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This is pretty good! The fragrance really lingers in the air; the entire breakfast nook and kitchen smells of sweet chocolate and cream. This is definitely not fresh strawberry but strawberry like you find in the palest pink ice cream for kids, you know? But the cream and chocolate and fakish strawberry is comforting. Very sweet smell. I bet my husband’s gonna be all over this one…

What is happening to me, reaching for a rose tea, ha. Now that I’ve had a couple that were good I’m more open to the idea. And this does a really good job of being balanced, where the rose is fresh and heady and very present but not ACK, POTPOURRI over-the-top. That said after a while as it cools it does seem a bit soapy to me, where I can’t tell if it actually is a taste that’s there or my brain’s associating the rose with soapy bubble bath of its own accord. Also, I don’t taste a lot of strong tea flavor here at all, but maybe a stronger base wouldn’t be very agreeable…this feels like a surprisingly light, fresh tea for a flavored black one.

Not bad though. If you like rose tea this is nice quality one.

I love love LOVE orange oil so the smell of this was a winner for me, it’s very orange zesty with plenty of warm spices but the spices never overpower or eclipse the orange (a common problem with tea, I think). Smells great if you’re an orange-peel-in-baked-goods freak like me. I especially like the fenugreek; it makes it seem like a cold weather treat because of the faint maple smell. That said, I’m not getting much of a cake flavor or smell. A little as it cools and becomes sweeter smelling I guess. I like the smell more than the flavor, which, while there’s nothing wrong with it, feels more one-note straight up juicy slightly tart orange water than the aroma’s kitchen smells. Unlike with Caramel Apple, I don’t taste tea here at all.

I was nervous about trying this one because apple in tea and I usually don’t get along—it’s possibly my most loathed tea ingredient—but the reviews were so good, and I was crossing my fingers this would be more a sweet or even baked-type apple flavor due to the name instead of tart raw apple juice-ish apple. I made my husband a cup tonight so he could be the guinea pig and when he liked it I tried it too. It helped that it smells wonderful if not very caramel apple-y dry—the chocolate is quite present. You might think cacao nibs in a tea called Caramel Apple would be weird, but it’s yummy! I can’t really explain why/how it works (I will say I bet the intense cacao flavor goes together with the rich bold Assam like gangbusters), but it’s delicious both to smell and taste. As it’s cacao nibs it has that deep relatively unsweet chocolate profile I adore. It was easy to imagine a caramel apple tea turning out badly—astringent raw apple clashing against sharply sugary, possibly fake or plastic tasting caramel notes, say—but this is really good. The caramel comes across way less like standard sweet sticky candy than the little creamy toasty-flavored gourmet ones for adults, where it’s almost like browned butter, more rich than sweet. So as a whole this doesn’t taste like fresh juicy apple coated in toothachingly sweet caramel—maybe that’d be a disappointment if you have your heart set on its namesake, but I didn’t really, just wanted something comforting that felt appropriate for fall and this did. It’s rich and the flavor is deep and well blended between intense notes and creamy sweet ones. Yay to an apple tea I like!

Normally I wouldn’t opt for a tea only flavored with cinnamon, because while I love cinnamon as a supporting player to other things both in the kitchen and the tea parlor alone it seems a little too one-note for me. But Kusmi’s teas get so-so reviews enough, and I’ve tried some already thanks to Nicole’s awesome freebie samples, enough to recognize the so-so thing—the flavors are often relatively subdued (where it’s more an evocative wispy aroma than a present taste) and the black base, while not terrible, does not really move me much generally. And this one in particular gets relatively good reviews on Steepster for a flavored Kusmi, so I went for it.

And it is nice. Not astounding, but I do think it’s better than the others I’ve tried so far, a little more flavorful but smoothly balanced. Dry it smells like red hot cinnamon candies, which was a little alarming as that’s not really the kind of cinnamon profile I was expecting and hoping for, but in the cup it’s mellower and a little earthier, more like the Penzey’s Vietnamese Cinnamon I love to use for cooking and baking. It might be the same base as usual, not sure, but it’s more attractive here, maybe because it goes well with the cinnamon. A pleasant cup of tea, the best Kusmi yet (Violet was so disappointing), but I’m still not in love.

