2013 Autumn "Medium Roast" Premium AA Grade Ben Shan Oolong of Anxi

I’m in bad need of some house keeping on my Steepster account. My cupboard is so inaccurate at the moment, it’s ridiculous.

Now, yesterday something happened. Try not to envy me too much, Steepsterites, but what happened was that I realised how little flavoured black we had at the moment. Only four kinds! I told Husband and here’s what he said.

“You slacker! You’ve not been pulling your weight around here much, have you?”

Yes, Steepsterites. I actually have a husband who will scold me (mildly) for NOT having ordered enough tea! Like I said, try not to envy me too much. :D

So we discussed requests a bit. Husband wanted more of the Orange Puerh from Nothing But Tea and also something red fruity because he had become quite fond of the Queen of Berries from Tea Palace. Okay, so first stop Nothing But Tea.

They’ve completely redesigned their webshop so it’s much easier to navigate. Hallelujah! It actually happened to me more than once that I came out of that shop thinking I’d placed an order only to discover later that I hadn’t actually. Don’t know how that happened, but it did. This time the order process seemed more straight-forward and they had a number of interesting things, so I chose the 100g pouch of orange puerh and a number of 10g samples. And then, and THEN! I was given one shipping option from the UK to Denmark and it was a whopping £26!!!!!! For a £14.45 order! O.O Steepsterites, I just about keeled over. Lucky me I have English family, so that order has now gone on my Christmas list instead. I’ve also sent them an email asking if that can really be true, because if it is, I just can’t afford to shop there any longer.

That being out of the question, next stop Tea Palace. Turns out their website returned a 404 error and was otherwise non-existant. Cue panic! Had they closed? I hadn’t heard anything and I’d had a newsletter from them in September which didn’t mention any such thing. A bit of snooping around revealed that they had taken their site down last weekend ‘for improvements’ whatever that means and I can only conclude it still wasn’t ready for re-launch.

So goodbye orange puerh and so long queen of berries…

I turned instead towards the Frenchies, and made a small order with Mariage Freres. I was at a point here where I was more than half expecting something to go horribly wrong, so now we’ll just have to wait and see if it ever turns up. I found their website difficult to navigate and ended up asking Husband what his French was like as even with the English version of the site all the tea names were still in French. The fairly simple fruit flavoured ones was easy enough as he knew some of those words and with the four red fruits one even I could make an educated guess. Horrid site to use, though. I wonder if it’s any better if one speaks French…

So now we’re waiting for that.

In the meantime I’m having a cup of this oolong. It’s the first time I’ve tasted it and I bought it because I was looking for darkish, roast-y oolongs at the time. The description said it was nutty and sweet, which are two things that I approve of, and a reviewer on the site said they thought it tasted like pears. I approve of that as well, so while shopping anyway, I got some.

It has a sweet and nutty aroma, definitely. At first when it was warmest, I thought it smelled a little like honey, but this has gone away as the cup has cooled a bit. The flavour is super-nutty too and only moderately sweet, which I suspect is a good thing or it could have gone cloying. I also agree with the person who said pears. Not as strongly as they seemed to have found them, but more of an aftertaste sort of thing along with a wood-y note.

It’s quite nice this.