52teas

Much more flavourful and sweet at this steeping time, though oddly enough it’s the cherry flavour that seems to be the most enhanced by the change, not the pineapple. I’d almost say that this tea doesn’t need to have any sweetener added to – it’s naturally sweet on it’s own.

The smell of this tea is incredible! Sweet and fruity – and the cherries – oh the cherries! (For those of you who don’t know, cherries are my favorite fruit).

I kept the steeping pretty mild this time so the results were a little weaker in terms of the added flavours – I could taste the honeybush fine though. I can still distinctly pick out the cherry and the pineapple, particularly as the tea cools. The fruit flavours mesh quite nicely with the natural sweetness of the honeybush – I think rooibos would ruin a blend like this but honeybush was an excellent choice for a base.

The rating I’m giving this tea right now is subject to change after I fiddle around with the steeping parameters a bit.

Bumping up a whole bunch :-)

While creating a spreadsheet log inventory of all of my teas, yes it has come to that. I decided to have some of this tea. I think I have finally figured out how to make this tea right and once I got it right I really did enjoy it. It was creamy and mint and just pure yum. As for my log so much more to go. Think I will take a break now.

I actually purchased this one and made it earlier this evening. It is good but not strong enough still. I am going to try this again with more tea and hope for better.

Thanks TeaEqualsBliss for this tea!

I enjoyed this tea however, I don’t think I used enough of it. Based on how it turned out it felt there wasn’t enough flavor and I don’t think I can judge based on my steeping. However, I did see the potential in this tea. If I made it correctly I feel it would have been amazing. I will try again later.

Yes, indeed i doubted if that combination could work – me being a Darjeeling-“fan” since ages. But, in fact, it does work. The flavouring adds some nice extra to a good Margarets Hope Darjeeling (although i’m not too much into Margarets Hope to be honest). In fact this tea is something very unique, something i guess i will drink now every day as long as it lasts :)

Very nice, never drank an aromatized honeybush tea that delicious. Perfect tea for the kinda cold weather outside this morning! Its really, as it says, neapolitan ice-cream ;)

I was expecting something a little more like orange-flavoured chai, but this tea is quite different. The cup I made might be on the strong side as I had a bit more tea than one cup needed, but not enough for two.

The scent is sort of a lemony-floral with only the faintest hint of spice and the tea was turned a vivid orangy-red shade when the steeping was done. It does have a distinctly tart, orange tang at the start of each sip, but it’s natural tasting and not hibiscus-derived (thankfully). The spices are very mild in my opinion and I have to look for them to find the cloves and cinnamon – not that this is necessarily a bad things either. After the orange flavour fades, my taste buds are taken over by a lemony flavour that I think is mixed with the flavour of cloves. It’s like this tea has two seperate and distinct parts.

The resteep (@ 5:15) is considerably less citrusy and the spices are a bit more noticable.

Not my favourite offering from 52Teas I’ve gotta admit. I’m not really sure exactly what is putting me off it, but I guess it’s just not to my tastes. Other people have commented saying that this tea is good iced, but unfortunately I don’t have any left to test that theory out. Ah well.

I’m very low on Assam teas in my cupboard and I usually drink a stronger tea in the morning. This one was a pleasant surprise though. It’s mild and mellow while still being chewy. I’m still not sure if I would classify this as a morning or afternoon tea.

After a frantic search through my cupboard I found one more assam tea. This is the only assam I have had that is so smooth it reminds me more of a yunnan than an assam. Don’t get me wrong, I still like this tea very much but sometimes you need a tea that just slaps you upside the head. This tea is much more refined and acts more like a gentleman than a hooligan. Still a fantastic tea though.

This tea is really growing on me. The tea is brisk, robust, and malty. I get honey notes and a raisiny sugar smell from this tea. This blend of assam teas is actually smooth and mellow, not something I can say about other assam teas I have drank. No bitterness or astringency, just smoooooth.

This is such a nice breakfast tea. Its brisk, robust, chewy, smooth and I am even getting honey nuances this morning. Seeing the list of all the teas in this blend makes me want to try each one of them separately. This tea has a wine like consistency and has an underlying sweetness to it. Its one of the few teas that I have that makes me want to make another cup as soon as it is finished.

