McNulty's

Made this iced with McNulty’s Kenya tea mixed in. So I’m using this moment to call it for ashmanra’s monthly prompt – A Tea From Africa!

Sort of wish I still had my Zomba pearls for this prompt. Ah well.

I did a 50/50 mix of this tea and the Kenya tea. brewed it western style, hot, and cooled it into a pitcher with some lemon and sugar. It’s one of my favorite summertime teas! The Kenyan tea adds a brisk tartness that really lends itself to the lemon in this iced tea. So refreshing.

The best that I have found.

Fragrant but can be bitter, careful not to steep too long

I love this tea! Balanced notes of apple and mint. I like to drink it over ice in the summer time.

Delicious! Quite aromatic. The hibiscus complements the sourness of the elderberry. If I steep it too long it becomes a bit too bitter for my liking. But 3-4 minutes is perfect!

Do you like adventure?

McNulty’s Tea & Coffee Co, Inc. was established in 1895. I’m not quite sure what to make of it including Co. and Inc. in their name, but don’t let their redundancy and antiquity fool you.

McNulty’s is an adventure.

Nested within New York City’s labyrinth of concrete and corporate-life is a little tea shop that sticks up to the big man. Walk into McNulty’s and be overwhelmed with the striking tones of different coffees and varieties of tea. You can inspect the tea yourself and when you’re ready to pack it up and go home, a few fellows come and bag your tea for you.

I’ve never had a Blue Eyes blend before, but immediately after taking the first whiff of Blue Eyes in McNulty’s wooded floors and wall-lined tea containers, I knew this was the one. Blue Eyes blend is ravishingly sweet. The tea unfurls and really comes alive upon your palette. The flavors of different fruits and spices dance across the tongue, and spark a dragoon of curiosity.

Blue Eyes blend is a spectacle. McNulty’s is an adventure. Highly recommended.

Really very strong smell.

I originally bought this to make boba tea, extra sweet and with hemp milk and tapioca pearls. It was a great dessert tea, tasted like chocolate with the hemp milk added.

Extremely fragrant jasmine pearls, but I think I might have steeped it too hot. I added a teaspoon of turbinado sugar which mellowed it out a bit. Still delicious but I think I’ll do the water a little less hot.

Great for Indian Iced Tea! Double strength, sweetened with turbinado sugar.

Originally published at The Nice Drinks In Life: http://thenicedrinksinlife.blogspot.com/2014/01/organic-darjeeling-selimbong-2013-first.html

Name: Organic Darjeeling Selimbong
Origin: Selimbong Garden, Darjeeling, India
Flush: First Flush
Harvest Year: 2013
Type: Black Tea
Purveyor: McNulty’s
Preparation: One teaspoon steeped in about eight ounces of boiling water for 3 minutes, sipped plain

Has this ever happened to you: You learn, you practice, you learn and practice some more, you start to master, you work very hard and devote a ton of energy, maybe you even teach a little (or, perhaps, you really just pontificate to however many of your friends will listen), you build a reputation, you exhaust countless nooks and crannies of whatever the subject is, and then, when you think you are finally approaching the pinnacle, you stumble almost mistakenly into a big pile of knowledge or understanding that you never even thought to consider might be an existent phenomenon. It happened to me recently. Not that I ever thought I knew everything about tea, I promise. But the “insights” into which I tripped and fell head first were so simple that it is absurd I should never have thought to consider them. Some people emerge from the scenario above knowing that they have discovered new, uncharted depths and forever altered their fields of inquiry; in my case, on the other hand, the word “duh” is quite apt.

There were two new items of information revealed as I read up on Darjeeling tea. The first is that Darjeeling tea has a protected designation of origin, or “GI tag” (“geographical indication tag”), as the Tea Board of India calls it. Tea certified to have been legitimately grown in the Darjeeling region and processed properly receives a seal from the Board to certify its authenticity, and no other tea may call itself “Darjeeling” or receive the seal. Wine and spirits of course have such things, and I learned last year that coffee does, too. I never even asked if tea might, and shame on me for that.

