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Another tasting note for work… Are you sick of this yet? :’D

The other day I made this with a big pinch of the leaves directly into the cup but neglected to consider the fact it, uh, gets stronger the longer you leave it so it was gradually turning hazel in the cup… The leaves are wonderfully whole and quality-looking (with a stray twig here and there- is this intentional?) so it tends to be fairly easy to pick just the right amount for a mugful, though I’ve found it takes practice getting it perfect!

It’s brewed to a light, slightly toasted sunny gold in the cup, and is giving off the loveliest fruity/smoky aroma. I love the smell of white tea so much. And that scent is very telling of the taste, very pleasant although much weaker than the aroma – or rather, fruitier than the aroma! It’s slightly dry on the tongue but the body is mellow, tasty, some toasty notes in there to round off a wholesome slightly smoky sip. I could drink this all day if only I figured out how to re-brew the leaves!

Sadly don’t have many other white needle teas to compare this to, but it’s delicious nonetheless!

Again, giving this a try for work “training guide” purposes. I have until the end of the month to complete my tea and coffee workbooks so I am tasting at breakneck speed! For a little while (until next weekend or so, when I’m planning on getting something more interesting) it’ll be this standard Whittard range of loose-leaf tea.

(I have to say, Ysaurella’s Dammann Freres posts make me want to go back to France and try something delicious…)

Onwards! Just a plain and simple tasting like the Sencha the other day. I’ve brewed this Gunpowder several times, at work, and at Tea Society at uni and each time it’s been a marvel to see just how large the leaves unfurl to be in the teapot. They are big! It’s really a great quality gunpowder, and just over a level teaspoon gives this lovely dark gold-hinting-at-orange colour in the cup. Smells a little smoky, too.

It’s smooth, a little fruity, teeny bit floral with just the bare minimum of astringency following the first sip. There’s half of that grassiness that comes with green teas like sencha but thankfully it’s not nearly as strong as that, stopping just to slope off into this mild, again, slightly smoky flavour. I know gunpowder isn’t named after the taste but I have to wonder if this is intentional, sometimes!

All in all, it’s a pleasant gunpowder. Always feel like it should be a staple in anyone’s collection…

A while ago I gave this a try in its teabag form- 50 teabags to one box, basically gave me 50 unsavoury, terrible tea experiences. However I’m hearing good things about the loose leaf version and I’m always willing to give teas another shot, so I caved and got the loose-leaf Sencha yesterday, thinking I could use this for breakfast.

Steeped to the pale gold colour the packet recommends (the leaves look… unimpressive, to say the least, like bancha rather than anything of a higher grade), it still has this foreboding, sharply tangy aroma to it. Part of this fresh citrus-y scent is what makes Japanese green teas so unique, of course, but too much of that gave me an entirely bitter experience last time I tried this tea. And onto the first sip…

Much better! Smoother, softer over the palate and nothing as astringent as how it smells or how the teabag tea tasted! I understand the main difference between this tea and the teabag version is the teabag version uses Sri Lankan tea leaf fannings, whereas this, as whole-leaf Japanese tea, is more delicate. I’d used about a level teaspoonful— I’d say the flavour, being so easily spoilt, is absolutely based on the quantity of tea used. In a teabag there’s simply too much to make one pleasant mugful…

As I’m getting through the cup the citrus astringency is slowly beginning to settle in, but not unpleasantly. It reminds me of drinking tea and eating maple-leaf dorayaki in the ryokan in Miyajima… definitely making me crave red bean paste, anyway. I had to take quite a bit of care with letting the boiled water cool before pouring it but I think I’ll make this part of my morning routine from now on. ♥

A dearest friend got me this for Christmas last year, and although the best before date on the bottom indicates to use it by this December… I hope I’ll be using this a little longer. ♥

Today I had this in a teacup, hence the short steeping time, although really in my opinion this one doesn’t need a very long steep time as it doesn’t brew all that strongly. Previously I’ve used more than your average teaspoonful to achieve a darker brew just so I can put milk in it but this is best appreciated black and light usually! The leaves are fairly large, great quality, and they don’t open up so much that you need a larger strainer for extra leaves. They also smell dry quite similarly to how the tea tastes once brewed!

The first word that comes to mind is definitely “toasty” on the first sip of this; it’s more prominent as it gets cooler so I wonder if this might make a tasty iced tea? It’s certainly dry and astringent and the Darjeeling is rather prominent here too, muscat-y and oaky with a partial but not full smoothing-out of that astringency with the other black teas blended in.

As far as afternoon teas go, this is something I reserve for the guests who’ll appreciate a lighter brew and a delicate but powerful aftertaste. My favourite part is how strong the Darjeeling is— all too often that takes a backseat behind the Ceylon!

