Popular Tasting Notes
Amazing!! This has been a great day for tea tasting adventures. Smooth, sweet, vanilla and cloves with a nice hint of orange. I thought this was a great tea to end my tea tasting evening with. The BF also loved this tea, I shall now apparently be guarding my stash of it from him…
This is the weirdest tea… I don’t know how many people are familiar with a Chinese pickled radish-y vegetable called dai tau choy, but when I brewed this tea and took a sip, all I could taste was a lingering flavor of dai tau choy. The tea bag smelled like caramel, sweet and malty… but once brewed, there was none of that. Just salty, pickled radish, and me sitting there feeling more and more confused with each sip.
I only had one sample bag of this, so I don’t know if this is just how the tea tastes. But this is definitely the most unique flavor I’ve experienced in a tea.
Preparation
I really wanted to like this tea. First this I noticed was that it had a solid foundation with a little bit of Iron Goddess character on the nose. 3 minutes in the yixing pot brewed a very pale creamy liquor. First brew was weak. Not much flavor at all. I resteeped it, and the second brew yields nothing. I experimented with different amounts of tea, different temps, and different times. Nothing could fix it. And that’s the biggest problem, a quality TiKuanYin shouldn’t take this much effort. One look at the steeped leaves and I could see part of the problem. They look terrible. Broken up and really torn up on the edges. They have no tensile strength and seemed to come apart just from picking them up. No nose on the steeped leaves, lack of flavor, no complexity and unappealing leaves make my :/ grade the only option I had.
Preparation
I was quite unsure about this tea as I’m not a big lover of raspberry. I find it’s usually very tarty and bitter.
HOWEVER! I made sure to only brew this tea for 4 minutes and found it had a lovely refreshing raspberry taste, not bitter at all. I added half a teaspoon of sugar, however it didn’t really need it as it’s already quite sweet. This tea would be lovely cold too!
Flavors: Raspberry
Preparation
This was my 2nd ever loose leaf tea! Pretty tasty and WOW IT SMELLS SO FRICKIN GOOD. I haven’t had it in a while but I remember it being a lighter black tea, not too bitter, and the strawberry flavor was very sweet and prominent. Did I mention the smell was to die for.