Tippy's Tea
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After a week of running around like crazy, I finally took a couple of hours for myself. I finished a fantasy novel (2nd in the series, called Sworn in Steel) that I started over a week ago, and brewed a pot of this to drink while reading. The mellow, smooth flavor just added to my enjoyment of the evening. That’s what tea is all about in the evening!
I’m trying to rotate trying all my new teas, so I sample a new one everyday. (Steepster has been very bad for my budget! But good for my tea obsession) Today is Not So Vanilla’s day. I was hoping the kenalog shot would have restored my sense of smell (and therefore taste) but it hasn’t. So I’m probably missing a ton of vanilla deliciousness. For what I can taste, this is a mild, smooth tea. I taste no bitterness, nor is it as sweet as some others. The first sip tasted very like any other tea, but as I drank the cup down I found myself savoring it more and more. It tasted almost creamy to me. I can see myself enjoying this in the afternoon.
Flavors: Creamy
Preparation
Sad day. I finished this one. There is no more in the cupboard and I’m on a very strict tea diet until I get a little more caught up on my bills. All the medical/dental/eye glasses stuff has rendered me flat broke. Flatter than an empty envelope. But I still have lots of yummy teas to drink. Maybe after Christmas I can re-stock on some of the favorites I have sipped down.
I had a cup of this this afternoon, and when I opened the bag I got a whiff of the scent of a chocolate mint. It was sooooo nice. MY sense of smell is still weak, and some days it’s non existent. This afternoon it was strong enough for me to really enjoy this tea. :)
Yee-haw! No soapy taste!!
It didn’t taste like mint or even tea, really, but without that sickening swirl of soap it was very drinkable. I have hope that in a few days I’ll be able to actually taste Some Thing. Ah, Minted Monkey, you never disappoint. :)
Today was not my best day. In fact, you might say it sucked. The day job was a nightmare. Well, no, not that bad. More like a bad dream. Then the rental office informed me they would be bringing not one, not two, but THREE different prospective renters in during the day. After my niece’s visit this weekend, the place really is a mess. And because I work with private health information, my work computer must be shut down if anyone is there. That means I don’t get paid for these three visits.
I might have cried when I hung up the phone. A little bit. But I didn’t punch my fist through the wall, which was a very valid option 2.
What do you do when you are soooo stressed you can’t even function? That’s right, Keep Calm and Drink Tea. Maybe scream every bad word you know in the silence of your mind. (8 years of military service; I know a LOT of bad words.) I decided to not mess around with good teas and went for a great one. Minted Minkey. It’s good for what ails ya.
Aww I’m so sorry about everything happening right now. That’s good that the office informed you at least. Mine has been bringing people in to view my place anytime they freaking want without warning, so I feel like I’m being held hostage. But regardless, that is horrible how it is affecting your job in that way.
When I signed a form putting in my notice, included it was a disclaimer agreeing to allow them to show my place anytime befween 10am and 7pm. The catch is you can’t move out unless you sign the form. Like what? Talk about a crafty way of circumventing the law.
I’m sorry you had such a stressful day Maddy!
Fjellrev, I’m pretty sure most places (provinces, states) they are required to give you 24 hours written notice before entering or showing your apartment.
I had a terribly traumatic experience where my landlord decided to sell the building, lied to us about it and then one day I woke up with a real estate agent and random people in my bedroom. I have rarely been so angry in my life and I still get jumpy when I hear people outside my door.
Seriously, you do not have to put up with that shite. Call residential tenancies if you need help.
OMG D: All of your stories are awful. :( Maddy and Fjellrev, I hope things go better for both of you.
This tea never disappoints. Even when I ( as seems to be my habit these days) let it steep way too long, it remains smooth and not bitter. This manuscript was supposed to be in to my editor a month ago. I tried to write tonight, I really did. The words must be outside playing in the spring weather. At least I have good tea!
Wow, what a weekend. I wrote my little heart out. It’s been a long time since I wrote for such long hours. I did not finish the manuscript, but I can see the end coming. 4,000 more words ought to do it.
I brewed a pot of Minted Monkey, but I forgot about it steeping (there’s a pattern here. I did the same thing this morning!) It steeped for 15 freaking minutes, and still tasted pretty good. Not one bit bitter. Just a little strong. That’s the sign of a darned good tea! I drank the entire pot and was going to re-steep when my brother called and I knocked the infuser over onto the dirty kitchen floor. Grr. Oh well, I guess I’ve probably had enough caffeine anyway.