Had a big glass of this cold steeped to accompany some cheese pizza. Really great pairing!

At first this smelled like a lot of the fancy straight blacks I’ve had from Teavivre and Butiki etc., that smooth sweet starch (and I admit that made me think “here we go” as I’m a little bored with sweet potato tea..they’re good, don’t me wrong, but I’ve just had so many of them), so the flavor took me quite by surprise. It’s fruity, juicy, and slightly minty. Yet underneath it still possesses that nice rich Assam flavor. Now reading about it I guess that makes sense, as it’s an Assam strain with a Taiwanese wild mountain black. It tastes as good as you can imagine given that pedigree, with the sweetness and smoothness of Taiwanese tea but robust depth of Assam. Really good, lives up to the hype! Thanks to Sil and Terri and whoever mentioned TTC in the Misc. Sales thread, ‘cause there’s no way I’d have known about it otherwise. This is definitely a keeper.

…Man, that cooling mint at the end of the sip is really awesome! It freshens you up to be able to enjoy the next swallow’s fruitiness.

A great sample from Mandala—super generous!

My up-and-at-‘em pick this morning. This one funny enough has qualities like those I just described for the Tanyang Gongfu, where it’s thick and starchy-sweet and smooth but also floral, but I appreciate that it’s not quite straightforward sweet potato this time, that there’s other elements like fire (Terri is so right that it’s kind of like roasted green chiles!). There’s a quality to it where the taste evokes more astringent, dry-woody teas like Darjeeling or Zhu Rong in flavor but not actual astringency (there’s pretty much none; this is as smooth as any of the popular Teavivre black teas). A neat trick. Good morning tea and strikes that smooth-vs.-woody, Chinese-vs.-legacy-type balance in the same way I appreciate with Zhu Rong. I really, really like this. I think I’ve figured out teas that don’t tidily fit into either of those vague categories but sort of take the best of both worlds and throw in some unusual unclassifiable characteristics (that smoked chile heat!) are my favorite discoveries right now. Jerks a jaded tea palate awake in the nicest way.

Had this yesterday. I thought it was interesting how it was a little like a cross between the Golden Fleece/Honey Orchid Black-type premium teas I’ve tried and stuff like Bailin Gongfu, Wild Mountain Black (I call them “the sweet potato teas”, like a sweet tuber sauced with molasses). There was definite sweet potato, that all-the-edges-smoothed-out, sweet-starchy quality I associate with Chinese black tea, but it was also lighter than stuff like Bailin Gongfu, with some subtle floral notes behind the sweet potato.

Having this in side by sides with two other Upton Import first flush darjeelings, Glenburn (FTGFOP) and Goomtee (FTGFOP), while I scan documents from over 5 years ago, goofy drawings from coworkers and notes from my blossoming romance with my now-husband. Memory lane time calls for a tea type that induces nostalgia, and for me that’s darjeeling!

The liquor of these is pretty much identical looking (so glad I have my alphabet cups!). The Goomtee smells the best to me; it has a sweet, fresh, corn-like aroma. For aroma the Singbulli comes second; it has a super clean, almost soapy fresh scent. The Glenburn has the darkest scent, almost like a roasted oolong.

Funny enough, my scent preferences don’t match my taste ones at all. I think I like the Glenburn best, the Singbulli second (the soapiness carries into the flavor, but it’s not bad, refreshing and sweet), and Goomtee last! The Goomtee is surprisingly bitter given its sweet clean smell. But as the teas cool, I like the Goomtee best after all—a fruitiness comes out that’s really lovely, though there’s still a sharpness that lingers in the aftertaste. The Glenburn gets this weird powdered sugar/talc aftertaste I don’t care for, and the Singbulli’s soapiness becomes too much.