Flyawaybirdie select Send Message

My coworker and I had an interesting conversation. I told him he didn’t appreciate good tea. He pretty much only drinks it for the caffeine value, he’s turned down nice green tea when I’ve offered ‘because it probably doesn’t have enough caffeine’. I’ve seen him dump three Lipton tea bags in a 8oz cup and leave it there for 15 min before drinking it. Shudder He then proclaimed that he loves tea sooo much that he drinks more tea than an Asian. (Really?) When I asked how much that was he said about 4 mugs/day. I laughed and then told him to come back when he got that up to 5-6 pots of tea a day at least. Silly man. He would probably be overwhelmed by all the tea goodness being enjoyed by those on Steepster. I consider myself a moderate tea person, especially after seeing how much tea all you people enjoy in a day, but four mugs feels like hardly any at all.

This evening my friends were supposed to drive down for a sleepover, but have been delayed. I felt like I needed something sweet smelling because I haven’t really eaten much today, and I can’t because I’m fasting. I’m soo happy I didn’t count tea into that.

Hugs and Kisses smells like a warm almond cookie. Some almond cookies are a little bit almond and mostly other stuff, but when I make almond cookies I tend to put 2-3x the asked for almond extract. I’m a big big fan. Of course my cookies don’t always come out looking pretty, but they taste nice (to me). My last batch of thumbprints ended up looking like fried eggs.

It’s almond cookie smell with a roundness imparted by cocoa, but not with nearly the sweetness that chocolate can add. I don’t get much floral, and I’m glad it melds soo well. It’s a nice sleepy tea.

I like that I can’t taste the rooibios as much, I don’t think I’m much of a fan, but I do get that rooibios clean mouth feel, like refreshing. It doesn’t taste medicinal like other rooibios I’ve tried though. More lends a nice after-tea mouth feel, but doesn’t intrude too much on the other flavors. I can see some people liking that, and some people wanting more rooibios.

It’s a pot and dainty tea cups type of night. Hopefully I can stay awake long enough to receive my friends, if not, I’m sure they’ll wake me up.

This one today because I was feeling super duper lazy. This is a good one I fall back on when I’m feeling lazy. Mostly lazy at least. I went through my tea box and finally added all those little samples to my cupboard, so that exploded. Still need to put the ones from MissB into the cupboard too. I did finally get the haircut I’ve been wanting for weeks. Chopped five inches off, it feels soo nice to be without split ends and knots.

Ahem- the tea is nice and roasty, it’s the tea I like when I feel hungry-ish but don’t feel like making/eating actual food. Like I said- lazy. I did have dinner eventually though.

I got this one through my mystery packet from MissB. I opened my mailbox today not expecting anything, but there was this cute little packet and the inside of the mail box was nicely fragrant. I’m sure my neighbor thinks I’m nuts because I was sniffing the envelope and grinning like a loon.
Soo.. this is the first one I picked out of the bunch. One was because it’s in a little clear envelope, and it JUST has enough for my very first sipdown! Woohoo! It really is only enough for a mug, but my ceramic teapot is barely larger than that. I felt like it was a nice teapot+teacups+saucers kind of day.
What was left in the baggie was looked like green leaves mixed with black leaves… the pieces are small and there was alot of dust. The dust escaped the basket filter into the pot and then into my little tea cup. Oddly this gives me a sense of nostalgia?
The dry smell is chocolately, but the brew smells like dark incense. Very intriguing. It’s not like the little yellow incense sticks you buy at the asian grocery, nor is it that incense like at the ball they carry during Mass, but I can’t really describe it as anything else. I suppose it smells kinda woody but burnt. As the smell wafts around the room though it starts smelling more and more like roasted dark chocolate.
The taste is incense to me, which is kind of weird, but after you swallow, the back of the throat taste is clean chocolate. Soo good!
The liquor is a mahogany color. You don’t get as much incense smell/taste as the cup cools down, but it doesn’t smell much like chocolate either. Still like wood. EDIT: After reading some of the other reviews, someone mentioned tobacco, and I think that’s it. It’s like cigarettes. I’m not around alot of smokers ever, but it’s definitely that type of smokey.
The mouthfeel is nice, not too dry and not too rich either. Like drinking nice warm water.
I like it, I kind of wish I had some more to play with it a bit, but I’ve got soo much new tea to try! Either way I’m happy.

I put this one in the big thermos to take with me to work today. I couldn’t find the little one I usually bring with me, my co-workers were amused at the size of today’s thermos.

I swear this one is impossible to oversteep- which makes it good for the larger thermos. It was literally brewing all day, and when I got my first cup about 4 hrs later, no bitter tannins to be had. I did however finally find that coconut bakery aroma that everyone else was talking about. The liquor at 4 hrs was a lovely clear maple type of color. It darkened a bit throughout the day, but still never gave off an oversteeped taste.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, and I’m pretty sure the wrongness is on my end and not the tea’s fault.

