293 Tasting Notes
I’m sipping this at the moment – it was one of the reblends from August’s “reblend” month. I cold-brewed it overnight & it’s my first time trying it cold-brewed. I have made it iced by hot brewing & then chilling it, but it’s even better cold-brewed! So yum!
I am logging this one as July’s scavenger hunt prompt “an african tea” because as just about everyone is probably aware, Honeybush is native to & grown in South Africa.
I just added this tea to the website & it has quickly become one of my favorites. I love it. Lots of berry flavor with that unmistakable note of bergamot, I love how well the berry notes & the bergamot mingle on the palate. So sweet but with just enough of that distinctively tart, slightly perfume-y note of bergamot. Really delightful.
And I claim this tea as my “Tea with a Creative Blend of Ingredients” from May’s scavenger hunt. (Yes, May.) Because I’ve not seen another tea with bergamot, blueberries, blackberries, allspice & nutmeg before. :)
I cold-brewed this tea overnight last night & I am loving it. I’m going to post this as a “melon tea” from August’s Scavenger Hunt.
I reblended this for July. I’ll be totally honest with you, after I blended this – I considered blending something else & tossing the batch because I used freeze-dried watermelon for this & while I have used both freeze-dried watermelon as well as dehydrated/air-dried watermelon in my watermelon blends in the past, but this particular batch of freeze-dried watermelon turned out to be so sticky. I’m not sure if it’s because of the combination of freeze-dried watermelon & freeze-dried raspberries, or if it just happened because this batch of watermelon is just stickier than previous batches of freeze-dried watermelon. I don’t know. I just know that it turned out sticky.
But then I tried it & it is SO GOOD. So very good! So very, very good! And it’s even better cold-brewed. I cold-brewed this for 12 hours and it is just so amazingly good. LOTS of watermelon flavor. The raspberry plays well with the watermelon. A nice contrast in flavor profiles.
Also, if you go to this tea’s profile here on Steepster, the “buy now” button will lead you to an Adagio tea. This is better than anything Adagio has ever crafted – so if you want this tea, I still have a couple of taster pouches of it left, so please, instead, visit my website. :)
I know it must be so frustrating that Adagio does this.
@Shae – it is. It’s very frustrating. It’s also – it hurts. I am one person. I own 52teas together with my daughter. We aren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination & we don’t make a whole lot doing this thing. In fact, if I were doing this for profit, I would have thrown in the towel a couple of years ago. I do what I do because I love tea. It’s my passion. I’ve spent a good portion of my life dedicated to it in one way or another and to have a much larger, profitable company like Adagio come in and sponge off my tiny little company hurts, tbh. When an entry level employee at Adagio is paid more by the company than I make at this thing (I don’t even have to know what their pay rate is to know that they’re making more than I do) – to have them also potentially profiting off of my work – hurts.
So, I just “discovered” this in the fridge (or my s/o did) – I had purchased it some time ago when I discovered it at Trader Joe’s & since I love green tea & pineapple together, I figured I needed to try this.
And – it’s OK. I don’t generally care for sparkling water. I find it a bit too bland and all that sparkle should not be so bland, you know? But here, the sparkling water works because there’s a good amount of flavor from the pineapple juice. I don’t taste a lot of anything that I’d recognize as green tea – maybe a hint now and then – that could be more of my wanting to taste green tea than it actually being there. But I definitely do taste pineapple juice – and I like pineapple juice so I’m not hating this. I don’t know if I’d buy this again – it’s not something that I’ll be heading out to Trader Joe’s to get more of tomorrow or anything, but if I happen to be at Trader Joe’s and I see it – I might put another one in my cart if the mood strikes me – but it’s not something I’ll hunt down.
This is my “tea that I’ve never tasted before” for August’s scavenger hunt.
This is the tea of the week for July 4, 2022 (it was just added to the website) & since I have yet to complete May’s scavenger hunt (and a Strawberry Tea is one of the prompts for May’s scavenger hunt) I decided to post here as I do my final taste test of this tea & also post it as part of my scavenger hunt teas. :)
This is so good. I love how it turned out (I know I say that a lot.) The solid Assam base is hearty & malty. It’s the primary flavor of this tea – however, as I continue to sip, the flavors of strawberry shortcake continue to develop & make themselves known. It starts off as a very gentle note of strawberry & hints of vanilla & butter. By mid-sip, I can taste buttery shortbread & a more pronounced strawberry note & a lovely note of cream. The butter really becomes defined as it continues to cool & I continue to sip.
Because this is an Assam, attention to the steep time is important. I recommend somewhere between 2 1/2 minutes to 3 minutes, but not beyond that because the longer this one steeps, the more risk of bitterness. When you do hit that sweet spot (for me, it is 2 minutes 45 seconds) you get a really rich, flavorful, malty black tea that is exactly the flavor I look for in a breakfast tea.
