Tealux

It has been a long, long day of driving to the US and back and visiting family. It’s been a low tea day too, and even though it’s only 8pm I’m having a hard time staying awake. Sifting through my secret santa box, the smell of this was so incredible, it had to be my first try.

The jasmine and juicy passion fruit fragrances are strong and complement each other beautifully. Every time a tea smells this good, I have to brace myself to be let down by the flavour.

Steeped for 3min at 94C, the liquor is deep brown and smells just as delicious.

And huzzah! It also tastes amazing. The base mostly tastes like a basic black, with maybe a slight hint of vegetal on the finish suggesting the green. A touch astringent. The jasmine and passion fruit are balanced and distinct. The jasmine and a fruity sweetness that’s almost peachy leads the sip, and then toward the end and into the finish there’s that juicy passion fruit flavour. It leaves the impression of tartness while only being a tiny bit tart.

This is goooooood. So goood! Thank you so much teamaniac! <3

Do not like!
It isn’t bad. But something in there just puts me off. Something sweet and medicinal smelling, and a bit bitter – in contrast with the sweetness of the fruit I think the contrast is what throws me off.
Ah well. I gave the rest of my cup to Dad. Hopefully someone else will want the rest…

Overboard Traveling tea box

Woah. Who would have thought I would like a plain black tea? Not I. This seriously smells like sweet potatoes and it tastes a little sweet even without added sweetener. Thank you The Cookie Lady for adding this to the box; otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a chance of trying this. Yum. Keeping the remaining sample.

edit
Well, I’ve already gotten 2 steeps out of the leaves and I’m pretty sure I could get a 3rd; but I want to try some more teas before I’ve maxed out on my caffeine limit for the day. Tasty.

Light and flavoursome. All the ingredients are organic and it certainly tastes that way (or so I imagine). Very refreshing for the summertime here in Sydney.

Not too floral perfumey; the jasmine takes more of a background role with a decent green base that melds nicely together. The blueberry isn’t tart or cloying at all either. It’s more like a lightly sweet, very fresh hint of blueberry that keeps you coming back for another sip.

One of my favourites from the massive Tealux haul earlier this year.

Overboard TTB.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a Darjeeling before, so yay for new experiences. This doesn’t really impress me, though. It’s not bitter at all, but it tastes rather rather like a vegetal. I’m not really a green tea person, when I drink it I almost always add lemon and maybe some sugar. This is not really my thing.

… Where’s the pumpkin? Lies! This s the first of the teas I received from the generous Ubacat! Looking at the ingredients, I wouldn:the be able to guess that they were aiming for a pumpkin tea at all. With that out of the way, the primary flavor here is by far melon. Makes sense since it’s one of the top ingredients. I don’t really get any creaminess when it’s hot, but I can detect a hint of it as it cools. It is slightly artificial, and reminds me a lot of those melon candies the I used to get when I was younger. Maybe a bit of other fruit and the rooibos in the background. I actually am enjoying this tea, and had it been marketed as a melon tea, my rating probably would have been higher. It’s tasty, I might just have to re label it.

My first roasted oolong! This is so cool. So it has a roasty flavour in the bag, and the leaves are all compressed into these deceptively small little nuggets (honestly, one of my favourite things about oolongs is watching the leaves expaaaand). :) As it’s steeping, the roasty scent gets much stronger, but there’s also something sweet there. Like some sort of pastry with toasted coconut on it? The liquor is gorgeous and dark, reddish I think (it’s not a white mug, so, colours are deceptive). The flavour is complex but mellow, slightly sweet and very toasty. I like this.

Edited to add: I think I resteeped this about 5 times? Impressive.

Thank you so much to The Cookie Lady for sending this sample in her generous swap package! I’m afraid I may have under-steeped this one, as the color was rather light and the flavor somewhat mild. I will try a longer steep time with the remainder of my sample. I taste the raisin notes as well as a nice mingling of cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla. I wish there was a little bit more of a buttery cookie flavor here, but it’s still a delicious dessert tea!

