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Sipdown of this one! I was portioning this out this morning and realized that there wasn’t a ton left after taking out my two scoops, so I dumped the rest in and steeped it for half the time. Worked great! This is definitely a weird blend, but it’s a tasty blend. Spiced, malty, a bit piney… it works. And it doesn’t taste too much like trees for me. :)

I am working toward a sipdown on this one too, and I’ve mostly been cold brewing it. But I forgot most of my sipdown teas at work this weekend (meant to bring them home so I could keep working on sipdowns) so I thought I would have a hot cup of this one.

I like the lychee in this one, and the Vietnamese green tea is fine (although a bit more grassy and vegetal than I would prefer), but the banana flower is… kinda weird. It’s not quite banana, more like a floral banana. So, weird. But it’s overall pretty tasty, even hot.

Mmm sipdown for this one. I’ve been cold brewing it because it covers a multitude of sins in the base tea, and for black teas it uses a lot of tea so I go through meh teas faster.

It was pretty decent cold brewed, but I’ve had better almond teas cold brewed too! In the final cup I had one perfect teaspoon less tea than I would usually use so I threw a scoop of Fauchon’s La Rose in with it, and it was quite delish. Almond and rose is one of my favorite combos!

There is something hinky going on here. I brewed this one up at a slightly hotter temp since I remembered it was a white tea and that I like white teas brewed hotter. It smells good, but there is some strange note in the flavor that is kind of bitter. Bitter in a weird way though, like it’s not the white tea but something else that went wrong. Boo, I like this blend, and now I can’t drink this cup. I was about to say that this is my preferred “bouquet” from the blends club (over the Dragonwell Bouquet), but I guess I’ll be having a cup of that next anyway. This note hopefully serves as a reminder for the rest of it: don’t brew it too hot!

Thought I had two servings of this one left, but it turned out to be only 1.5, so I dumped it all into my cup and steeped it for a little less time. It’s a teensy bit overly strong, but not too bad. The Zhu Rong is very bold in this cup, and drowns out the goji and chocolate a bit more than when at optimal ratios. Still pretty tasty, though.

And another sipdown, only 7 teas to go! Note that I have not at all added the tea samples sent to me by Cameron B. Right now I am pretty much pretending that they don’t exist (sorry Cameron, I do want to try them, I’m just trying to be focused on sipdowns. Soon tehy will be front and center, and hopefully by that time Steepster will be behaving).

A blends club blend that I haven’t tired, but it’s still on my list to sipdown! I love bourbon, but I’m not huge on wuyi oolong, and I’m not necessarily a fan of hot bourbon either, so I approach this blend with a bit of trepidation.

It smells a fair amount like the Sarsaparilla Tieguanyin blend, which isn’t too surprising since it also has sarsaparilla in it, but with roasty charcoal notes from the Wuyi. Flavor-wise, it is similar. The tea has a good texture, thick and creamy. I don’t know that this really reminds me of whiskey and/or bourbon, but there might be hints. At first I was lukewarm about the flavor combo, but it’s grown on me a bit. I’m still not a big fan of charcoal roasted oolongs like this one, but I don’t mind them too much. I’ll be able to drink this one up; maybe I will cold brew it too. :)

Yes, I really do still have some of the autumn picking of this from 2012. It’s nearly autumn of 2014, so I figured I should get a move on and drink this one down. It’s not like I am running short on green tieguanyins from Verdant (I am really not). Yesterday I drank this one gongfu and then today I had a western steep of it. It was delicious both ways!

I always forget how amazing these are. Floral and almost candied, and the autumn carries a hint of butter as well. Yuuuum. I could drink these TGYs all the time!

One last cup of the awesome spring harvest of this tea. I always considered Bi Luo Chun to be not really my kind of green tea because it is often really vegetal and beany. But this one is amazing! Sweet, honeyed melon is a big part of this tea. I highly recommend picking up some of the current harvest if you enjoy green teas, because it is really lovely. Thanks again to Angel and Teavivre for sending me a sample of it!

Another short tasting note for this sipdown, which people may or may not see with Steepster being so wacky!

As I have said many times before, this is one of my favorite green teas. I’m not a big connoisseur of green teas, but I’ve had a good number of varieties, and to my taste it doesn’t get much better than this. Lots of natural, nutty chestnut flavor, a bit of butter, but not too much, a bit of sugar snap pea. I think it’s the nuttiness that I love. Yum.

I guess I still don’t know what exactly is in this tea, since I haven’t dug out the info sheet since the first time I had it. I don’t even know if I still have those info sheets or where they went in the move, so I may never really know, haha.

This is pretty tasty overall, and not really floral despite the “bouquet” designation. The dragonwell (probably dragonwell-style laoshan green, right?) is so buttery that the tea almost borders on savory. It gets a bit sweeter and lemonier as it cools, and it would probably make a tasty iced tea.