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I dialed down the steeping time and this tea doesn’t taste as woody – I’m found out what the taste reminds me off. You know the temperate rainforest on the cost of BC (and Washington, Oregon)? The tea makes me think of wet cedar bark, slowly decomposing in the moist climate and covered with a thick layer of green moss. Or that might just be my inner Ecologist showing. ;)

I’m also picking up the spicy note a bit more clearly, it tastes like a mix of cloves and pepper. The grapefruit is just a subtle flavour in the background.

I made a mug of this forgetting that we’re all out of milk. This is a tea that needs something added to it to keep the ceylon base from being too astringent so I stirred in some honey instead. It improved the taste, but I still prefer milk – the milk really brings out the wonderful, sweet creaminess of the tea.

Okay, last cup of tea for the night, I promise. ;)

This is another favorite I haven’t had in awhile, this and my Rainbow Rooibos seem to be the only rooibos-based teas that I enjoy. With this one at least it’s a case of there being a good amount of the other ingredients to balance out the taste of the rooibos. And as a bonus it leaves my mouth minty-fresh. :D

Yes, this tea is most definitely better with no milk and just a dash of honey.

Looks in the box

Woah, I only have one teabag left – how did that happen?!
XD

Go Canucks! Kick Buffalo’s ass! :P

I’m afraid I’m not having a very ‘hockey-suitable’ tea, though. The smell of this tea is an odd mix between the typical ‘tea’ smell and a soft jasmine fragrance. Interestingly the smell while steeping is pretty reminiscent of my H&S Dragon Pearl Jasmine.

The flavour however isn’t nearly as flowery. It’s light but it has a clean taste with some sweet, vegetale notes hovering in the background.

This tea was one of mu first from my foray into good-quality loose-leaf tea. I love the little pearls and, unlike Adagio’s Black Dragon Pearls which are more like balls (insert joke here), these actually are dainty little pearls of tea.

I wanted to watch the pearls expand properly so I cut open the sachet and dumped the contents into my strainer. I love watching this tea of tea unfurl – it’s almost like a work of art right in my mug. The jasmine is delicately-fragrant but not overpowering (ie. I don’t feel like I’m drinking perfume). I got two good infusions out of these leaves and I think I could easily get one or two more.

So given that yesterday I drank a bunch of not-so-great teas, I decided that today I’d go for some tried-and-true favorites that I know are good.

This tea is quite unassuming and ‘normal’ tasting, but it’s a good, pleasent kind of normal. The tea is practically made to be taken with milk and it goes down smoothly and at the same time it isn’t bland or flavourless.

Another tea from silvermage2000. :)

I’m on a quest to find a mango-flavoured tea that’ll knock my socks off. So far I haven’t had much luck and this doesn’t really break the pattern, although it is nice enough. The tea smells wonderfully mango-y and I taste the fruity mango flavoured at the beginning of each sip. Hoewever, the rest of the sip is curiously flavourless. The tea base seems oddly dull and bland – maybe because of the decaffination process?

I absolutely LOVED the scent of this tea dry – was like cherry-vanilla liqueur. Too bad appearances (and odors) can be deceiving.

I started to get worried when I poured in the water and the smell of the brewing leaves changed to something that was rather musky; sort of a sweet, vaguely cherry-ish musk. Not being a big fan of musk in my tea I desperately hoped at that point that the taste would be radically different from the scent – I’ve had teas like that before.

Unfortunately this isn’t one of them. I didn’t get any green tea at all in the taste, just yerba mate – which I like just fine on its own, but in this tea it’s not so good. So the main body of the flavour is roasted yerba mate, but it fades into a musky, sort of very artifical-tasting cherry flavour that lingers in the back of the mouth. I tried gamely to drink it, hoping that the favour would change – maybe as it cooled – but no suck luck. Eventually I gave up and poured it out – which is actually the first time I’ve done that to a tea.

Bleh, if someone wants to take this off my hands feel free to give me a shout, you might have better luck with it than me. Otherwise it’s going to be garden compost come spring, I think.

I took this tea with milk, but it didn’t do much to improve the flavour – it actual amplified the starchy taste a bit, maybe. This tea also still has a bit of a bitter edge to it.