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Not going to rate this now. I’m going to sit down with a cup of it next to a cup of GM’s lapsang souchong a little bit later and see which comes out on top, because it has been long enough that I’m debating with myself here. Plus…I’m eating this alongside my lunch of Singapore street noodles, which is obviously a strong enough dish to make this more for my own reference than anything else.

The primary difference between this lapsang souchong and the GM version I have is that this one seems to be far more intense in the ‘ash’ or smoke portion of the flavor than the other. Once the cup was brewed, I was surprised at how light it was in color (keep in mind that I choose to brew Samovar’s blacks at two teaspoons for 16 oz. versus the tablespoon that they recommend, just because this is the amount to which I’ve become accustomed with most teas, and usually the saturation of flavor is more than enough for me). The scent was…strong. Strong enough that the smoke aspect was acrid and slightly sharp, and gave me a creeping sensation of scratchy throat. I won’t say that it was unbearable, but I didn’t find it particularly pleasant. The taste seemed to be more mild than GM’s, and less sweet. I enjoy the mildness, but I miss the sweetness.

The good news?

Adding a little bit of fat free half and half completely eliminated the very ashy, sharp-smoke quality from both the flavor and the smell, and resulted in a more mild, balanced, and extremely pleasant cup of campfire tea. It’s the perfect accompaniment to my noodles, and I’m looking forward to having it when my palate is more sensitive so that I can really explore the nuances, because I feel like the flavor of this one has some unlockable depth.

Up at 1am! This schedule thing is not correcting itself, but…

This is still a good morning. I’m jamming out to Passion Pit, I’ve got an idea for a book, and a pre-‘breakfast’ cup of this that seems to have turned into something slightly sweeter on the tip of the tongue than I expected, but not so sweet that it’s the coconut pouchong, which sounded like a bit too much…more a nutty sweet that seems just right for whetting the appetite and helping me feel better disposed toward the idea of cooking eggs and bacon after all.

PS: I don’t think my cats like the Passion Pit. They do not seem to like it when I dance in the kitchen. They especially do not like it when I pick them up to dance with me. Oh well. At least one of us is having a good morning!

I don’t really know where to rate this…so I’m not sure that I should yet. I know that it would be in the green spectrum of things (that’s the good news…does that count as a steepster spoiler?), but I’m not quite sure where.

What a strange, strange experience. I had no problems, you understand, leaping over the hurdle of adjustments required by my first lapsang souchong. I had no trouble diving into chais, no problem trying licorice-white tea when I have a long, long history of disliking licorice, but for whatever reason this tea, this type of tea, has scared the living daylights out of me since the moment I heard about it…and as with most things I find frightening, I’ve found myself simultaneously fascinated.

The pu-erh chai that I tried from Golden Moon did a fairly good job of reinforcing my fears, unfortunately. I knew that was true because the ‘maybe socks’ note that I was getting from the chai was easy to find here in this cup in abundance…but without spices masking the entirety of the flavor profile, and with more depth to explore, this has been easier to convince my taste buds to be mellow about.

I won’t lie — that’s a lot of what this cup has been about, for me. Convincing myself to just relax and not think about it too much. I’m not really sure what it is about pu-erh that makes me so uneasy. One could make the argument that it’s the slightly scary aging methods, but I’m one of those people who has no problem devouring blue cheese or gorgonzola crumbles on salads, so…I don’t think that’s it. I think it might be something to do with mushrooms. This is going to be a huge mental leap, but…

Okay. I love mushrooms. I do. They’re delicious. I make a shallot-sherry-tarragon-mushroom-cream soup that’s to die for. But I’m a really texture-oriented eater, and the little gills under mushroom caps sort of scare me a little. I also grew up down south, and spent a lot of time in Florida, where moist, dark, earthy places were typically filled with all sorts of things you really don’t even want to think about.

So, mental block, yes. Definitely mental block.