I know I just had this tea, but I’m having it again tonight because I need a treat. My littlest kitty, Dixie, has been lethargic and not eating since Friday afternoon. When she had no interest in eating her favorite can food, I got really worried. So I spent the afternoon at the emergency vet clinic while they identified she had eaten a corner of her fleece blanket and it was obstructing her little butthole. Poor little baby. They had to sedate her and manually clean… Well, enough detail. She will be fine they think, but they’re keeping her overnight to recover from anesthesia and for observation. I don’t know what this is going to cost me. I guess my newly paid off credit card will no longer have a zero balance after I pick her up tomorrow. Sigh. Drink more tea.
Pets seem to know when you have reached a point where your head is above water and that’s when they step on it! :) Glad to hear she seems to be doing well. :)
I made a pot of this to drink while I worked tonight. Sometimes you just feel like having something you know you enjoy. And enjoy I did. I also got my friend’s birthday gift together for her party tomorrow night. You don’t know how hard it was for me to include the unopened the pouch of this tea in with the rest of the present.
I decided I absolutely deserved to finally open my new pouch of Minted Monkey. I think of this as an afternoon or evening dessert tea, but heck, who says you can’t have dessert with your mid morning break? I opened a box of my new Girl Scout shortbread cookies to go with it. Mmm… Delicious! Compared to the Oolong I had for breakfast this tea seems quite strong. (and maybe I used a little more leaves this time) But just as smooth as my sample from my last order. So glad I have this one back in the cupboard!
Indeed. At least, here in Fargo ND, the little entrepreneurs are hard at work, destroying diets and selling bliss everywhere. Those shortbread cookies would go well with ANY tea I think!
Gaaaaaaah. You lucky US people, you! I’m in Canada, and I’ve only ever seen the chocolate / vanilla sandwiches and the thin mints—which, to be fair, are my weakness, always and forever. But oh, for the VARIETY. . .
I agree, sweetea! Actually, I’ve only seen the chocolate and vanilla sandwiches around. Man, those vanilla ones are addictive. Wish you can get only those.
You don’t get Girl Scout cookies up north??? That explains why so many of my Thunder Bay and Winnipeg friends stock up when they come down. :( :( :(
Today was a good day. I got all the cleaning on my list done (took me 8 hours!) and spent the last hour sipping this and knitting. I will be moving at the end of March and it’s horrifying how much stuff I have. You would not believe the things I unearthed from my bedroom closet! I sorted, boxed up for goodwill, and carried stuff out to the dumpster. So now I’m tired, physically weary rather than sleepy, and decided I deserve a treat tonight. Since I just ordered 50 grams of this, I feel like I can go ahead and drink up the last of my sample.
Yummy as always. I really enjoy Not So Vanilla, but I prefer this one. So smooth it;’ decadent.
I had a cup of this tonight to be sure I still loved it. I do. I have enough of my sample left for one more cup. I’m keeping an eye on the website to see when this will be back in stock. I told myself I was ordering NO MORE TEA, but I have to make an exception for this one. It is my very favorite dessert-type tea.
I received my package from Tippy’s Tea today. I also received packages from David’s Tea and Tea Source today. I had a cup of Cold 911 because I have a nasty sinus infection, but after that I looked through the teas I ordered and decided to try this one next. Boy, am I glad I did! This is smooth, very smooth, and sweet on its own, no sweetener needed. I don’t have a sense of smell, so I couldn’t smell any chocolate or mint, but I swear, I could feel chocolate and mint. If I close my eyes I get the same sort of feeling I get from eating Junior Mints. Sweet, minty tang of candy, not the harsh tang of toothpaste. It’s hard to explain to a smelling person, but a lot of teas are interchangeable for me. I honestly can’t taste the difference. With this tea, I KNOW I’m drinking Minted Monkey. That’s the best thing in the world for an anosmic like me. I have a lot of tea to drink down, but as soon as I get my stash under control, I’m ordering more of this!
Flavors: Chocolate, Mint
Preparation
I took a bunch of teas to a friend’s place and this is the one she wanted to try. :) It’s always fun to explain to people that there’s no actual chocolate flavouring, all the cocoa notes come from the base tea. It was pretty well-balanced for me today – I could taste the cocoa/malt of the base, the vanilla, and the mint.
Mmmm, this is really yummy. The dry tea leaves smell so amazing, like mint chocolate. The intensity mellows a bit with the steeping, so the tea is a more subtle blend of malt, chocolate, vanilla, and mint. I added milk and sugar to the second half of the cup, which definitely makes it more desserty, and really brings out the creamy vanilla flavour. It’s like melted vanilla ice cream with a bit of minty chocolate sauce. :)
Flavors: Chocolate, Malt, Mint, Vanilla
Preparation
I got a sample of this with my last order – since I’ve enjoyed all their teas that use this as a base, I was curious to see what it would be like on its own. The smell of the dry tea is very chocolatey! As it steeps, it remains pretty chocolatey with some maltiness. Surprisingly, the flavour was actually less chocolatey than I expected! Don’t get me wrong, the chocolate notes are still there, and this is a very nice tea overall. It’s quite malty and there is just a hint of bitterness/astringency, as well as a lingering sweetness in the aftertaste that I’m coming to associate with some Chinese black teas. Second steeping wasn’t quite as delicious as the first, but I still finished off the cup pretty quickly.
