Art of Tea

This is a nice sweet mint! I’m not normally a huge rooibos fan but I liked this one. It has a nice creamy vanilla flavor that rounds it out. I love peppermint tea, but it reminds me of being sick, this one doesn’t have the association for me and it’s still nice and minty. it’s much more dessert-like than herbal with the creamy flavoring, so it’s better with a good amount of sugar.

I am a big fan of keemun tea, and consider the smoky character to be a key aspect of the tea. However, the smoke so dominates this tea that I can’t really enjoy it.

The aroma is very smoky: to the point of making me think about Lapsam Souchong. All I can smell is the smoke. The taste and finish are likewise dominated by the smoke, making the tea one-dimensional, though the complex character of keemun is what normally draws me to the tea.

Once I get over my initial impression, I can just enjoy the raw power of the tea. As I said, I do like a smoky tea. I also discovered that the second steep was in many ways better than the first: the smoke is subdued, letting the flavors of the tea peek through. The finish is still dominated by the smoke.

As an experiment, I tried steeping a pot with half my usual amount of tea: only 0.8 grams for 6 oz of water (3 minute steep). The smoke is no longer overwhelming. Although I can’t detect the tea flavors, the tea is good this way. Still, I wouldn’t change my ratings, since the tea is still one-dimensional.

Note: It is possible that I am reviewing the wrong tea here. In late 2013, Art of Tea only has a Hao Ya (with no A) and that is the tea I am reviewing.

Another Sample sent by Awkward Soul, & destined for the box that I’m sending to Sil.
Sil & I keep sending one another these big boxes of tea, & I keep thinking eventually our cupboards will even out. I’ll have everything she has, & visa versa, right? Wrong! LOL, more tea companies come along, & there is always something new to try. Meanwhile, I have a big pile of goodies to send her way, plus the BBBB also! I usually combine them into one box, but I don’t think I have a box that is big enough. So I may send 2. Shhhhhh…..don’t tell her, I don’t wanna get in trouble, but this one’s gonna be a doozie! It’ll totally screw up her sipdown plans. LOL!

Ooops, so I totally forgot to say anything about the tea, hahaha. Honestly, the aroma was like singed rubber bands, but the tea tasted fine, with a light incense essence to it.

Spiffy white and black tea blend! This one is mostly crisp white tea in flavor, but with a hint of black tea that adds some extra body. Plenty of dry grape flavor (with a bit of dryness at the end of sip) and rose. The grape flavor is on the artificial side, and pretty much the same “champagne” tea flavoring in a couple other tea blends, but I do like how that bit of black tea in this blend adds extra interest to the tea.

Full review on my blog, The Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/fleury-doux-champagne-tea-art-tea-oolong-owl-tea-review/

Back to crocheting on my assembly line of Tea Owl wings. So many wings!

When I asked my sister to smell the leaves, the first thing she said to me was, “It smells like Fig Newtons!” I’m not sure if I agree with that sentiment, but it does remind me of something. Creamy and lemony, this tea smells like sugar and cream. However, once it’s brewed, much of that flavor isn’t really present. You get the first hint of a creamy texture in your mouth, with hints of a lemony feeling, with a stronger flavor at the end. It’s a bit odd, honestly. I enjoyed it, though, once I put a little sugar in. I’m not usually a sugar-in-tea sort of person, but this tea felt like it called for it. Overall, it’s not something that I’ll be re-purchasing. I might try cold-brewing it, though, and see how that turns out… It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not a flavor profile that I enjoy.

When I first opened the package of this tea, I was pleased. It has a lovely roasted, toasty, and almost-sweet smell that reminded me of a really good cup of Central American coffee. The taste didn’t disappoint! It had a very oolong flavor, with roasted and cinnamon notes. The initial steep reminds me of the flavor of a piece of toast with cinnamon-sugar on it. Lovely. It’s not as naturally sweet as the scent of the brew would lead you to believe, though.

To be completely honest, this reminded me of Teavana’s matevana (a roasted mate with oolong). Butttt there’s no mate in this. Tasteception?

It definitely had coffee and vanilla notes and while it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t amazingly good either. Kinda a meh for me.

Thanks for sample Ladyfriend :)

Pretty interesting tea. It’s my first pu-erh, and I like it! The first whiff of fishiness nearly put me off, but I braved through it and was rewarded with a lovely cup of burgundy liquid, tasting of miso, mushrooms, and wood. It was deep, strong, and really lovely. I’ll be re-purchasing.

I already finished my 3 cup sample I got and don’t want to forget I tried this. Going off of my memory from a week ago, I would get this if I needed an Earl Grey Creme and was already purchasing something else. More vanilla than bergamot and mellow. I enjoyed every cup I had .

