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I followed up the hakka orange oolong with this when I was sick, and it was an interesting drinking experience. I remember the taste of stewed tangerine zest more than anything. The tea was there, but didn’t really assert itself.

The tea itself was apparently harvested in 2010 and I’m not sure when it was stuffed into the tangerine itself, but I see myself most likely using this as a tea to experiment with in the future. Not bad, and fine for sick tea, but a bit too “old tangerine-y” for my preferences.

Apparently I drank this and didn’t take any notes. I have a hint of a memory of drinking this. Like 1% of a memory. Going to have to drink this again really soon, so this note is mostly serving as a reminder to do so.

Drank the last of this the other weekend to refresh my memory on how I feel about it and decide whether to reorder since it came back in stock. Still really like it! Creamy, fruity and easy to enjoy, even when I wasn’t feeling well. Glad I’ll have more coming!

Thanks to Roswell Strange for this one! Received it back during our Secret Santea event and finally got through my open greens to be able to give this a try. This is my first time having something from DAVIDsTEA.

I love my Japanese greens, but I don’t usually drink plain sencha. I usually drink something from the shaded green family like kabusecha or gyokuro, or something at another point in the spectrum, like houjicha. So every sencha is an experience in trying to really pay attention to the often more unassuming flavor profile that comes with them.

I selected this sencha on the particular day I drank it (Saturday before last) because I wasn’t feeling well, so I wanted something to help give me a bit of an energy boost that I could then make ochazuke with afterward. The description of this being umami and oceanic sounded like it would be perfect for that.

Unfortunately, that’s not the flavor profile I got. Perhaps I would have to play around with steeping this one more to get it right, or perhaps my sense of taste was already starting to get weird because I was on the downhill slope of getting sick.

I mainly got grassy vegetal out of it, and the flavor wasn’t particularly robust. I did get the slightest bit of astringency and bitterness, as well. It had an almost fired taste to it, as well. Made for an odd-tasting ochazuke. I will give this another try, though. Can’t judge from one try!

While sick on Saturday I remembered that I still had some of this sample left. I threw the rest of it (a 10 gram chunk of roasted orange, oolong and herbs caked together) into my kyusu and steeped this all weekend, including Monday when I stayed home sick. The chunk wasn’t even falling apart and still had flavor after all that so I brought it to work Tuesday. I’ve been grandpa-ing it for the past two days. That is 5 days of steeping so far.

No joke, this tea is a beast when it comes to longevity, it’s soothing, and it’s got a distinct taste without being overwhelmingly medicinal. I am seriously considering buying a full orange since it’s pretty well priced and can be resteeped so many times.

Woke up with confirmed sickness Saturday, steeped a couple bags of this just to hydrate with something warm and soothing.

Felt like I was succumbing to sickness Friday night so steeped up a couple of bags of these. It was soothing, but didn’t prevent me from getting sick, of course.

This was my puerh for the day on Friday. Getting toward the end of trying all my BF W2T samples. This one has a softer aroma than some of the others, and produced a smooth, golden, viscous liquor of florals and hay. Definitely on the softer side flavor-wise, but that contributed to its enjoyable subtleties. Very slight bitterness came in during the session, but very much in balance with the other flavors of the tea.

It seems like I didn’t go any farther than that with my notes, so I’ll need to spend some more time with this one very soon.

Whether they actually have the effect they were developed to have or not, I have really enjoyed the GABA oolongs that I have had thus far. This is the second I tried from TTC—the first being the (not deep) baked GABA. I have been appreciating baked and roasty oolongs more and more lately, so I was excited to try this one last Friday.

These rolled leaves had a sweet, baked smell that intensified upon being doused with boiling water. The liquor came out a deep brown and smooth, with a roasted, sweet, nutty flavor. The roasty notes intensified in the following steep, without drowning out the sweetness. Overall, this was a simple, enjoyable experience, and I’ll look forward to having more of this soon.

Why do I keep doing this to myself? I have not updated my notes in a week, meaning I am now over 100g in tea and tisanes behind in logging here, and I didn’t even take notes on all those things as I was drinking. Meh.

Fortunately, I did take some notes for this one, though they’re not very detailed. I drank this last Thursday. 8 grams in the gaiwan, the usual, though I may have remembered this day that I need to keep the water a bit cooler when doing these greener oolongs. I think water being too hot may have funked up some of my other recent sessions.

Anyhow. Nice, rolled green leaves that produced a pale yellow liquor. Coconut milk flavor up front, which I found quite interesting and appreciable! I’m a huge fan of just about anything coconut—coconut oil, coconut milk, coconut shavings, coconut water, coconut slices…you get the idea. This was very different from what I am used to getting out of the jin xuan cultivar, as it has always been more of a dairy-milk-esque experience for me in the past. Coconut milk led to a fruity body flavor, which complemented it well. I don’t think I got much flavor evolution out of this one beyond that, as my next tasting notes for it are from revisiting the same leaves on Friday.

Reusing the same leaves produced a more pronounced milky flavor the next day and a very distinct up front sweetness. This was nice overall, but I’ll need to spend some more time with it to get a better feel for it.