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I recently made an order from What-Cha to try out their rose and Earl Grey oolongs, and he threw in a sample of this tea. I was curious about it, so I am glad to be able to try it!

As soon as the water hit the leaves I smelled very distinct sticky rice aromas. The combination of the butteriness and creaminess from the Jin Xuan oolong and the rice flavors reminds me of a sticky rice made with sweetened condensed milk. Rich, tasty, with a hint of that green oolong in the background just to remind you of what you are drinking. I really like this one! May be tempted to get a quantity on a future order.

This one I threw into my order of samples because I couldn’t not! Almond oolong, oh yeah. And yeah, this one is fab. Tons and tons of almond flavor, like amaretto or marzipan. Yum. I’ve mostly had almond black teas, and I think the oolong base works well with it. It supports without overtaking it, and the almond brings out the buttery-ness in the oolong. I prefer it to the roasted oolong base of the Fauchon 2013 Sweet Almond and Orange in part because I don’t need the roastiness all the time. I think this would be awesome combined with a rose oolong, which is also on my list of oolongs that need replacing, since DF seems to not be carrying Rose de Mai anymore. If only My Green Teapot had a rose oolong too!

Naivetea replacement trial #2. It is convient that My Green Teapot carries both passion fruit and lychee green oolongs, I like one-stop shopping.

Like the passion fruit oolong, this one is quite similar to the old Naivetea offerings, and I think it will make a good replacement. Lots of lychee flavor, and a nice floral oolong base. It tastes fresh and juicy, not artificial. There is some notes of honey but I think that is left over on my infuser from when I had Fauchon’s Madeline tea and obviously didn’t clean well enough. It works, though, and it gives me ideas for future oolong blending!

The bottoms of the tins of my Naivetea Passion Fruit and Lychee oolongs are getting distressingly close, so I am on the hunt for replacements. I discovered this tea company offers both passion fruit and lychee, so I ordered samples of both. I like that this company appears to get their teas direct from Taiwan, which is how Naivetea used to do it.

The aroma on this is super promising. Lots and lots of juicy passion fruit. The single-serve sample was perhaps a bit more leaf than I would usually use, so I dropped the steep time a bit, and it came out well. Any extra-vegetalness I am attributing to too much leaf, but even so there isn’t much. This may be the tea I am looking for: lots of passion fruit, lots of floral green oolong. It seems perhaps a bit less naturally sweet than the Naivetea, but that may be down to over-leafing. This is probably enough to get me to order a larger amount and then do a side-by-side with the Naivetea. Promising!

Looking through my cupboard I was shocked that I had never reviewed this one. It is one of my new favorites! Rectifying that now.

This tea, amazingly, fills the hole left by the dear, departed Bergamot Rose Laoshan Black from Verdant, since they no longer blend their teas. No, the base tea isn’t as good as Laoshan Black, but it is distinctly different than DF’s normal black tea bases and does seem to be a high quality Chinese black with long wiry leaves. It is so fluffy it didn’t fit in one of my standard 100g tins that all other DF teas fit in, I had to use an extra large tin. The flavors are chocolate, rose, and bergamot, which is pretty much heaven for me. In the end, this tea may be BETTER than BRLB because I taste more of the bergamot and rose, which is always something I had problems with. There is really not much more I could ask of this tea, and I hope they never stop carrying it.

Now it’s time to catch up on some older purchases that I have somehow never logged.

This one suspiciously looks like it has darjeeling in it, what with the greenish leaves even though the ingredients are listed as black tea only. I suspect the “Indian black tea” is a darjeeling, which is really not my favorite, BUT this one isn’t so bad. I brewed it cool and the darjeeling is few and far between enough to not be astringent.

This is a nice citrusy tea with lots of grapefruit flavor along with some other lemon/lime/orange notes. It’s a nice tea, although not overwhelmingly awesome. Tasty, but I’m not reaching for it often. I need to remember that it is not as finicky as it might seem with the darjeeling.

The final tea of my recent acquisitions. This tea has been out for a while but the formula has apparently changed: it used to be a black/green blend, but now it is a black/white blend. I am much more interested in a black/white blend because I actually enjoy white tea brewed at high temps (not so with green tea), so I decided to pick it up. It is supposed to be a red fruits and honey blend.

Dry, you really smell the red fruits, and that holds into the steeped tea. I get a bit of honey, but the red fruits are dominant. This is like a mellower Le Bonheur (which has some lemon to brighten up the red fruits). What really surprised me is that I can definitely taste the white tea. There didn’t seem like there was a lot of white tea leaves in the scoop I put in my steeping basket, but there was apparently enough to make a difference. I get a bit of hay notes that remind me of a bai mu dan. Quite tasty, and robust to high steeping temps.

Yet another new Fauchon blend! This one is another red fruits blend, this time with rose and apparently black pepper (!). In the dry leaf it smells like red fruits and I do get the floral rose. Once it is steeped there is an interesting spicy note in the scent that must be the black pepper.

The flavor is slighly more subtle red fruits than Le Bonheur or the 2017 Edition, but still definitely present. The black pepper gives it a pleasant kick without being super overwhelming. I would take more rose! I can barely taste it over the black pepper. This one is tasty but it wouldn’t be a must-restock.

The Fauchon limited edition 2017 tea is apparently red fruits and chocolate. UM, YES. My favorites. The dry tea smells like red fruits and chocolate, natch. Perhaps more fruity than chocolatey. The chocolate certainly comes out in the steeped tea, though. This is Le Bonheur! with chocolate, pretty much. Super delicious. Fruity and chocolatey. Not sad I picked up two other red fruits blends this time.

Another new acquisition. Fauchon recently shortened the name of this tea (and BTW, can I say how much I love the new tins? They are tall cylinders and they have the most beautiful designs), but the recipe seems to be the same. This was released a while ago at the same time as their other “gourmand” series (raspberry macaron, chocolate eclair, creme caramel) but even though I got the rest I skipped this one. I corrected that this time!

Dry, the tea smells like honey but also a little incense-y, which was surprising. Or perhaps it’s just such an intense honey scent. It reminds me a bit of the frankincense in some of the old Verdant Tea blends. The base tea seems to be an unroasted tieguanyin-ish oolong, yay! The incense smell calmed down after steeping, although it was still quite strong in honey scent.

The flavor is super intense honey. Almost an herbal honey. I like it a lot! I think some of the cookie/cakey flavors do come through in the aftertaste. Glad I finally picked this one up, it is totally worth it.