69 Tasting Notes

87

I took advice from earlier and used stright-up boiling water. My mug is almost too hot to touch, but I can certainly smell the peppercorns, pistachios and almonds this time around. I quite like it. Won’t be able to touch my lips to it for a few more minutes, but so far it’s even better than I remember.
The fruitiness hits you at the sides of the tongue, and the pepperiness kind of dances along the edges of the middle and launches spikes into your soft palate. It’s reeeeally nice. I get the nuttiness more as a kind of matte aftertaste than an actual taste, which is disappointing after the lovely smell.
I keep not choosing this tea whenever I make tea, and I don’t know why. It’s lovely! (And will hopefully stop me from falling asleep while I’m working late into the night!)

Preparation
Boiling 4 min, 45 sec
Michelle Butler Hallett

I really like this blend, and, like you, don’t make it nearly often enough. The apples especially cheer me.

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60

Mmmmmm, it smells like honey! And the forest. There’s a beautiful woodland quality to the smell Tazo Awake tea. Like I should be drinking it on the front porch of a log cabin, wearing a hand-knit toque, scarf, mittens and a big flannel coat, watching the little snows drift silently to the forest floor. I think I might have used too much water, because it’s a little on the light side, but it still smells delicious. It has a bit of sharpness to the taste (which I’ll attribute to the age of the tea itself*), but plenty of that down-homey black tea taste that I like. Can’t describe it, other than Black Tea.
Tasty! (But not ultra tasty. A good go-to tea.)
*Full disclosure: I HAVE the full leaf tea, but don’t care for it. I used the crumbly old tea bags that they used to have at Starbucks (making this tea a little on the old side as well, perhaps.)

After Red Rose, Awake has always been my favourite.

Preparation
205 °F / 96 °C 4 min, 0 sec

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I steeped it on the low end of the recommended time, because I’m not a big fan of Earl Grey (full disclosure), but I wanted something different for breakfast.
I popped in some milk and sugar, because — again — not an Earl Grey fan, and was disappointed when, instead of lavender and bergamot, I got a dominant smell of burning paint.
What? Burning paint?? This is going to be so yummy….
Um…
The taste is pretty inoffensive. I get a little bit more of that flowery herbiness on my tongue than in my nose, which is unusual.
Just tastes like airplane tea to me.
Oh well.

Preparation
205 °F / 96 °C 4 min, 0 sec

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50
drank Berry Up by DAVIDsTEA
69 tasting notes

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50
drank Berry Up by DAVIDsTEA
69 tasting notes

Actual rating of 60%. I can’t move the slider on my ipod…
Lovely candy apple red colour; great oily swirls. Smells very much like blueberries, cherries & raspberries. Disappointing mouthfeel. It’s like it leapfrogs my tongue and heads straight for my throat. There is a slight lingering juiciness, however. The taste is nice, but I can’t pick out a single flavour. Kind of a fruit punch quality.
The kind of tea you’d serve at a picnic princess tea party. Kids would probably love it. I’m not so convinced.

Preparation
200 °F / 93 °C 6 min, 0 sec

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70
drank Jumpy Monkey by DAVIDsTEA
69 tasting notes

I’ll admit, I chomped down a bag of Oreo Thinsations while this tea was steeping, so my palate may be compromised (with crunchy chocolatey goodness…)
You can really smell that maté strawiness coming through, as well as the coffee. It’s like you can’t really expect what it’ll taste like by the smell. Will it taste like coffee? Like maté? (I am not a maté drinker, by the way. I do not care for the taste. This tea came in the Power teas three-pack at David’s Tea, which was the first thing I bought from them.) It does smell sweet, but — having tried this tea before — I’ve dumped in a healthy amount of whole milk and granulated sugar, so that may be helping.
There were no actual beans or chunks of cocoa in my teaball while I was steeping.
It is a very pale tea, with almost more of a puce tinge than the traditional brown I think of when I think tea. Lovely, lovely oily drops flowing on the top and sitting on the rim of my mug where the tea sloshed a little bit while I was carrying it down to the basement.
Mouthfeel is awful at first. Thin and almost tinny. But then it billows up and hurtles itself down your throat as a very robust entity. A strange transition. A characteristic of the maté? Maybe.
The taste is very, very full. I can taste the chocolate (white and cocoa), the faint kiss of coffee, and the sweetgrass maté.
When I was in my early teens, I went and spent a week with my friends (one of whom is a fairly accomplished local performing artist, one of whom works for the socialist government, and one of whom I have lost touch with entirely), and we stayed near a house in a camping trailer. I had never been in a camping trailer, and slept poorly. We all did.
But it was a full moon, and we were all feeling rather spiritual, so we left the camping trailer, gathered sweetgrass, and made it into dolls sitting around a burnt-out campfire under the mostly full moon.
I kind of get that feeling from this tea.

