52Teas Send Message

This is the first tea of the week for June – which is on the website now (available in limited quantities at the moment, more will probably be added to the website later this week.) This tea is inspired by my youngest daughter Lilith who just graduated from High School (in the top 5% of her class, no less! I’m a very proud mama!) – her favorite flavor combination is orange and vanilla.

I cold-brewed this overnight last night in a big mason jar – and she and I both love this tea! It’s a good balance of orange and vanilla. It smells amazing too.

The sencha is a good base because it has a natural ‘creaminess’ to it that works well with the vanilla. It’s not to acidic from the orange, it’s not too sweet from the vanilla. It’s light, refreshing and definitely one I’ll want to keep around for the summertime!

Overnight last night, I cold-brewed a quart of this to enjoy throughout the day today and it has been wonderful. This tea is one that definitely tastes best iced. I shared some with our houseguest (she’s my youngest daughter’s best friend and has been staying with us for a few months because her family moved away due to job demands and she didn’t want to move in the middle of the school year since it was her last year, so we offered to let her stay with us until the end of the school year) – anyway – I shared some with her as both a hot beverage (a couple of weeks ago) and now as a cold-brewed iced tea and she came in and declared her love of it. She drank it as a hot tea – and she finished the cup. She didn’t hate it but she didn’t love it either. When she loves a tea that I make for her, she comes in raving about it … which is exactly what she did for the glass of iced tea this evening.

The cherry and lime are very bright flavors of the drink but the cola is prominent – in both the aroma and the flavor. Sweet, tart & really refreshing.

This is last week’s tea of the week. Let me say this – I love my “job” – creating teas and then getting to do all the tasting that’s required! Plus, I even get a ‘bonus’ pouch of tea if I do my job right!

This one has a lot of both flavors – right now – after sipping about half a cup – I’m tasting a lot of coconut but the first half was more blueberry. It’s really silky to drink. The black tea base is strong enough to be tasted with the flavors. I think I managed a decent balance with this tea.

I’ve been at work most of the day getting the subscriptions ready to ship (shipping out on Tuesday since tomorrow is a holiday) & I decided I needed a little break. And of course, what break is really a break without some tea? Since this is the tea I just finished processing, I decided to go ahead and brew some of it – mostly because it smells so amazing that I was craving it by the time I finished packaging it all up.

Dry – it smells amazing (as I’ve already mentioned). It smells like sweet cola with fruit. Brewed, the smell is still there – but it is a bit softer than the dry leaf.

The flavor of the cola is a bit different with a green tea base than with the black tea base. The natural fruity tones and sometimes malty tones of the black teas seem to match up really well with the cola notes. The green tea is a bit less fruity and a bit more grassy/vegetal, but that’s not to say it tastes ‘bad’ or even “less than” in comparison to the black tea . . . just different. It’s less of a ‘sticky sweet’ cola and more of a light cola, like maybe one you made with club soda and perhaps half a shot of cola syrup. Less sticky sweet, but still sweet and cola-like in flavor – which makes it an ideal choice for hot summer weather (which we haven’t actually gotten much of up here in the Pacific Northwest, I’m happy to say).

The cherry and lime are also a bit more delicate than what you might encounter in a sticky sweet cola – but those flavors are definitely there and I find them to be more noticeable if I add just a teensy bit of sugar (about a half teaspoon?)

I really like this – I did hot brew it this time, but I really prefer it cold-brewed. Perhaps I will brew some overnight tonight to enjoy tomorrow.

I didn’t sleep well last night, and I knew I needed some caffeine to give my brain that gentle shake it needed to clear away the sleepy. So I’m glad that I finally (at least for the moment) have something like this in my cupboard. This is the first tea of the week for May – and it was a blend crafted around a finely chopped CTC English Breakfast that one of my suppliers recently started stocking. I loved it because it is an organic blend – not to mention remarkably hefty – a very bold flavor – with nice malty tones.

I went with brûlée flavors because I worried that for my first attempt with this tea, something fruitier would be overwhelmed by the robust, in your face flavor of this tea. If the flavors of a caramelized vanilla custard are somewhat overwhelmed, I figured that would be OK because it would be more like an “English Breakfast tea crème brûlée” rather than a purely vanilla custard crème brûlée. And that’s exactly how it translates in the teacup for me.

