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It’s mint and lemon verbena mixed together, a nice herbal blend hot or cold. What more is there to say?

The dry tea leaves are nicely rolled and dark green with a floral and milky creamy (not buttery) scent. The leaves fully unroll into huge dark green and still carry that floral milky creamy scent but I’m also picking up a plum scent on the wet leaves. This tea tastes delicious, it’s floral and creamy but not buttery like a Ti Quan Yin. It also doesn’t have that large and long lasting mouth-feel or buttery aftertaste that a Ti Quan Yin has, and I like it even more because of this. After a few steeps the floral notes fade a bit and the creaminess becomes stronger. The mouth-feel and buttery aftertaste become more apparent too the more it’s steeped, but it’s still not nearly as strong as I find Ti Quan Yin to be. This is a green oolong I found to be quite delicious and more enjoyable than a Ti Quan Yin.

Another sample I had bought a while ago. I kind of went overboard when I was buying samples from them, so now I’m slowly going through them.

The leaves are curled like a Bi Lo Chun but lighter and with curled buds. The dry leaves smell very fresh and crisp with a hay note to it. It reminds me dry leaves in the fall. The wet leaves are slightly broken, not too bad and the opened fully on the first steep. It looks a lot like a green tea and I’m picking up some sort of fruit scent, not like a berry, more like a peach or plum. I’m surprised this is a white tea, I would’ve guessed it was green had I tested it blind. The taste is like green tea and white tea had a love child. It has hay notes, buttery notes, floral notes, vegetal like asparagus notes and still has a crispness to it. This is good!

The second steep is a little bitter, I may have overdone the steeping time. The first one was 3 minutes, the second was 5 minutes, but it’s what the package says, so that’s what I did. Next time second steep will be shorter. Anyway, the second steep even though a little bitter keeps all the notes, is much more buttery and is leaving an astringent aftertaste that I blame on the too long of a steep. Overall good tea!

Bright green matcha powder covering flat, dark green leaves. The leaves are broken, badly. It almost looks as if I opened a tea bag and dumped the contents. Dry is smells very sweet and grassy, same with the wet leaves and infusion. The leaves, even badly broken, did open fully on the first steep. The liquior was a very bright and vibrant green. Taste was very sweet from the matcha, grassy from the sencha and had an astringent/bitter aftertaste on the tip of my tongue. I know that sounds weird, but that’s what I was getting and I’m assuming that the bitterness was from the leaves being so broken. Even though it was bitter the smoothness of the matcha balanced it out and made it pleasant. The second steep though had lost most of the smooth sweetness, I guess since the matcha went out into the first infusion. Unfortunately because there was no more sweetness the bitterness was much stronger almost making it undrinkable. I know I didn’t oversteep it, temp was 160-165 and the first brew was 10-15 seconds, the second was 15-20 seconds. Maybe i should’ve added more matcha from my stash, but I wanted to try it without doing anything to it first. Maybe I’ll buy my own sencha and add matcha too it since the first steep was really good.

This started out like a typical run-of-the-mill green tea, mellow, vegetal, nothing special about it. Dry smell: mellow vegetal. Wet leaves smell: strong vegetal. After brewing it and taking a sip: mellow and vegetal. I didn’t pick up any of the orchid notes. But when I swallowed I got this interesting taste, seaweed. It was mellow and light, but it was there. I sniffed the cup and I can smell something slightly salty. I take another sip, vegetal, and slightly salty. Interesting. There more I drank and kept looking for the seaweed notes the more I tasted it and liked it. It never did become strong but it was there and i liked it. It was like finding a toy in the cereal box when you’re not expecting one.

I’ve had this hot before and despised it. It tasted like hot cough syrup. But since it’s getting warmer I’ve been playing with my flavored teas, making them iced. So, in my hopefulness to make this one drinkable, since I still have over half the tin, I cold brewed three sachets in 1 quart of water, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, and lots of ice cubes. This tea is really sweet, and iced it tastes great. I’m really glad I gave this tea a try iced, it doesn’t have that cough syrup taste to it at all and now I have confidence that I will use all the sachets without feeling like I’m a sick 5 year-old!

I’m not a big fan of roasted oolongs but this was a free sample with my package and I’m in the sampling mood today if no one’s been able to tell :) The dry leaves of this are very dark, typical of roasted oolongs and it contains what looks like dried apricot shavings. Its dry smell is slightly smokey and earthy with apricot. I’m picking up what smells like wet stones, that fresh cold stream moving over a bunch of stones and rocks without moss or algae smell, it’s quite nice. Wet, the leaves lose the apricot smell but everything else stays there, only more pronounced. The infusion is a medium brown color and tastes like grilled apricot, the wet stones, and definitely roasty. The apricot flavors are much lighter than what I was expecting, the oolong takes center stage here, the apricot being a supporting role. As I said, I don’t care for roasted oolongs, but this is a good flavored one, especially if you like to taste more of the tea base than the flavors.

I should’ve known better when I read that it’s from Darjeeling area. I don’t care for tea from that area or from Ceylon. But I decided to give it a try regardless. The dry leaves are mostly dark green, there are some lighter green and some brown leaves in there. The smell reminds me of when I worked on a farm, of not quite dried out hay, like a blend of green and black teas. The wet leaves smells like tobacco to me. My dad used to roll his own cigarettes and that’s what I was getting with this tea. The infusion color was a light brown and smelled vegetal, earthy, malty and a hint of a floral note in there. I don’t care for black tea, but I’ve had enough to know that this green tea is from the Darjeeling area. Again, I don’t know why I got this tea, good thing it was only a sample, but I don’t care for this at all and I’m not rating it because I should’ve known better. Perhaps I was thinking of expanding my tastes or something, but I will be sticking with Chinese greens with a Japanese green thrown in there for fun.

I’m surprised that there are quite a few Octavia Teas not in the database here. So, I’m going to keep adding them as I try out my samples.
The dry leaves are small, dark green, curled and smells like grass that is slightly earthy and slightly sweet. The wet leaves are grassy and very vegetal smelling. The infusion is the typically light color of green teas, and again smells grassy but this time I’m picking up the flower notes…just barely. The taste at first seems like an unremarkable grassy green tea. I swish it in my mouth and I can start to taste the flower notes and I get a vegetal aftertaste, it’s slowly gaining character. As the tea is cooling the notes are becoming more pronounced: grassy, vegetal, with a hint of flowers. Pretty good green tea, I like it.