3011 Tasting Notes
(I’m actually commenting on the unsweet version.)
This is the only restaurant iced tea I truly like. Don’t know any of their particulars, but it is always fresh, never tastes oversteeped, and doesn’t have anything lemony, citric acidy, or preservative-y. Their deli sandwiches are tasty, too.
Rain!
Not just teaser sprinkles that make the sidewalk sweaty, rain with a little friendly thunder that lasted off and on last night. (I can just hear my mom singing “Showers of Blessing” right now :)
I always associate Keemuns with rainy days, and this was the first one I put my hand on. It’s extremely light for a keemun—the stereotypical Keemun dark, wet burlap taste is barely detectible. This morning, it was compounded by my rush to get it steeped so I could sit outside and smell the dampness. This one needs a full 4 or 5 minutes to squeeze out its whole personality.
Still and all, it’s a lovely morning. Hope some showers of blessing fall wherever you are.
We appear to received some showers of blessing last night as well. After church we drove 25 miles or so to the Texas Roadhouse (Mmmmmm ribs) and there were actual puddles in the planting beds.
How did you get Ku Cha online or did you come to Colorado? Their tea house is wonderful! I was in there last weekend and just to taste a puer I was interested in, they took me to taste it at a gonfu table and did a whole pot free. I didn’t like the puer very much but ended up purchasing a different one. They even have an area where you can custom blend your own tea by yourself.
Received as a gift last summer. But I believe that sounds like a wonderful destination to add to my someday-when-I-can-travel wish list!
This tea is more fun to watch than anything … authentically pink and all, and I’m intrigued that it’s possible to have hibiscus as an ingredient that doesn’t taint this nice, light tea with tartness.
If I were one of you cool-headed, analytical folks that numerically rates tea on a consistent scale instead of a flighty, emotionally/hormonally-influenced reviewer that gives tea a superlative number just because I’m wearing clean socks, I’d give it an 89 for entertainment value; 65 for taste.
Chose this because I knew it’d have some heft and I woke up decidedly heftless with a hefty hunk of to-do’s ahead of me. Brewed strong on purpose; I think the “sweet and earthy” in the product description is appropriate.
The most fun of the hefties was a run to a local teaching supply giveaway (tornado donation remnants from last summer). Hauled home a crate of resource books to replace lost ones, some fiction and non-fiction that I can now try on an experimental basis, and a bale of GAMES magazines from the early 80’s—-wonderful idea fodder for kids’ games and activities. (And a hoot and a half—the electronic games reviews are for Atari; the print ads are for cigarettes and English Leather.)
Just dawned on me…that’s reading material that’s older than 75% of you reading this :) Ay-yi-yi.
Tastes pleasantly like dried apple or maple wood. Twiggy.
Made for a wonderful afternoon ahhhh break at work. I needed one. Felt like a ham hock being dangled in an aquarium full of piranhas.
(Our seasonal crazy time.)
Didn’t see anything like this in your reviews. I wasn’t sure you would get it. Glad you did. This is really inexpensive. Now I will have to see if I can catch the apple or maple wood.
The spelling always makes me think of “Ha-cha-cha.”
Think fresh lumber, not pancake syrup :)
Oh, lumber! Now whose striking the manly pose?
Michael Palin, of course. He’s a lumberjack and he’s OK…
Gmathis: Aw, man! You beat me to the Lumberjack Song!
Have always wanted to try this one; Nicole gave me the opportunity. Without peeking at reviews, I remembered there was cranberry, but I couldn’t put my finger on the “other” I was tasting. Other is almond! And really, really tasty almond at that.
These are two flavors that can be used in interpreted really badly—way too tart on the cranberry, way too bitter on the almond, but this is a pretty perfect representation of both. I think I may need to try some on ice!
I do love this tea!
I miss having this tea in my cupboard! It is really good with a tad of milk and sugar too.
One of my favorites. This is a shelf requirement, should I ever actually succeed in paring down my collection.
