Worst tea you ever had?
Well, not to be a pessimist, but I am curious!
Mine was a recipe from my acupuncturist when I had a terrible sore throat. It had mushrooms and tree bark in it, and it was brown, and it was GOD AWFUL.
As far as other tea experiences in life – I guess anything lukewarm is always a downer, or whenever you go to someone’s house and they didn’t properly wash their teacups so there’s a lot of soap residue floating on the top…ewwwwww.
Yours?
The worst tea I have ever had would probably have to be something I bought from an Asian grocery store. Their teas are hit or miss. Some of them are good but more of them are not so good. It is still fun to buy them though. I think the lowest quality Chinese teas make it to the Chinese supermarkets over here.
some kind of orange pekoe from a box of teabags, probably collected from the floor of a factory which produces low grade black tea.
if you are counting just anything brewed.. first place is the calea z i mentioned in my thread, second place was a psilocybin/ chamomile/lemon tea- nasty but of coarse i drank it all.
Those are the worst! The tiniest little pieces of tea leaves, all crushed into a bag. It’s like an insult to the drinker. But great when there is no other option.
Psilocybin tea? Tell me more, that sounds awfully interesting. You must be very brave.
DAVIDsTEA’s Cherry Cola is the one that sticks out in my mind; probably not so coincidentally it’s also my lowest rated tea here on Steepster. I gave it a score of six…
I don’t know if I remember the worst tea ever (I’ve had some bad ones), but the worst one I currently have in my cupboard is Constant Comment from Bigelow. ACK. Basically every flavor that I hate in tea barring physical chunks of chocolate.
I feel you on some of those TCM teas, effective at times but they taste like all kinds of death.
For me it is probably a tie between some really ungodly flavored Ceylon teabags from Hyson and some incredibly gross puerh I got from adagio that gave me a migraine and made it where I couldn’t even smell Shou for the better part of a year. Glad that one passed…and to be fair not sure if it was the puerh or just the fermentation realllly needing to die down, I was a bit of a noob so maybe I should have let it rest more? Too long ago to tell, I still get headaches if I drink shou too soon though so I dunno. Unpleasant either way.
I never put the concepts of migraines and tea together. I guess I’ll have to pay more attention to how I feel after drinking tea…usually the sentiments are positive. :)
Cheap ‘fish aroma’ shou from ebay was pretty bad. They coupled it with a sample of the worst tasting tie guan yin I have ever tried – it actually put me off tie guan yin for ages until I tried another vendor and realised it was one of my favourite teas. I dont know what they did but it tasted like it had been sprayed with a chemical TGY & Jasmine flavour. totally disgusting
‘Dusty Old Sofa Aroma’ Dancong from aliexpress was pretty bad as well. Couldnt taste anything apart from dusty pot pourri all day, the taste had just stuck to my tongue
OMG. Fish aroma? Dusty old sofa? You’re clearly adventurous. You’d have to pay me to drink those!
thats my version of what they should have been called, ‘dusty old sofa’ should have been a ‘mi lan dan cong’. maybe it was a mi lan dan cong, once. Then stored next to some josticks under a pile of dust in the back of the warehouse last century
My well meaning friend gave me some chai mix from teavana. It was a blend of a white tea chai and I think a Yerba mate chai. It looked, smelled and tasted like the Christmas poppuri my mom used to use. I had to throw it out, and because of this have never stepped foot in their store.
I had a friend give me a big thing of one of Teavana’s white tea chai too. I couldn’t drink it at all. I think it is better used as an air freshener than tea :)
I probably should have set it out. With all the twigs and dried berries and whatever other nonsense they put in there it would have been pretty enough. Kinda pricey for potpourri though ;)
I’ve had quite a few flavored teas from DavidsTea and Adagio that literally made me sick to my stomach. Most recently it was Adagio’s Blood Orange tea. That tasted like potpourri and cheap candy.
And although I love Whispering Pines tea, their autumn TGY just didn’t agree with me. Like drinking sickly sweet dead flowers.
Last year I had some really fishy green tea from Yunomi and Teavivre. I love green tea but strong marine flavors put me off.
My first loose-leaf tea order was about $5 short of free shipping, so I ordered 4 oz of Lapsam Souchong, frankly because I’d just read a novel in which it was one character’s favorite tea. It smelled like a day-old forest fire. My wife told me I couldn’t brew it at home because of the stink so I took it to work. The first time I steeped it, the other person in the break room started sniffing at the microwave, refrigerator, etc to see where the smoke was coming from. I had to confess it was my tea. Strange look.
That just made me laugh so hard! I’m sitting in a Peet’s coffee and people are wondering why I keep laughing. All these responses are amazing!
What I wound up doing is mixing one part of this tea with 20 parts of a mediocre decaf. It makes a very smoky semi-decaf tea.
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