s good for a multitude of steeps!

This is as roasty as it gets!

There’s a lot of charcoal in this cup, no smoke though, for me it’s a huge distinction.

It’s musky and spicy, hints of cinnamon and clove.

Strong burnt and sweet caramel, bitter chocolate all in one sip. Like many heavy roasted oolong, there’s a lot going one here.

The fourth steep is spectacular, it’s loosing some of the bitterness and the sweetness has intensified. The chocolate is very persistent.

I’m a fan…decadent, a dessert tea.

Backlog:

So….Got this from the last Tealux sale. Forgot how buttery this one is!
Not as big of a fan of all this butter in this one….Think I actually like the floral oolong from Verdant more…the one I totally can’t remember the name of. xD
Probably won’t be getting more of this one, mainly because it’s so expensive. And plus, Verdant’s floral oolongs are better, in my opinion. Not as buttery, and not as likely to make me sick. xD Anyway, this is still a good tea. Still like it.
Just wish it wasn’t so buttery!

Man…I got expensive tastes apparently. I love way too many oolongs, I just want all the oolongs in the world xD Least that’s what it feels like. But they’re so expensive it seems. >< Oy. But this is SUCH a good tea. Ahh, it’s perfect. This is a good day for teas.
Thanks, Virginia for this sample! I’m gonna have to find more somewhere!

Drank this absent-mindedly while chasing the baby and taking a variety of potentially harmful things out of her way only to find that she had a whole bunch of paper in her mouth. So I can’t say that I was really paying attention but I really did enjoy it. More on this one another time I guess.

I don’t really like green oolong – I usually find them to be too floral for my tastes.
I love swapping because generous people send you tea that is outside your comfort zone.
This is the second green oolong that TheTeaFairy has sent me that I’ve liked.
Am I rethinking my position on green oolong? Not really, I still prefer the darker ones.
I don’t know enough about this type of tea to be able to choose one that would be green without being crazy floral. I liked this one because it’s not floral.
I like it, it’s light, refreshing, easy to drink – thank you for sending me one of your favorites (I would have thought this isn’t floral enough for you?)

Good morning Steepster!

When I woke up earlier, I had a lychee craving. I happen to have some in the fridge. And I happen to have these delicious lychee pearls, so why not create a lychee feast?

This tea is very unusual. I personally don’t know any other lychee Dragon Pearls.

They are big and fragrant, but not soapy. The taste is so juicy, just like plump lychee. I get this lovely chocolaty smooth and malty Yunnan taste which makes this lychee tea so different than all others out there. I get none of that heavy perfumed lychee after taste you get in most black lychee flavoured teas.

It’s like drinking chocolate lychees. Not that I ever had any, but I’m sure there must exist some chocolate lychees somewhere. After having this tea, I can totally see their sweet floral taste work perfectly well with dark slightly bitter chocolate.

(And I just realized I wrote the word lychee way to many times in this review)

I other news, today I’m seasoning another one of my Yixing clay pots. Fun times!

Well, this might be the best lychee tea I’v had since Butiki’s Lychee Oolong.

In life generally, I am drawn to the unusual. I like when things don’t fit the mould. So I love that this came into the form of Dragon Pearls. I’ve never seen a lychee pearl tea before. Though lychee is a flavour I adore, I never found a black lychee tea I actually liked, always way too perfumy. Until this.

Wow.

It’s sweet, refreshing, super juicy, just like a luscious and plump lychee. The novelty here, is the chocolaty taste of the pearls in the background. It gives a certain bite and a roundness to a familiar taste, making it totally different than all other lychee teas out there. It gives me a glimpse at what lychee flavoured dark chocolate would taste like.

Well based on this tea, I can tell you it would taste delicious!

a friend picked this up, loved it for the caffeine rush then decided he didn’t like it after all so i ended up with it lol. I’ve had this before, but my tasting note was shit and i’m not sure why. I suspect my taste buds have changed because this is WAAAAY too earthy/licking a forest mud floor, for me. I ended up pouring out a few steepings, just to see if later steeps would cut it…nope. This is no longer a tea for me…just too….consistent in it’s flavour profile, which isn’t up my alley anymore to begin with? :)

dexter sent this to me and uh it was what i managed to sip on most of the afternoon. this was a really tasty one….and something likely to end up on my list again when i order from tealux again. Dexter keeps finding little happy spots with them that i like. This might be one for you to try out cavo!

