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I felt like a straight green tea or oolong this afternoon, so I figured I’d start working through a small box of sample-sized straight teas sitting in my tea nook. Some of them are swap samples (I’m sorry, whoever sent them…) and some of them, like this one, are from old Sips By boxes. This tea is apparently from my May 2019 box.

Unfortunately, this tea is very “meh”… It has a very generic dry leafy flavor, and a little hint of smokiness in the background. It’s not bitter or astringent, but there’s not much going on in the way of complexity.

Still, it’s a comforting sort of autumnal flavor that brings coziness with each sip. But I’m glad it’s just a small sample size. ;)

Yay, I finally got this tea page to load! ❤

Polishing off another of my teeny tin sample leftovers with this one from Teavivre.

The aroma is very sweet and honeyed. There is a touch of honey in the taste as well, but mostly it’s thick, hearty bread with caraway seed backed by subtle earthy notes and a hint of smoke.

As it cools, the honey comes out a bit more for a nice honeyed toast flavor.

A very satisfying tea for the morning!

This tea has gotten a bit flat with age.

The grape flavor is still there, but the oolong base doesn’t taste like much anymore. It does still have a nice silky mouthfeel, and is pleasant enough to sip on. But mostly at this point, it’s just muscat flavoring with little-to-no oolong.

It looks like this tea isn’t offered on the Hawaii website, though they do have the Queen’s Muscat Oolong which I remember being quite similar. I seem to have never written a note on it, oddly enough…

This tea smells so amazing, both dry and after steeping.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t deliver on the scent. It’s not bad per se, it’s just a bit bland. There’s some mild spicing, maybe cinnamon and ginger, perhaps some clove. But the apple isn’t really there at all, and the base tea nonexistent.

Womp womp. Oh well!

I really should have looked at my previous note before steeping this… This tea is such a diva, it comes out fairly bitter and astringent with my usual (rather conservative) black tea parameters.

Even with the bitterness, I quite enjoy this one. It’s such a bright combination of citrus and still tastes lovely even though it’s a few years old at this point. The strongest notes are the orange and tangerine, and the grapefruit adds a nice bit of sharpness. I don’t taste the jasmine at all, but it’s possible it’s lost in my deplorable preparation. :P

I think I’ll leave the tin out on the counter, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll manage to steep this properly! Sorry, tea.

This one has a lost a bit of its luster with age.

It’s blander than it used to be, with a very light banana flavor on an unremarkable base. It does still have a pleasing creamy quality to it that reminds me of banana pudding. Perhaps a hint of cocoa in the aftertaste? The chocolate was never very apparent to begin with.

Ah well, I don’t feel too bad about neglecting it so, as there were only a couple of cups’ worth left anyway…

…what a weird tea this is.

It sounds good in theory, I love plum and enjoy bergamot. But the plum here is very odd and candylike, and a bit chalky. The bergamot and clove combination becomes very perfumey.

Overall, it’s a weird artificial and medicinal mix and the rest of the sample is getting tossed. A shame, this was one of their teas that I was most interested in.

This was another of my Adagio mini tin residents. I find those tiny tins useful for storing opened sample packets without worrying about taping them or something. It doesn’t say what year the harvest was, but the “best by” date is in late 2018, so I’m guessing it was a 2017 harvest? This was the end of the sample, so I only steeped it for 2 minutes because of the more broken leaves.

Such a yummy and comforting green tea! It has a very creamy, sweet, and smooth flavor with corn and edamame notes. There’s also a lovely grainy quality that makes me think of raw oats. At the end of the sip, a little apricot pokes its head out, and there’s a very slight astringency that accentuates it with a feeling of fuzzy skin on my tongue.

This is a great green tea to keep around, and I’m sure it was that much tastier when it was fresh. I’ll be sure to add it to my wishlist to be restocked at a later date! I’m being a bit conservative on the rating for now, since I’m just coming back to tea and this isn’t fresh.

Tea of the morning!

This is such a yummy tea, it’s like Yunnan and Taiwanese black teas had a baby. It has those lovely thick sweet potato and bread notes that I love from Yunnan teas, but also the rich honey and dried fruit flavors of a Taiwanese tea.

Such a rich and flavorful, but light and easy-drinking tea without the slightest hint of bitterness or astringency.

Perfect for a lazy breakfast in a mug. Nom nom nom.

Still making my way through my B&B backlog… This was my caffeine-free selection last night.

I admit, I am not a red rooibos lover. So perhaps I’m a bit biased, but I really did not get anything cake-like from this blend. It was perhaps slightly sweet, and I got a hint of some form of red fruit or berry rather than dessert. The rooibos itself wasn’t that bad, not overly medicinal or strong.

But still, it was mostly just rooibos. Meh.