Sipdown no. 139 of the year 2014.

I just realized that until now, I’ve had no tea or coffee or anything to drink today except water (and a couple of glasses of wine with dinner). No wonder I have a headache. Caffeine withdrawal!

This blend isn’t helpful for caffeine withdrawal, but I am going to have to try to go to sleep soon. The work week is already looking scary and I’ve been staying up too late.

I continue to find this something that was pleasant enough while it lasted but unfortunately not the highest on my current list of preferences for herbals. If someone were to offer it to me I’d drink it, but I have learned enough about my chamomile preferences lately to know that I prefer sweeter chamomile without the intervention of other herbs intended to take away from the sweetness.

This tisane is the current front-running sipdown candidate among the herbal/fruit/otherwise decaffeinated mixes in my cupboard just because it’s my current least favorite. I didn’t reread my first note before I steeped it, so I didn’t intentionally overleaf. I must be sure to do that next time to see if it makes a difference.

It’s certainly not something that I dread having to sip down (there have been many others in this category), but it’s not my favorite chamomile blend. I’m still liking the Harney Yellow and Blue for that designation. Tonight, even without overleafing, this chamomile is a bit sweeter than I remember, which is a good sign. It’s also a little straw-y, which isn’t.

I’ve tasted a lot of chamomile in various guises lately, some good, some not so good. This blend isn’t doing a lot for me.

The chamomile smells sweet in the packet. The rest of the ingredients make for a very rich smelling blend, with more than floral notes—there’s something almost like cocoa to its depth. It’s also lovely to look at (like its picture).

Once it is steeped, though, the chamomile becomes more of a sharp, pungent note in the aroma, and the rest of the ingredients don’t pull together as a team to balance it out. It steeps to a pretty, clear yellow color.

The flavor is much like the aroma. It’s not as sweet as the dry mixture’s aroma promised. There’s a little tartness from the rose hips. The lavender and rose are very faint, and I don’t taste the peppercorn. I don’t get much spice to this. On balance, I’d rather have sweetness than spice, though.

I’m wondering whether more leaf would make a difference. It seems to me that if the chamomile has a sweet, fresh smell in the packet, that should be indicative of how it will taste after steeping. That it doesn’t here makes me wonder if I need to perfect my preparation methods. It’s almost sweet, but not quite. On the other hand, it could be that the tartness of the rose hips is the culprit. I think it’s the hibiscus in Tazo’s Calm that makes the chamomile in that one problematic for me. I like this better than Calm, but not as well as Harney’s Yellow and Blue.

Sipdown no. 10 for 2016 (no. 231 total).

After sipping my way through this, I can safely say that the ginger was more prominent than the lemon throughout, not just in the cup I wrote about initially. I continued to enjoy the ginger flavor in this, though I can’t say that in the last few cups I sipped down I got the effervescence impression that I mentioned initially. Perhaps that is a function of age (the tisane’s, not mine).

I’ve had other lemon-ginger combinations that I didn’t care for, but I was prepared to have a different experience as soon as I opened this up. The smell from the packet of combined lemon and ginger made me think of….. ginger ale! I got the same note from the steeped infusion, which yields a deep orange colored liquor.

I have family in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Birmingham they have a local ginger ale called Buffalo Rock. It’s really yummy, and what makes it so good is that it has a much more intense ginger flavor than standard ginger ales like Canada Dry. Here’s more info about it: http://www.buffalorock.com/golden-ginger-ale/

Drinking this, I was reminded of Buffalo Rock ginger ale, minus the carbonation. The ginger flavor is deep but not to the point of pain and it has a spicy kick in the aftertaste. The lemon is taste-able as well and is what lifts the flavor up and gives it an impression of effervescence. I really do feel like I’m drinking a good ginger ale without carbonation, but not flat.

I may be the only person who wrote a note about this that found the ginger more prominent than the lemon and I wonder whether this is either because of what ended up in my measuring spoon or the age of this tisane (which was in a sealed packet but still rather old). I hope that’s not the case though because I would drink this for the ginger flavor more than the lemon. I could see it being an excellent tummy settler, too.

The thing is, I don’t drink ginger ale that often. Mostly on airplanes or when traveling. I drink it about as often as I drink root beer, though I like it more. So I wonder whether I’d really drink this often enough to justify keeping it around. On the other hand, I’m regretting not ordering The Necessiteas Rootbeer Float so as to have that around.

Remember about a week ago I mentioned a little project I was working on, cataloging all the teas of the world. I foolishly thought I would be finished by now, but thirty pages later and I am still finding little nuggets of information to add…and I am loving every minute of it! I love when a new subject comes up for me to obsessively research, learning new things is my passion and when it pertains to one of my other passions than the results are even sweeter.