This is the smoothest assam I have ever had. The tea is brisk, robust, and chewy without any bitterness. I am even having a hard time finding astringency, there is some but not much. Most of my assam drinking has been from single estate teas. It seems that 52teas has taken the best assams and blended them. This tea is really very good. If you have a hard time with assams hitting you in the face with their strength, I would give this tea a try. I have a hard time calling an assam tea smooth and mellow, but this one is close.

Caved and got this tea a while back (before it showed up on the Select obviously, d’oh!) because I was seduced by the idea of a tea that tasted like a) ice cream, and b) a type of ice cream I love. Mmmm creamy and sweet and nutty oh my!! ::happy dance!:: Ahem, okay back to the tea…

The black tea flavour is definitely present and pleasant with decent strength but little bitterness. This could be a cup I could drink sans milk or sweetner, but in the name of experimentation I added some to see if it’d round out the tea and maybe bring out those elusive nuts? A spash of milk and half a sweetner packet did make this taste creamier and sweeter, helping the ice cream comparison, but unfortunately didn’t do anything to make it taste more pecan-y.

Overall from my first cup of this I say that it is a yummy, fairly mild and easy to drink black tea with a natural sweetness, creamy notes, no bitterness, and good with or without additives. Unfortunately it seems closer to a “Vanilla ice cream” or “Maple ice cream” tea then a Butter Pecan one because I just can’t find the nuts! I’m hoping playing around with the steeping might bring it out a bit more? Does anyone have any suggestions?

UPDATE: Okay, when I stick my nose into my cup and inhale I can definitely smell pecans and when I exhale after taking a sip I can sort of smell them for a moment. Are all my ten thousand or so taste buds just broken? o_O

I really like the strawberry aroma – zabaglione i’ve never eaten, but its taste (at least the taste i think it is ;) ) adds a nice touch to this tea. Very well composed, the aromas are not destroying, but building on each other. Have to experiment a bit with adding some sugar to it :)

Sipdown #4 for today!

I will be drinking ONLY Rooibos and Honeybush for the rest of today! :)

I really like this one and am upping the rating on this one as well…I’m totally digging honeybush today…more than usual…not sure why…

VERY Smooth yet a lovely lemon…a great comfort tisane! Ahhhhhh!

Special thanks to LiberTEAs for this!!!

Smells like all sorts of lemon(s) and Honeybush! Surprise! Surprise! :)
It’s average light brown/orange type color.
It’s not a pucker-fish-face type lemon but it IS smoother than I thought it would be.

This is lovely. I really like it.

Yesterday afternoon, I started watching Oprah’s interview with JK Rowling and they were drinking tea so I had to pause and make tea. I liked this tea so much the first time that I thought I might have built it up in my head saying “I can’t drink this now because I want to be able to fully enjoy it” each time I thought about having it. But it wasn’t built up at all. It was that good. Except now that I know for sure, I don’t think I’ll wait to have it again. =)

I’m happy with this tea at these parameters. I might try a higher water temperature or a longer steeping interval. I did not steep past the fourth steep, but it was still going strongly then so I don’t know if it could take more. Several of the steeps started out tasting mostly of white tea and fading into the black current taste as I drank. I think that had to do with the temperature of the tea as it cooled while I drank. I liked the latter steeps most.

1st steep: 2 min.
2nd steep: 2 min 30 sec.
3rd steep: 3 min.
4th steep: 3 min 30 sec.

Backlogging. Last Thursday afternoon.

I’ve waited too long after first trying this tea to write a thorough and good tealog of my initial impressions. So I shall save that for the next time I have this tea and just briefly record my initial impressions.

The dry leaves were large fuzzy whites with a few twigs and lots of black current berries. I don’t know what black currents smell like but the smell was sweet, slightly tart, berry, and just a bit artificial but in a yummy way. It oddly nostalgically reminded me of purple smelly markers from when I was a kid, you know the ones that smelled like foods. I don’t remember much about the wet leaves except that they didn’t have as much scent as I would have expected.