Absolutely one of my favourites… As a classics student and overall nerd anything named after Alexander the Great is going to appeal to me!! :D Somehow I remember the blend being different a couple of years ago when I went to Paris, the last time before I went this year, and it had spearmint and things I didn’t like… So to find it to be a green tea with violets (never had a tea with violets before!) in it was quite the pleasant surprise. And so, I have a tin of it to accompany my delicate rose tea. You can’t have one without the other…

The scent from both the leaves and the brew are beautifully fragrant and sweet, like they used an essential oil in it as well as the flowers. To me it smells exactly like parma violets… probably because I’ve only eaten two things with violet flavouring in before, parma violet sweets and crystallised violets chocolate. This is very much like that— sweetened as well as naturally sweet. And the colour of the tea is lovely! A pale green rather than the yellow you might normally expect from a sencha or bancha (which is what the leaves look like)!

The first sip is always surprisingly overwhelming in its fragrance and sweetness, just because, although I know green tea takes floral flavours rather well, I never expect it to take it THIS well. If it wasn’t for the mellowness of the liquor and the slight, pleasant astringency at the end of a sip I would think I was just drinking violets without the tea. But the slight roastiness of the tea is there, like a backup to the violets, and gives it maybe a second little kick to renew the sweetness in the mouth. And the taste is so clean and pleasant… I can’t find any drawbacks on this tea at all; you asked for violets, you got violets. It’s certainly unique, and very simple- can’t help but wonder how an extra couple of flavours might taste in this. Vanilla? Cream?

This is beeeeauuuutiful. One of the first rooibos infusions I got from work, the loose tea itself smells like— wait for it— strawberry laces! It’s an amazingly sweet scent, as rooibos takes scents and flavours very well, but of course doesn’t have the same flavour as this incredible first smell.

It’s labelled ‘Strawberry’ but this particular product, I’ve seen, has also been labelled as ‘Strawberries & Cream’ although if there is any creaminess other than the natural rooibos heaviness and body, it’s not getting to me as much as the Vanilla version did. The strawberries complement this in a way I’d never thought possible; very well-rounded, a little dry, completely fresh and fruity and, best of all, naturally sweet; unexpected from a malty rooibos base, to be honest!

One of my favourites, definitely. Always drinking this without milk.

Hi all! Disappeared for a bit, but then I haven’t gotten any new teas lately.

Thanks to some sleuthing and a nice attendant in a Yogi Teas distributor shop, I managed to get me some of those glass mugs I was after! Hurrah! There was a deal on in the store where if you bought 2 Yogi Teas you got a mug for free… So I got another. This is one of those two.

First off, I had a brush with this before, and both times I noticed how thick and creamy and delicious the chocolate aroma is — like a hot chocolate! But the taste in comparison to that sweetness is a tad disappointing. Something about the weakness in flavour makes me wonder if the water I used for it was overboiled or not filtered properly, but I’m only getting cinnamon and ginger out of this, and very weakly, at that.

Going to give it a couple more tries before I rate this badly, I think, but it’s worth trying!

Quietly nicking a spoonful of this from my housemate while he’s away… It’s too good to resist.

Unfortunately today I have some cold symptoms so the taste is affected quite a bit, especially considering it’s something as light as a TGFOP darjeeling, but it turned out delicious nonetheless! Recently, also, Twinings UK put up a guide to professional tea tasting on their website: http://twinings.co.uk/about-our-tea/how-to-taste-tea As I have to taste teas for work I’m going to try using this kind of vocabulary and guide from here on out. So with my inability-to-smell-handicap, here are my thoughts today:

This darjeeling brews very very light. A good teaspoonful with boiling water didn’t brew to an amber for quite some time, remaining golden for a few minutes (I tend to judge when a tea is ready by its colour- perhaps something I should avoid doing in future after this?), and having left it has possibly made it more astringent and dry than is normal for this tea. It’s toasty and light without that heavy roasted taste of many black teas, due to its quality I should think, and the toastiness comes towards a floral flavour, even very slightly hops-like and edging into wood flavours. It is really, however, very dry and bitter towards the end.

I’m rounding this off with a little unsweetened soy milk as the tannins are proving too much for me at the end of a tiring day, but lighter, with an afternoon tea, I think this tea could be taken black perfectly!

I have a little loose-leaf tin of this tucked away, and it has the sweetest, most wonderful strawberry smell. However as it typical of fruit-flavoured black teas, the flavour doesn’t copy over exactly! After making this iced earlier today I had a little hot tea left over for a tasting; and, black, brewed strong, it has a lot of astringency to get past before finding the fresh, malty fruit notes in this. It’s unlike a fruit tea where the fruit is just an afterthought; it definitely works alongside the black tea, although that might take a strong brew to discover.

Gave this a whirl when my girlfriend and I popped into Yumchaa Soho for tea the other day – neither of us had tried it before. Yumchaa have a tendency to put little tea in the one-person teapots so that it doesn’t oversteep, which usually works rather well, but on this occasion I think I might have preferred it a little stronger! The blueberry and gentle vanilla tastes are definitely there, and for once I was surprised that the fruit flavour overcame the floral notes— a little stronger would have been perfect, but as it is, it made for a sweet, well-rounded cup.