Christina / BooksandTea Send Message

I got this as part of Tea at Sea’s free sample promotion in the Steepster discussions area.

Packaging/Instructions: The sample came in a small zip-seal bag with the brewing instructions included on a label attached with a string. According to them, it should be brewed at 85°C, but I did it a bit lower for about 3 minutes.

Dry leaf: The dry leaf looks like little dark green pellets, all curled and twisted up. The smell of the dry leaf is strongly vegetal – I noticed seaweed the most, but I do get why others would smell corn silk.

Liquor: The liquor is a clear yellow-green, and smells less seaweed-y and more oolong-y than the dry leaf. This is borne out when I taste it – it reminds me a lot of the lightly-roasted coconut oolong I had yesterday. Not very astringent, but I can detect a floral hint underneath. Orchid perhaps?

Verdict: This is nice, but I think I prefer my green teas a bit stronger. This is a bit too light for me.

EDIT: I’ve steeped this three times now. The third infusion was a bit hotter and ran a bit longer to get more tea out of the leaf. So far, I like the depth of the third infusion best – it developed a sweet/savoury flavour reminiscent of squash.

I received this as part of a Christmas gift from a neighbour, and all of the other teas that came with it have either been sipped down or given away. So here we go:

Packaging/Instructions: It came in the typical red-orange zip-seal bag that Teavana ships all of its teas in.

Dry leaf: It looks like a salt-and-pepper mix of white chocolate chunks, chocolate bits, and rooibos leaves. The rooibos was by far the least visible component. The smell was absolutely heavenly – it smelled like Bailey’s Irish Cream mixed with mint!

Liquor: I steeped this for about 6 minutes, and the result was nothing special. There’s a definite mintinesss in the aftertaste, but nothing much going on in the cup itself. Unfortunately, as the aftertaste lingers, it turns out sour and musty – which I think is due to the white chocolate bits. The liquid is dark reddish-orange like regular rooibos, but there’s not much of that pine-y rooibos flavour that I notice. In general, this tasted quite weak, and I was surprised by the lack of sweetness, considering the white chocolate and carob bits.

Verdict: Unimpressive. I may have underleafed so I’ll try it a second time, but if it still doesn’t work I’ll see about giving it away.

Backlog review:

I brewed a it a second time last night and the steep turned out much better. I deliberately underleafed and understeeped the brew according to the directions on the label (probably about half the leaf and half the time) and this turned out to be much more palatable. Still extremely lemony, but at least it’s not a huge wall of fake lemon taste like last time.

This tea darkens a lot as it’s exposed to air. At first it was a nice deep yellow, and then it became goldenrod then brown. Didn’t affect the taste any.

I think this would be a good base for an iced tea. Looking forward to trying it out in the summer time mixed with a strawberry green, or spearmint (or both!).

The past few times I brewed this, I thought it tasted really sharp and harsh – almost heartburn inducing. This made me want to toss the whole mix out, since I still have a whole bunch of the two unblended varieties of mint, and I thought the harshness came from mixing them together.

Then I checked the label for each type of mint and realized I’d been oversteeping by at least TWICE the recommended length of time. >_<

So I’ve learned my lesson: try and keep it to a minute, tops. This time it’s been much better, though I did make sure to add a spoonful of honey.

This is the second tea-infused chocolate I tried after DT’s White Chocolate Matcha Matsu (blech), and I like this one a lot more.

That said, I’m not getting much of the Hot Lips tea flavour here. I can smell cinnamon when I hold the chocolate square up to my nose, but I don’t taste very much cinnamon when I eat it. The most dominant taste is the dark chocolate, which is rich and creamy (as it should be). I can’t taste the tea leaves at all, though I can certainly feel the texture that the ground-up leaves add to the chocolate (somewhat gritty, but not unpleasantly so). There’s a bit of a green tea flavour in the aftertaste. There’s also a hint of spiciness, but just the slightest tinge.

All told, this is a nice rich dark chocolate, but I wouldn’t have guessed it to have any special flavouring if I didn’t know it was from David’s.

I’ve tasted this one before, and I’m still pretty okay with it, but the more I try it, the more I realize that this isn’t the green-tea/mint blend for me. There’s something about the green tea base of this blend that isn’t working for me – it’s got kind of a skunky note to it.

Anyways, I’m trying to get to the bottom of this package. I’m brewing it as directed on the label, with the water and leaf amounts scaled accordingly:
- 24 oz of water (in my trusty Bubble Teapot from David’s)
- water temp approx 175 °F
- 4.5 tsp of leaf
- 2 minute steep

The liquor is nice and orange and the first sip is really minty, with a long mint aftertaste. But there’s just that middle base of rather uninspiring green getting in the way.

Sipdown!

That’s right, I finally finished off the 2 oz that I got at Christmas time. Teavana no longer stocks this tea (I’m guessing it was a holiday-only special), which means that I can’t restock this.

The first few times I brewed this tea, there were huge chunks of fruit and cinnamon sticks. Since this is the bottom of the bag, it’s got fewer chunks, and much more rooibos leaf. I never considered myself a fan of rooibos before, since my previous experiences all made it taste pine-y and resiny, but this brew might just make me a fan, since it’s well balanced out with the cinnamon and fruit that remain.

I steeped this twice, and added a spoonful of honey to each steep. The first steep was still the strongest. Nice dark orange liquor both times, with a very cinnamon-heavy scent.

Long story short: this tea is pretty good. However, I’m glad I have one less blend in my cupboard.

I just got this in the mail today, and was looking forward to trying it out.

Holy crap this thing is LEMONY. As in, it’s so one-note it’s almost without nuance.

The dry leaves smelled like lemon pledge when I opened the container. Kapow! While these reviews prepared me for a mental reaction of “wow, this is really lemony”, I wasn’t expecting the “holy crap, this is the Great Wall of Lemon being built brick by brick” experience I actually had.

Based on the label, I deliberately underleafed and understeeped the brew: 24 oz of water with 3 tsp of dried leaf for less than 4 minutes. Despite this, the tea is still ludicrously lemony, and the lemon Pledge effect is still there. I added a spoonful of honey to the pot to tone things down and that has helped, but this is still damned lemony.

I’m going to try experimenting with this one, but I do hope that I’ll be able to brew something enjoyable with it. Perhaps a mix of this with mint would be nice.

I’m not a fan of white chocolate even at the best of times, so my opinion about this chocolate bar is going to be very biased. That said: this flavour, to me, is best treated as an experiment.

The mix between the white chocolate and matcha is pretty good, as both are evident – or at least they were to me. My mother, who is not a tea drinker and has no experience with matcha, didn’t taste anything besides white chocolate because she didn’t know what to look for.

However, just because you can taste both doesn’t mean that they they taste well together. The sweetness of the white chocolate doesn’t complement the flavour of the matcha at all. The matcha has a salty taste to it, and even reminded me of roasted seaweed on the back of my tongue. The white chocolate is just sweet and bland. Together, they don’t work well at all.

So, bottom line: I tried it just to say I did, but didn’t like it. Blech.

I’ve been brewing this a little bit in the past week to finish off the 2-oz package I got for Christmas. The first time I tried it around Christmastime, I found it far too sour/fruity.

I think the first brew was all fruit chunks. Since then, my subsequent attempts to make this have tasted much more cinnamon-y. This is better if you overleaf, though, since the chunks are so large that trying to stick to the recommended serving size is kind of a waste.

It appears that this tea has been discontinued, as it’s no longer on the Teavana site. That’s sad, but I won’t miss this tea too terribly when it’s gone, as if I want apple cider, I’ll just buy apple cider.