Tazo

I like this one brewed strong with milk and sweetener. It’s a good breakfast tea. I like the depth of it, and it also has a lighter topnote/aftertaste that is pleasant.

Great aroma, but it has a strange aftertaste and leaves an unpleasant chalky-like feeling in my throat. I don’t seem to enjoy Tazo’s herbal offerings.

Definitely wakes you up, but maybe not for the right reasons! I usually love black teas, even when there’s some bitterness, but there doesn’t seem to be too much to this flavor other than the bitterness. The tea has a nice smell to it that doesn’t come through in the actual taste, and the aftertaste is a bit rough.

At least it’s caffeinated so I’ll be awake for my classes…

This tea is SO delicious. I love it.
My friend (a total tea nerd… she’s given me all kinds of great tea tips) made me try this, insisting it tasted like “drinking a chocolate orange.” It’s true! It’s the sweetest, most smooth and beautifully tasty tea I’ve ever had. It’s chocolate-y and citrus-y and so sweet and wonderful. It’s strong and it’s the perfect tea to drink while doing homework. YUM!

Love, love this blend…and am dismayed to hear from Starbucks that it has been discontinued….any one know how to find the proportions so I could blend my own? Suppliers? Thanks

I could drink this all day every day. Hot, iced, lukewarm. Sweetened, unsweetened.

I love it,
The taste is smooth and relaxing.
More so, I enjoyed the taste of the smooth chamomile, crisp mint, and light lemon to add.
Everything about this tea is relaxing, from the name to the smell, to the first sip.

I love it with a bit of honey, when I get it at starbucks.

I recommend it, if you are having a bad day, lighten up with this cup of tea!

As a fan of Rooibos, my mom decided to get me it as a gift one day while I was home.
I admire the smell of it when I had opened the tin, it was quite satisfying.
During my first cup, I enjoyed the great robust full flavour the Rooibos had, while it was somewhat sweetened by the other ingredients.

The taste was quite good, but I would prefer just the rooibos, so not my favourite.
I put a little bit of honey in aswell, it was a bit better, more satisfying.

If you like trying different rooibos, go for this, it isn’t bad!

One bag down. Two more to go. With milk at dinner.

It figures that all I want on a blustery winter’s night is a tall glass of iced chai. So, I made one to have with dinner. Instead of doing a long brew time, I tried using a shorter brew time to see if I was just over brewing the tea to make it taste entirely of pepper.

Nope.

To misquote one of my favorite quotes: There is too much pepper in the tea! Black pepper was one of the only spices I could taste. I was getting a little bit of black licorice from the star anise, but not much. I could barely taste the cinnamon or cloves. Just pepper.

Luckily, I gave most of this tea away and I think I have two or three teabags left. So after that is gone, I will not be re-buying this tea.

I actually wanted this tea tonight and I purposely brewed it strong so that I could add my milk and honey. But then I took a sip of this ridiculously strong brew and it isn’t half bad. There is the pepper bite, but it is blending into the background a bit with the other spices. I can’t tell if the tootsie pop I had is cutting into the pepper or not, so I’m still going to reserve my final judgement until I have it without having something sweet in my mouth.

I’m going to put my honey and milk in it anyway because I did like having a sweet hot chai last night. It might be growing on me a little.

So, I’m trying Tazo Chai again. This time I used 3/4 of a mug of water and steeped the bag for 10 minutes. Then I added a teaspoon of clover honey and some very vanilla soy milk.

I love the smell of anise and that is what I smell coming from the undoctored cup. Anise and cinnamon. If this fails, then I’m going to have to remember that combination when I try making my own. The liquid is a nice amber brown. I almost hate to put anything in it because it is such a pretty shade. Even doctored up, I can still smell the anise before I take a sip.

Wow! Pepper. That is almost all that is coming through in the cup. A big dose of black pepper. Now, I do like pepper, but when I think of a chai I think of other spices too. It is a pretty good cup this time, but I wonder if I can do anything different to cut down on the taste of pepper and bring out the other spices.

It is what I was looking for to warm me up though, so I am taking that into account. If I had to choose between this and the other Tazo teas, I would drink this.

I don’t think I brewed this one long enough. I was kinda spacey during dinner and all I cared about was getting some sort of tea again. I’m not going to rate this one until I have had it again, because it was pretty boring and meh this time.

Pretty Good. It was my first time trying Rooibos, it had a lot of flavor and sweetness, but I couldn’t tell which part of all the flavor was actually the rooibos. I will have to get some plain rooibos and then try it again.

Backlogging! Just wanted to note that I’ve now determined that it’s possible to get three steeps from these bags, not just two. I’ve been using the following times and temps:

-1st steep @ 75 degrees and no more than 2 minutes
-2nd steep @ 80 degrees and 3-4 minutes
-3rd steep @ 85/boiling and 5 minutes

Yep, you can pour boiling water on this white tea…

Although I have to note that I’ve been slightly unfair to Tazo. I recently got into an argument with someone who insisted to me that Tazo puts whole, unbroken leaves in their filterbags(!). I told them there was nothing but dust and fannings in Tazo. I was partially wrong! After the THIRD steep, when I held up the bag, I spotted something like 6-10 little broken leaves inside! How ’bout that.

