Ilse Wouters Send Message

It´s been an exciting tea discovery last week… this is the second tea to be found in my ChaTale tea box and a first for me, as I had never taken a dark tea or pu erh before. I started looking for information about the product and the way to prepare it (should I loosen the mini cake first or just pour boiling water on it? do I need to rinse it? can I reuse the leaves and if so, how to adapt the steeping time? …), and discovered some interesting youtube videos : http://www.charteas.com/Buy%20Puerh%20Toucha%20tea%20online%20at%20Charteas
Pu erh is a type of tea which has undergone fermentation, and this “detail” makes that pu erh actually can age well. I don´t have information about the age of these mini cakes, but I do know this was a unique tea experience and I really liked it. Maybe the only thing I didn´t like that much was the bloating effect this tea had on me twice during the course of using a single mini cake (and I reused the leaves four times in all).
So, finally, my pu erh experience was as follows : I heated water to 100ºC, used the freshly boiled water to give the mini cake a quick rinse (10s max.), and inmediately poured new boiling water on the mini cake which I then steeping for 2 minutes. I used a ceramic mug with a (ceramic) tea filter which can easily be taken out, so I just withdrew the filter and the loosened cake in the filter was inmediately ready for a second brew. The first brew was very dark, the aroma´s of the tea were quite strong and reminded me of wild mushrooms (I adore wild mushrooms, so this was definitely a positive thing). The taste was quite strong as well, with a very present smell and taste of something having undergone a fermentation. Logical of course, but I was impressed : the tea tastes completely different from anything I´ve tried before! About half an hour later I steeped the pu erh a second time, by pouring freshly boiled water over the tea filter in the mug. I had it steep 30s longer (so, 2.5 minutes in total) and the colour of the tea was similar to the first brew. Not a lot of change in taste and smell either. The 3rd-5th brew I made the day afterwards. I guess the tea might have lost a bit of its qualities, but I must say that the 3rd and 4th brews were still very nice (steeping for 3 or 3.5 minutes by then). The 5th time (steeping time of 4 minutes) the result was clearly inferior, and almost no colour developed.
As it was my first time drinking pu erh, I didn´t have a reference, but I liked the experience and look forward to trying other pu erh teas. I might buy a larger cake, but I need then to get some more material (tea needle, tea knife) to loosen the tea leaves. http://www.teavivre.com/info/pry-pu-erh-tea/ tells you a lot about this process.

Recently I discovered there existed something as a tea box subscription, and I started to compare different plans by different vendors who send to the UK. I decided that I wanted to give ChaTale a try and subscribed to their Yummy Breakfast plan (always including an Earl Grey tea). I had barely paid for the plan when I received a mail from ChaTale that their tea box subscription plans weren´t going as well as they had expected and that they were stopping it. A wonderful start to my decision. On top of this, my box got lost in the mail, and so I finally received a replacement box about 1.5 month afterwards. This was the Earl Grey tea which was included in the box. The smoky aspect is very subtle, which gives it the huge advantage not to need milk. I followed the directions in the box and had the tea steeping for 3 minutes. The aroma´s from the tea are very gentle and in a way, you get a similar impression when drinking the tea : smooth, aromatic, almost velvety in the mouth. This Earl grey isn´t strongly citrusy, neither does the smoky touch dominate…it stays very well balanced indeed.

This is a tea I have since quite a while and I think it might have lost most of its fragrances, as I cannot find any trace of the bergamot. It´s very herbal, both in smell (of loose tea and of steeped brew) as in taste. Green tea still very present, and absolute need to limit the steeping time to a minimum (1-2´) as the tea gets (too) strong easily. Definite taste.

I need to agree with some other opinions written about this tea : these are excellent tea bags (in my opinion most probably the best quality and taste you can get from a teabag available nationally in a major store)… and when I finished the first box I bought (without writing about it in steepster), I bought another one. As someone else said : the Kenyan tea is quite strong, and in UK this implies mostly that people add milk…I like my tea black, but indeed, better steep it a short time if you want to avoid it getting too strong (I don´t really think it gets too bitter, it gets “deeper” if that makes any sense). It´s quite funny : when I bought the tea, the cashier at M&S told me that he had lived in Kenya and that he really believed that one of the better teas (and coffee) came from there, but that in general they are underrated. The strength of the tea is rated as 2, and I agree again with a comment I read on steepster that some teas rated 2 actually seemed smoother than some rated 3 (the same applies for M&S´s single estate Rwandan Rukeri teabags). I compare both with coffee (as I like it : strong and full-bodied).

