The Tea Table

I thought I hated this tea and just wanted to use it up so I wouldn’t waste it, but now as I finish my last cup I think for a moment I might kinda miss it. The overall flavor is good but then you get the obnoxious almost aspartame-like aftertaste of the licorice. Nope, I’ve made up my mind, the aftertaste is a dealbreaker. Goodbye, anti-strain tea!

Sooooo badly wanted this tea to curb my chocolate cravings. Not a chance. So sad >sniff<.

Ordered a free sample of this one. Too vanilla-y for my taste.

I’m so glad to have this tea in my cupboard again! I love this tea because it is impossible for me to mess up, it could steep all day and get cold and it still tastes wonderful!

Absolutely loved this tea iced! I went through it so fast, will order a larger bag next summer!

This is what I consider to be the best of the currently available Princes.

This is by far one of my favourite green teas.

It’s a nice full black tea.

This tea is acceptable. The Raspberry overwhelms the much more subtle melon flavor, alas. And the freeze-dried raspberries taste a little bit more like Smart-T’s than fruit.

Overall, this inexpensive tea might be worth a try. I don’t think I will reorder it because I’ve found a much nicer melon tea that I prefer (that would be you, Golden Moon) and the raspberry flavor is all over the place.

I got this sample from Cait along with the roasted Ti Guan Yin a while back. She included it at as surprise sample, but it’s a bit sad because I don’t really have the best history with peach in tea, but she didn’t know that.

So it’s been lying around for a while until today when i took it out of the sample basket all randomly (I moved all my sample to a big basket that I have recently. Lexitus think it makes it look like there are more than there really is.) and I didn’t have anything else that I’d rather have so okay.

It’s definitely peach and it’s definitely cream. It comes as a sort of delayed reaction when I take a sip, the first flavour present being a good honest Ceylon. It’s very round and very smooth in flavour.

The first of June’s teas! (Seriously, how is it June already?)

This is, indeed, very fruity! It blended very nicely with the tea itself, and was neither sour nor cloyingly sweet, both of which were fears of mine when I read the ingredients list. When I opened the pouch of tea and took a whiff it smelled very strong, but these parameters actually brewed up a fairly mild tea.

In the sample packet, the smell is to die for. Chocolate. Nom. Chocolate. Nom nom. Chocolate. Nom nom nom. Not really much else, just sweet, creamy smelling chocolate.

You can’t really see it in the picture, but the red rooibos is interspersed with long yellow dried petals. They’re pretty. They look sort of like fragments of crepe paper.

I had very high hopes that this would be some sort of caffeine free chocolate dream concoction that I could drink at night while watching The Biggest Loser. Just the illusion of calories.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. In the cup, the aroma is rooibos first, chocolate illusion after. As is the flavor. The chocolate isn’t bad as far as it goes. The rooibos isn’t a bad rooibos. It’s the balance that’s the issue for me. As with some other recent rooibos trials, the problem here is that the rooibos won’t shut up.

For me, if a rooibos is good, it’s a lot like a good waiter. You barely notice they’re there, you just notice that you’re not left wanting anything. They don’t barge in, they don’t totally ignore you. They’re just a very quiet presence that miraculously gets the job done.

This one isn’t quite there. Dang. Now what can I have while watching The Biggest Loser. Quick, before I head for the cookies!

Drinking it with waffles. The syrup changes the taste of the tea too much.

The dry leaf smelled delicious! I had really high hopes for this tea.
Very sweet. That’s the best way to describe it. It was just as good as I had hoped.

Not much flavour in general. Decent amount of mint, but not very tasty. Not much tea flavour at all.
Toward the bottom of the pot, I just started to get a chalky taste in my mouth. Not sure if it was from the tea, but the tea was all I was consuming at that point, so I suspect so.

Doulton’s Shakespeare: A Tasting Note in 5 Acts
Act III scene 3

“A high hope for a low heaven.”
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act I scene 1

I really wanted to like this tea. It’s got both “garden” and “party” in its name, therefore it must be like a floral party for mah mouth — amiright? Oh nose! I am wrong. I actually had this tea yesterday and the disappointment was so great that it took me until today to write about it. Perhaps I set my expectations way too high.

Both the dry leaf and the steeped tea’s fragrance screamed potpourri. It’s rather what I’d imagine chewing on a big-ole mouthfull of potpourri would be like. After it cooled a bit I sort of enjoyed holding the liquid in my mouth (more like having just chomped down on some fresh flowers), but then I’d swallow (back to bitter potpourri), and finally the aftertaste was sort of nice and flowery.

