Tazo

I hardly know anything about roobios teas. The selling point to me tonight versus the other teas I have on hand: caffeine free. My tea habit has escalated quickly in the past few months, and this week especially I was really feeling the caffination.

This is quite an interesting taste, not one that I expected. While nice and mellow, there’s an surface taste of slightly tangy/sour. It’s hard to describe, but my first comparison would be yogurt. A fitting end after a dinner of greek food, and a relaxing cup while I watch the Women’s free skate in Sochi. =)

from The Traveling Tea Box

So I managed to find a black tea, pu’erh blend after that last green. I really like the subtle peach flavor. It’s not like a cobbler, nothing doughy or vanilla-like but just peachy. A perfect hint of flavor for a black tea. Have to keep this one.

The taste of chocolate is very faint, more like a sweetness. This just tastes like an ordinary sweet mint tea. Disappointed!

I received this as part of a Tazo sampler pack my best friend got me for Christmas. It’s a nice breakfast tea to have with milk and sugar. Steeped up (read: the tea got dark) in my mug fairly quickly today at work and you can’t beat the convenience of a tea bag. I still think I like the Tazo Earl Grey better, though, but I’ve been on an Earl-Grey-For-Breakfast kick lately, so that’s kind of to be expected.

(1 teabag, 8oz, Boiling water)

I should have looked at the reviews before picking up this tea. Wild Sweet Orange. it sounded devine. Then I opened the bag. MMMM It smelled really orangey. I thought this would make a nice tea. Brewed it up. Man, is it ever tart. Crap, I couldn’t even drink it. Added some xylitol to it and it toned down the tartness. Still not the best tasting but it will do.

I don’t plan on buying this again once the box is empty. I’m no expert on English Breakfast, but this seems pretty bleh. However, I do appreciate it for what it is. Since I’m not drinking coffee, I use this for a kick of caffeine.

This is my go-to EG. I drink a cup of this every morning. It’s easy to find, easy to drink, and not so expensive that I can’t go through a couple boxes a month.

Love this sweet minty herbal tea. The tarragon is a flavor you don’t normally find in mint teas, so this always stays stocked in my pantry.

I enjoy my mint in tea, but up until recently it has been fresh spearmint from my garden in my iced tea. Since discovering loose leaf teas early this winter, I have come to really enjoy peppermint in teas, but haven’t had too many with spearmint yet.

Last evening my stomach wasn’t so happy with the pizza I’d had for lunch, so I decided a mint tea mint be good thing to try. I got a box of this at a “white elephant” Christmas exchange with my family, and a sample from hapatite – Thanks :)

I used a big mug with this and probably should have used 2 tea bags, but went with one and a long steep time. The result was nice, mild, and minty. As it cooled a bit, I noticed an aftertaste that I was familiar with.. not a great taste, but not offensive. I recognized it as the flavor my iced spearmint tea gets if we don’t drink it fast enough and it sits in the fridge too long… so it must be a residual flavor from the spearmint. I haven’t noticed it with peppermint blends thus far. I think this a great tea for when you need to grab something easy, refreshing, and caffeine free.

I think I’ve decided that I need to plant a peppermint patch somewhere on our property… far enough from the spearmint so as to not cross each other. I could dry the leaves and play with some of my own blends next winter, and of course use it fresh during the summertime :) I might even seek out a chocolate mint plant to experi"mint" with… Sorry! Couldn’t resist!

I’m supposed to get up at 5:45 AM tomorrow but I can’t sleep. Thought I’d give this a try since I have a nearly full box sitting around. The taste is better than the first time I had it, but still kind of strange. I can mainly taste licorice, rose, and bit of ginger. The smell is lightly floral, not overpowering. From the last time I had this I do remember that it did quiet a good job make me sleepy so hopefully it’ll do so again.

I haven’t been on Steepster in a while and can I just say I love the new layout! Having the numbers on the rating bar is awesome as well because I have to have them end in 0 or 5.