Turns out that pretty much no stores near me sell boxes of Tazo tea, though. That’s probably a good thing, so that I don’t waste my money on this.

Starting to think that I can’t actually give a fair review to any tea I haven’t made at home. I got curious about the white tea I chuckled at earlier, so I took a bag of this home with me last night and had it with breakfast this morning.

And…it was…pretty good, actually.

I steeped it fairly cautiously the first time, at 75 degrees and only for two minutes, and took it with honey. I wasn’t expecting much, but this one surprised me by being the most enjoyable Tazo I’ve tried so far.

It smells like artificial fruit in the bag, and it’s definitely got a strange, artificial-seeming aftertaste that is quite tart. I guess I’m supposed to assume that’s the “natural cranberry flavouring.” I don’t know. And I’m not very familiar with white teas yet, so I have no mental comparison and cannot comment on the tea, although I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly as nice without flavour.

Still, this one does, indeed, taste a lot like drinking blueberry muffin. I cannot taste cranberry at all, but I certainly don’t want to. Not bad for breakfast! I decided to go for a second infusion and see what I got out of it. So, in a “give no f-cks” manner, I steeped the bag a second time for about 4 minutes, at a hotter temperature (not sure what, maybe 80 degrees) and took it with white sugar (I hate wasting good sugar!). It was a bit weaker, but still not bad! So then I figured at school I will just go back to SBUX after the first cup and ask for a hot water refill and get two cups for the price of one out of them.

Which is what I did at school today…and the tea just wasn’t as good. I cannot figure out why it seems so difficult to get decent tea at school. Even stuff I bring to school just doesn’t taste quite right. I keep thinking it’s the water, but maybe it’s just the drinking it from a cardboard cup that’s ruining things. Gah!

I will, hopefully in the relatively near future, be trying some straight whites, and then I will come back to this and see if it still seems decent enough.

Went to the campus SBUX late last night because it just about the only place still left open after my Physics class. I needed to do some readings for Film, so I stopped by and picked up a tall cup of this figuring, yeah…I really need to be a bit more Awake. Har-har.

I sniffed this wet, without the slightest idea of what might be in it. I thought I picked up citrus. Apparently the notes are meant to be caramel and black cherries…is Tazo kidding me?

It’s drinkable in the sense that I didn’t throw it out. But what the heck is wrong with this tea? I can, if I concentrate, perhaps pick up a faint taste like cherries in it. Slightly bitter cherries. Caramel is nowhere to be found, and neither is black tea! This is brownish hot water. Is someone playing a joke on me? I paid for tea! What an utterly tasteless cup.

Wow, didn’t realize this site would create an “empty” log for me if I even clicked on the log link. Well then.

So this is the second Tazo tea I’ve tried at school after the Darjeeling. I finished off the Yunnan I brought from home this morning (turns out my work travel mug does only a minimalist job at keeping liquids hot…or contained in the mug), and wasn’t in the mood for the flavoured black in my backpack, so I went to Starbucks again. I decided on this one because I’ve always been a fan of chai masala, so I figured this one was an even safer bet than the Darjeeling.

(While I was in line, I noticed that SBUX apparently sells a white Tazo tea. SBUX and white tea, really? What a predictable disaster.)

I have to say, first of all, that this one smells absolutely wonderful. It may be that my nose isn’t especially sophisticated, but it smells like what I know to be chai masala. I can pick out the cinnamon and cloves, the anise, a bit of cardamon if I concentrate…very nice. Warm and comforting.

The taste, initially, left a lot to be desired. The spices were fairly strong but indistinct, and the tea base was far too weak, resulting in that rather distinctive bad-chai “toasted water” taste. Yuck. And on top of that, it was quite astringent (do I detect a pattern with Tazo?) which left me with the overall impression of drinking unbuttered toast dipped in black pepper…not quite as awful as I’ve made it sound, but certainly not very pleasant, either. I had to think that I liked the Darjeeling better!

About half-way though the cup, however, I added a bit more raw sugar, and this somehow transformed it. It seemed to bring out the spices in a more balanced way, and the prominent notes became the cinnamon and cloves rather than pepper and toast. Much nicer, which resulted in my mentally bumping up the rating by 10. I still think the base is too weak, though.

Not bad, certainly drinkable if you have enough sugar on hand. I pretty much no longer take tea with milk, but I can see milk mellowing this one into something very pleasant for a quick cup.

(I will have to fix steep time/temperature later, because Steepster apparently hates my aunt’s laptop touchpad mouse, but it’s probably around 82 degrees…and this time I actually saw when the bag hit the water, so 3 and a half minutes.)

There seems to be a lot of hate for this tea, but I’m not sure why?

I happen to find it a fairly decent Earl Grey compared to Twinnings (cardboard-tasting) or Second Cup (too much orange) or Stash (licorice?! how’d that get in there??), yet not quite up to par with Numi’s aged Earl Grey. Still, if I’m craving a London Fog I keep a stash of these teabags in my purse and head down to the local cafe to order an extra hot vanilla steamer. Then, I just add my own teabag. Easy-peasy-bergamot-squeasy.

I find that on it’s own it can be rather overpowering with bergamot. However, steep this baby in extra hot milk and it really holds its own. There’s nothing more disappointing than ordering a London Fog only to be underwhelmed by the Earl Grey. Me, I’ve solved that problem.