The cup of tea itself brews to a beautiful dark color, like the shade of Brazillian cherrywood, only maybe just a little bit darker than that. I didn’t get any fish smell off of the leaves, nor the rinse.

Unfortunately, something came up halfway through sipping through the cup, and I had to focus on other things. I can say for a certainty that I prefer this tea hot to lukewarm…the heat seems to bring the sweetness forward more, and I wanted that sweetness to balance out the other earthier flavors.

So, let me see.

This tea smells a lot like what I imagine it smells like on the inside of a very large, mossy branch of wood that has been lying on rich earth, absorbing rainwater and growing soft and pulpy while the sun bakes on the bark, beneath a thin blanket of damp and gently decaying leaves. It’s very much a ‘forest after a spring rain not long after a thaw’ smell, a heavily organic smell, but the sunny part of this tableau is definitely important, because it represents a mellow sweetness.

Early on in the first few sips, my first thought was, ‘mushrooms and honey’. It isn’t precisely mushrooms, and it is definitely not clearly honey, but that pair of flavors together might resemble this experience a little bit, if the mushrooms were woody enough and the honey was barely-there and of the dark, more raisin-y variety.

I can give myself another mental shift, if I try. Dusty hayloft and barn, replete with baking hay in the heat, leather tack, hot wood, and something faintly animal (which sounds awful, but horses have never smelled bad to me).

A strange cup, but I DID finish it, and I think I could even get to a point where pu-erh really only made me think of pu-erh. I’d be lying to you if I said I was wholly comfortable with it just yet, but there was nothing in this cup I would call bad…it’s just very intense. Very musty, very hoary. The flavors are so low and dark that calling it intense seems misleading, but I definitely stand by my use of the word.

Man.

Reading the lists of flavors that Samovar provided while I anxiously awaited my order’s arrival, I tried to compile some mental understanding of what those combinations would be like together and had the most difficult time. Having now had the tea, I’m still not certain that I can describe quite what it’s like, but I’m going to try.

First of all, the leaves are incredibly fuzzy. I opened my tin eager to get a whiff of the leaves and was surprised by the amount of fluff stuck to the sides of it…there’s a lot. Which makes me happy, for whatever reason. It really looks more like clippings of brown and green-silver yarn than tea leaves.

Second…

I have never had to rinse tea leaves before. I know you’re supposed to for some, and probably there’s something to be said for doing that for some oolongs no matter what, but…I never have. Needless to say, my zojirushi being set to 175 already meant that the little rinse they got was fairly low-temp, and I don’t know if that makes a difference…they recommend boiling. And such a short steep time!…but then I got to thinking…does the 3-minute steep time still hold true for the lower-temp 175 brew vs. the boiling-water brew?

And then I decided it smelled delicious while it was steeping and I didn’t care, because I could just experiment more later and find out. Hoo-ah.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I could never have expected this. To me, this is sort of like someone managed to combine together oolong and white tea, completely bypassing any of the notes I usually associate with green tea in a bizarre leap I wouldn’t have anticipated was possible. We’ve talked a little bit in TNs and comments about green oolong vs. black, but I dub this white oolong. It even has the fluffies floating around the bottom, the nutty nectary sweetness, the…mmm. Even the little bit of tang I sometimes get from whites.

Bready fruit, like plantains — easy to find. Starfruit when very hot (along with something more nutty like peach or apricot), then more bready as it cools, like plantains.

Nutty sweet floral roasted starchy tropical-fruity bliss. I cannot for the life of me find the ‘smoked chocolate’ in here unless I try very, very, very hard, and even then I’m not sure that I’m not just making it up. The cup had more strongly fruity flavors when hot, and some of the edges seem to be rounding off now that I’m at the bottom of the cup and the liquid is tepid. I haven’t tried this at a higher temperature…it sounded good this way, so this is the way I started out…but I imagine it’d be quite tart…more like the skin of a plum than the flesh of it. I’m interested in trying it to see.

