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This is really one of my favorite teas. I find that it tastes lovely in the morning or evening and each time I drink it I pick up different notes. The taste starts with a wonderful caramel mellowness and then you pick up bits of apple and kiwi crispness around the edges. This tea tastes equally lovely with slightly less or more brewing time and is tasty iced too.

Teavana’s sales methods are not my favorite and the full price is quite over the top, considering you can find other lower priced Golden Monkey teas or high quality black teas. Look for it on sale and send your significant other in like I did. :)

So this was a nice serviceable Jasmine at a reasonable price, but I didn’t love it to pieces. I was looking to reproduce a lovely Jasmine that I had recently at a local Thai restaurant and this wasn’t quite as good as that. You definitely get the lovely Jasmine top note scents and the standard Jasmine tea mouth feel, but I was hoping it would be a bit more robust and complex. Longer brewing with more leaves helped a bit, but still wasn’t quite there. A good standard Jasmine, just nothing super special.

This was a lovely mild oolong with a wonderful malted character. I drank it quite fast and just loved the mouth-feel and the drinkability. There was something very smooth and wonderful about it though I typically like a bit of fruity top note (and that wasn’t here) I enjoyed it thoroughly nonetheless. It is the perfect mix of a vegetal green and a spicy bohea black. It has a smoky smell and leaves brewed are very limp. The liquor is a chestnut color and it has this wonderful toasted walnut flavor that lingers on the palate.

I can understand how people would love this tea, but it just wasn’t for me. I guess the flavors that just predominate for me are earthy and mossy. I really didn’t get the fruity notes at all, though now that I think about it there was faint liquorice flavor. And the liquorice is definitely more pronounced when smelling the dried leaves. I tried this tea again and again wanting to like it more, but I just didn’t. For me it is good, but just not spectacular. I predominately drink green and black and this just wasn’t one I liked though it seems like a high quality tea. The taste is like a somewhat less toasty and smoky formosa oolong, but definitely similar in body. There is a bit of fennel and mint and its very smooth. It also stands up to quite a few steeps, which is nice.

This tea is full of wiry twisty tips. This was my first experience with a Ceylon tea and I enjoyed the vanilla and spicy notes, but in all I found the flavor a little less robust than what I was expecting. A very tasty cup, with an interesting mouth feel that lingered in the middle of the tongue. I tried adding slightly more tea and brewing the same and I noticed I got a more robust cup that I enjoyed. The smell of the leaves is quite high in vanilla and spice

This was definitely my favorite of a grouping of samples I got from Upton. It was my first Darjeeling and I am definitely hooked. It had a mild honeyed wine character to begin with and finish of pure tropical fruit and bits of pineapple flavor that were almost magical. It is also good with a second brew but looses some of the complexity. It looks twisty and black with interspersed silver tips.