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Another sample from KiwiDelight. I’ve loved the genmaichas I’ve tried so far, so I was excited to sample another one. The dry leaves are small and flat, and there are some stems included. There is also toasted rice, which is much smaller than I’ve seen before. And everything is covered in a green dust of matcha. I was surprised when I took a sniff, because the dry tea doesn’t smell much like toasted rice, it mostly just smells like grass and leaves.

Well, the toasted rice aroma definitely came out while it was steeping! It made my whole kitchen smell, which was amazing. :D At first when I tasted the brewed tea, I got quite a bit of toasted rice flavor. But it seemed as I kept sipping, it moved more and more into the background and I could mostly just taste the tea. It’s quite grassy, with notes of autumn leaves and some kind of fresh vegetable taste that reminds me of celery or cucumber or something. When I finished the cup, the rice flavor came back as a lingering aftertaste.

I liked this tea, but I really would have liked more genmai flavor.

Trying a different Harney sample for my first tea today! I was pretty excited after loving the golden monkey I had yesterday. It actually smells pretty similar in the bag – very malty. But this one has more honey and I can smell a touch of stonefruit and alfalfa. The leaves are about a 50/50 mix of black and golden twisty leaves. I love the look of the gold leaves, they’re so fuzzy and shimmery. I really want to try one of those pure tip Yunnan teas that are all gold and beautiful! :)

This tea has a lovely aroma! Malty, but I love the honey and stonefruit scents. Wow, the taste is powerful! This is definitely the epitome of malt to me, it’s extremely strong but delicious. I also taste a lot of honey, which is fantastic! There’s a woody note and a hint of baked bread. I can see the similarity between this and the golden monkey – they have the same notes but in very different proportions. I found this even more amazing with just the tiniest amount of sugar added. I was a bit sad that I didn’t really taste that wonderful stonefruit that I was smelling. The most I got was a hint by the time it had cooled all the way to room temperature.

I have to say, I feel really bad for this tea on Steepster. It really doesn’t deserve the low rating it has, but it only has 4 ratings and one of them is a 34 (what…?). Makes me sad. :(

Yay another Butiki tea! :) This was one of the samples I asked for with my order. I love blueberry teas so I couldn’t resist! I must admit, I got really nervous about this one when I was reading the other tasting notes on it. It seems a lot of people had a really hard time with this tea coming out very bitter. Eep. It looks like a black tea, though the leaves are smaller and some of them are rolled up like oolong. There are a few blue flower petals and my small sample had one giant blueberry in it. The dry leaf smells like yummy blueberries and not much else, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I followed the directions on Butiki’s website for steeping.

So, I didn’t read up on purple tea at all, and for some reason I expected it to be similar to black tea, probably because the leaves are so dark. Let me tell you, I could not have been more wrong! I knew as soon as I saw the liquid that it was nothing like black tea. I took a sniff and it smelled like blueberry and not a lot else, just like the dry leaf. Not helpful, tea! :P I took a sip and it was pretty much the last thing I expected… It tastes like white tea, and a very mild white tea at that. The blueberry is definitely the star, and there’s a light hay-like flavor there too. The aftertaste reminds me of green tea though, sort of leafy or something. I find it kind of amazing that a leaf that dark can brew up so light! I was really worried about it coming out bitter, so I measured out a precise half-teaspoon instead of using the whole sample. I think I could’ve just used the whole thing to make the flavor a bit stronger. Overall, delicious and unexpected! :)

Yay free sample! Thanks again to Laurent and Dorian at Nina’s for the opportunity to try this one. I love genmaicha and I was excited to see how good it is with caramel and vanilla. Plus this one has quite a following around here, so I knew it had to be good! It certainly looks like genmaicha, aside from the black tea leaves. Mine had a couple of pieces of popped corn in addition to the roasted kernels. Smells vaguely caramelly but nothing too amazing. Steeped for two minutes!

