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One more tea from Brett at Tribute Tea (in Chicago). Thanks!
I do enjoy occasional florals, jasmine being one of them.
Like the other teas I received from Tribute, the leaf appears to be of excellent quality, & care has been taken to maintain a lovely appearance.
This is a very nice jasmine tea, naturally scented, & tasty.

This is another sample from Brett @ Tribute Tea, which BTW is in Chicago, not to be confused with another company of the same name in Seattle
http://tributeteacompany.com
This is a lovely sweet cup of yum! Kind of buttery, caramel corn & yellow flowers.
The sweet aftertaste lingers, with an almost apricot mouth.
All of the teas I’ve tried from Tribute have been tasty & of excellent quality.

Another tea from Brett at Tribute Tea, thank you!
I haven’t been drinking that much oolong lately. I blame this on being busy. Oolong is a tea I prefer to drink when I have time to relax, so I drank a cup of this in the bathtub.
This is a pleasantly sweet one, with a fruity essence & a wonderful aroma :)

Here I am…back at my house.
I’d rather be hanging out in my PJs, but I got stuff I have to do, so I came home to do some of it, while Tony went to shoot a little pool with friends (I haven’t shot pool in months, my pool cue has probably disowned me by now, along with my Harley…)

Brett, the owner of Tribute Tea, graciously sent me samples of several of his teas awhile back…much farther back than I want to admit…I’m so behind on things…

I’ve put off drinking the white tea samples he sent, mainly cuz I just don’t drink white tea that much. It’s not even that I don’t like white tea, although I have been known to describe white teas as bland, milk toast, & other words that imply tasteless & boring in the past. The truth is, I have developed more of a taste for white tea, but it’s still near the lowest end of my totem pole of teas I want to drink. The only things lower than white are rooibos, followed by artificially flavored things.

That makes it sound like I would give white tea a low rating, but this is about taste preference, not quality of the leaf itself, & since I don’t actually rate teas anymore, it’s irrelevant. The truth is, I will always choose a black tea first, but I will occasionally want something different, & on rare occasions I actually want white tea.

This tea:
First off, I can tell that it is of wonderful quality, because it smells awesome, like a super clean barn, newly packed with freshly baled straw. It smells clean, fresh, green, refreshing, & even a little tart.
Next, the leaf material is beautifully intact, & visually it reminds me of freshly dried clover. Very clean & fluffy. White teas such as this one are fragile, & you can end up with a lot of ‘dust’. That’s not the case here at all. I can tell great care was taken with these leaves.
Parameters: I used the entire 5G sample in my test tube steeper at 190F for 1 minutes, with a resteep at 2 minutes. The liquor is a beautiful rich gold. Usually I go with shorter steeps, but lately I’ve been giving whites a bit longer, & I admit, the results makes me happier.
Flavor: Clean & crisp, like white linens, like spring. There is a slight astringency & a tad of mildly bitter cucumber mouthfeel. This tea is refreshing, savory, with a sweet tart quality like apricot.
The 2nd steep also features a creaminess, a little malt, & a green veggie kind of taste, kind of like long beans, with their green & floral flavor.

Brett, thanks for sharing with me, & my apologies for taking so long to sample this!

Also tasty.
Hopefully I’ll write a better review next time.

I drank this earlier this week, it was one of the teas I took with me to work on Wednesday. I drank it again this morning while I was making one of my awesome breakfasts: homemade sausage patties (no offense to the vegetarians, but it’s amazing what you can do with a lb of locally raised ground pork & some spices), asparagus & eggs. Tony was gloating over his package of english muffins, which always irritates me, so I made an almond flour coffee cup muffin in the microwave (one of the rare things I actually use that evil machine for), cut it in half & put it in the toaster, & it was tasty with apricot jelly.
I have nothing really to say about this tea except that it is good…very good. My lack of comments is not due to the tea, it’s just that I drank it a few hours ago.

Looking forward to a quiet day of tea drinking, knitting, & couch potato-ing with Tony.
First thing of the day: sipping tea in bed with our iPads, & a chance to see what my Steepster friends have been up to :)
Next up: breakfast!

I started drinking this yesterday afternoon. It started of with a rich creamy texture, developing into a fruity taste, at least to me. I did a rinse today to freshen the leaves & then drank several more steepings this evening. I’d like to give a much more in depth review, but I’ve been doing desk work this whole time & although I thoroughly enjoyed each steep & am enjoying the good energy, I just don’t really have much else to say.

I’d like to thank Angel & Teavivre for the generous sample, & there is enough that I can drink it again, so I’ll try to be more focused next time :)

I made it through the 2nd week of teaching classes, & although it was a very very busy action packed week, it went by quickly & was good :)
I’m rewarding myself with this cup of awesomeness. Thick & rich, I steeped 1 T x 3min/5min resteep.
A worthy reward!

Oh BTW, my favorite vendor on Ali Express, Make Friends by Tea, has all their yixings at 10% off…just thought some of you would like to know!
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/346539

I’d like to thank Angel & Teavivre for sharing a generous sample of this tea, as well as the white tea cake I sampled earlier today. This is a really delicate looking tea, & I poured the entire sample into my glass test tube steeper, giving it 1 min at 194, with a few resteeps. The original steeping was really very nice, & I’m guessing that the reason this is called peony is because of the floral taste of it. It is floral, and more flavorful that I recall white teas being, so either I’m sampling better more flavorful white teas, or I’m getting the proper parameters down, or maybe I’m actually developing a taste for white tea? Either way, I enjoyed the initial cup, & the resteeps were also ok, although they gradually took on a little bitterness.