Preparation
200 °F / 93 °C 4 min, 30 sec
Michelle Butler Hallett

I love this one in a gourd, sipped through a bombilla. Much more concentrated, and quite potent.

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65

Steeped nice and dark thanks to the beetroot, but I need a finer mesh than the ball I used. There are little floaties and swirls of secret tea stuff throughout my mug. It has spectacular little oil drops on the top. The ingredients list (Apple pieces, carrot flakes, dried watermelon flakes, wild strawberry leaves, dried honeydew melon, beetroot pieces, flavouring) doesn’t open my eyes as to what they’re from, but I do like them.
Smell is very fruity. I don’t know that I’d pick “melon” out as the base behind that fruit based on the smell. Smells more like a soap or a bath product that you’d smell and say, “Oh, I’d like to eat that!” than a tea you actually intend to drink.
The weight of the tea is spectacular. It comes in like cream, but is evasive against the surfaces of your mouth like mercury on linoleum. But once you swallow it, there’s a drenching cool juiciness left behind. I quite like it.
The taste is very nice as well. I sprinkled in my sugar before tasting, as I am wont to do. I don’t think I’d suger it up next time. You can really get the watermelon and honeydew in the flavour.
This doesn’t seem like a tea to me, though. More like a treat in the summer after the sun has gone down, to help keep the sunshiney warmth inside.

Preparation
200 °F / 93 °C 7 min, 0 sec

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70

Oh em gee, it is the very verge of summer in my basement!
The smell alone makes me want to get up and dance. I want to play in the puddles. I want to buy a popcicle from a truck playing horrible cartoonish music. I want to pick little wildflowers. I want to rake the winter out of my lawn, put down some chairs, take this tea outside and sit and enjoy the light breezes that generally accompany the end of spring.
What a great smell!
(It could be because I bought this tea around this time of year…?)
I don’t know that I necessarily get blueberry out of the smell, but I absolutely get the blackberry.
I’m not a massive fan of the weightlessness of this tea, but the flavour is decent.
Kind of dances along the tongue and then right down your throat. Doesn’t stick around to tell you its story. Sweet, but not terribly so. (I’m drinking this one au natural, because I can’t stand to milk or sweeten green teas.) And, because the tea is OLD (like maybe two years old?), it has a last-second kick to the back of my tongue that I don’t like at all.
But that’s not the fault of the tea by any stretch.
Tasty. Better than the bunk hot chocolate I though I’d wanted.
(Turns out I didn’t. But that didn’t stop me from drinking it or the 30-odd mini marshmallows I threw in it…)

ETA: I’ve changed my mind about the weightlessness. It adds a LOT of the freshness to this tea. Even though I’m drinking it hot, the weigtlessness combines with the slight fruit and bitter-less green tea to give it an almost cooling sensation. Very unique, and makes it feel even more like summer. I’ve added 5 points to my rating because of it.

Preparation
200 °F / 93 °C 6 min, 0 sec

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50

And I had such high expectations for this tea today!
I chose it specifically because it’s cold out. I put it in a fancy new mug that my dad gave to me that looks like something a Hobbit would use. I splashed in a little whole milk and stirred in my usual lemon honey.
But when I sipped it, I was entirely uninspired.
Usually this is my favourite chai. But today it’s like faintly spiced water.
SO SAD!
No body at all. It’s got a weight less than water.
Hardly any smell.
Almost zero spiciness…
Well, poop.
I’ll drink it, but I won’t love it this time.

Preparation
Boiling 4 min, 30 sec
Michelle Butler Hallett

I’m surprised, and sorry. I had this at — oh, hang on, I had two teabags in a large mug at Starbucks, that’s why I liked it so much. Never mind.

Michelle Butler Hallett

Such a pricey tea should not require two bags to make it drinkable and chai-licious.

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Bio

I’m a work-at-home mum. Seeing as how I work in the basement at the computer and am too lazy to brew myself a cup of coffee each day, tea has become my drink-of-choice.

Location

Winnipeg, Manitoba

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