Celebration

Welp, this is tasting note #1000 and I thought there would be no better tea to celebrate with! Ha! I’m so funny, folks.

Anyway, on to the tea. The dry leaf of this smells…interesting. Not great, but that’s the bamboo, I know it. I’ve got a few other bamboo teas with the same scent. I set it to steep and started the timer for two minutes, my normal steep time for tea. As I waited, I read the little box and it says to steep for 8-10 minutes. Whoa. So in the interest of Science! I let it steep for 8 minutes. The smell carried over to the brewed tea, but no matter.

Now, there is a very good reason I don’t let things steep for 8 or more minutes…I forget about them! Also, I put in my sugar lumps before pouring the hot water in, but by the time the timer went off, I’d forgotten that I’d already done it and did it again. Of course my 1000th tasting note includes me being a dummy XD.

This tea is lovely. It’s very fruity, but the bamboo keeps it from being overwhelmingly fruity, if that makes any sense. Strawberry and mango and other fruits, but those two really stand out to me. Hot, it’s good but not mind-blowing, but that’s okay. I bought it for cold steeping.

I iced this, and though the cup was underleafed it is still as delicious as last night’s cup. Creamy, sweet, and tastes amazingly of cake and icing and happy things. Thank you Roswell Strange for introducing me to this tasty brew. I am sad to see it go but it will be making it into my RiverTea order when I eventually place one. 159.

Sipdown (147/153)!

I have a little bit of backlog to get through; honestly not a lot though. I haven’t done much tea drinking these last few days for a variety of reasons; the primary one being a weird work schedule outside of my normal sleeping pattern which has just resulted in my being completely exhausted the last few days. I’ve almost literally woken up, gone to work, come home and gone straight to sleep… Boo!

But anyway, I’m definitely stealing an idea from aisling of tea here because I totally timed drinking this tea (once it had arrived) with it also being my 1500th tasting note! She did the same thing for her 1000th tasting note because, you know, celebrate with “Celebration”. How crazy is that!? I think pretty crazy. 1500 tasting notes since joining Steepster less than a year ago! When I joined Steepster I had no idea how involved I would get in this community, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!

As for the tea, dry is definitely smelled like juicy strawberries and visually it looked almost identical to Tea Desire’s Buddha Bamboo (my favourite bamboo tea thus far) but with red flowers instead of yellow. And shit are they red! Super red! Steeped up, and it tastes pretty similar to Buddha Bamboo as well but that’s to be expected I think; they’re both strawberry bamboo teas. The main difference that I recall is that this was creamier and BB is definitely juicier/more “punchy”. But both are good! I think it would depend whether you like punchy things or creamy teas on which would be better to stock. In this case I think I lean towards the Tea Desire blend. I think it’s the addition of red currants that sells me.

The rest of this is going to VariaTEA whom I fully expect will enjoy it because I know how much she, too, enjoys Buddha Bamboo. Gotta share the tea wealth!