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I needed this lovely and slightly sweet tea. It just makes me feel better when I drink pretty tea out of a pretty mug. This tea is pretty because of the jasmine scent. I only used two teaspoons this time and I think I like it better. The taste is more delicate and lovely.

I might be sipping this tea all night long. I’ve been having a difficult time dealing with the thought that I went to college and I’m going to have to settle with a minimum wage job for a while before I find myself a “real job”. But extra income will be nice and my brother will be going to college himself in two weeks. Yay for him!

I made a third steep of this last night and dumped it in my little tea bottle with a little bit of sugar and put it in the fridge. Now I am having it iced.

The first present flavor is a lovely and smooth black tea. Then you get that semi-sweet chocolate taste on the back of your tongue. The semi-sweet chocolate gradually turns to a dusting of dark cocoa powder over your tongue.

I don’t know if I like it better hot or iced right now, but I should think about getting a tin of this when my sample runs out. It is delicious!

Four pearls this time with enough water for one tea cup steeped for three minutes.

There is the dark cocoa note! It is standing front and center and announcing that it is there. I hope to get three good steeps out of this one. Yum.

Time for the second steep. I actually lowered my steep time on this for two minutes. The flavor didn’t change that much. It felt more like sucking on a potato. No sweet flavors to my tongue at all. So I tried putting a little bit of sugar in my cup. It didn’t bring out or cover up any of the flavors. It was a little sweet but not that much.

The more I sipped on it, the more I realized that I was starting to get a case of “numb tongue”. My tongue was starting to go numb and that is never a good sign. I think it is just too much ginseng for me to handle.

I want to thank Teavivre for sending me a sample to try. It was interesting, but just a miss.

This tea is interesting. I have never had any ginseng tea before. The only reason I know what ginseng tastes like is because I have had the Arizona green tea with ginseng before. I used what came out to be 2 teaspoons because the first teaspoon and the last teaspoon were half spoons.

I brewed the first steep for 3 minutes. It is a light color and doesn’t smell like much. I had this with some Nature’s Harvest veggie crunchers and I think that is bringing out a more savory element to the tea. The aftertaste is very ginseng. There was a while there where I started to taste some pepper. I let it cool down and that is gone now. Cooler the aftertaste is less sharp and the tea is smooth on the tongue. I think I’ll wait a while before making the second and third steeps on this one.

Apparently this has moved into my morning tea slot because I don’t have to think about it to make it. Just steep it five minutes in boiling water and add milk. I have been trying to get up earlier and this is the only thing that helps me stay up right now.

It was a toss up between the black pearls and this dragonwell last night, so of course I couldn’t wait to try this one today!

The leaves smelled like butter when I opened the package. Not strongly of butter, but it reminded me of how my last dragonwell brewed up. The leaves are so big compared to my last bag of dragonwell. Long and flat. They wouldn’t fit into my teaspoon so I just poured out enough leaf to lightly cover the bottom of my press.

I impatiently waited two minutes for this to steep. I was worried for a minute because the liquor was turning out so light. In the press it was almost still clear but in my cup it was a very, very light yellow. I sipped it and the first word that popped into my head was “smooth”. It tastes so smooth and I drank it fairly quickly because it went down so easily. At the end of the cup it tasted a little mineral-y but not enough for me to really notice it if I wans’t paying attention.

I got busy organizing books so I didn’t get to have the second steep until after lunch. This steep was for three minutes and the liquor was much darker. It is still light and smooth but there is another note teasing the edges of my tongue. It is a slight creamy sensation with the tingle of light mineral water. I was afraid my lunch would overpower the tea, but now I’m thinking that I should have had it with my tea.

I have never steeped a green tea more than twice (mostly because I have never had a high quality green before), but I am going to try a third steep in a little while to see if it still has more to give.

Third Steep: I steeped this for four minutes and it tasted exactly like the first steep. I don’t think the flavors would develop any more after this so this is probably a three steep tea for me.

This is my favorite earl grey to have with milk so far. The bergamot just pops and is so juicy. Really stands out with the milk. I haven’t had my morning earl grey in a while either.

I accidentally set the smoke detector off while frying bacon this morning. Apparently I need to use a lower heat once the pan is hot. Oops.

I came back home from vacation to find a brand new box of tea samples from the wonderful Teavivre. It took me all day to figure out which tea to try first, but this won the right to be my 300th tea tasting note.

I brewed three pearls in my french press for two minutes with the first steep and three minutes for the second steep. The pearls themselves are about twice the size of the green jasmine pearls and smelled like dry hay. It was interesting to watch the black pearls unfurl with the hot water.

At first the tea didn’t taste like much. It isn’t as earthy as my yunnan black and that is what I was expecting from the tea for some reason. Only after I let the tea cool down for a while I began to notice a dark note. It wasn’t very strong but it was a dark note. Not earthy and not very sweet, but present.

On my second steep the dark note was a little bit stronger and that was when I was able to pinpoint the flavor. It tasted like a small sliver of bittersweet baking chocolate. I think I am going to have to brew this again with another pearl or two to really bring out the chocolate note.

I think the next time I try this I am going to put either my second or third steep in the fridge to try this iced. I think it would make a nice iced tea.

Thank you again Teavivre for this lovely tea sample. I would have never imagined that I would go from having a tea bag every once in a while to writing about loose leaf tea samples.

Backlogging from Vacation #2:

I didn’t drink a lot of tea at my fiance’s father’s house because they don’t have a hot water kettle. To me, a house without a kettle is like a house without books. very strange.

My fiance heated my water up on the stove and brought it to near boiling. Then he steeped it for about three minutes. I had it plain for the second time since he has had this tea and it tasted better. It was still very earthy. I figured out the smell. It is the deep soil that you find down in the water table. That smell. That is why it also smells a little like fish to me because I associate the earthy water smell to freshwater fish. It reminds me of diggng for worms in the garden when I fished with my dad.

I wanted a glass of this because I ate too much and I thought it might help my stomach feel less bloated. It didn’t quite work the way I wanted to, but it was still good.