Love is Tea (LIT)

I love so much this tea!

Yum! I love Adagio’s blueberries & cream (I think it was a custom blend). I haven’t ordered it in a long time because of my enormous tea stash, but this was very refreshing reminder. Yssah sent this to me a long time ago during a swap.

I love the warm and creamy blend with the hint of blueberries. The blueberries wasn’t tart, and for that I love this blend so much. I don’t like tart.. well too much tartness is not good. This is excellent especially with milk and sugar. The flavors come out more. This is a good dessert tea!

CharlotteZero sent me a few teas I really wanted to try along with the mint for my headaches! thank you so much! I really appreciate it! It’s the fault of your nice tasting note that I wanted to try this one, but you shouldn’t have sent it all if you liked it so much! Luckily, I love it. :D Two delicious steeps. I’m guessing the name “black lagoon” comes from the almost entirely black color of the first cup. With the second steep you can actually see the bottom. No worries about finding the creature from the black lagoon in the second steep! How is it I have never see that movie? Anyway, the flavor is like assam – bread, rye, chewy. Just enough briskness but no astringency and some sweetness. Very nice!

I received this from yssah a long time ago as well! I have always been a fan of thai tea, and I used to make a lot of it at home too. This one is exactly like the tea I used to buy! I can’t smell very well right now because I’m sick, but I can sense slight hints of that warm slightly lemongrass-y, slightly medicinal scent that it usually has. I am awful at describing this scent, but it smells.. well.. just like thai tea. I had to use a finer meshed tea bag for this as there is a little dust in there. It brews a beautiful wild, orange! I brewed this in a mug and added sugar and milk to it. Usually I make this over the stovetop and use sugar and condensed milk. Must do that next time!

I received this from yssah a long time ago. I finally was able to sample this. I love the bits of almond in this black tea, and almond tea is one of my favorite teas to drink. I love almonds and almond milk … and I love the warmth and the amaretto taste to it. It is delicious. It goes great with milk and sugar and definitely a good dessert tea.

Why is this tea so good when I have no idea where to find it again? Oh well. This was my second small pot of this tea, and I’m sending the remaining to Tea Sipper tomorrow. I hope she enjoys it as much as I have!

Yum. I’m really enjoying this tea. I’m a sucker for a strong cup of assam, though, and this one is certainly that. It was really nice to have after a bowl of homemade Massaman curry over rice. This isn’t too bitter or too drying. It’s a nice smooth cup of tea.

Yesterday I did my taxes and was sad to discover that I owed A LOT in state and federal taxes. I’d thought I’d be getting a refund, because when we set up payroll services through Paychex, I told them I’d prefer them to deduct too much as opposed to too little. (Insert your five favorite expletives.)

Casey was so nice to me, though. He saw that I was sad and went online and bought me the FORLIFE glass teapot that I’d been eyeing, but hadn’t purchased because I’d promised not to spend any more money on tea or teaware until my birthday in March. I completely forgot about the taxes owed and was suddenly feeling incredibly fortunate.

The first cup I steeped I seriously over-leafed. I had just eaten a big brunch of tofu scramble, avocado, and potatoes and I’d covered everything with nutritional yeast and hot sauce, so I’d thought I’d need a very strong cup of tea to wash it down with.

The first very strong cup I made was intensely fruity, I’d say the flavor was something like a prune or dried apricot. It was also a little bit bitter, but this was the fault of how I brewed it. The second cup was made with fewer leaves, and hence was smoother and I could pick up some earthiness, maybe a bit of whiskey sour (but these notes were very faint compared to the fruitiness). The disappointing thing about this tea is that it doesn’t have a very strong aroma or finish. I was expecting to dump this tea into my big red canister (where the chai masala making tea goes), but I think instead I will try to find a similar tea to add into my regular rotation.

Tried this one on my lunch break. It was very good. It had just enough fruity sweetness and creaminess. It had only the smallest hint of fresh florals, which I like, but not something I want to be prominent in a milk oolong (as far as the one’s I’ve tasted go). It was also very faint vegetal notes. This is pretty close to the perfect balance of flavors for me.

I received a generous sample from Yssah! Thank you so much. This tea has some rice and popcorn mixed in with the spiky, green leaves, which look like sencha. Delicious blend. It is roasted with vegetal flavors to it that are not too prominent. This is flavorable, however. Good blend.

Ok, I need to buy some star anise, among other things, to give this more oomph. Today I made it up chai stove style (which is a silly way to do it as there are no spices in this right now). I plopped in some ice cubes, because why not, and added sweetened condensed milk. It sort of worked. Next time I’ll follow a recipe or something.