I feel as though this is a cup of tea that’s going to provide a lot of flavor revelations the longer I go on drinking it, and that’s pretty exciting. In fact, I think I might have myself some more. Gonna try to resteep first. The short steep time makes me worry that it’s not able to go a second round, but here’s hoping!

This is one seriously strong cup of tea.

The color to which it brews is a brazen reddish-bronze. Sitting on my desk in a clear glass mug, looking down into the bottom from the top, I can almost not even see through the tea…and my cup is sitting on a white napkin on top of a blonde desk.

Trying to describe this one is going to be difficult. It’s a very savory tea, but slightly bitter. I’m not talking about the sort of bitterness that comes from oversteeped black, though I’ll readily admit that after my first sip I wondered if I hadn’t overdone the amount of tea steeped or the steep time (given this one says it can go up to 5 minutes, that seemed unlikely). It’s more like the bitterness you get when you try bittersweet chocolate or high-percentage cacao dark. That bitterness connects to a very notable taste of earth and soil and, in a development that reassures me that my impending confrontation with my fear of pu-erh may not be a total disaster, I like that earthiness. It isn’t a dry earth, it’s a moist and humid and black rich earth…and fortunately, it seems to want to do little more than play foundation for the raisiny sweetness responsible for the tea’s umami deliciousness. Rolling the tea over my tongue, I’m able to get different sensations toward the back and the sides of my tongue, flashes of sweetness or bake-y malt.

There is a slight pinch at the back of the throat that hasn’t decreased as the cup has cooled, and I’m again not sure if that’s my steeping or just the briskness of the cup itself, as this is my first time sitting down with this tea, but it doesn’t seem to want to go away. Not scratchy, not completely scratchy, but pinchy. Just a bit. It’s a very strange finish to have when the flavor profile of the cup is so completely dark and smooth.

I don’t think I would have this every day, but there are certainly mornings where I want a cup of tea that seems like it could dissolve a spoon. This one qualifies. In fact, the longer I sip it, the more I feel as though…

…you know, if tea were chocolate and not tea, then this tea would be the dark chocolate to the milk chocolate of the Golden Spring that I’ve made my staple go-to black tea. They both share the raisin-sugar mouth-watering umami deliciousness, but this tea is darker, bittersweet, earthy, full-bodied, stiff and smooth and the Golden Spring is lighter, brothy, full-bodied and made for downing in mass quantities.

Not sorry that I bought this at all. Looking forward to trying it with milk and sugar for sure…something I think the Golden Spring doesn’t quite hold up to as well as this could.

Not gonna lie…I’m scared of pu-erh.

It may be that I should’ve waited to try this until after whatever uplifting, familiarizing, reassuring experience might follow the arrival of my Samovar order sometime later today, since I purchased what I understand is a very forgiving ‘starter’ kind of pu-erh, and it might’ve set me down the road to not having a mental block about the stuff…but it was exceedingly early when I sat bolt upright in bed for no good reason (3am) and I needed something cozy. I needed chai. I wasn’t completely willing to go the distance and do the yerba mate chai thing; I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll need that mega-dose of caffeine much later today. This was lingering along with a handful of other tea samples in my Golden Moon basket…so…

Here we are.

I can’t get past the idea that something about this tea smells a little bit…funky, and yet I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. It seems to hide directly behind the hint of cinnamon, just out of view, and worry me. I have a creeping feeling that it is…socks. Or something like socks. Maybe someone’s socks after they were walking around in the dirt. Or…or…not socks. Something. This is definitely not the chai experience to which I’ve become accustomed, and I am having a hard time telling whether or not this is psychosomatic or genuine.