This was my first Zen Full Leaf tea experience. I have certainly imbibed plenty of this tea iced during summertime, and plenty of the filter bags at home. Today’s sachet format produced an unexpectedly tasty cup at my local Starbucks. The liquor is darker than that for the Green Tips, and the flavor more complex, but this is not just green tea. There’s also lemongrass and spearmint and lemon verbena in fairly hefty doses.

I was careful to follow my newly discovered method, using a ceramic mug in the store, so that the water was cooled a bit before the steep. I also removed the sachet after only a couple of minutes. It was much better than I remember Zen being before, so I attribute this higher quality experience to the full leaves.

This is now called Teavana Shaken Iced Green Tea. It is identical to Tazo Zen!

I cold brewed a batch of this tea as a part of my concerted effort to remove most filter bags from my house before summer’s end. No surprise that it tastes a lot like an unsweetened iced green chez Starbucks, since this is that blend.

It’s refreshing enough, but I have never found Zen to be especially “Zen”. Wouldn’t that name be more appropriate for a Japanese single-original first-flush sencha.? It could be called Zencha!

A venti iced Zen was my first tea of the day. It’s rather warm out, so I decided to seize the moment and drink something cold rather than hot. The barista must have misunderstood the order because I was first given a sweetened cup, so I returned it for unsweetened. As a result, I now know what the sweetened version tastes like: too sweet for me!

I had an iced Tazo Zen today. It was pleasant and thirst quenching. I don’t really think of this as a green tea so much as an aromatic blend, since it contains a fair amount of lemongrass, lemon verbena and spearmint.

A venti iced Zen accompanied me on yet another journey to yet another possible future humble abode. This one must have been five miles away, and upon my arrival, exhausted from having speed-walked the whole way, I found a ghost-town like demeanor hovering over the building. Not a single soul in sight! Tattered labels on the mailboxes with names crossed out and new names, and some mailboxes with no names at all. Nine apartments: where oh where could the person whom I was looking for be?

En route, rather than seeing the usual depressing flyers about missing cats, I saw one on a telephone pole with the ominous bold-faced, all-capital letters MURDER, below which was a photograph of a woman who apparently came to an unfortunate and premature end. The poster was offering a reward leading to the apprehension of her killer. “My future neighborhood?” I mused to myself…

Then when one of the building’s residents (who had never heard of the person with whom I was to meet) gave me his Wifi password so that I could open my email to find the guy’s phone number, I discovered that among the various named Wifi stations in the area was this one: pussy house. “My future neighborhood?” I mused to myself.

I never found the tenant and much later, hours after the scheduled appointment, I received a text message from him inviting me to come back after 6 pm. No, thanks all the same!

The search continues…

Today’s trip to Starbucks began with a grande triple shot soy milk cafe mocha extra hot with foam on top. My refill? A Zen iced tea. I needed something cool and refreshing and I was inside a mall, and starting to feel a bit toasty in my thick sweater and bulky winter coat.

Iced Zen is a nice blend. Lemongrass and a touch of mint are used to embellish the green tea. There’s also some lemon verbena in here. I’m not sure which green tea is the star of this show—it appears to be a blend of China greens, but I’m not entirely sure. Anyway, it’s a balanced and pleasant brew, and the lemongrass is used judiciously and so does not overwhelm, as I sometimes find in blends.

I find that the iced Zen tends to vary from store to store and from barista to barista, depending upon their personal view on the proper level of dilution. Today’s cup was on the light side.

Whoever decided on the blend for this tea really knew what they were doing. I picked this up on a whim today since lately I’ve been favoring rooibos teas and this sounded pretty good…yeah, this tea is awesome! I love it and I hope I can find more after I run out of this tin.

I’m new at tea and got this as part of a sampler, so you can go wrong with free! This was good for one of those days when you just need a cup of tea.

Not that bad!
After I ordered this tea, I read the reviews on here and I was expecting the worst. I brewed a couple cups, added a bit of sweetener, let it cool and iced it. Maybe its because I added sweetener (I brewed about 6 cups and I only used 2 tbs of Truvia) but it was not sour at all! If i could describe the taste, I would say that it tastes like Tang with a bit of a lemongrass and a bit of bitterness from the orange peels. All in all, I personally prefer passion tea from Tazo but this one is not too bad.