Mighty Leaf Tea

Stole this one from a hotel I was at just before the pandemic “started” in the USA. I rarely add anything to my tea but found it to be a bland Black Tea but improved with milk and sugar.

Clearing and cleansing, awakening aroma. Good first tea of the morning to nurse me out of a hangover and little sleep (bigfatgreekwedding). Dry grass gunpowder green tea with subtle bitter-smokiness, bright and sharp spearmint. Gently sweet, mineral-astringent tingling. Good balance to this tea.

Nice to sip on a warm cup while sitting in the shade of a late spring afternoon. Grassy with a smooth tropical fruit balance – I guess it’s pineapple. Sunny-cool, happy, bitter-sweet.

More mown grass forward than jasmine. Bitter-sweet herbaceous undertone but overall rather smooth.

#tiffanys2021sipdown Tea #74 overall / Tea #41 for February

Wednesday 2/24 — So I’m on a good roll to finish February on track with sipdowns, so figured I’d get a few in this morning at home since I was working the 3-11 shift at work today. I’m not a earl grey fan or much of a black tea fan so I grabbed two different earl grey teabags and figured hey half water half milk make a latte and knock two out. So two earl grey lattes in one day. Sheesh.

This was more subtle smelling not sure if flavoring wasn’t as strong as the steeped tea one or an older teabag? Oh! I did post a pretty picture of latte in my matching DT mug & handmade coaster from @teathoughts :

Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/CLrtQWAglUK/

#tiffanydrinkstea #tiffanys2021 #tiffanysfaves #tiffanyinthe614 #tiffanysteasipdown #sipdownchallenge

A random tea bag in my stash, I might have snagged it when I was on a trip at the beginning of the year. I enjoyed this tea and would pick it up again if they changed their packaging to eliminate plastics. I found it to be light, slightly nutty, and smooth.

Sipdown (263)

Thank you Evol Ving Ness for sharing! With this being done, I’ve now finished off all the teas from our swap back in November 2017. Yay for finally getting to the samples!

This tea was better iced I think but it is better than I thought it would be hot. It’s similar to the iced tea in that you get the black base but also floral notes from the lychee. It’s floral like the fruit which is less offensive than the perfume quality most floral teas have. It’s a bit astringent and it’s not overly flavourful. It’s nice but a tea I am alright to not revisit.

Thank you for sharing this one, Evol Ving Ness! I had it iced today with our steak dinner and was worried since a lot of people said this was very floral, like potpourri. However, this sample is almost 3 years old in my stash, plus however love Evol had it before that and maybe age helped it mellow out. It’s floral but floral the same way lychee is, not overly floral. And the black base tea is a little sharp which dials back the floral nicely. It went surprisingly well with the meal because it provided a sweet counter to the savoury food.

I brewed it for 2 mins and 45 seconds in 200F water.

Yes, I know this says it’s iced tea. But as my body has shifted to standard time already (I’ll save the DST rant, as I’m sure you can find several in the archives), I needed a boot-in-the-backside wake-up this morning and decided to start with a strong and tannic tumbler of this tea from derk. A little milk to tone down the sharpness and I’m catching some of the subtler cherry wood undertones mentioned in other reviews. Eyes are open, albeit reluctantly. Mission accomplished.

This was a freebie in my freebie bag from the 2018 San Francisco International Tea Festival. And it has coconut in it. My bad.

It’s a bagged tea, in a rather nice sewn cloth sachet, and I couldn’t really make out from the aroma of the dry leaf if the coconut had turned, and being incased in the sachet, I couldn’t sample a bit of coconut, either. So I heated the water and prepared to brew the cup as normal. As soon as the hot water hit the leaf, the very distinct aroma of rancid coconut hit my nostrils. Welp. My GI has been hell lately, so I’m not about to take a chance with that. Down the drain it goes.

No rating on account of turned coconut. Though Todd drank his sample only a few months after the tea festival, and I see from his review he described it as “sour.” That almost makes me wonder if these already had turned coconut in them before they made it into the freebie bags for the festival…

Temperatures in the one-teens are unacceptable. Especially for 3 days in a row. This isn’t Arizona.

Our tomatoes are cooked on the vine. Watermelons have exploded. The 19-year-old cat thermometer reads loooong and miserable.

I want to sleep all day.

I want an entire bottle of cold white wine to myself.

I want a strong, unsweetened iced tea.

Only one can win. You all know the answer.

Thanks, Gary, for the cool-off.

Sipdown (1075)!

Finishing this one off now – thank you VariaTEA (and also Evol Ving Ness) for sharing with me! It’s pretty nice; I tend to like pistachio teas and this one is a really nice sweet pistachio with an almost amaretto/almond kind of undertone to it as well. Full bodied, enveloping in the mouth and weirdly just a hint spicy!?

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I think this is one of the last remaining samples shared with me by Evol Ving Ness.

This sample is like 3 years old. Plus I didn’t steep this as long as intended. As such it could be human error that is making this basically just a slightly nutty mediocre black tea. Still fun to try though so thank you, Evol Ving Ness!

I bought a lot of this tea but it is one that I have had to experiment with a lot to be able to drink this. It gets bitter rather quickly and it is not one you can drink without milk. This is one that is unforgiving to my lazy forgetful tea drinking.
I had this hot brewed with rice milk. It was actually surprisingly delightful today for the first time. I could really taste the vanilla. I do not usually drink my tea with sweeteners but the rice milk does have some natural sweetness to it which might have been the reason that it was palatable today. I did add about 3/4 cup of rice milk to 8 oz of tea. It is a lot more what I would normally drink.

not bad but
weak thin bland
dusty honey rooibos
artificial tropical-peachy flavor
faint short-lived caramel aftertaste does not redeem
i feel bad for sending this out in swaps unless you like it then i’m happy.

It is naturally sweet and has smooth creamy taste to it. It is in my top 5.

I had higher expectations about this tea based on the quality of packaging (a pretty neat sachet ) and the tea leaves in it, which were relatively large and unbroken. The tea tastes pretty generic for a bagged Ceylon, i.e. does not have any memorable taste at all. The bergamot component does not come off as particularly fresh or interesting.

I expected it being a step above similar products from Stash and Bigelow and it wasn’t the case. In short, there is nothing that differentiates this Earl Grey from others and makes me want to come back. It’s drinkable and it is definitely an Earl Grey but that’s that.

Kitchen cleanout, fresh but low quantity remaining so it’s gotta go.

Smells nice and toasty-nutty-seaweed. That all fades into something lighter and salty-mineral when I take a sip. I’m noticing that while there isn’t really an aftertaste, the aromatics do continue to kind of build in my mouth and some caramel becomes noticeable in that ether. I have my favorite loose hojicha but this isn’t too bad for bagged tea. It was a nice lead-in to this toasted croissant with the rose petal preserves we picked up from the new Mediterranean store in town.

Housemate, who I made a cup for, says “Oh glob, that’s good tea.” slurrrrrp

I am the first one to rate? :O

The sachet is quite big and clear.. So, what we have there? Small green pieces, probably a leaf. Few bigger ones – brown colour. Well it is hojicha after all. I have found about 6-7 pieces of stems! That is quite a lot. Let´s brew it!

After 3 minutes brew I got a nice, clear liquor with brown colour. In aroma it was nutty. Pleasant aroma, bit unexected from green tea though :) But that is hojicha.

While drinking, I expected also nutty flavour. But it was not. It was more roasted flavour, with little astringency. But lovely. Yeah, I bet there are better Hojicha teas, but this one was not in my opinion so bad.