India has a few GI tags for tea, actually, including Assam and Nilgiri (as well as a handful of tea-growing regions without such commercial protection). But Darjeeling tea was the first to get a GI tag, and for good reason: people who drink tea have long thought it the best. As with most protected designations of origin, Darjeeling tea’s came about because there was a major problem with fraudulent labeling; that is, a significant amount of tea being sold around the world was labeled as Darjeeling but, in fact, contained little to no legitimate Darjeeling-grown tea. Naturally, this was because the “Champagne of teas,” as Darjeeling tea is known, was simply the most preferred among paying customers. Consequently, it became the first ever Indian product of any kind to receive a GI tag. To this day, Darjeeling remains the darling of the Tea Board of India, as any perusal of its website will show, and it is one of the very few single-region teas that mega tea brands (Bigelow, Twinings) market to the masses. Darjeeling tea’s fame and popularity endure, and for good reason.

The world’s producers of tea would do well, I think, to invest more time and energy into getting their products protected designations of origin, much as Darjeeling has. It is expensive and time-consuming, yes. But consumers generally are more informed about their products than they have ever been, and the legions of tea aficionados specifically are growing rapidly. The drink’s importance, once upon a time, used to be the fact that tea – any tea – was in the cup on such social occasions as tea time in Buckingham palace, a knitting club meeting in the American Midwest, or anything in between. The details of the tea were rarely a matter of comment, and if they were, it had to do with outside flavoring, such as with Earl Grey. Such things are still of great import, of course. But they are not the future. In the face of plateaued interest in tea as a centerpiece of formal gathering, tea is experiencing increased technical interest: Where is the tea from? What kind of tea is it? Is it authentic? How was it processed? Is it organic and/or fair trade? How much caffeine is in it? What are its health benefits? What is the history of this variety? What else can I learn about it? These are the questions that people are asking, and a designation of origin, though certainly no simple or direct ticket to fame and fortune, is precisely the kind of thing that gets consumers’ attention and tells them what they want to know. And of course, it protects legitimate tea producers from fraudsters intruding upon their market share. It would only be a boon for consumers, producers, and merchants alike.

The other item I learned – and it really is preposterous that I never even thought of this – is that teas from different years’ harvests taste different. Not radically different by any means, but naturally different, according to the differing weather patterns, soil conditions, etc. that accompany the advance of time. This got me thinking: Why are teas, and coffees for that matter, not labeled with a harvest year?

With wine, it has always been standard procedure to list the year on the bottle, even for blends. But with coffee and tea, that was never really how it worked. There are craft coffee and tea movements aplenty, but consumers and professionals alike are so accustomed to the mass-produced blends, designed to reduce taste variation over time to practically zero, with which we all grew up and which we still encounter with great frequency, that it has not really been demanded of anyone to label coffee or tea as being from a particular year.

To the coffee and tea connoisseur, there is a better explanation for this that will occur immediately and appear quite obvious. Wine, you see, ages. It can be kept on the shelf for a few years, a few years more, decades perhaps, and either drunk, sold, or stored yet longer. Furthermore, wine is not even distributed before it has aged for a long while, usually a year at bare minimum. What with most serious wine consumers, collectors, and merchants having hundreds or thousands of bottles of wine on hand, procured after being stored at the winery for years in the first place, a harvest year on the label is a most convenient datum. Coffee and tea, on the other hand, are not meant for that. Tea may last a while in brick form, or if kept in airtight containers, but it is intended for more or less immediate distribution and foreseeable consumption. Coffee especially has a brief shelf life, being ideally drunk within a couple weeks of being roasted. But let’s be generous and stipulate that the mass-produced coffee that sits in warehouses for up to months on end is somehow legitimate. Still, after a year or two, coffee or tea would almost certainly be no good unless kept in the very best of conditions. Which begs the question: what producer, merchant, or enthusiast would store coffee or tea away for so long in the first place? So why even bother with a year on the label? The coffee or tea is between one week and two years old, and either it tastes properly fresh or it does not. Isn’t that all that counts in this discussion?