Flavors: Chocolate, Malt
Preparation
Got my Tippy’s Tea order today!
Of course the first tea I opened was this one. It smelled so chocolate-y, I got excited!
But while I was steeping it, I forgot about it for a couple minutes. So it ended up being really bitter. xD Could taste some chocolate and maybe malt flavors. But I can’t give it a fair rating till I actually steep it right! I’m still excited about this tea, just need to keep an eye on it better! XD
Oh no! You might be able to get another infusion. Unless you steeped it for 10 minutes or so. We’re happy that the order has arrived safe and sound. We hope you enjoy our teas.
Haha yeah, I think I will end up really liking it when I steep it right. Going to try it again this weekend hopefully! (:
This review must be read with the understanding that I absolutely love smoky flavoured food and drinks. I’m a big fan of Islay single malt scotch whiskys. I love smoked meat. Smoked fish. Campfires. So it is with that bias in mind, plus the fact that I love this tea, you should read this following review.
The first time I tried a lapsang souchong tea was in Belfast, Ireland. The tea was a bagged version. I think it was Twinnings, but I honestly cannot recall. It was very early in my tea education. I was a tea neophyte at the time, but sophisticated enough to realise that bagged teas were a perversion of the fresh, well made, loose leaf versions. To digress a little here, I use to hate white teas. Absolutely hate them! All my experiences came from bagged versions of white, which would be sacrilege at this point in my life! Then I got my hands on a very fine silver needle, and a fine bai mu dan and all that changed. The sophisticated nature of those teas became apparent and all was right in my world. Anyway, that bagged LS was horrible. It tasted like rubber, with a slight burning taste. Almost like the zenith of a riot. For note, buses and cars use to burn during riots outside of my family home in Belfast. It is a smell that is seared inside my snoze! So I forgot about LS due to that experience which rather sullied my expectations.
Then I sourced this particular LS. I got it because I started to get into smoky scotches and thought I’d give it another go. I was not disappointed. The smell of the loose leaf is extremely smoky and strong with a definitive pine characteristic. There is, thankfully, not a hint of riot in this tea! This tea was infused for 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Five grams of tea was used per 175 ml cup, a little strong, but I like my tea this way. The smell of the infused liquor is again, very heady, smoky and pine. But there is also a spicy creaminess which gives this tea more character. I can see how a lapsang souchong could become one dimensional, but the spicy, creamy notes add an extra layer to this tea which I enjoy. The first taste is smoke. Then pine. Then malt. The spicy characteristic sits on your tongue playfully, whilst the creamy flavor adds a smoothness to the finish. The aftertaste is all campfire. It transports you to your roots, of a primordial atavistic past. There is not one hint of astringency to this tea. Which always surprises me, every time! No bitterness either. It is wonderful. It does remind me of a really, really high end scotch whisky. That smooth character, the lack of acridity, the complexity of flavor.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. But it is mine, and there are others out there like me, I think.
To give you an idea of how strong the smokiness in this tea is, in our Early bird blend, we use 0.8 g of LS per 25g of finished tea. So it makes up about 3% of that tea. Strong stuff that must be respected if you are going to blend with it. At least this particular lapsang souchong is.
Flavors: Bread, Cream, Pine, Smoke, Spicy
Preparation
nice review of a tea that i cannot drink due to having been evacuated from 2 wildfires in the last 10 years…. perhaps one day I’ll get over it as well, but for now, LS just triggers a bit of PTSD. Strange how the mind works! By the way, I visited Belfast in the 80s….the train from Dublin (where I lived at the time) went through the back lot of the DeLorean plant….all those silver cars lined up waiting for their flux capacitors…..
Tried this one iced today. I didn’t think I would like the smoke aspect cold, but I surprised myself! I enjoyed a cold and smoky rich glass of tea today. It really motivated me to GSD (get shit done!)
Happy to be able to drink my otherwise ‘winter’ type teas into the spring and summer!
All your notes about Tippy’s is making me so tea-antsy! Must wait another few weeks before tea-buying-ban is over, though. Gah!
I’ve really enjoyed all the teas I’ve gotten from Tippy’s. Great customer service too. When you lift your ban, I heartily recommend their Minted Monkey. And this one, the Not So Vanilla. Or if you want a straight black tea the Imperial Golden Monkey is yummy.
yummmmmmmmmm
The bonus of the teas made with their Golden Monkey tea is that they travel well in a Timolino or whatever stainless travel mug you might use. The flavor doesn’t go all flat like with most other teas.