Tazo

I just read the other reviewer’s tasting note on this Tazo Long Jing. Interesting how different people end up with completely different views about the same tea. For me, this has never been bitter at all. I also like the uniform leaf form and the snare-drum sound of the flat leaves sliding by one another.

Well, it’s gone, so no one has to decide who is right and who is wrong! ;-)

Every time I make this tea, I am pleased by the sound of the dried leaves rustling against one another. It sounds like a unique percussion instrument half-way between a snare drum and maracas.

tiny pale green blades
thin as paper, sharp as knives
floating lilypads

purple fades to gray
at the bottom of the well
green dragon succumbs

A seriously solid Long Jing. Too bad it’s been discontinued, along with the rest of the Tazo Collection series of loose tea.

Examining the envelope of my Tazo Long Jing, I discovered that this tea was produced way back in December 2012 and is set to expire in December 2014. This suggests that different standards for what constitutes “old” are used by specialty tea emporia than by mass-market brands.

The good news is that this tastes good. Perhaps the true aging process does not begin until a hermetically sealed package has been opened and exposed to air? Of course the cheap brands at the supermarket are not hermetically sealed, but these “Tazo Collection” whole leaf teas are. Or were, I should say, since Starbucks appears to have abolished the line.

Once again I noticed that the second glass was smooth and more tasty than the first. There must be some physiological explanation for this phenomenon. It’s the same tea! The only difference is that the second serving has been sitting (not steeping) in a tetsubin—not a yixing, so no extra flavor is being added!

I just learned from my envelope of Tazo Long Jing that a light tea oil is used in the wok for producing this type of pan-fired tea. So it’s fried, not just fired! Learn something new every day. Well, I picked up a bottle of green tea oil with the rest of my Tazo Collection order, so it will be interesting to discover what other applications it might have in cooking. I have not opened the bottle yet.

This tea from the soon-to-be-defunct Collection series chez the soon-to-be-defunct Tazo company—or rather soon-to-be-evolved-into-Teavana company, tastes good. It’s a solid Long JIng—no question there. The leaves are on the large side, rather broad and long and extremely thin. They are lighter green color (not sure that I’d call it “jade”) and very fragrant, with a cereal-like aroma.

The liquor is pale peachy-green and tastes like an above average Long Jing to me. I’ll be drinking this supply and will probably try at some point to compare it to the current Teavana Long Jing just to see whether it is the very same tea.

No point in recommending this tea, since it will be unavailable in the not-too-distant future, but I am enjoying mine now! (Howard, Howard, Howard… )

(Blazing New Rating #49)

Hotel tea. Surprisingly not as bitter as I thought it might end up. My water temp was a little lower than recommended because I figured that was better than to hot! It’s actually decent. On my phone, so I can’t give it a number, but it would actually be in the low 70s.

After doing a major overhaul of my tea collection today (mostly just reorganizing and getting rid of unwanted boxes), I found I only have a few bags of this left; so much the better. Even considering bagged teas, this is possibly the most mediocre earl grey I have tried. There’s just nothing about it that makes me want another cup, and I’ve found it’s really hard to brew correctly without it going bitter. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll sip it down and then I’ll avoid it from now on.

I’m slowly working my way through all the earl grey bags my grocery store has to offer, because I like to take a few with me whenever I travel and I want to figure out what I like best. I think it’s safe to say that this is not it. The bergamot is way too floral for me and the tea itself gets bitter fast. It’s really hard not to oversteep this one, which is a shame because it’s not too bad when it’s done right. I can only seem to get a good cup out of it about 1/3 of the time, though, usually because I’m distracted. Since it’s so sensitive I might try brewing it at a lower temperature next time.

I decided to compare the Tazo Collection Gyokuro to the Superior Sencha this afternoon because I was struck by the similarity in price between the two. Usually gyokuro is much more expensive than sencha, even ichiban sencha, so it seemed like a good opportunity to test out my hypothesis that haute sencha eventually converges with gyokuro.

What I found, to my surprise, was that I actually preferred the ichiban sencha to this gyokuro. This is good, no doubt, but for some reason the sencha tasted more delectable to me today. It was slightly salty, but it is also possible that I was craving more of a sencha taste, and this gyokuro has a subtler, less vegetal flavor as well. It also seemed slightly thinner and less full than the sencha.

The liquor was very pale greenish yellow, and there was less particulate matter and cloudiness in this brew than in my side-by-side preparation of Superior Sencha. I was fairly painstaking about keeping the parameters the same, but it is possible that I steeped the gyokuro for slightly less time than the sencha. Anyway, I’m still happy to have a large bag of this gyokuro from the Tazo Collection sale still in progress chez Starbucks.

From a business standpoint, it was probably a mistake for Starbucks to make tea-lovers go to the Starbucks website to buy their loose-leaf tea. They should have kept the tea-selling business of Tazo at the Tazo website. Let’s face it: the people who frequent the Starbucks website are much more likely to be hardcore coffee drinkers, and people who are focusing on tea will go first to a tea-only site such as Teavana before attempting a lengthy and often fruitless search through the difficult-to-navigate Starbucks.com website in search of good tea. Some of it is still there to be found, but it will not be there for much longer, it seems.

(Blazing New Rating #46)