My response to that is to return to the consumer profile described above. Casual imbibing of coffee and tea is as popular as it has always been, but not growing very much. It is not where the potential is in the market; it is not the future. Aficionados, on the other hand, are on the rise. More and more consumers are switching from major chains to craft coffee roasters and fine tea purveyors. More than ever before, they notice origins, processing methods, taste profiles, and numerous other data. They read the literature, and look for the new. Key here is that they record experiences more than ever: Is it only the emergence of the Internet that gave rise to Steepster and Coffee Review, or is it also the fact that people are there to take interest and participate in the first place?

By including a harvest year among the data for tea and coffee, merchants would not necessarily distinguish it from other tea and coffee sitting next to it on the shelf like with wine, of course. But, they would:

-Confirm the freshness of the product.
-Give consumers a sense of something new, thereby keeping up interest (“Oh, the 2014 Assam is here,” as opposed to, “Oh, Assam is here again.”).
-Create the likelihood that reviewers will mention harvest years in their reviews. This sudden consciousness of a new variable would make them increasingly interested in continuing to consume from the same region to observe firsthand the differences and similarities among the years, as any good aficionado would be. It would also mean that readers of reviews would be drawn back into that product by becoming conscious of the new variable. (“Oh, is that what there is to taste from the 2014? It’s different than what I tasted that other time,” as opposed to, “Oh, is that what this guy tastes? It’s different than what I tasted that other time.”). Finally, producers and merchants can mine the data for all it is worth.

Maybe it is the old product data manager in me (my old position when I had a day job, before I switched to a full-time school schedule), but I really do think that more attention to authenticating and publicizing the variables of tea and coffee is the best way to draw people in to the product.

Anyhow, on to the good stuff: It is time to explore the tea that finally got me to learn and think. McNulty’s was kind enough to confirm for me that this tea was harvested in 2013. The dry leaves of the Selimbong garden’s first flush are rather pastel hued, dark, all twisted tightly but alternately curled up or straight and long. Packed into the glass jar, the visual texture is akin to that of a Van Gogh painting. In stark contrast to the Darjeeling leaves that I reviewed in 2012, which had an aroma like wine and fruit, these leaves smell like a rainforest. There is some caramel, some tannins, some traditional florals, but mostly the rich maltiness that one might expect from, say, a huge mouthful of the dry leaves.

The brewed Darjeeling tea has a rich, smooth, brown color, like a deep, dark honey. The aroma is of sweet, sweet florals. Specific notes are smooth and include principally honey and flowers, with light hints of toffee and caramel as well. The palate offers a light body, although I was not confident noting that at first because there is such a thoroughly generous symphony of flavors that together with the malt they actually make the body of the tea seem rich! It took a little while before my mouth was able to sort it all out. Truly it is a most impressive, sophisticated, and unique tapestry that is woven, and I was reminded yet again why Darjeeling tea is my favorite black tea. (Well, some would say it is an oolong, but you know…)

Could it be that in my prior Darjeeling tea review, when I thought the tea was rich and thick, I was deluded by a similar phenomenon? I suppose it is quite possible.

The tea is not too acidic, not too tannic, not too malty (although the malt augments some as it cools), and not too brisk: just enough of each. The prior Darjeeling tea had some fruit flavors that are absent from this year’s crop. The 2013 offers good floral notes, though they are not quite as sweet as in the aroma. The flavor notes are of toasted things: toasted toffee, toasted caramel, even toasted marshmallow. Again, the body of the tea is light. It has a light body and constitution, even a light heart and soul – the flavors are bright, sprightly, and numerous. It is really curious how such a light body flatters the swirling bouquet of spirited tasting notes. The palate is balanced and even throughout, but it smooths out as the tea cools. The finish is of caramel and florals, with a drop of honey.

I recommend to all of my kind readers to get some Darjeeling tea – authentic Darjeeling tea, that is – and compare it to teas past and teas future. It will make for an exciting, and delicious, adventure.