The aroma of the brewed tea is much more exciting! I can smell the toasty rice mixed with the vanilla and caramel for a marshmallow treat-like scent. Mmmm! The taste is not necessarily what I expected. For some reason, from the combinations of these ingredients, the first taste I get is coconut! Whaaaat…? Then I taste dried autumn leaves, I assume from the sencha, and at the end I get more vanilla. The caramel is there, but not necessarily as a sweet taste (I don’t know if that makes sense! :P). It’s more of a richness than a candy-sweet flavor. I don’t really get black tea from this, aside from some astringency and bitterness that suggests to me that I may have steeped this incorrectly… Hmm. I have enough left for maybe a half-cup so I guess I’ll try a lower temperature or something. Either way, this tea is mighty tasty and I will definitely be purchasing it at some point! :D

This tea is from my swap with KiwiDelight. I figured I’d try this one first since there was only enough for one cup. I wasn’t sure what Obukucha meant, so I looked it up. It means “good fortune tea” and apparently it’s a Japanese tradition to drink it during New Year’s. However, the actual type of tea depends on where you get it from, so really it doesn’t tell me anything about what kind of tea this is. Sneaky! Looking at the leaves, it’s definitely a sencha of some kind. The leaves are wider than a lot of the senchas I’ve tried so far, and they look very flattened, almost like they were pan-fried. Smells like alfalfa and sweet grass. Yum!

The brewed tea still smells like alfalfa to me, but that familiar steamed spinach aroma is there now. This is probably the most savory sencha I’ve tried so far. I definitely get the spinach taste, but there’s also a prominent mineral quality that is very interesting. I also find seaweed, which I’ve seen a lot of people list for green teas but I’ve never really tasted it myself before now. There’s also a touch of pleasant bitterness. I think you could add salt to this tea and use it as a vegetable broth! .

Good morning Steepster! Okay, so it’s almost noon, but this is my first cup of tea so too bad! :D This is out of the pile of Harney samples that I realized I still haven’t tried. I can be such a slacker… I wanted a straight black and this was the first one I saw, so voila! I think the name describes this tea very well, the leaves are small and curly, half golden and half dark brown. I can totally imagine these being the coat of some adorable curly-haired monkey. Okay, that doesn’t make much sense but too bad! The smell is unlike any other tea I’ve had so far. It’s extremely strong malt and almost savory, but there’s definitely a hint of honey in there too. It definitely piqued my interest. Kind of followed the average parameters on here and steeped for 4 minutes at about 200 degrees.

It’s interesting, as soon as I took the lid off of my brewing basket, I definitely smelled a strong fruit note. However, when I took the basket out and sniffed the tea, it wasn’t there. I discovered that it was coming from the leaves, which I thought was interesting. The brew itself smells strongly of crusty bread with a small bit of cocoa and maybe some honey. Oh my goodness! This tea is just like eating that dark wheat bread that steakhouses serve you with honey butter! I was floored by how spot-on it is. Needless to say, it has a very strong bready flavor, specifically dark wheat bread. There’s also a strong malt taste, which makes perfect sense as the yeast in the bread! And then a touch of cocoa just to make it a tad rich. I got a sesame seed note at one point, but it wasn’t something I picked up on during every sip. The aftertaste is all malt. I know honey is a very common descriptor for this one, but I didn’t really get that. There was definitely some sweetness but I guess I associated that either with the dark bread or cocoa notes. Sweetener might have brought that out more but I wouldn’t dare with this tea!

I think Golden Monkey may have been one of the five free TeaVivre samples I chose, and now I really hope it was because I would love to try another version of this tea! So yummy and satisfying.

This was one of the two flavored teas that I chose when I ordered samples from Harney & Sons, mostly because I love vanilla and it seemed to have rave reviews around here. And I’m always up for more caffeine-free options! The dry leaf looks fairly unremarkable – there are generic small black leaves with some strange tiny white specks mixed in. Some kind of flavoring, I assume? Anyway, it smells divine. I would describe it as a creme brulee kind of smell. It’s sweet and creamy vanilla custard mixed with a bit of caramel and coconut. Steeped for 5 minutes.

