Six Summits

terrible. I’m not sure why, but I could barely finish the cup. In fact, I would have tossed half the cup down the drain if I hadn’t been on the bus and wanted to put my steeper away without spilling anything all over my stuff.
It was fruity and green like but was missing something, something I cannot pinpoint! blegh.
Rating: 70

Okay……so, yesterday my Teaopia opened as Teavana, so I went in and looked for something to try with my lunch, and this is what I ended up with after smelling many a very fruity and weird oolong tea. This smelled nice and clean and a little sweet from the berry fragrance (this one was sans berry in the mix btw), and after my ginseng oolong from the morning, I was left feeling unsatisfied in the oolong part of my heart, so I wanted an oolong.

I got this unsweetened, since I can take some straight oolongs unsweetened, but I definitely think this would have had more wow if it had been lightly sweetened. Oh well. I can’t say it was horrible…I did pick up the raspberry scent, but really, I found the tea rather unremarkable. Not good for my first Teavana experience (aside from the genmai cha I got many years ago, but really, it’s hard to fudge up a genmai cha).

I’m fearful of the new changes. I hope to high heaven I find something there that I like. I don’t have a DAVIDs in my mall, and my other options are Starbucks and TImmies. I do often bring my own tea into work, and sometimes I have pre filled sachets as well, but I like being able to go to the opposite end of the mall for a tea break, and…the most of the staff knows me and I am friends with a few of the girls there.

Cons, while the staff are still super friendly and helpful to me there, the cost has gone up on the tea bar items. I was told it was better quality tea than before, but when most of the teas are littered with heavy fruits, I don’t know that the quality of the tea is gonna really shine. Some of those blends are so incredibly complex, I just don’t know what to think.

I think I got this from Tamm. Not sure. I’ve been doing so many swaps lately and just tossed all my samples together. I suck.
The looks really pretty. Dark green against bright red. Lovely. I wasn’t expecting much from the taste since that was just too many dried berries in there. I added extra leaf so that I’d taste the tea. This tastes mostly like tart freeze dried raspberry… I think this is one of those teas that Teavana formulated so that it only tastes good sweetened. When it cools, you can detect the floral and slightly vegetal oolong base. It’s a shame about the berries because I think the oolong would be a lot tastier without them. And the berries would be a lot tastier in my cereal.
I may try this cold brewed for my husband. :) I think it would work better that way.

I received this one from Tamm Smells pretty nice when I opened up the bag. However I’m baffled that there seems to be multiple versions of this tea…with and without berries. Kind of like Special K with and without berries. It’s not bad…but I’m not seeming to get a whole lot of flavor…Oolong or raspberry. For the price they have on Teavana’s website I guess I’m expecting more. Maybe that’s just me.

Okay so at the sale I picked this up forgetting that there is more than 1 version of this tea. So now I have Six Summits+berry pieces and Six Summits sans berry pieces. The sales person didn’t tell me that this was a flavored tea and you’d almost miss it if you didn’t know it was there. The tea is green, sweet, and fruity. I may have used an excess of leaves, not knowing how much these guys would unfurl! This is another one of those teas that is good, but first, didn’t need the flavoring, and secondly, is not worth the high price tag. If this was an $8 tea I could see that, but $18 seems unreasonably high.
The rating is the one carried over from earlier tastings of the Six Summits+berries version. I’m lowering it a bit now to reflect my current feelings on the tea.

Looking back at this, apparently I have never rated it though, it isone of the first teas I bought from Teavana. Long story short, I finished up this sample today/yesterday because one of my friends bought way too much of it at Teavana on Wednesday (so I inherited some). I did not combine the samples, as I normally would have because they are the same tea, because Teavana decided to “revamp” this tea recently by removing the raspberry flavor and adding actual little pieces of raspberries.

The original tea itself was just plain oolong with no pieces of fruit added, there was some strange essence of raspberry within the tea though. The aroma was faint with the dried leaves, but with the hot brewed tea, the aroma was definitely there. The flavor was mild, it tasted like a slightly fruity oolong. The raspberry flavor was not really describable, you tasted some sort of fruit, but it was not tart or bitter like some of their other fruity teas, instead it was sweet and gentle.

The old batch I rate at a 70.

This “new and improved” formula has little pieces of raspberries in it. You can see the pretty little chunks mixed amongst the darker leaves. The fragrance of the dried leaves is still gentle, but it is definitely stronger in the brewed tea. Also, the liquor is a slightly different color, a little darker than the previous version. The flavor is about the same though, it was really just an aesthetic upgrade.

This was a good choice to take to work today. :)

I’m a little nervous to be trying this tea after reading some of the reviews. I went back and forth on whether I should buy some of this and decided.. well, it’s oolong + raspberry and I love both.. so let’s give it a try! When I opened the pouch I was expecting the tea to smell rather gross, but it is actually more natural than I was expecting. The oolong is tightly rolled and uniform and the raspberry is light and pleasant. Curious to see how this will translate to the actual flavor!

Sipping… The raspberry loses some of its bite and actually tastes a little bit like raspberry jam. There is a tart note that blends well with the oolong base. The oolong tastes of butter and minerals. Definitely very tasty! This isn’t my favorite fruity oolong, but it does hit the spot this evening. Yum!

I was gonna say “wow I think this is my favourite Oolong yet!” and then I read about it a little more on the teavana website and realized there’s actually raspberry flavouring in it.. soo, not actually a straight Oolong.

Either way, I really like this tea. Yeah, you can taste the raspberry, but before I knew it had it in it I didn’t even really notice it. I noticed the sweetness, and that kind of berry/floral taste, but not anything that jumped out like crazy artificial flavouring.

My favourite thing about this tea is the kind of woodsy taste it has to it. It has the same floral notes as the last Oolong I tried (Thai Mountain from Teavana) but not as strong and more subdued by the woodsy flavour and the added sweetness from the berry falvour.

Overall, a good cup of tea! But disappointed it wasn’t actually straight like I thought it was when I ordered it.

Note: I should add that there are different versions of this tea. The one I had has no berries in it.

Drinking the new formulation of Six Summits from Teavana…and don’t like it. If I wanted to drink essence of dried fruit, I’d stop by the grocery store. I think Teavana is focused too much now on selling tea to non-tea drinkers; thus, they’ve reformulated many of their teas to have a heavy fruit component. I feel like I bought two ounces of dried fruit with only a little tea mixed in. Not at all what I want.