Tea Licious

I am a simple guy with simple tastes. I prefer the teas unadorned with fruits, fluff, and extras. This is not to say I can’t treat myself to a flavored tea once in a while! However, if you are going to have a tea, have a TEA! In its truest of forms, Camilia sinensis itself. The Royal Yunnan is bar none the greatest of the pure Chinese blacks. Full, malty, and sweet. Goes great with meals and salty dishes, or if you just need an afternoon “pick-me-up” look no further. Easy to brew and lacks the bitterness found in many of the Indian blends. Simply put, if you are looking for an all-around, anytime black, your journey is over. Fill your holy grail with the noblest of black tea elixirs!

This is hands down my FAVORITE of all the green teas, flavored or otherwise. I order mine by the pound from Tea Licious every couple of months or so. It is a lovely Japan green with a full buttery flavor with a sweet, delicately vegetative aftertaste. Goes down smooth and always a pleasure, it really lives up to it status as the “precious dew”. highly recommended!

After digging deep into one of my LARGE Tea Storage Boxes I randomly chose this one…

It’s also a SIPDOWN.

It’s very nice…White Tea, Tangerine, and a bit of breadiness to it :)

A wonderful white tea with gentle tangerine flavors! Another Winner from Tea Licious!

Plain and simple…this is a WONDERFUL Gyokuro!
Clean, smooth, slightly sweet and juicy. Really great!

All of these ingredients are a bit on the mellower side and I appreciate that. They all play nice with each other and it’s hard to tell which ingredients stand out more than the others. It’s herbally but soothing and seems to go great with the pumpkin seeds I am nibbling on at the moment…

Had some more of this today — still very good!

I was a little worried about this one. I had a tea with coconut the other day and I really didn’t like it. I’m actually liking it less the more I remember it. But this one is GOOD, Way way better. I think there is something about coconut in tea that I may not like as much as other tea drinkers, but I think this one is as well done as it possibly could be. A coconut scent and flavor with subtle pineapple paired with a great rooibos tea. So here is a sigh of relief from me that not all coconut teas are bad.

Second sample from Tea Licious. I must admit first and foremost, I am a big sucker for blueberries. Anything with blueberry is awesome for me, like literally. Blueberry pie, Blueberry smoothies, anything goes really. So going for my samples, I figured I haven’t had any white tea in awhile and BLUEBERRY woooosh, sucked right in. The last and only white tea blueberry i had was the one at Tim’s and i can safely say that tasted like crap and completely artificial.

Smelling this one, better than the tangerine white. I’m glad this tea didn’t turn blue or anything on me and that it was only flavouring inside. It’s a rather mild blueberry taste but it’s great it doesn’t completely overpower the tea. However, it’s rather mundane kinda like it’s there but not really there at all. The white tea quality is pretty average too.
Too be fair though, at this price/quality level is to be expected.

One thing that might come out of this, a somewhat increased interest to find an outstanding blueberry white tea!

I’ve had a very sleepy, busy day and this tea is making it much better! It is super smooth and has a malty and sweet taste. very enjoyable!

I like this one. The flavor is very light. The flavoring is slightly stronger than the white tea, but I taste the white tea enough so I wouldn’t say that the flavoring completely overpowers it. It has a refreshing, bright taste for having such a delicate composition.

Very nice.

Thanks to Tea-Licious for this sample. Can’t get on their website to look up what this tea description is. But I can tell you it is very minty! Co-worker smelled in from down the hall! The chocolate flavor was missing at first but that is the flavor I’m left with after each sip…really tasty! Wish I had more!

First off, thanks for the free samples and shipping them to Canada! It was a nice surprise in the mail!

I’ve been trying to get on the website to get the picture of the tea and a description but the site has not been working for me for the past few days (I get a InMotion hosting page). Hmm to the tea itself, I’m getting that tangerine taste from Some velvet morning from Davids which isn’t quite that orangy at all to me. I think it’s mainly flavoring that’s the issue, I’m going to avoid tangerine flavored stuff from now on. I see white tea and safflowers in the mix, didn’t really taste the white tea much, just mainly the tangerine.

First off, thank you Tea Licious for the sample!

Dry leaves smell slightly like good black tea with notes of dried plum or raisins. Very pleasant fruity aroma. Steeped, it unfurls to fully intact leaves, you can distinctly see both green and brown leaves. The smell is distinct of fermented oolong with a bit of darjeeling citrusiness going on.

Liquor surprisingly doesn’t have much smell, I can only distinguish brown sugar notes. It smells like a light steep of some good black tea.

The taste is very light, citrusy, slightly malty. Again it reminds me more of black tea, some very light cross of yunnan and darjeeling. I am enjoying it quite a lot in fact because it seems to be extremely balanced in terms of taste (while it’s easy to oversteep the black tea). I love the refreshing taste and citrus candy aftertaste (like Halls Grapefruit, even the same astringency) it leaves in my mouth. Very cool and unusual for me tea.