The brewed tea smells like creme brulee too! Sweet vanilla and cream with a caramel note and a hint of frosting. Yum, yum, and yum. Tasting, I get definite notes of custard and lots of creamy vanilla. I also catch the taste of buttercream frosting, which needless to say is delicious. I don’t really get much from the base tea, but I don’t suppose that’s the point with a tea like this. From what I can tell, decaf black tea bases tend to not taste very impressive anyway. I did get a touch of bitterness toward the end, so maybe I should try a shorter steep. Thanks, Steepster, for bringing me and this delicious tea together! :P

Yay, one of my samples from Butiki! I’ve been looking at this tea since I found their website, and I’m way excited to try it. :D I have to say this is the most beautiful tea I’ve seen thus far. The leaves are so dramatic – crazy long and twisty and spindly like the roots of some ancient tree. And they’re pretty much pitch black which makes them all the more gorgeous. There are a few cream-colored dry flower petals in here as well, as a nice contrast and accent to the leaves. The smell is not what I expected: I get a lot of yogurt scent for some reason. Maybe I’m crazy, heh. But it’s definitely vanilla yogurt with some caramelly drizzle on top. I’m glad the sample is meant for one serving because I can imagine this tea being a pain in the butt to measure. :P

The leaves get so huge when this steeps! It reminds me of steeping oolong in terms of how much it expands in the water. Amazing! This aroma is much more what I would expect from this tea. I can smell caramel and vanilla goodness mixed with a lot of raisin and little bit of yogurt (?!). Drinking this is like eating raisins! Which is fine with me because I happen to love raisins. So raisin is definitely the most prominent taste for me, with a little hint of cocoa. I didn’t seem to get much caramel or vanilla at first, so I added a tiny bit of sugar to the second half of the cup and they came out immediately. Yum yum yum. I don’t have any experience with Taiwanese assams so I think I would have to try a plain one to really be able to pick up on the flavoring in this tea. I suspect it blends so well with the base that I can’t pick it out individually, which is a good thing!

For some reason, this tea has a very tart or sour aftertaste for me… Anyone else experience that?

This is a backlog from last night. I got a sample of this tea with my David’s order. I was pretty happy to see a couple of the carnival teas since people have been talking about them so much around here. The dry tea is a jumble of stuff – popcorn, nuts, candied pineapple, apple, etc. It smells tasty – like popcorn and caramel and butter. Yum! I steeped the whole sample for 5 minutes.

It smelled super yummy! Similar to the dry leaf, but with depth. I actually thought this tasted very much like caramel corn, but perhaps with a bit more butter. It’s like a mix of caramel corn and buttered movie popcorn. Mine came out kinda weak, so if I did purchase this I would definitely use more tea per cup than they recommend. Overall, thought they did a good job of emulating caramel corn with this one. :) I really want to try Cherry Snowcone!

I’m not generally a fan of all-fruit teas, but I received this one as a sample when I purchased some cups from David’s. There is no apple or hibiscus in it, so we were off to a good start. The loose tea is mostly chunks of fruit with red and yellow flower petals mixed in for visual interest. Mine had a couple big pieces of strawberry and then a lot of smaller pieces of candied pineapple and mango. It smells quite tasty. There’s a very strong tart pineapple and mango scent with orange and strawberry frolicking in the background. I steeped the whole sample (a little over a teaspoon) for 5 minutes.

The brewed tea smells almost exactly like Tang! It’s mostly orange with notes of pineapple and mango. It smells quite tart, just like the dry leaf. I was worried that this would just be an orange tea, but I was pleasantly surprised when I tasted it. The orange is definitely most present, but it blends beautifully with the pineapple and mango flavors to make one juicy, fruity tea. It was tart, so I added a very small amount of sugar just to take the edge off, and this made it much more tasty. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this tea and I would purchase more. :)