Cavocorax gave me enough of this to play around with for a while, which is great because I’ll need it!

This one’s interesting. The flavoring may have dulled down over time, as I’m not picking up much mint. I didn’t think there was any at first but there is something increasingly freshening in the lingering aftertaste, that’s definitely minty. My first impression was of smooth malt balls, actually (maybe that’s the chocolate element). Not a bad cup at all, and it goes well with milk.

Thanks for the sample, Fiddling (I think this one was from you)!

Sipdown, 178. Thanks to yssah for the sample. This is the last of the LIT samples that yssah sent me.

This smell pretty innocuous dry; mostly like bergamot. I couldn’t tell if it was black, green, or a black/green blend, but the leaf was pretty dark so I went with just boiling water. That may have been a rather sizeable mistake. The smell of the brewed tea was, quite frankly, horrible. I can’t even describe how, although there were some weird floral notes and perhaps a bit of smoke. I took a sip anyway to try; amazingly it wasn’t actually bitter but that smell was too much for me. Not sure what yssah meant about “interesting” in her tasting note, but I’ve had jasmine earl greys before and the didn’t combine like this. Not rating this one because of the off steep temp for the leaf, but I am not sure that that’s responsible for everything here.

Sipdown, 176. I decided to cold brew this one because I had just the perfect amount for it, and black currant iced tea sounded tasty.

Unfortunately, this turned out very perfumy. I drank about half the cup but then couldn’t take anymore. I won’t rate it because I don’t know how this would perform warm, but I don’t suggest cold brewing this one!

I went through all my ratings and reset them down. Sometimes I would feel like I was giving a tea too low a score, but I had to remind myself that a 70 is still a “smiley face” on the scale. I think by stretching out the 80s into more of the 70s and 80s it is more accurate in its reflection of my likes. Now to keep it up!

Do parakeets have off switches? The nicer it is outside, the goofier Sebastian acts. I feel bad because I can’t open the windows because of my allergies. The pollen count was 2607 yesterday. Today it is 4151. Thankfully it is supposed to rain tomorrow so hopefully it won’t get 9000+ like last year (seriously. http://www.atlantaallergy.com/pollencount.aspx?year=2012&month=3). It was horrible enough last night when I went to get my mail…you can just feel the large particles in the air. Ugh. And they’re not even the problematic pollen.

I had this iced last night, it was a lot more subtle than I hoped for. That might be something I can change by adding agave or sugar or something. I didn’t really get kiwi, just a tiny bit of strawberry in there.

I’ll finish it but I far prefer the 52teas kiwi strawberry margarita white tea I still have a bit of…gonna have to have some more of that today. I think these flavors may be better suited to something more delicate than black tea. This is overall a pretty good black, it tasted great iced and was really smooth.

This is a nice black tea, not too strong but tasty. At first I wasn’t tasting any almond whatsoever but it came out as it cooled a bit.

Thanks for swapping Yssah :)

I’d never had Thai Tea before so I thought I’d give this a try. It brews up bright orange! Like, really orange! So strange! I added a dash of milk to it because that seemed the right thing to do and now it’s the same color as butternut squash soup.

I wish I knew what was in this mystery tea. It’s nice, but not heavily flavoured.

Drank the last bit of the sample I got from Yssah. Thought I wrote a tasting note when I tried it first but I guess not. It’s a delicate tasting Earl Grey, not strong so it’s pleasant all by itself.

Hey I can do this sipdown with numbers too…62 left in the spreadsheet for herbal/fruit! …cries

Yesterday was a pretty tea-less day because I had two tests and I was going to a taping of Conan! That was awesome. I did have a tea from Caribou while I was studying but eh not worth logging.

So it’s warm again today, and I made this iced while I was starting on gardening.

This is more like hibiscus lemonade than anything, I definitely do not get mango at all in here. It’s very tart and it tastes like lemons and rosehips and hibiscus.

It’s okay, I think I’d add something mango flavored to it if I had more.

Sipdown, 195. Now I can add those other teas and only be at 200 lol. Thanks to yssah for a sample of this tea.

I guess this was another tea that I didn’t really look at the description of before I asked for a sample of it. I didn’t realize it was an herbal, and a medicinal one at that. I love guanabana fruit but this is the bark, twigs and leaves apparently. Annnd that’s what it smells like. Musty, kind of like old hay. And the flavor is odd because it tastes intensely dusty, but then underneath that it is sweet and kind of fruity like a soursop. But man, that dusty taste! It’s almost enough to make me sneeze.

I won’t rate this one because it is really outside of my usual, but it was interesting to try!