My first steep was very light in color and light in flavor as well but good. I increased the water temperature by 5° for the remaining steeps and that seems to have done the trick. The remaining steeps were darker in color and I could taste both the white tea and the smooth yummy berry flavor. The forth steep was still quite good and I would have gone on steeping if I’d continued to drink more tea at that time.

Next time all the steeps will be at 160° F and I will steep the first steep for the full two minutes. In the future, I might be interested in trying a slightly higher water temperature depending on how that comes out. I might also be interested in trying increasing each steep time by 30 seconds instead of one minute at some point.

I’ve rated this tea a 74 on the higher end of my good range (60-80).

1st steep: 1 min 30 sec. 155° F.
2nd steep: 2 min 30 sec. 160° F.
3rd steep: 3 min 30 sec. 160° F.
4th steep: 4 min 30 sec. 160° F.

I got my second pouch of this last night and immediately brewed a cup….mmmm. I upped my rating of it now that I’ve played around with it and found how I like it. So far my favorite way to drink this is blended with Teavana’s Coconut Ginger Zingibar. I used 3 heaping tsp. of Chelsea’s and 2 of the Coconut to 12 oz. water and added some milk and agave and yummers!!! This is my favorite bedtime/dessert tea blend yet :)

Yum! I have gone through my first pouch and just ordered another…Now I’m thinking I should have gotten 2 or 3. I used 4 tsp. in 12 oz. boiling water and let it steep for 8 minutes and added some agave and milk. I taste mostly banana but if I drink it like wine and put my nose in it and sip and smell at the same time I get more chocolate flavor. ( I try to only do this when my kids are not around to avoid ridicule).

The second time I made this I added about 2 tsp of the Zingiber Ginger Coconut from Teavana and wow, so yummy!

So now that I’ve been reunited with my tea (if not all my tea-making toys alas) I’ve been wearing away on my big stash before I make any new purchases, and because it somehow looks a lot bigger then it did two months ago before I went away!

Since I have a nice big tin of this, and since it’s pretty hard to mess up a honeybush and I’ve been going ka-razy! with job applications/interviews/licensing exams I’ve been making it quite a lot. I had to look back and see what I had written about it the first time, and I think I was a little bit harsh, but generally correct. This doesn’t have the rich, decadent coconut-ness I was hoping for, probably because the tarter tropical notes of the pineapple and the sweetness of the honeybush have equal roles to the coconut in this production. But despite not being “what I was hoping for”, this is GOOD. It’s refreshing and surprisingly sweet (go very sparingly if you add sweeteners, this needs little to none or it turns candy-sweet ick!). It comes out a nice amber colour and full-flavoured no matter the random steeping it gets (frazzled me is not so good on water temps and timing), and while I find the flavour is noticeably more pronounced when it’s cold I prefer it hot when there’s still room for a bit of tangy pineapple and creamy coconut to shine through the sweet honeybush.

I’m upping the rating a bit on this one since I’ve gotten over my lack of coconut snit. All and all a good, reliable cuppa!

Backlogging

I got a big, beautiful tin of this during the Memorial Day Blowout on Steepster Select a while back and I was super-excited to try it because of my love of all things coconut and the fact that it was blended with honeybush which I’ve come to enjoy rather more then rooibos.

The dry tea smelled AMAZING. Like “wow!”, “yum!”, and “can I eat it?” all at once. There were giant chunks of pineapple (a wee bit shocking at first) and nice big flakes of coconut. The scent was sweet with that rich creamy note I associate with coconut.

The coconut in particular was a let down, I’d really hoped for the rich, almost oily mouthfeel I’ve gotten from other coconut teas, and the chunks of coconut in this one should have provided that…

Overall it was an alright tea that tasted okay, so I’m not really sure whether I’m actually disappointed or my expectations were just too high. Based on this I’m going to score it generously in hopes that my next attempts are more satisfying. Next time I’m going to forgo the honey and try a bit of milk/cream and see if that gives this tea more of the decadent heft I was hoping for.