The dry smell: Coconut milk- the kind we like to use for Vietnamese desserts or curry, with no added sugar. Yum. The leaves were quite large and fluffy, which made me use heaping teaspoons each time. It kind of made me wish for a weighed measurement recommendation, but then again I haven’t a scale so that would not have helped me much anyways.
The brew aroma: Roasted coconut. What? Still very exciting but it’s interesting how that takes a turn. Not aged roasted coconut though, like very young roasted coconut that’s been toasted for a little bit. If you took coconut flesh or juice from a young coconut (still in the wood) and stuck it in a convection oven to make coconut chips. I’m not sure where the cakey smell is supposed to come into play. It definitely doesn’t have that heavy coconut macaroons or even maracrons smell that I associate bakery coconut with. It doesn’t have that coconut jelly cake smell… which is layered flavors of agar if you’re not familiar with it. The aroma does become more creamy as it cools, but oddly the creamy that accompanies adding dairy cream/milk or creamer to your tea and not the coconut milk type creamy.

The base smells/tastes like a green oolong. It’s a beautiful whole leaf that creates a light green liquor. It’s also very very light in flavor. Despite how light the flavor is, it doesn’t veer into green, despite not being a roasted oolong. The flavor is fresh light and I would say vegetal? It goes well with the coconut aroma, which doesn’t translate to the taste very much at all. It’s very much a dual experience, where the tea is giving off the aroma of a young but creamy coconut, veering on the side of coconut juice, but the taste and mouth feel is such a light oolong that it’s bordering on warm oolong tinted water. I wondered at the fact that it didn’t change much though from steep to steep.

Much better in a small teacup. The large mug experience was lacking.

Maybe I’m too used to dark oolongs. I was expecting a much more robust and full flavor out of this one, but I’m not yet terribly disappointed. What I’m mostly surprised at is that I brewed at least four or five Ingenuitea ‘pots’ today- I went through my kettle’s 3L of water, I know that much, at least two of which were after 8pm, and I don’t feel very caffeinated at all. Slightly sleepy even.

I’ve not been enjoying alot of teas lately, goodness knows why, unless it’s a particularly full or heady brew, or dripping with honey. Take this review with a grain of salt.

This is a backlog, since I haven’t made any notes in the past few days.

This one is mixed 1:1 by weight with Golden Monkey. Which is a shame because Golden Monkey is so fragrant on it’s own, but for some reason the bag of GM ended up in the tin with this oolong and by the time I remembered/got back to it, the GM smelled like fruitiness, so I gave up and dumped the bag into the tin and shook it up.

I think that makes the tea a little less ‘fruit juice’ than it otherwise would be, but I rather prefer it that way. It’s rather nice hot, and OK iced, sweetened or not. It’s also fairly expensive for what it is. I’ll try to finish it out, I now have 4oz worth of the mix, but probably wouldn’t repurchase, overall including the tin, it cost…. too much. I could have gotten wayy more tea for that price elsewhere, tins included.

On that note- how are these overpriced tins supposed to be reusable? The tea smells soo strongly when dry, I can’t imagine putting anything but the same type of tea back in.

It’s beautiful. What else to say? Tehe… I made a whole pot of it. I’ll probably be up to like 3am, but NO REGRETS.

I kept putting trying this one off because I actually bought a full 2oz without trying it first based on recs, BUT had been disappointed in the other samples I’d bought at the same time. I’ve been going through Adagio’s Valentines regularly recently, but after a whole weekend of it, I wanted something a bit richer in the tea taste, but wasn’t in the mood for a green.

One of Teajo’s big selling points I think is that they take care to make their flavored blends with a nice base. I definitely get that with this one. While it’s olfactory appeal is wonderful- very chocolatey and berry and tea-y, the tea taste and mouth feel is not at all disappointing, and this one had alot to stand up to because I had come from finishing McD’s strawberry covered frappe. For me, coming from something like a frappe- espresso+creaminess+sugar and not being disappointed by a flavored tea is wonderful.

Not only for the olfactory side, also the rich mouth feel from the creaminess of the frappe wasn’t harshly cut like some teas can do. The mouth feel was rich and full, and at first mingled nicely with the leftover richness of the dairy and yet left the mouth with nice clean tea feel after without the dry feeling you can get sometimes. (I have no idea if this paragraph made any since. It’s soo difficult to describe!)

I’m soo incredibly glad I didn’t get a horribly synthetic raspberry flavor with this, I generally hate raspberry flavored/scented things for that reason, no one gets it right…. and consequently I had developed an aversion to the fruit even because in my head it was always soo awful- another reason I had hesitated on this tea. The raspberry flavor to this one is warm and not too sweet. Even as not a fan of raspberries in general, I can get behind this tea.

Overall, it’s wonderful. A side benefit is that it’s organic if you’re one to care about those things. The way it’s set up is that it’s flavor profile is similar to Adagio’s valentines, but the tea base and flavor blending is like 6x better. I love it. However because Valentines is similar enough in profile and offered at a lower price point, I’ll probably keep that one in regular rotation, while I hoard this one. It’ll be a special occasion tea or a ‘I need a nice tea to cheer me up’ type of event… At least until I get to the point where I’m spoiled enough by nice tea I won’t even bother with Adagio anymore. This Teajo’s creation is definitely on that next level.

This tea gets a happy face. =D