I wondered about the milk thing … I think there’s enough in the packet I can try it both ways.
I love doing desserts with this. Steeping it in cream and using that to top things, creme brulee infused with this, ice cream… all yum. :)
I am in awe of your foodiness! (I really do need to learn to cook with tea.)
Hey,K S, this is good! And work-microwave friendly, no coddling or cautious timing needed. Tidy tagless bags; has a brighter, sweeter quality than you’d associate with most English Breakfast selections.
I will start watching for Paisley branded stuff locally. (May have to watch a long time, but there’s always TJ Maxx :)
I couldn’t find this one, but if it’s listed/spelled differently, I’ll be happy to correct.
Living in the largely rural Midwest, our “exotic” fruit section in the produce area isn’t, and I wouldn’t know a lychee if you conked me on the head with it. So I wasn’t sure what to sniff out or taste for in this nice sample from Michelle.
What I am getting is a pleasant black tea base with a little honey-ish sweetness. I erred on the side of caution and used just a rounded teaspoon to a 12-ounce tumbler, so it may just not be prepared strongly enough to get a good lychee vibe, whatever that may be.
Fortunately, there’s more in the pouch to experiment with, and regardless, I like the way this tastes!
Glad you like it! I’m not a huge fan, so if you want the rest of the tin, it’s yours :)
Cool! No hurry at all.
I’ll send it your way then. I got it myself in a swap, so I’m just passing the love on :)
Just for the record, Steepsters are some of my favorite people on the planet (sorry, family and my fifth graders bump you for first and second ;). Sometimes long-term sites and social connections degenerate into a bunch of contentious and cranky backbiters. I certainly haven’t seen evidence of it here.
:) It’s so true, though. I can honestly say that I’ve never met a community so welcoming and friendly as this one! Tea people really are the best kinds of people.
I tried lychee that my daughter brought home from the Asian market and it tastes like bathroom cleaner to me. And looks like de-orbed eyeballs. But I tried Harney’s Lychee Black Tea and it was delicious! I thought the fruit in it tasted more like roses than anything, and it certainly didn’t evoke cleaning fluid at all! :)
@ashmanra, lol you sure make this sound frightening!
A lot of Asian markets have these little jelly cups that are lychee flavored, they’re really good!
K S: LOL! It isn’t just me! My daughter still calls it eyeball fruit. She tossed it out the back door at my mother’s house where she lived for a while after my mom died. The people who came to look at the house to buy it were momentarily horrified by the sight of the shriveled eyeballs on the back lawn. Ha ha! They figured out what it was fairly quickly. GMathis should get some and scatter them around the zombie bunny! :)
We have gmathis exotic food aisle. Having never seen lychee, I can only imagine the horror of walking into that back yard! Eeek.
I have seen the funky little jelly cups at our Asian/import/health food place.
For the record, we are still terrified of getting rid of the zombie bunny. He has been moved to the carport, and the bucket of whatever perennial grass he was in is now stone dead. Looks more threatening than ever!
It smells like FROOT LOOPS! Which brings back all kinds of wonderful latent church nursery memories—-blocks and the toy kitchen and play doh and those cool Fisher-Price pull-along phones with the goofy goggly eyes and my teacher Miss Lenora who bought me a Peter Rabbit book…
All that to say, this has the most pleasant and fragrant fruit scent of any green tea I have tried in recent memory, hands down. And the scent doesn’t let up once it’s steeped; you can just bury your nose in it. The berry-pom flavor is lighter that the scent, but still strong and sweet. Not a hint of tartness, which makes this a winner as far as I’m concerned.
My thanks to K S for providing this goofy and relaxing trip a few years backward! (Then there was the room that was so small the piano could only face the wall and rather than turn her back on a bunch of four-year-olds while we were singing, the teacher with the beehive hairdo would play piano, and sing while c-r-i-n-k-i-n-g her neck towards us as far as it would go. I still remember all the lyrics.)