Therefore I picked a rather “Meh” play for this “Meh” tea. Furthermore, Love’s Labour’s Lost has the greatest percentage of rhyming couplets of any Shakespeare play: flowery language for a flowery tea.

I have enough for another pot of tea so I shall try adjusting the preparation perameters. If the adjustments help, then I’ll re-dub this tea “Love’s Labour’s Found.” M

Ah-hah, there’s a good mix: this Khumbu Green with the Ceylon Black with Orange that I recently picked up from the DeKalb Farmer’s Market makes an excellent iced tea. I think it helps that the Ceylon Black has a really strong tea flavor as an iced tea, so the deep earthiness of the Khumbu doesn’t just bowl it over. I used a 2:1 mix of Khumbu and Ceylon, and the orange flavoring on the Ceylon was very muted, a nice little hint behind the tea but not an overwhelming orange drink with some tea in it. (Also, the Ceylon cold-brews a nice golden, so this mix isn’t as pale as the pure Khumbu was! And the mingled leaves were really really pretty — I’ll photograph them next time I make this.)

This is also a very nice hot tea. It has the same toasted flavor to it without being quite as earthy, and intriguingly adding a small bit of honey makes it taste almost milky with the sudden sweetness.

I’m also amused that this tea is so much darker when brewed hot:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cait_tea/4616069126/in/set-72157623664718933/

Okay, wow! This is a tea meant to be cold-brewed (which is how I like my iced tea) so when this arrived for my tea-of-the-month subscription I was very excited to try it. Sadly, the weather lately has been rainy and cold and entirely off-putting to the whole concept of iced tea, so it took me a while to finish up my previous carafe of iced tea so that I had something to brew this in, and then I wound up leaving this tea brewing in the fridge for something like three or four days!

Given how long it was brewing, I was pretty worried when I pulled it out: it looked barely darker than plain water, and I thought that maybe I hadn’t used enough leaves (I put in my standard three heaping spoons for two liters). But I poured myself a glass anyway, and even before I tasted it I could smell the tea as I lifted the glass. It smelled earthy and green and not at all weak, so I closed my eyes and had a sip — and wow! That’s some tea! The adjectives that come to mind are “hearty” and “toasted” and “solid”, which clash oddly with visual ones such as “watery”.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cait_tea/4609134579/in/set-72157623664718933/

Definitely a new standard in iced tea for me.

Enjoyed the last of this sample tonight, and it was just as tasty as it was the last time. I’m tasting more mango tonight. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m dead tired and going to try to sleep despite the accumulated caffeine in my body as soon as I finish this, and then have a cup of the (hopefully appropriately named) Sleep Tight by TeaGschwendner.

Another big, chunky fruit mixture. This one brews to a really beautiful melon color. OK. I want a sweater in this color, too.

I was in this for the lemon, which isn’t very fair. The aroma is at least one part lemon to one part something else, but the something else is probably closer to two parts. The lemon comes first, then the other, which is denominated mango in the name of the tea.

Thing is, it doesn’t really smell like mango. It smells sweet and fruity, in a Jolly Rancher sort of way, but I’m getting more of a generic fruit back end. If I hadn’t known it was supposed to be mango, I probably would have pegged it as nectarine.

That said, the taste of the tisane only suffers if you expect it to taste like mango. It’s actually, in some ways, better tasting than mango. Mango, the fruit, can have a mealy thing going on that squeezes the taste of the fruit into a unidimensional almost pungent, not quite delicious sweetness. (Other times it is wonderful.) This tastes more like a mixed red fruit taste than a one note mango, which may spare it the risk of mango disappointment.

I like it just fine. It’s as good or a better example of its genre as the Strawberry Kiwi from The Necessiteas that I tasted recently, and probably about as good as Teavana’s Strawberry Lemonade. It’s sweet enough without doctoring. It’s just a different mix of tastes, and isn’t what I was looking for in the continuing lemon search. I prefer the Strawberry Lemonade. But I’m trying not to let my bias cloud my judgment of the lemon Mango’s merits.

Very smoky over bearing flavor. I’m not a fan, but I like the slightly sweet and subtle greens.

Alas, this doesn’t make such a great iced tea mixed with Khumbu Green. I had hoped that the sharpness of this one would mix with the earthiness of that one, but instead they fought it out unhappily. Either one alone is much better than this mix….