Mariage Frères

Meh. This green tea base seems to be the typical cheap Chinese sencha base that I don’t like. The oddly cooling mentholy and piney lavender is retry well balanced with the sweet fragrant rose. If you like rose and lavender, you’ll like this. And it’s all enhanced with berry flavoring. I’m tasting cherry.
I’m not too impressed with this but I’m grateful to have tried it, thanks to Dustin’s generosity. :)

I wish they’d noted what kind of tea base this is, China or India… either way, it’s brewed to a fairly dark colour and smells gorgeous. Nearly candylike, which is surprising, since I always associate ylang-ylang with bath products. Never had it in a tea before!

Although… taste-wise, it does remind me of a bath bomb or a shower gel. Possibly only by association – the strong floral taste isn’t off-putting or soapy-tasting. It’s rather like the way rose tea tastes strong without being medicinal. The aftertaste is sweet like a syrup, an unmistakeable natural flavour (I’m starting to love MF’s use of flowers! mallow flowers, rose petals, violets-!) and there’s minimum dryness on the tongue. Love it!

Will this sample ever end, CrowKettle? Haha. I think I have one more cup left.

This is a really nice tea. I’ve seen reviews that say it’s super picky, but I steep at about 170F, and no problems. Today I iced it and added a little honey (to celebrate buying more ice trays, FINALLY). Delicious. Yuzu is a somewhat floral citrus, more like pomelo than any other citrus I’ve tried, but it’s not really pomelo either.

Really delicious, a bit of bite from the green base today, but refreshing and light. Not something I need in my cupboard all the time, but I do quite like it.

Thanks so much for sharing!

(Brewed as below, poured over all the ice!)

Another green tea today. I thought I only had a cup of this left, but it looks like after this one, there are THREE more cups in my package! What a generous sample from CrowKettle. :)

This one is a bit tricksy. You have to steep it cool or it goes bitter. 160F works for me, and brings out the lovely citrus flavour. Mmm.

I really like this green tea, but not enough to buy a whole tin. :) I just don’t reach for green teas often enough to make it worthwhile.

Now I’m going to make another mug of tea and go for a walk, and pop into work to pick up my mittens and kitty toque.

Another from CrowKettle!

Made this for my BFF tonight. She’s keeping me company while I struggle and swear through more math problems, so I thought I’d hydrate and caffeinate her!

I managed (somehow) to not oversteep this one, or use too hot of water! Yay! The citrus flavour is really neat, but I love yuzu so that’s to be expected.

It’s a super neat floral and delicate citrus, and I actually really like this one.

Thanks so much, Crowkettle!

Edit: As it’s cooled down to room temp it’s become bitter. Maybe 1:30??

Bonsoir Steepster! I’ve just returned from another trip to Paris, a daytrip this time, and again I’m loaded with various teas I’m all excited to try :)

First off: I bought this tea because of the name. As a classics student anything with a mythology or ancient language-inspired name is going to catch my interest. However Artemis seemed too similar to another rooibos I had which I didn’t like, and Apollon was out of stock – so this is the next best thing! Métis, which called to mind resourceful Odysseus’ cunning plan when he told the cyclops that his name was ‘me tis’, “nobody”. Turns out Métis is also the name of Athene’s mother whom Zeus swallowed. The more you know!

The scent is very pungent, not purely because of the rooibos base, but there’s a hint of spice and, dare I say it, the lavender seems to be the root of that floral liqueur, as well as the sharpness of the red berries. The taste is overall very complex and floral and sweet without being like a perfume (as lavender and mallow flowers can be!) – more like a sweet, candied-flower dessert? Apparently spices are in this tea as well but they aren’t coming out as strongly as they do in other MF rooibos teas such as Nil Rouge – if they’re there at all I wouldn’t say they do anything other than round off the flowery, fruity flavours to something clean and fresh-tasting.

Something different, and with such a pretty name I don’t think I’ll have any problems getting through this :)

Cteresa packed a teabag of this tea by way of a surprise with the swap we had agreed upon. Thank you, Cteresa!. While I was sipping this tea the first thing that came to mind was that I would really like to order some of it…

This tea actually has what I miss in Theodor’s Place Saint Marc: balance between the tea base (a very smooth green tea), the fruity top note (red berries) and the vanilla impression in the aftertaste. Everything comes together beautifully in a well rounded and balanced taste.

This is a good green tea. While I often don’t drink green teas, this has a light astringency and leaves a really good taste in my mouth as I drink it.

This is the last, the little bits at the bottom of the tin – am clearing a lot of teas, I have a totally unprecedented number of available tins. Weirdly with no compunction to have a large mega order yet, almost as if I am not really sure what teas I would really love to have. I have been trying so many flavoured things, I might have tired from the concept a bit, at least in general. So for now, am just happy to be drinking what i got at home.

