Upton Tea Imports

I was lured in by the description mentioning minty notes and green apple. Well, as it turned out minty translates into sweet grassiness and green apple into something fresh tasting but not exactly apple.
Overall the tea really is well balanced, it is on the sweeter side that I usually don’t like in Darjeelings but still is not overwhelmingly sweet for me to discard it totally. And the refreshing notes make a very good addition to the taste, balancing the sweetness and giving the tea very high drinkability. It is a perfect evening relaxing tea without too much flowery taste of FF Darjeeling.

YUM! This is a fruity, sweet, delicious treat!

The pear flavor is pleasant and sweet – and just a hint of sharpness from the sunflower comes through – just enough to cut through some of the sweetness of the pear. Making this sweet, but not too tremendously sweet.

I noticed flavors of, sequentially: honey, preserved plum, tobacco, and slight smokiness. It’s sweet even for a Chinese black. I’m betting it would blend beautifully with a Yunnan. Great value, too—it will probably become a staple of my teachest.

The aroma is sweet and light, somewhat of apricot. The liquor is medium-colored and has a notably clean taste, that of archetypal “black tea”. It has no astringency, mild sweetness, and a nice body. Not a complex tea, but not boring.

Thank You Doulton for allowing me the chance to try this tea

I was pleasantly surprised with this one. It is delicious, slightly sweet, light on bergamont, mildly chocolately. Just very yummy! It smells great before and after. Gorgeous flavor!

I bet if Captain Jean Luke Picard wanted to change it up a bit he would say….“Chocolate Earl Grey…Hot!”. This is one I will be buying when I run out.

This reminds me of Almond cookies and green tea. This is quite good, indeed! Hot or Cold!! Special thanks to LiberTEAS!!!!

My new teapot from Upton arrived this morning (I shall call him Colin). It’s one of the 4-cup Chatsford Bone China (on-sale!) pots that I’d been eyeballing for over a month — so I’m thinking that it’s fate that Tim was mortally wounded (Tim’s now chilling on one of my bedside tables right next to my Wonder Woman lunchbox — every now-and-then he gets to wear the cozy Doulton made just for fun).

Anywho, since I was ordering from Upton I naturally had to get a few samples (I’m so weak). I held myself to the three that were on my shopping list. And this is the one with which I decided to christen Colin.

I could very much smell the bergamot when I opened the packet, but it was almost a woodsy bergamot. After steeping it’s a lot more woodsy than bergamotty. It’s a pleasant, innoffensive cup of black tea. The description mentions grapefruit — I get no grapefruit. Maybe in the distant aftertaste, but I’m not a fan of grapefruit so this is a good thing.

Overall it’s a decent breakfast tea, but I don’t plan on buying more of this. NE

BIG storm coming. Pushing Summer out, and bringing what little of Autumn we will see riding in the wake.

Time to ride the dragon.

Was at Field of Greens yesterday and opted to eat next door at the Path of Tea. My companion was excited they had lapsang, and so we got a pot.

Every time I have some other lapsang, I get a craving for my black dragon. I’m on my third steep and every deep sip just envelopes me like a huge from an old friend.

Sometimes I make this tea, and I stare into the cup, and I think “I wish I could quit you”.

There are days you just don’t understand why you like lapsang. Today is that day.

I love drinking this tea with lots of different steeping techniques because you get a different flavor profile every time. Today is a medium short steep in a big pot, and it couldn’t be more different from recent gongfu steepings. This pot is all sharp edges and bristling questions, like an arson investigator picking his way through the lingering smoke. There are days this is what you want. If today is not that day, I have found that small, very short steeps produce a much rounder, softer cup.

I love steeping this in the gaiwan, now. When I brew this Western style I find you can’t really risk more than two steeps before the result gets both thin and sharp. But in the gaiwan with short steeps you can get a half dozen quality steeps.

As an aside, I’ve discovered that you can do gongfu style steeping in the small size (2 cups) Beehive teapots if you want more than a thimble full of tea with each steep. Sure, you’re committing a fairly large wad of tea leaves, but getting 6-20 steeps of 2 cups each is a lot of tea to drink, so it works out pretty well. I especially do this when I engage the “gongfu madness” to make a large batch of a tea (usually because I need to take a big thermos of it with me out to the disc golf course or ultimate field) and the results have been fantastic. Combining several short steepings produces a wonderfully complex cup.

After my confounding experience with the yabao I needed something soothing and familiar.

I haven’t had a draught of this tea in… ten months. That’s about nine months and three weeks too long.

If you are at all a fan of smoke in tea, try this tea. It is not one of the “meaty” lapsangs. No bacon, no beef jerky, no barbecue, it tastes like smokey tea.

This is one of my favorite teas in the world. I often stray, but I always come back.

I don’t think I’ve ever steeped it this briefly before, and the result is still fantastic.

Truth be told, right now, I’m drinking this Black Dragon cut about half and half with the Wang Celestial pu-erh.