Took my new gaiwan for a test run with this! I wanted to start out with a tea I had tried before, for comparison purposes. I’m still totally entertained by how these leaves start out so small, and end up so big. And with my glass gaiwan, I can watch it happen! So. 4g of tea for 4oz of water. I can’t remember exactly how I timed the steepings, but I think it was something like: rinse, 20s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 60s, 1.5min, 2 min, 3 min. It’s not dramatically different from steeping western-style with multiple infusions, but there’s definitely more of a progression of flavours. It starts out light, gets sweeter, then creamier, then grassier. Also, I think I’ve found a solution to the “holy crap that’s a huge (cumulative) amount of tea” problem: I set up a pyrex measuring cup next to me on the table, and with each steeping I poured 2oz into my little cup to drink and 2oz into the pyrex cup. At the end the pyrex cup got a covering of saran wrap and went in the fridge, so tomorrow I’ll see what it this Jin Xuan tastes like cold. :)

Oh, yum. So first of all, the scent of the dry tea is ridiculously sweet and creamy. It smells like some sort of candy, and makes me seriously question the notion that there are no flavourings involved in this tea. The leaves are very tightly rolled little balls. I used a generous teaspoon for 8oz of water, and that came to about 4g. After several steepings, the leaves had completely filled my little infuser basket. I got a 1/3 c. measuring cup and was able to get all the leaves to fit in there, but it involved a little bit of squishing. Crazy! A lot of the leaves come with a bit of stem attached, which isn’t very obvious in the dry form, so the first time I looked at the steeped leaves I was like “where the heck did all these stems come from??”.

Anyway. The tea liquor is quite a pale yellow, and in the first couple of infusions it has a very milky fragrance; after that it gets milder and more floral. The flavour is amazingly milky in the first infusion especially, but underneath you can tell it’s quite a green oolong – it’s light and sweet and completely lacking in astringency or bitterness. I’m on my… 5th? I think? infusion and it’s starting to get bland so I think I’ll stop (also, that’s a lot of liquid! I’m going to be peeing all night as it is). I steeped for 2min initially, the added 1min for each subsequent infusion. Lovely.

I’m going to have a really hard time describing this one, partly because it was so freaking good and partly because I’m not super great at identifying flavor nuances yet.

First, I thought that perhaps I was tasting the burny outside of a roasted marshmallow minus the sweetness (which totally doesn’t make sense…)

Then, I moved on to imagining that perhaps it was toast …but like…maybe with something on it? Except, I don’t even know what. So unhelpful.

So…I finally caved and read the flavors others had listed here and….maybe it’s sweet potato? Malt was a given, being that it is an assam…but sweet potato is to only other flavor listed that I can attribute the other flavor to. I feel exceptionally bad at writing tasting notes right now.

The main point I’m getting at here is ohmygosh I want to drink this nearly every day. Thank you Tealux/Tealyra/Teawhateveryouwanttocallyourselfnow for making delicious teas.

7 spears for about 10 oz. of water. The result was pretty light in flavour, but quite sweet. It didn’t taste like any oolong I’ve ever had though, without the lovely aftertaste I usually crave. I’ll have to have it again (and/or resteep it) and make more detailed notes, because unfortunately I don’t remember much beyond a bit of mineral and a lot of sweetness, but it was certainly pleasant. Doubtful, though, that it will be interesting enough to get me to repurchase.

ETA: Resteeped it a couple days later, in 90C water, leaving it for quite a while – it actually ended up being quite flavourful, although also more astringent than I’d like. The flavour was really unlike almost anything I’ve had before, and I was struggling to figure out what it was that it reminded me of. I am thinking purple tea? It still didn’t have an oolong flavour, but wasn’t like a green either. Definitely tasty though (I diluted my too-astringent cup with some additional boiled-cooled water until it was at a bearable level). Next time, I’ll try to give it an even longer first infusion (if I remember).

This sample is from my swap with Starfevre. I haven’t seen her around lately, I hope she’s doing well. I am a huge maple fan, and even though the maple teas I’ve had have been disappointing, I always want to try more! I would love to find a very strongly flavored maple tea for the fall and winter months. Anyway! This tea is a mix of very dark, generic-looking black tea leaves, little hunks of maple brittle, and some red peppercorns, which I avoided like the plague when measuring out my cup. Seriously though, why are they in there? It smells very sweet and maple-y, in fact I can smell it through the 4 mm thick bag even.

The steeped tea smells quite sugary with a light maple aroma. Hmm, this tastes kind of odd. The base tea seems kind of vegetal, and specifically reminds me of cooked green beans. The maple flavor is nice, perhaps a touch artificial but that’s okay. Overall, a very light-bodied tea. Definitely not my perfect maple tea, but not terrible either.