This is one which is no chore to finish and might be a rebuy though I need to see how much I will miss it now I have finished it . There is something so perfectly civilized, so elegant and smooth about it, the smoke I love so much, the bergamot just a hint.

Just to up the rating on this a bit – the more I have it the more I like it. It is going to became a favorite, the mix of smooth smoke and bergamot it´s just so right, and I find the tea itself so smooth, so refreshing.

The weather has been so bad that somehow I am finding myself buying new teas in April! Picking new teas often is an autumn thing for me. But I was craving vanilla tea which somehow I just did not have at home, and found myself returning home with 50 grams each of vanilla tea and nothing less than 2 emperors. The vanilla tea, I will get to it because first brew has not been what i wanted, but this Tzar Alexandre, oh my, am sort of in love. Though a warning, this is a very personal love.

I love lapsang souchong but usually prefer the bergamot in earl greys to not be too strong. This is a light lapsang souchong with light bergamot and somehow tea body. It´s awesome, like how did nobody think of this before, where has this concept been all my life? BUT a warning, not sure if this is a tea for those who do not love lapsang.

The brewing details are not a recommendation, just a note. I brewed it slightly too hot and/or slightly too long, will experiment a bit with it. It survived wrong brewing details with honors, but I think it will be better with water some 5 or 10 degrees cooler.

I was a little nervous trying this today, because of the previous experience with Butterscotch from the same company. But I decided to give it a try anyway…it’s been a few hours since I had some, and right now I am eating some yummy Victoria style cottage cheese, and I know if I had some sips right now, my taste buds might be a bit askew, so I am going to finish my snack, finish the rest of the tea, and do a second steep so I can get a better frame of mind of how I want to rate this…

Back later for more!

Ok, back for seconds…

I can’t really pick up anything from the dry leaf, but I am a little stuffy, so maybe that is why. The liquor brewed up quite dark and mahogany in colour, and smelled a little smoky and astringent, so I wonder what the base is for the tea.

As for the taste, I am picking up the same kind of powdery taste that I got from the Butterscotch tea, but here it seems a little more vanilla or cream like, with the addition of the fruit flavour, which does seem very strawberry. As a black base, I do find it more astringent than some.

I did add some milk and sugar, and this second steeping is feeling milder than the previous one, but the berry flavour is there in the back. I may have added too much milk in this batch too. But at the end of each sip, I do get this juicy feeling over my tongue and at the back of my throat as I swallow. But I am not getting that massive pop of flavour that others have reported. Again, maybe the milk is hampering with that.

All in all, this is better than I thought, and I’m glad CrowKettle gave me a sample to try, but I know I would never buy this at full price. It’s tasty enough, but not tasty enough for me to fork over $30 for a tin.

I have certainly been having trouble making a taste note of this tea. There are no less than 3 entries for it on steepster, and I could not seem to add any taste notes to the original entry for it. (and accents on tea titles seem to just not work with steepster search). testing now….

And it worked, wow! to add the taste note now

This was a sample for a swap with Toitoi, thank you so much! This was a tea which had been on my wishlist for a while and which I was so glad to have a chance of trying. Ysaurella was the one which pointed out that it had hazelnut flavours, after I had already had a couple cups of it without identifying those, and she is totally right. Not sure where my nose was what, except that I think the brewed liquor smells quite different than the loose leaf. The dry leaf, particularly concentrated on the awesome foil bag Toitoi used smells intensely of sweet hazelnuts, with caramel and vanilla (that is: sublime). The liquor itself, at least how I brewed it, the hazelnuts meld and it´s the caramel vanilla which rules. And it is a lovely tea indeed.

But, I had my other Mariage Freres tea around and remembered to compare this tea´s scent with Wedding Impérial and Pleine Lune. Comparing just the scent of the dry leaf, Phénix wins it: smells much more balanced (Pleine Lune has that sharpness of the bitter almonds, Wedding Impérial that malty ovomaltine like smell) more delicious, just more right. But and this is a big but, the liquor seems to have less character, be less memorable than for those other more famous MF tea (and I also prefer Thé du Loup to Phénix). Not sure if this means the others are more justly famous, or if it´s me being biased towards the teas I have had more often and am more familiar with. Interesting.

This tea would, by the way, be a buy-more if I ever get the chance without being lured away from it from all the other so-alluring hard to find Mariage teas…

Thanks for the share MissB I’ve had this one before but wanted to revisit it and see how i’m feeling about it after a year or so. I don’t like this as much as when i first had it but it’s a relatively decent cup of tea. there are others i vastly prefer from MF though :)

Final Count: 95 (8 inbound + a couple swap though…)

SIPDOWN!