The cool time is also essential for this particular tea. It needs at least 10 minutes to cool before you start sipping. If you drink it fresh & hot right out of the teapot – it’s going to taste like black tea. A really flavorful, delicious black tea but if you want that strawberry flavor, wait a few minutes (at least 10) – the flavor will continue to develop..
It’s also a delicious tea to come back to about an hour later after you’ve forgotten that it’s waiting for you on the counter – (this is my way of saying it’s a good iced tea!)
Flavors: Butter, Malt, Rich, Strawberry, Vanilla
That’s the joy of creation — seeing your finished product come out as intended!
Yeah, it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes (not often) the blend just does not work and I need to go in a completely different direction. Sometimes it didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted to but it is still tasty (sometimes even better than expected). It’s hard to know how the leaves will react with the ingredients sometimes.
Applies to yarn, cutting and gluing, concocting kids’ activities…(I’m laughing at “the blend just does not work.” Describes the kids I’ve been teaching for two years two a T! Love them all individually, but oh, the combined chemistry!)
I cold-brewed some of this overnight & I found that the flavors really POP when it’s cold brewed. I like it as a hot tea as well, but I think I prefer it cold-brewed.
I really like this Fujian White Peony & how well the flavors played with the white tea. The blood orange has a nice tartness that contrasts with the sweet honey notes. A lovely iced tea – very refreshing.
I decided to choose this tea to fulfill the prompt “a tea that reminds you of your best friend” (from June’s scavenger hunt). This tea reminds me of one of my children – and my kids are my best friends. :)
Blackberries were their favorite fruits when they were young, we had a big blackberry bush in the front yard and they would go out to the front yard and pick the berries right off the bush and start snacking. So, whenever I think “blackberries” – I think of those treasured memories.
This tea is really delightful. Rich black tea, sweet, creamy parfait notes & sweet berry notes. Nice blackberry finish. So good. This tea is going fast – so I might have to grab another pouch before it sells out!
This is our latest Vanilla and/or Marshmallow black tea (although we do still have just a couple of the French Vanilla Marshmallow Assam teas still in stock) that we blended as a special bonus gift to our subscribers for our 7th anniversary – and also to add to our inventory as our latest Vanilla/Marshmallow black tea.
I had ordered the base tea (Keemun Mao Feng) on a whim, mostly because the tea I wanted was not available & I needed something else to bring me up to my minimum purchase with my supplier. This is not a base I would normally get because it is on the pricey side. (I also generally do not order teas that I’ve not at least sampled, but I do trust this supplier so when my rep told me that they enjoy it so much that they drink it regularly – and they were so confident in it that if I didn’t like it that they would give me a refund. So, I decided I didn’t have much to lose!)
And wow, I fell in love with this tea. Unflavored, this Keemun Mao Feng is bold with notes of smoke, earth & stone fruit. It had a really nice, well-rounded & balance to it & upon tasting it, I knew instantly that I wanted to turn this tea into our next vanilla tea.
And it works beautifully as a vanilla tea. The notes of stone fruit pair so nicely with the vanilla tones. The warmth of the tea – plus vanilla equals true beauty in a teacup.
Anyway, since I am kind of backlogged on the scavenger hunt thing, I’m logging this as a “Vanilla Tea” from the June scavenger hunt. (At this point, I’m so far behind that I think I’m in the lead!)
I’m posting this as both a blueberry tea and a lime tea (can I do that? LOL) in this month’s scavenger hunt. I love this tea . I cold-brewed this overnight & it’s especially nice cold brewed: Sweet & a little tart. Very refreshing. There’s also a hint of creaminess to this that I really enjoy.
I love it when teas turn out even better than I thought they would!
This evening, I wanted a black tea and decided that I wanted to have something “different” from the teas that I have in my main tea collection – so I found one of my tins that I’ve not explored in a while – and found this tea – still sealed – so let’s do it!
After I brewed it and was browsing through Steepster, I noticed that there is a prompt for the scavenger hunt for this month “a tea flavored like my favorite ice cream” and rocky road is absolutely my favorite ice cream.
This particular pouch comes from the 2020 reblend – and it’s quite tasty. I can’t say it’s a perfect rendition of rocky road, mostly because it’s impossible for me to get a perfect rendition of rocky road with tea because part of what makes rocky road so good is the textures in the ice cream. With the ice cream, you get the smooth creaminess of the chocolate ice cream, the crunchy almonds and the fluffy, bouncy texture of the marshmallow. With the tea, you get the chocolate-y notes & creamy flavor of the ice cream – and maybe a bit of the creamy texture but not quite as much as you do from the ice cream. You get the nutty flavor of the almond but not the crunch. You get the sweet notes of marshmallow but not the chewy, fluffy bounce of the marshmallow. So, I would instead say that this is as close to the ice cream that I could get in tea form. And I’m quite happy with it even though I don’t have those various textures because at least I can enjoy this now and since I do not have any ice cream in the freezer at the moment, what I can enjoy now is good for now. It’s chocolatey, nutty, with a sweet marshmallowy note. Yummy!