I tried for quite some time to finish my cup, and in the end I couldn’t…a real rarity for me. I wonder if I ruined this tea for myself by being so wary of pu-erh; I wonder if I wouldn’t have liked it better had the qualities of the pu-erh flavor not been somewhat masked by spices, so that the vague hints of them that I was receiving were immediately associated with a pu-erh experience that I enjoyed, rather than striking me as, and I stand by this assessment, a faint impression of socks.

It isn’t terrible, but it sort of unnerved me. Hopefully later today I’ll have my first cup of really good pu-erh, and this will all rectify itself.

Already rated this one, so no need to do it again, especially as I’m quite certain that was the longest tasting note I’ve ever written. It’s still delicious. What is particularly nice about this tea is that it contains a good, solid dose of caffeine that can be brewed at 175…which is not a big deal save insofar as sometimes I forget to hike my Zojirushi’s temperature back up to 208 before going to bed so that it’s ready to crank out black tea in the morning, and it’s nice to know that on those occasions that I do so, this will be waiting for me in my cabinet in the morning, ready to kick me into a slightly higher gear.

My cravings for this tea are not constant, I admit, but there are times when nothing else in my cabinet sounds quite as good as this does. Mmm.

Redhots.

That’s the first thing that you need to know about this particular chai: it tastes like redhots, those little pebble-shaped candies that are cinnamon and sweetness and altogether too easy to eat in mass quantities. If you like redhots, you’re going to probably find it difficult to dislike this chai. I love redhots, myself, so all’s well, but I still find that I prefer to take this tea blended with something else. While I wouldn’t call it one-dimensional, necessarily, I would say that the flavors in this one aren’t so complex that it makes a muddy mess of other chais when added to them (or even just other teas), so it seems pretty ideal for that purpose. Alone, the cup is not quite enough to keep me interested, and I think that eventually the sweet red-hot taste does get a little bit overpowering. As with everything, your mileage may vary! Sometime soon, I’ll have to give this a try without milk to see if I can’t pick out the fruit and herbal flavors they mention, as most of the time I think the milk crushes them utterly.

Farewell to the last of my sample tin of this. I could’ve sworn that I had written a tasting note for it, and now I can’t seem to find it…strange. A tasting note I spotted by someone else mentioned sweet grains and artichoke, and that seems to sum it up pretty adequately.

Don’t think I’ll be buying another tin of it. It’s not bad, really it isn’t, but I’d take a cup of Downy Sprout over this any day. And will be, because I put my new Samovar order in, finally. Doing so knocked off a healthy portion of my shopping list. Whee!

I got this as my sample from Teas. etc. when I ordered the assam that was the Select some time ago, and am only just now getting around to trying it. The leaves of this white tea are pretty crispy-crunchy and actually surprisingly green, which is a slight change from the silver needle and the Downy Sprout that I’ve gotten more accustomed to. There are still little white fuzzies, but they aren’t nearly so thick or prevalent here.

It still produces a very good cup of white tea. Not my favorite, but good. Once steeped, the tea feels exceptionally thick and heavy in the mouth. I’m not surprised that this white has a more ‘green’ and vegetal flavor than the other whites I have given the appearance of the leaves; I think it’s from this greenishness that the most notable quality of the tea stems. As I’ve been sipping I’ve been thinking, ‘salty’…but it’s not salty in a way that would compel me to describe the tea overall as salty…it just contains a note that seems to lean in that direction, which surprised me, as anything of the sort is notably absent in my other whites. Curious, I went and looked up their description of the tea, and it seems they’re characterizing this quality as ‘sweet cream butter’, which I think is probably reasonable…butter isn’t necessarily salty, but it does have some traces of that same aspect, and that must be what I’ve found here. The almost viscous heaviness of the tea seems to texturally underline that sweet-cream-butter description.

It’s pretty heavy for a cup of white tea. I don’t know that I would find myself craving this more than the flavor-saturated sweetness of the Downy Sprout I have. I’m glad that I have more sample left though. I think I’ll need to try it again to see whether or not it’ll grow on me or wear me out.