And i have to say, i added a bit of extra leaf to this one today and man there are the chestnuts! totally nutty delicious in my travel mug today while i got busy at work. I am really digging this one :) Thank you so much ysaurella for sharing!

I could have sworn that I’d logged/drank this before today but apparently not. Or i simply forgot to write a tasting note. Thank you Ysaurella for this sample! Another Marriage Freres tea to knock off my list :)

I don’t think i’ve had chestnuts in a really long time, so i can’t say that this tastes like them. However there is a deliciously pleasant “nut” and vanilla flavour to this tea that is wonderful! I also really love the way it smells. I really like that there is no bitterness to this and there’s almost a sweet fruity taste that disappears almost right away when you sip it.

Thank you again for the wonderful swap Ysaurella

I tried this once before, and when digging through my basket of samples received in swaps I found some remnants. Enough for one cup, though no guarantee of freshness at this point!

Decided to have one more sipdown cup before bed, so I’m drinking this while watching Safety Not Guaranteed which is a great, quirky movie.

So in this tea, I taste a hint of fruitiness, a hint of honey, maybe a slight bit of floralliness (I made that last word up)

I’m not 100% sure I’d be detecting these notes if I didn’t already read a bunch of other people’s reviews of this tea. Just being honest!
And it may be a wee bit stale.

Still good though, but I don’t think I’d buy it, based on this cup alone.
Is it weird that it reminds me of a Monk’s Blend I’ve tried before? But less flavorful.

I probably could have steeped it longer but I was worried about bitterness. With the amount of leaves I had left for one cup I probably could have added another minute at least!
My previous rating was 81 and I guess I will leave that alone. Because I don’t think I can fairly rate it based on what I just drank.

edit HAHAHA! Just read my old review of this (annoying it only pops up when you post a new one, am I missing an easy way to find my own review from the past??), anyway I totally said last time that it reminded me of Monk’s Blend. Funny. Still haven’t had them side by side to compare, or even do a sniff test though.

Ok, maybe I’m losing my mind.

I received this from Ellyn awhile ago and haven’t logged it until now. I had a cup of it when I first got it, but I guess I forgot to really take note of the details.

I made some more tonight, and my mind was blown because it tasted exactly like a version of Monk’s Blend to me. (The two Monk’s Blend I’ve tried so far were from different brands and had slightly different tastes). Is that what this is? I haven’t skimmed down for the earlier reviews of this particular tea but this info was irrelevant to me the first time I drank it, now I feel it really compares to those other two teas, since I’ve gotten a taste.

Anyway, it’s creamy and fruity but there’s something unique about it. I am telling you it tastes like Monk’s Blend. I love Monk’s Blend!

Thanks for the sample, Ellyn!

Phénix is not a very well known MF blend, no idea why because it is quite good.
It reminds me about Thé du Loup of Theodor EVEN IF there is no chocolate in Phénix but caramel.There is due to the presence of Hazelnuts I think and the smoothness of the both tea bases.
I get honey on aftertaste, really well blended.
I wonder if the tea base is a keemum…we never have these informations with MF. But it’s a very mellow tea.
cteresa this is a tea I would love you to review…if you are still continuing to drink tea at this period of the year (it’s cold in France perhaps the same in Portugal ?)
A very greedy tea.

I was a little worried seeing the ratings of this tea but really wanted to try by myself too.
This is clearly a mild tea base, but not weak. Inversely, the aromas are strong and especially on citrus. There is a kind of je ne sais quoi really joyful with the citrus here.
The vanilla adds something very interesting to the blend.
Saying that where is the crème brûlée promised by MF ? in the air I would say, like a spirit, an inspiration : there but not really too…

I really like Thé de Pâques and I’m happy to have bought 100g today.
It smells like a mystery blend to me…blended by the Easter rabbit ? arrived with Rome’s bells ? I just surrender to the fantastic aromas especially due to the fantastic way the citrus come with vanilla.

Looks like I am the first to rate this. This is a sample from the recent swap and tea crawl, and I think I got this one from CrowKettle if I’m not mistaken.

This tea kinda smells powdery, and I am really not sure why. It also has a little of that to start. It does meld into a sweet finish though. I can pick up some sweet caramel and butterscotch notes at the back of my throat with the sips. I did add sugar and milk to try to give it a little kickstart on the sweetness and creaminess.

The infusion was a lovely mahogany red shade. I think the only thing that catches me off guard with this one is that powdery start. It’s so unusual. I don’t think the tea is off, because it was sealed in a foil pouch.

I’d say this is an ok tea, but it isn’t something I can’t live without. I’m glad I got to try it.