I dont taste the almond at all. If you told me I was drinking a plain black tea I would believe you. As a black tea, its fine, but if you want something that actually tastes like almond, keep looking

Originally published at The Nice Drinks In Life: http://thenicedrinksinlife.blogspot.com/2012/08/first-harvest-darjeeling-tea.html

Origin: Darjeeling, India
Type: Black Tea
Purveyor: McNulty’s
Preparation: One teaspoon steeped in about eight ounces of boiling water for three minutes, sipped plain

Darjeeling tea is harvested a few times over the course of a season – first flush, second flush, autumnal flush – and each yield has its own characteristics, its own personality, its own charm and identity, making its own mark on the world of tea and on the palates of tea drinkers. (Che bella!) I have heard that the tea made from the first flush is the lightest, as the leaves are plucked before the full length of the season has given the plant day after day of bountiful nutrients and minerals and other goodies to be imbibed from the soil, eventually yielding an autumnal leaf that makes a richer and stronger (and more bitter) cup of tea. That all makes sense on paper, I suppose, and yet I must say that if the tea that I sipped is the lightest crop of the season, then by the autumnal flush the tea must brew like crude oil.

The dry leaves of this First Harvest Darjeeling (as McNulty’s calls it) are medium sized, and all shades of brown. They are rolled, and not quite crumpled so much as gnarled. The bag of tea leaves could easily pass for a bag of tiny twigs. These leaves offer a thick, winy nose, not unlike a tawny port, with fruity undertones, perhaps peach-like.

When brewed, the tea is the color of tawny port, with a rich visual texture like honey. That is appropriate, because the aroma is of honey as well, and somewhat floral – honeysuckle, let’s say. When sipped, the tea has a smooth texture, soothing to drink, almost like a tisane. Is it hearty, per se? No, although the question does arise. It is rich yet semi-delicate. Maybe that is what people mean in describing the first flush as “light”: delicate to the touch. The flavor is certainly no kind of weak. There are plenty of tannins around the edges, while a vanilla-honey flavor – soft but superabundant – takes center stage. There are hints of peaches and nectarines.

Overall, the cup of this First Harvest Darjeeling is mellow but deep. It seems more like an afternoon tea than a breakfast tea. Sipping it does more to provide a platform for the collected thoughts of a day to play themselves out than to provide a spark to generate the day’s events.

I brewed the same leaves a second time, in the same manner, and the result was what one might expect. The color of the tea does not diminish, and the nose, aside from exuding more tannins, is the same. But on the sip it offers a muted, slightly more bitter version of the first cup of tea, with a lighter texture. The finish is tannic.

By the way, half-way through the second cup, the caffeine starts to really hit in. Maybe it can work as a breakfast tea after all!

Originally published at The Nice Drinks In Life: http://thenicedrinksinlife.blogspot.com/2012/08/organic-hairpoint-green-tea.html

Origin: China
Type: Green Tea
Style: Hairpoint
Purveyor: McNulty’s
Preparation: One teaspoon steeped in about eight ounces of boiling water for 2:45, sipped plain

Of all the tea varieties, green tea is my favorite. It has the perfect balance of flavor, tannins, and body. It is healthy, delicious, and good for any occasion. The organic Hairpoint from McNulty’s is a great specimen; it tastes and feels the way a green tea ought to.

The dry leaves are a curious rendition of green. The closest hue that comes to mind is a sea green, but having endured, as tea leaves often do, a substantial extent of physical strain (steaming, rolling, drying), many of the leaves have either deepened or lightened in shade. The have not balled up, but rather twisted and curled themselves, simply unable to withstand the stress of their treatment remaining straight. Still, wrinkled and gnarled though they are, one can see that these were (and remain, where it counts), lush, healthy leaves with much to offer. Even their aroma betrays the quality of the brew to be made with them: a hint of malt, just a tad of salinity (grown near the sea, perhaps), and all of it underlined with sweetness.

When brewed, the color of the liquid is a delicate yellow with plenty of green tinge – lemongrass, one might say. The aroma is a malty sweetness, not quite that of green tea ice cream, but not far from it either. Medium-bodied, the tea is tannic, as a green tea should be. There is the slightest iota of citrus around the edges – unless that is just some more sweetness from the aroma mixing with the tannins. As green teas go, this Hairpoint is a little on the brisk and malty side. But then, it casts some lovely floral notes back to the palate as a surprise farewell token before plunging down the throat.