I’m drinking this non-latte at the moment, but for one of my taste testings, I did try it as a latte and it’s phenomenal served like that. It’s also good the way I’m drinking it now, a big, warm mug with a half a teaspoon of sugar (it softens the edge of this tea just enough and brings out the caramelized flavors nicely). I also enjoyed it the first time I prepared it for my taste testing: served straight up with no sweetener at all. I have yet to cold brew this – but I suspect it’s also quite good like that too.

PS: this one has just been added to the website, but the quantity is very limited until I update the inventory next week.

This is our Retro Monday/Featured Reblend for April . . . it’s my tea (a LIberTEAS blend) formerly known as Potpourri – https://steepster.com/teas/liber-teas/6465-potpourri – that I’ve renamed Highgarden green tea because I felt that it would be a perfect tea to represent the Tyrell house!

This tastes every bit as lovely as I remember it. It is also as visually appealing as well as aromatic as I remember it.

The flavor is softly lemon with earthy notes, hints of nutty sweetness, sweet floral tones and an herbaceous undertone. It’s really quite lovely. I love it served hot but I’ve found out that I love this even more as an iced tea! It’s so unique and refreshing.

This is my newest VIT (Very Important Tea) that I blended – I had originally planned on blending it in time for a January something release, because it goes along with the Candy Shop theme from January, but I was still so behind that I didn’t have time to do it.

I’m glad I did finally get this one blended though because it’s yummy. It’s inspired by one of my favorite lollipops from Lollies by Leah, a blend of strawberry ice cream and lemon sherbet flavors.

For this blend, I used Bu Lang black tea from the Yunnan province. The leaves are beautifully large and bulky and brewed without the strawberry and ice cream and lemon and sherbet flavors, it has a medium body, smooth, malty and fruity so I knew it would work well with these flavors.

My first couple of “taste test” cups were served hot and I loved them. Now I’m drinking it iced and I love it like that too. It’s a really wonderful blend.

I’m not sure if this will post or not – as it seems that my feed on Steepster hasn’t ‘fed’ at all in the last 24 hours, nor has it recorded my ‘likes’ or my comments – so I guess we shall see.

Anyway, this is a tea from our menu of teas for February. This tea wasn’t actually inspired by Pac-Man, it’s simply a blend of Pear, Apple & Cherry together with an organic green tea base of Chun Mee & Gunpowder. I thought PAC-Man was a better name than “Pear, Apple & Cherry”.

I’m enjoying this one as iced tea today – I did the taste testing as hot tea and really loved it that way but I knew this would be best iced (most fruity green teas are). Since I only had a very small amount of this left in my pantry, I wanted to use the rest for iced tea.

The green tea base is nice – I love this combination of Chun Mee & Gunpowder. The fruity notes are also quite pleasant – I notice pear as the prominent flavor but the apple and cherry come through nicely too. I wanted to be careful with the cherry as I am always mindful of the ‘medicinal’ note it can often have – but with these other fruits in play, I don’t pick up on any hint of cough medicine.

Delicious, fruity and refreshing – makes a nice glass of iced tea on this warm spring evening.

PS: We only have one taster pouch of this one left!

This is our Featured Reblend for February – and unfortunately (due to having less Genmaicha in stock than I realized) there isn’t a whole lot of it left after fulfilling subscriptions.

This tastes so much like I remember it – nice toasty rice flavor from the genmaicha – a sweet, custardy note, a touch of mango (that hits toward the finish and lingers) and toasted coconut. Sweet, yummy, creamy deliciousness. A nice representation, I think, of my favorite Thai dessert.

One of our teas from February. As I mention in my blog post for this tea, I was a little surprised that Frank didn’t try this tea – because he did quite a few peanut butter teas.

I love this – the peanut butter comes through nicely but the black tea is also nice and strong. There is just a hint of the cookie aspect – a hint of caramelized brown bottom, a hint of pastry/baked cookie. After my first taste test, I thought about playing around with that, but I loved the way it tasted so I didn’t want to possibly try to amplify the cookie to the potential ruin of the yummy peanut butter notes.