There we go again : it seems that autumn has arrived already! More of a reason to get this spicy chocolate tea out, as I consider it a bit as “comfort tea” ;-) Especially when the weather is sad. As my partner asked to have some tea – very exceptional!!! – I decided to make a pot. So much nicer as well, or at least so it seems. Spicy and chocolate in a not overwhelming dose which I can only applaud. Yesterday, I prepared oxtail and I added some chocolate to the sauce, and what a – subtle – way it is to enhance the flavour! Well, here it is similar, I believe. So, I´m rating this tea a bit higher this time as well…

Yesterday I prepared some rhubarb compôte, one of the little pleasures of life, if you ask me… I adore rhubarb, its fibres and especially its sour touch, and how it seems that when adding sugar that sour aspect can survive and taste like only rhubarb can taste. The wonderful thing about being in UK is that the rhubarb season (which ends late June in Belgium) goes on a lot longer and even now – at the end of August – , I can still get the rhubarb at Farmers´Markets. It freezes brilliantly as well, so I´ll have some stock for the winter months.
And so, when having finished preparing the compôte, I thought I should look for that aromatised black tea with rhubarb I still had…somewhere! And I found it! It´s getting to the end of its shelf life (best before date : 8/2016) and especially the rhubarb has sort of disappeared from the taste. In the nose you can still get it (together with the strawberry). One of the aromatised black teas I really love is Marco Polo (in France you can find it everywhere : the better known is a Mariage Frères blend but I think – cf. Thé des sages – they deliver it to a lot of tea shops all over the country) where the caramel blends in nicely with the black tea. Why do I mention this here? Well, this tea reminds me a lot of Marco Polo, and adds an extra delicate berry finish to it.
While I´m a bit sorry to notice that with time the rhubarb addition to the tea has disappeared from the tea experience, I´m also quite happy to get a closer alternative to the Marco Polo blend (which I don´t have currently in my tea collection). For the rhubarb touch, I´ll stick to the compôte…

The weather is lovely, and so anything fruity can be appreciated. Time to sip a bit of “Quatre fruits rouges”… the steeped tea smells nicely of red fruits, in a shy sort of way which already lets you know that this aromatised black tea is a job well done. It might well be that the fragrances are softer now as I got the tin 2 years ago, but I like it this way. The discrete presence of the fruit in the taste is also to my liking. I didn´t realise at first, but I left a bit in the mug, which I drank later (cold) and it had turned a bit bitter, not overly though. Overall a positive experience… and I should finish this and other Kusmi tins I bought about the same time.

Ever since my childhood – when my mother more or less forced me to drink herbal teas she would blend herself – I kind of avoided these infusions. Did I have my fair share already, or do I just not like the taste of them? I prefer to think that most of the time both of explanations apply. Maybe there are exceptions like a sweet mint tea as you can get in a Maroccan restaurant, or a very fragrant thyme infusion to help digestion.
Delhaize´s “No Stress” is one of the infusions available in their “Well Being – Caring Moments” range and is built around some “lemony” herbs like lemongrass and lemonbalm. These are clearly present in the smell. I see on the packet other ingredients I cannot easily identify : apple (!), fennel and lemon as well as natural lemon aroma. Fortunately (for me) the resulting infusion isn´t at all citrusy, it stays herbal with a discrete lemony touch. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I can imagine a herbal tea fan liking this one. Personally I think it´s a nice cup to enjoy before going to bed.
Individually wrapped tea bags have the extra advantage you can easily take them with you, and they stay fresh longer. So I might use them before their “best before” date (8/2018) after all ;-)

Delhaize´s take on a green tea where the herbal notes are covered up with – very discrete – fruity notes. It stays very “easy drinking”, for the big public. Although I´m not too much into green teas, I quite like this “no nonsense” approach and I´m happy the coconut flavour is limited. No stuff for the green tea aficionados, I´m afraid : too little complexity comes from the green tea in this aromatised tea. The recommended steeping time on the pack is 3 minutes, which I find a bit on the short side.

Was offered this tea in a B&B in UK. As I didn´t know the company I did some investigation and obviously Frellsen is a Danish company. They began importing coffee in 1897 and the company is now in hands of the 4th generation of Frellsen. As far as I can tell, they have 16 types of tea on offer and this Earl Grey seems to be the most important one. It´s very fragrant, but somehow the aroma´s seem to wander off before the tea is steeping, because the drink is quite neutrally tasting, which is a shame.