This is the first organic green tea that I have sipped. Whereas I certainly look forward to trying the rest of them, I am already so satisfied as to convert to this Hairpoint as my standard green tea for now. And I am glad to recommend the same to my kind readers.

Originally published at The Nice Drinks In Life: http://thenicedrinksinlife.blogspot.com/2012/09/china-keemun-tea.html

Origin: Anhui, China
Type: Black Tea
Purveyor: McNulty’s
Preparation: One teaspoon steeped in about eight ounces of boiling water for three minutes, sipped plain

Of the various tales surrounding the origin of Keemun tea, the most ubiquitous is also, perhaps, the most likely. A failed government bureaucrat set out to earn his fortune in the private sector (alright, that part is unlikely) with tea. He learned to make black tea in Fujian province and brought the skill back home to Anhui province, where only green tea had been made up to that point. Having quite the knack for his craft, out hero found a great degree of success, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Indeed, Keemun is often an ingredient in English Breakfast Tea, with those blends that do include it being generally more expensive. So successful is this tea, in fact, that it virtually always appears in those omnipresent lists of “Ten Famous China Teas” (no single list is definitive), even though it just came about less than a century and a half ago in a large country renowned since ancient times for dozens of different high-quality teas.

I set out to solve the riddle of its success. This was expressly not difficult – one cup, and the mystery vanished.

The dry leaves I picked up from McNulty’s are the color of carob seeds. They are small, mostly straight, and twisted so tight that if I did not know any better I would assume that they were solid twigs instead of flat leaves rolled up. Their aroma is mainly vanilla, with some florals – sweet, sweet florals.

The brewed tea is of a caramel hue and has such visual texture that one would think that a few spoons of honey were already mixed in. The aroma is similar to that of the dry leaves. Some malt also appears, but sweet florals predominate. The taste, much like the sight, is enough to perpetuate the illusion that a plain cup of tea includes a great amount of honey. But now, though the sweetness is so strong, it is joined by other strong elements as well: acidity, tannins, briskness. There is a moderate degree of malt, at least enough to support the other notes, which is important because the body is medium – not weak or thin by any means, but still dwarfed by all of the flavor elements.

And yet this Keemun is not a grab-you-by-the-mouth-and-kick-you-around kind of beverage. It shows its strength but uses it gently. Next time I intent to brew it for only 2:45, and am confident that that will even it out the right amount. Three minutes just let the flavor get a little too big; we are left with gentle giants that occasionally bump shoulders by mistake. But they are still beautiful, playful, even thoughtful, with plenty of instinct for grace (if not quite plenty of room, in my particular cup). They are good for either waking up or calming down; drink it in the morning or afternoon.

On the way down, the Keemun settles back to sweet florals, releasing them with a full body at the back of the mouth. We are brought to the classic question that accompanies all finishes: is it goodbye or a forecast of hello? In this case, definitely both.

this is a mid-level blend, not distinct enough to include with estate offerings
it is a good foundation for chai

I often mention my favorite no-name China Oolong tea that, last time I looked, is still running just 31 cents an ounce at our local health food store. This is its elegant, wealthier relation. It leads with a predictable woody taste, but has some lighter, brighter, fruiter stuff happening when you give yourself a minute to think about it. Nice!

Thank you to TeaEqualsBliss for sending me some of this tea.

Based on some of the previous tasting notes of this tea, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But I like it. It has a boldness to it, but it isn’t quite Assam-ish… not malty but there is something there that … It’s just different. I like it though. I am going to need to contemplate this tea again!

Had this tonight at the tea meetup and thought of this song, since I was just listening to the Garden State soundtrack this past weekend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2XNmF8tnN0

Anyway, this was the best cup of Blue Eyes I’ve had – very balanced. The hibiscus was a tart note but not overwhelming, and the apple was in check too.