This is really my favorite way to drink tea, this strong mix of smokey and earthy. Maybe that’s because it comes the closest to replacing the coffee I used to drink so much of, but no longer do.

If I haven’t already gushed about this tea more than anyone cares to read, that’s an oversight.

Over the past year or so I have tried many other lapsangs because I was convinced it couldn’t just be this one which was so utterly perfect.

Well I was wrong. They’re all either too sharp or too smokey or too bitter or just plain crap. This tea is an absolutely shockingly well balanced cup.

ESPECIALLY if you think you don’t like smokey teas, try this one. I’m so glad to have 200 grams of it back in my pantry.

I’m cheating a bit, because I drank this about a week ago, not today, but I realized I never logged it (my brother was still visiting and I was trying not to be a laptop cave troll).

This is, hands down, my favorite tea in the world. I used to drink this tea every single day of my life. The only reason I don’t now is vague concerns about health risks from particulate matter arising from soft wood smoke.

If you like smokey teas, but find many lapsang are too bacon or too house fire, try Black Dragon. A solid, smokey flavor, but still tastes like TEA.

My husband goes through iced tea like crazy and lately he has been enjoying cold brewed green teas. He asked for something different this morning, so on a whim I pulled out the genmaicha. I was a bit nervous about how it would turn out cold, but it is really awesome. Buttery, nutty, and smooth with a slight sweetness – I may use the remainder of my genmaicha for iced tea.

This is a decent genmaicha, but not my perfect one. It is smooth and slightly toasty, but I wish the sencha was a bit more full-bodied. It seems like I have to use more tea than usual to get the flavor that I want. I’m still on the lookout for my perfect genmaicha, but this one is not a bad sub until I find it.

It calls for 2-3 tsp and so for me that was 5 grams for an 8 oz coffee mug. I brewed at 3.5 minutes, 180F. This used up my entire Upton tea sample so if you order don’t expect to get more than one session out of it. Now on to the taste, but first the aroma. It smells ok. I don’t know how to describe it. Kind of musky. That sounds bad, huh? The color is a very light golden. The flavor is sort of bitter with an aftertaste that lingers for a little then disappearing. Overall, I am not a huge fan.

The aroma of the brewed tea is very pleasant… it smells a bit like warm almond cookies!

This is a sweet, tasty green tea. The green tea tastes fresh – not grassy, but there is a delicate vegetative note to it. The almond and cinnamon flavors are balanced well with the green tea taste. Very smooth and delicious. The cinnamon flavor is sweet (not spicy) and the almond flavor gives this a nutty flavor that is somewhat toasty.

YUM YUM YUM!

Finally got a break in week upon week of rain and spent the early morning mowing the front and back. Took two hours and I’m completely nackered.

I have had the Phuguri Estate second flush from TeaG many times while living in Chicago.

It is an eye opener to get to try a second tea from the same garden, as a different flush, to get a real sense of how flushes are truly different.

This tea is much more green than I remember the second flush. It has a fair bit of vegetal bite at the finish in the mouth. But not in a bad way. I just recall the second flush being a lot less volatile and golden.

First flush is not always a short cut to “the best” in spite of what some traditions may insist upon.

1.5 tsp (for me that’s 4.5 grams), and a 4.5 minute brewing time. What does this tell you? This is a dark heavy cup of tea. It smells almost alcoholic, the same sensation you get when taking a whiff of bourbon or scotch. You also get a very strong caramel note, more pronounced than almost anything I’ve had. How does it taste? Good but also bad. I can’t make up my mind. I don’t think I like it. But it’s not bad. It’s like eating venison. Your mind is so confused because it’s gamey but it’s not necessarily bad. Maybe it’ll grow on me.

The description is right to the point.
Lilacs? Check. The aroma might not be strong and doesn’t drift up from a cup of tea but if you bring it to your nose and inhale – there they are – unmistakable lilacs.
Delicate, flowery liquor? Check. The flavor is very smooth, flowery and dry like white wine.
Sweet and refreshing taste? Check. Yes, indeed it is very refreshing and the light sweetness is there as well but hiding behind flower dryness and feels more like an aftertaste than a separate note.

The brew doesn’t have any oiliness or toasty qualities, it is pure, fresh and stands up to 3 infusions, the third still being tasty but lacking in aroma. And I like the name :) Definitely goes on my shopping list as soon as I run out of Adagio’s oolong #18. They have similar characteristics but this one is way better.

Wow, what is going on here? It’s a Darjeeling that thinks it’s a green? This selection from Thurbo Estate look nothing like the Darjeelings you’d expect from northern India. It’s broken very fine and has the hue of woodchips. The steeping time is a done-before-you-know it 1.5 minutes, faster than some green and white teas. The aroma? Smells sort of like a Chinese or Japanese tea to be quite honest. What does this all amount to? How does it taste? Quite good. A strong but quickly passing bitterness; it doesn’t linger. Good viscosity, like a syrup that’s been thinned out. The color is beautiful golden.