Today’s tea is a spicy kick and possibly a little sweet if the name Hot Sweet Cinnamon by Art of Tea is to be believed. It is a blend of (all organic) Black tea, Cinnamon bits, Orange Peel, Cloves, and Natural flavors, it is a tea that I usually label as a pomander or potpourri tea because the aroma (and ingredients) were always used in pomanders and potpourri around my house growing up. The aroma is very spicy, lots of cinnamon and clove and a hint of rum or liqueur just sneaking in.

The brewed leaves are very spicy and loaded with cinnamon, it smells like Christmas and a hint of a typical ‘black tea’ aroma at the end. I can detect a very mild hint of oranges, but it is barely there hiding behind the muscled arms of the cinnamon and cloves. Think of the oranges as a wilting ingenue and the spices are her buff body guards. The liquid without its leaves is fairly sweet and cinnamon and immediately reminds me of Red Hots, those obnoxiously addictive candies that I have eaten far too many of in my life.

The taste is surprisingly bitter, though not in a way you would usually expect in a black tea (which is good because it would mean I failed at brewing it correctly) it is the bitterness of too much spice. I find my mouth going numb and my stomach growing annoyed almost immediately. Turns out there can be a thing as too much spice, tragic as that sounds. The taste after the initial clove kick in the face (at least I didn’t feel it) is fairly sweet and cinnamony, again a lot like Red Hots. The base Black tea is pretty weak, I barely tasted it around the spices. It was not my cup of tea, sadly.

For blog and photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2014/02/art-of-tea-hot-sweet-cinnamon-tea-review.html

Here’s Hoping Tea Box

This has a fantastic cinnamon smell and flavor to it. The base is bready and warm. However the fig just had this artificial aftertaste that clings to everything and kind of ruins everything else.

Roasty and creamy. Comforting, but ultimately unremarkable. This resteeps well without losing flavor. It also doesn’t oversteep easily, which is nice.

Sipdown! Thanks for including this in my Secret Turkey package, RogersCK!

Hi there. I am alive! It has been about a year since I have been around. Coincidentally, we have been having a cold snap in northern California, so I have started winnowing the stash again.

I see my last sipdown was in 2014 and I was on a roll. I had 163 for the year at that time. Then I disappeared.

Rather than start over for 2015, which is almost over in any case, I’m going to take up where I left off and we’ll call this Sipdown No. 164 as I suspect there will be more before I turn into a pumpkin again. Yeah, I know this is about pumpkin pie. The BF asked for something the other day when it got cooler and as it was Thanksgiving week, I figured this was a good choice. Looking back on a previous note, he wasn’t overly crazy about this when we last tried it but this time around he was much more excited by it.

I thought it was pretty much the same as I’d mentioned in previous notes — a rather ordinary cinnamon spice tea when very hot, but more pie-like as it cools. Even if I was in the market for more tea/tisanes I would probably not put this hugely high on the list but only because I’m not a huge fan of pumpkin pie (the pastry). If you love pumpkin pie, you’ll likely love this as well.

Now to play a bit of personal catch up. I can’t now recall what got me so busy that I abandoned ship in late 2014, but I can say that between now and then I’ve had one of the worst years of my life. Probably the only one worse was 1996, when my mother died and my marriage was about to end.

At the end of 2014, I went to visit my closest friend at her farm in New Jersey. She had been battling cancer for twenty years, and had been cancer free for about 15 of those years, but it started catching up with her and it was pretty clear during the visit that things were not great. About a week after I returned home, I heard that she had died, which was quite a blow. Fast forward to the summer when I learned that I was very likely going to lose my job of 16 years in the fall as a result of budget crunches associated with a corporate restructuring, which indeed came to pass. I have been unemployed since October and beating all the usual bushes looking for work. Frankly, if it was just me, it wouldn’t be so bad — I’ve worked pretty much straight through for about 30 years and it would be nice to have a bit of time off if I wasn’t worried about providing for my kids. But as I’m the sole breadwinner, I have felt enormous pressure to find something else and have been spending most of my time for the past few months in that endeavor. Then, out of the blue, a few weeks ago, I learned another friend died very suddenly. I have to say that I cannot wait for January 1, to be rid of this year.

Even so, I did have some small successes over the past year. I qualified for an associate membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which had been a goal of mine. I sold a few stories and I’ve had quite a few near misses as well, much more than I used to when I first started submitting, so there is that. One might think that having more time to write would be a good thing, and if it was just me, I would agree. But because of the kid support thing which is rather fear inducing I haven’t been able to do much writing recently. I finally told myself I was going to take a week off of the job search last week while the kids were home for “Harvest Week” and it was the first time I was able to relax enough even to read fiction since last June.

