95 Tasting Notes
I forgot I’d already tried this one! Hah. We got sent a sample of it, and I thought, “Oh, chocolate and pomegranate, that sounds interesting…” and tried it and went, “Wow, grenadine, no, that’s nice enough but I don’t need to own it, I should go log it.”
Nice to see that past me was in agreement with present me. Not changing the rating.
Flavors: Chocolate, Grenadine
The smoke almost completely overwhelms the other flavors of chai. They’re still there, which is good, but this is a bit like drinking chai while the campfire blows smoke in your face – you lose something in the process.
I’m finishing the mug, so it’s not bad, but I’m not ordering it again, so it’s not my cuppa. No rating, because it’s not one I’m going to be drinking again.
Flavors: Cardamom, Smoke
In the bag, this smells like so much coconut goodness.
Once actually brewed, the tea tastes and smells…like oolong. There is a trailing aftertaste of coconut there, so it’s not completely gone, but it is not the coconutty-goodness that I am still searching for. Oh well.
The quest continues…
Flavors: Coconut, Tea
I got a proper full sample of this tea – enough to brew an entire pot. So I brewed it!
Yup, that is indeed a Juniper Ceylon all right. The juniper flavor is nice and strong without being overpowering, the ceylon is perfectly acceptable, and now I have a tea for when I’m missing the juniper syrup that Starbucks made for exactly one holiday season and then discontinued (stinkers) and also don’t want to get punched in the face with sugar. Quite pleasant.
I’ll keep a small tin around; not going to be an every-day tea, I think, but definitely one I’ll keep fro when I want to taste the smell of the woods in my mouth.
Flavors: Forest Floor
Hm. I love vanilla. I love black tea. This one…doesn’t do it for me.
I can smell the vanilla. I can taste the tea. But they are just sort of “there” and not doing anything in particular together. It probably doesn’t help that the tea tastes like garden-variety blended tea – I suspect it’s made of a bunch of different teas all melded together, and I’ve developed a sufficiently discerning palate regarding “tea” that it now just tastes like nothing in particular. It’s generic.
It was not helped by the fact that I had to brew twice as many leaves to get my usual strength.
This is why I like to buy samples. It means I’m not too sorry when I find one I don’t go for.
Final verdict: meh. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing to strongly recommend it either.
Flavors: Tea, Vanilla
Ah, spring, when a woman’s fancy turns to “it’s been almost three months since I finished my advent calendar of teas and I want to try new ones” again.
Since Steepologie figured out how to make sample packets again (they had some problems where their sample packeting machine broke, and so they delisted all their samples for a couple of months) I figured I’d better jump on the wagon and try all their teas before the machine got broken again by all the orders coming in. I trawled through their site, looking at all the blacks, oolongs, and greens I could find – because that’s what I drink. Rooibus? Not a chance.
…except.
I love Mexican Hot Chocolate. A lot. It’s a fondness I developed when I was a tweenager, and it’s never gone away. And when I was in their store the first time, I was very sad I couldn’t get a sample of their tea, because it’s a rooibus and I was NOT going to get a full tin of a tea I was sure I was going to be disappointed by.
And the sample-generating machine was fixed.
And I had a coupon code from my advent calendar.
So I got it. And what do you know, it actually does taste like Mexican Hot Chocolate, and it does NOT taste like rooibus-trying-to-pretend-it’s-actually-camellia sinensis! WOW. It’s actually good! Apparently, given the fact that I also liked Fire Nation (and once upon a time, I liked RoT’s Rooibus Masala Chai, before I got tired of teabags) the answer to my problem with rooibus is “cover it over with so many spices that you can’t taste it anymore. Ideally, chili peppers.”
This tea definitely has a kick to it. (I like chili pepper. I don’t get it nearly as often as I used to because my kids have undertraumatized taste buds.) It also has a strong chocolate nose. I’m sure that the chicory is helping there, but that’s probably the fact that they added chocolate extract to the whole shebang. What it does not have – and I’m pleased by this – is actual chocolate; cleaning actual melted chocolate skum out of the inside of my teapot is one of my least favorite things, no matter how tasty the tea.
This is one I may have to get more of. I have too few naturally decaf teas in my inventory, and since I try very hard not to drink any caffeine after six (messed up sleep is not my friend) having another one in my arsenal is definitely welcome. I don’t even feel the need to mix this one with a decaf black – it’s fine as it is. Score!
Flavors: Chili, Chocolate
Preparation
What a nice surprise! Will the caffeine in the cocoa or chocolate keep you up? Or did they use chocolate flavoring to bypass that problem?
This was an unexpected tasting packet that came with an order I made ages ago, and it sat on my shelf, unnoticed for a while. I grabbed it for a quick trip since it was sealed and could be trusted not to spew leaves inside my backpack, and brewed it up when I figured I had time to brew a different pot if I didn’t like it.
Pleasant surprise – I liked it quite a bit! I don’t usually go for smoky teas, so it was lovely to find one where the smoke was there as a pleasant accent instead of being the entire point. It also had a nose of slightly caramel scent to me.
Like most of my teas, I did not brew at 212F/100C – much too easy to stew at that temperature – but instead at 185F or so. Dash of milk, and I’m good to go.
Our tea cabinet is too full right now, but hopefully sometime soon we’ll get space and I can pick up more of this one.
Flavors: Caramel, Smoke, Tea