Thanks to The Cookie Lady for sending me this tea to try. Overall, this is not my favorite kind of sencha, I much prefer the really green, steamed vegetal leaves but it’s still rather nice. A very mild green tea with definite berry essence. I am not getting so much fig, there is a little bit of soft fig taste in the background but it’s not that obvious over the tartness of the berries.

I like fruity senchas and I enjoyed trying this, but with my large Lupicia stash I am pretty well set on flavored senchas for a while. ;)

Mmm, just a quick note to say that this is VERY tasty cold-brewed. I might have to try all my Taiwanese blacks this way.

A Taiwanese Assam! Cool. :) The dried leaves are super cool looking, all long and twisty, and very aromatic. The brewing tea also smells amazing, malty with a bit of fruity baked goods? For a non-flavoured tea, this one certainly has a lot of flavours going on. Very nice.

So as far as I can tell, this tea is pretty much identical to The Tea Spot’s “White Wedding Tea”. Which is pretty much what I was hoping for when I ordered it, so yay? Anyway, it’s quite lovely: light and sweet and caramel-y (from the chestnut flavouring). The jasmine flowers are there, but I don’t really perceive any jasmine flavour. It’s yummy.

Well now……just…..what? How does tea do this? How does it taste like milk?!?!!?? I had my boyfriend smell the bag (the bag which says there is nothing else besides oolong tea leaves in there) and he looked up at me with this strange face and was like….“Why are you buying baby formula tea???”

It smells like milk and tastes like a milky green tea latte kind of deal. I rather like it! I’ve been looking forward to trying a milk oolong for quite a while now. That, of course, means that I have no idea how this holds up in comparison to other milk oolongs. I only know I’ll greatly enjoy drinking the rest of my sample packet ( and my boyfriend will too)!

ETA: I forgot to mention that I thought I’d brewed it all wrong at first. My timer went off and the “tea” still looked just like water. It is probably the lightest-colored brew I’ve seen.

I can’t say I’ve ever had brandy, so I can’t really compare.

It’s creamy, sooo creamy and smooth. There’s a maltiness there that makes it taste close to a black tea, but without the bam in the face that blacks can give you. Like a gentle wake up call to the soul.

It’s not at all astringent when brewed according to directions, but there’s a drying aspect to it that makes my throat hurt. It’s nice, but at this point not particularly memorable (yet). I’m not sure I’ll repurchase, but it was a lovely experience.

A sample from cookies. I enjoyed the black dragon pearls I tried from TeaVivre, so I was very interested in trying them from another company. These pearls look very similar to the other ones, they’re about 1/2 to 2/3 inch in diameter with a little bit of variation in size. Color is dark chocolate brown with some lighter tan streaks. I didn’t get a whole lot of scent from them, maybe a little bit of malt and some sweetness. I used four pearls in my eight ounces of water.

Once steeped, the tea smells somewhat sweet and raisiny with molasses and cocoa notes, and a touch of earthiness. Hm, I agree with Stephanie that this tea is a bit ho-hum. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not making my skirt fly up either. There’s a definite earthy baseline here, and there’s also some raisin and molasses influence, but not enough to make it terribly interesting. Overall, it’s inoffensive, but not something I would purchase.

Let me start out by saying that it really irks me when I forget to put rooibos blends in a T-sac and instead put them in an infuser because oh.my.gosh I hate little floaty rooibos bits. When it’s actually tea floating in my cup, it’s no biggie. But….little scratchy bits of rooibos that stick to the sides of your mouth and under your tongue…ugh. I don’t mind the flavor of rooibos usually, but feeling pieces of it in my mouth while drinking it is just unbearable.

Now, I made this for my boyfriend to try and stole a couple of sips from his cup. He didn’t seem to mind the pieces (thank goodness because I wouldn’t have finished the cup due to being so annoyed). The flavor and smell, however, were wonderful! I definitely see myself seeking out other coffee-flavored teas now. I liked that there was the slightest hint of warm, roasty, comforting coffee-ness in both the fragrance and taste. I also felt this truly encompassed the flavors of tiramisu. The most prominent parts were the espresso, vanilla/cream/custard, and almond. Is there normally almond or amaretto in tiramisu? If there isn’t, perhaps there should be because it tasted great all together.

I just have to make sure that I always brew this in a bag. I’m rating this solely based on flavor, since any rooibos/honeybush blend finds its way out of my infusers, making it not the fault of this blend.

Thanks for the sample cookies

These pearls are pretty mild. Drinkable but boring. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for them? Meh. Sorry!