672 Tasting Notes
Going to have to bump down my rating of this one, unfortunately. This is a fresh bag, but the tea doesn’t taste anything like it’s supposed to. Where’s the sweet butteriness? Where’s the toasted coconut? It just tastes weirdly off and faintly sour now. I really think they changed the recipe, which is dumb, considering this was such a popular tea.
Once I adjusted to shorter steep times, this one really grew on me. Light and refreshing, even if the flavor doesn’t immediately bring coconut to mind.
In other news, I’ve done my share of binge-watching on the new Jessica Jones. Just finished episode 9, and it’s definitely been impressive for sheer acting, even if the plot wobbles a bit here and there. I checked Adagio to see how many Jessica Jones fandom blends had already popped up, and to my surprise there weren’t any. So I made a few of my own:
http://www.adagio.com/signature_blend/group.html?group=8878
Preparation
A very nice go-to tea, flavorful but not too sharp. I need something soothing today. My head hurts and this NaNoWriMo challenge is taking its toll, both on me and my tea stash. Apparently writing requires a lot of tea:
Got this in the mail today from Singing Dog Vanilla, a company that makes every vanilla thing you can think of (including vanilla salt!).
I can see little chipped up chunks of what I think is vanilla bean pod in the mix. I do smell vanilla in the dry tea, but it’s not particularly strong.
Steeped up, I taste some vanilla, but again, it’s on the light side, not really what I was expecting from a company that specializes in vanilla products.
The assam base is smooth and inoffensive. All in all, I will have no trouble getting this down, but it’s not the vanilla experience I was hoping for.
The vanilla tea quest continues!
Flavors: Vanilla
Preparation
Yeah, I’ve got my eye on the vanilla bean paste. Must be great for baking!
http://www.singingdogvanilla.com/c/VBP.html
Finally finished this off. I never really knew what to say about this tea because it’s not bad, it’s just terribly boring. I bought this when I was still making rookie tea-drinker mistakes (i.e. buying large tins of things I’d never tried before because they were cheap), so it’s lasted me QUITE a while. On the plus side though, you can hardly mess it up, so that’s something.
I happy to say that cutting down the steeping time has helped this tea a lot. The sencha no longer tastes overwhelming. I still find the coconut flavor a little unusual — as in, if it didn’t say coconut on the bag, I don’t think it would occur to me that coconut was in here — but it doesn’t taste bad. It reminds me more of pine nuts than coconuts. I can’t quite tell what they’re using to flavor this. There’s all these tiny minty green bits mixed in with the sencha. If that’s coconut, why isn’t it white? Whatever they’re doing, it’s completely different from their approach to flavoring their Coconut Oolong, which tastes thoroughly and obviously like a fresh bag of Mounds.
Preparation
Trying to clean up my cupboard a bit, so here’s another sipdown. This tea isn’t terrible, but it’s strange, an odd combination of flavors that don’t really go together. It would definitely have been better without the mate (and why would you ever need black and mate in the same tea anyway?).
Sipdown. I really enjoyed the buttery green vegetal notes of this tea, but it’s soothing flavor is a bit at odds with the walloping punch of caffeine that comes with it. I steeped it barely a minute, kept my water temperature low, and I’m still feeling it.