In any case, now that I’m dipping into tea again and am compulsive enough to feel that I must record beginnings, ends, and interesting in-betweens with the teas in my cabinet, you may see some more of me, at least in the near term.

I will never in a million years be able to catch up on all the notes in my feed so I’m not going to pressure myself into trying. I’ll just jump in while the jump rope is turning and wave as I go by. ;-)

I’m tired.

Little league baseball season has started. With two kids on two different teams, this means we will have three games and two practices each week for the next few months. Last year around this time we pretty much lost control of our entire schedule because of the baseball situation and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Not that it wasn’t fun watching the kids play. No. 1 in particular is quite talented. He has an amazing arm and is a pretty reliable batter as well. But still. On top of everything else the kids have going on it’s quite a hellacious couple of months. Not to mention what we, the adults, have going on. All of which basically gets put on the back burner. At least this time I have a folding chair to take with me to the games (I asked for one for Mother’s Day last year because my butt hurt from having to sit on the concrete at the parks where there aren’t bleachers).

All of that is a long winded way of saying that I’m going to put this in a big mug and go lie down with it beside my bed, and I expect I will fall asleep (continuing with the baseball theme) before you can say Jack Robinson.

The pie flavor is coming out even before much cooling goes on tonight, which is comforting. Soon my body will realize that it isn’t getting any sugar out of this despite the taste and I won’t be able to stay awa…

Everyone in my house is distracted by something tonight, and they’re all distracted by different things. Consequently, I could not get anyone to pay attention to my attempt to rally around a dessert tea we could all enjoy.

No one was interested in trying this but me and the BF. I was very interested though, especially after I stuck my nose in the packet. There’s a gingerbready smell to the dry mixture that you can just tell from smelling it is going to take on a pastry note when you steep it. Mmmm.

The liquor is orange. Deep orange, very pumpkin themed. The aroma is of clove, mostly, but also cinnamon and also, very faintly, that promise of pastry.

When it’s very hot, it’s a spice tea. Clove, cinnamon, ginger, all represented, pretty much in that order, along with something else from the pumpkin pie spice experience. Allspice? Nutmeg? It’s not listed among the ingredients, but there’s something else that’s evoked, as in the pumpkin pie spice you can buy premixed.

But when it cools some, a subtle pastry-like note creeps in that makes it more than just spice and really evokes the pumpkin aspect of the pie filling along with a bit of crust. I can’t help but think that milk might make this come out even more, though it’s enough for me without.

I haven’t had any other tisane that claims the name pumpkin pie but I would guess it would be hard to evoke the pie and not just the spice and to do it well. I don’t love pumpkin pie so much that this would necessarily become a staple for me and the BF said he wouldn’t order it again, but I give this one high marks for living up to its name.

Oh! And I can’t taste the honeybush. So points.

I have teabags of this that I really enjoy traveling with because the tin was full of individually wrapped bags. The flavor is super mild, sweet, and floral. I steeped this for 2 minutes for the first 3 infusions, and 3 minutes for the next 2, 4 minutes for the third. Definitely a soft flavor, but very tasty.

I brewed this up two or so hours ago and it’s sat by the open window where I forgot it almost that whole time.

Oops.

It tastes pretty stunning chilled, though. I’m not sure where the vanilla tones are coming from, but it’s a bit like a vanilla coffee drink. Or maybe a little Kahlua-esque? I’m going to regret the caffeine when it comes to sleep tonight though.

Still. A- would forget tea again.

I think I finally have Fiance’s full buy in on the tea station upstairs. Which is good because after my laptop migrated up here last night, I don’t really have the motivation to go downstairs before I need to. Besides, his buttons will get reattached to his shirts this way.

This is a really creative blend. Hojicha and oolong pair together to create a wannabe coffee. It brews up darker than a lot of black teas, and is a rich chocolately brown with just a fliker of amber in the light. It smells pungent and roasted, and a lot like coffee really.

I went with a conservative steeping temperature, and as a result there was no bitterness, but still full-bodied and potent. There’s a definite amount of nuttiness and it feels just slightly creamier than a normal brew (I’m attributing this to the white chocolate). I didn’t get any oilyness or film from the chocolate, but I didn’t really taste it either.

This definitely captures a coffee, but it’s like coffee for when you don’t want coffee. It’s weaker than coffee and not as bold as what I’m used to drinking, but because of the differences in flavor and potency it’s easy to disassociate this from coffee as well, and just picture it as a roasty warming cup of love.