I was drinking this at work yesterday. This is really good – unusual, for me anyway.
I’m not even sure how to describe it. WOW smooth is where I want to start. Mellow, gentle, barely pu’erh. It’s just a touch earthy – and I don’t know what the rest of the flavor is, but I like it. It’s not really a black, it’s barely pu’erh, but it still has lots of flavor – just different from anything else I’ve tried.
If I ever get my cupboard under control, I would consider getting more of this so that I can play with it some more.

I got this back in Feb and forgot to even try it. So this tea is a very complex tea. Let me try to describe it. It’s kind of like a black or a pu’erh and yet not like them. I can smell charcoal from the tea. It brews up dark. I can taste the oolong along with a charcoal taste and a deep sweetness like a plum or molasses. It says there are cinnamon, musk and amber notes in it on the package but I’m not really picking up any cinnamon. I am holding off rating this tea for now until I’ve had a few more cups of this. I steeped for 3 minutes so I will try some different steep times and see what I like.

I am playing catch up from a week of lots of packages coming and not enough writing of tasting notes so sorry for the flood of notes:) I received a very generous sample of this from bluebelle.

Roasty oolongs are becoming my favorite evening wind down tea. Something about them makes me just want to cuddle up in my pj’s with my book and stay that way for a really long time. When I saw this tea in the mix of sample I got pretty excited, but the perfect time to try this kept escaping me over the past few weeks. I finally got to it this week. This was roasty, and more sweet than some of the other roasty oolongs I have had. As the sip lingered in your mouth it was almost like eating chocolate. I still got the oolong flavor, but it was mixed with a chocolaty after taste. I am not sure about this one just yet. It was enjoyable, yes, but something I crave and would buy again, I am still not sure.

Another tea I’ve had for awhile and enjoyed many times but forgot to review. The brew temperature from Tealux says 194F. That seems just way too high for a white tea and I’ve been brewing closer to the 175F. Definitely has a smooth butterscotch flavour. The peppercorn is very faint and I only seemed to notice it when the tea cooled down more. It is just enough to add to the tea but not ruin the overall flavour. I’m not as experienced as some others on Steepster noticing the different notes but am working on it.

Sipdown no. 92, another one from Sil.
This is a sweet roasty charcoaly tasty cup of yum!

“A little weird tasting, but not undrinkable” says TheTeaFairy in her note stuck to the ziploc holding this 2-cup sample. Naturally, I have avoided it and tried all the samples she indicated were her faves. So tonight, after missing again, I thought to myself: self, I bet you will like the ones she hates. So I grabbed the so called weird tasting tea!

Don’t you know it, it’s not weird tasting to me. And it smells like butterscotch indeed. I did add honey because it wasn’t sweet enough for me. It smells faintly of chamomile but luckily it doesn’t taste like chamomile. It almost tastes milky too, I wonder which ingredient does that.

I wouldn’t call this an amazing cup — my goodness, I’d have to read my notes and find which teas I thought were amazing because lately I have found them all to be missing something. Maybe it’s me. I know it is. I haven’t been in the mood.

Great light amber colour on this, not astringent at 3 minutes with 190F water. It’s not a bad tea. I wouldn’t rush out and buy it or anything, despite the alluring name. Thanks again to the generous TheTeaFairy who sent me so much tea I’m still working my way through it.

So this tea, right from reading the name, I was stoked to try it out. And it didn’t disappoint. Thus far I could say that this tea is one of the number 1’s from the Great Canadian Travelling Tea box. Such a wonderful idea, it has opened me up to new teas. I really want to get my hands on more of this wondrous creation. I consumed this tea on Oct 2 & 3 2013. It was a marvelous 2-day event :)

Dry leaf: Dark, like super dark oolong leaves, with kind of a purple-y tinge to it, which I would then deduce, hence the name purple oolong.

Steeped: from a first glance, the water appears to be brownish with a purple tinge. The taste was just PHENOMENAL. Just saying, I was soothed and entranced by this mystical tea. I guess I could describe it as a kind of woodsy taste, maybe just ever slightly bitter and sort of smoky.

Re-Steep 1: This time around it was slightly more subtle, yet still soothing. The only difference? It was slightly sweeter the second time around :)

Re-Steep 2: Lighter than the steep and re-steep. The scent is just so yummy and the taste is yet again subtle. The aroma of the tea is spicy and becomes even more sweet.

Had some cooled off tastes very fruity almost like a fruit juice.