This is first steep so I will see if latter steeps bring something new to the table and then add more notes if that’s the case.

Just wanted to note that steeped leaves look quite chopped and second steeping was already a little too weak, usually I can easily steep tea three times getting decent results on the last steep. I am not sure if it’s just characteristic of this particular sort of tea, but I wanted to mention it.

First off, thank you Tea Licious for the sample!

Liquor is a beautiful golden color. It tastes creamy, grassy, a little smoky, leaves a slightly dry feeling in the mouth. Even though it’s a green tea, it has much of oolong notes as well. It’s very smooth, there is almost no bitterness to it.

First off, thank you Tea Licious for the sample!

Quick Google search shows that Temple of Heaven is a common gunpowder tea. Dry leaves smell is very pleasant, sort of dark honey.

Steeped leaves unfurl quite a lot into deep green full leaves. The smell of steeped leaves is candy like with a hint of smoke and citrus.

Liquor is light brown orangey color, smells smokey and malty. Taste is quite bitter but pleasant bitterness. First seconds after a sip taste is very grassy which quickly becomes bolder. In a way it tastes much like Shui Xian or Da Hong Pao but with more bitterness and much bolder. Love the fact that flavor changes so much.

Additional notes: sipdown! I really like this one. The green tea is so silky and smooth and maybe a bit creamy.. but it really fits well with the fruity flavors. So fresh! (Even if this sample was a few months away from being two years old, it still tastes the same as it did originally.) One of my favorite green teas (though there hasn’t been many I’ve tried. I’ll miss this sample… I wonder if Tea Licious would like to send me more samples?? I don’t think Tea Licious has enough tasting notes for their teas. hmm

A perfect tea for a sunny day! (The highway flooded yesterday, so this makes for a nice change.) The scent and flavor reminds me of fruit snacks I ate as a kid, not a bad thing! This would make for a nice light summery tea. The green brings out the fruity flowery flavors! And it gets peachier the closer you get to the bottom. The pieces of tea that came out of the infuser looks like confetti in the bottom of the cup. Yum.

On my 3rd cup…it has chocolate chips in it that do NOT fully melt so I am trying to make it so! It’s very tasty regardless!!!! YUM! More notes soon!

Another sample from Tea Licious. This tea smelled like Tetley tea bags, and so I have to say that I wasn’t shocked to find that it tasted just like them, too. For me, the only surprise was logging on to the website and seeing that this was in fact, a green tea. It tastes very much like a Ceylon tea. It had a slight astringency to it, but other than that, it was so close to the bagged teas of yesteryear that I would have sworn it was something else.

It’s not a bad tea, but it doesn’t stand out in any way, either.

There are a few companies called Tea Licious after a search, but I found the site again: http://www.tealiciousllc.com/

I wanted to make a few more notes since this is the last cup of my sample.

First cup: The black flavor is less strong than I remember it. It could be due to how old the tea is OR because it took me a while to decide what tea I wanted, so the water cooled! The color is a nice amber. The flavor is full but sweet. It’s kind of like an assam. I still couldn’t tell that it’s an oolong, if I didn’t know it already.

Second cup: I poured boiling water and let it steep a while and the second cup is the same as the first. Not much of an oolong flavor! It doesn’t really change flavor with the number of steeps like other oolongs would! It’s still good though.

My oolong flavor rating where one would be a light & floral flavor and five would be the strongest flavor, this one is a five.

I’m just happy to actually remove something from my cupboard for once! :D

I have just recently tried oolong and it became a new favorite. This here seems more like a black tea than an oolong (though I’m no expert.) There wasn’t a hint of that floral scent that an oolong should (?) have. It is a fine black tea though, if that is what you’re looking for. I’ll definitely be drinking more cups of this to pick out the flavor, but I think more of a description on the website (for all the tea on Tea Licious) would be helpful.

I received this as a sample today and it is so pretty that I couldn’t wait to try it out. Tiny rosebuds are scattered throughout deep emerald oolong balls, which are punctuated by woody lemongrass. It’s truly a beautiful tea.

195/2 min. I smell lemon and I taste lemon. Unfortunately, that’s all I can taste right now. I believe there’s too much lemongrass in here and it has overtaken the flavor completely. I cannot taste rose at all, even though I was able to smell a hint of it when it was dry. Where is the oolong?

Second steep: 3 min. Okay, less lemon. That’s good. I’m also able to pick up on more of the ginger flavor. Oh, and oolong, too. It’s finally making an appearance.

Third steep: 4 min. Much better. The lemon has been toned way, way down and the oolong is coming forth in a trusty oolong manner. No rose or ginger flavor to speak of, though. It’s very pleasing and by far my favorite of the three cups. I won’t try a fourth steep as I don’t believe it would hold out that long. The leaves barely contain any scent now.