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calming tea needed after a stressful afternoon and a 4 year old’s birthday party. this fit the bill. in addition to previous notes i would add this tea has a strong flavour, so am using a new metal infuser as the bodum plastic one I used before would soak up the flavour, making it difficult to clean off.

yummy sweet grass. its getting me excited for spring – for the smell of freshly cut grass. helped me warm up after a rainy morning run/jog to get back into the swing of things after winter/injury/running break

Umami, vegetables, slight sweetness; very green liquor. First time trying Kabusecha and its remarkably similar to Gyokuro – like a toned down version. Did a bit of quick research and it seems that Gyokura, Kabusecha, and Sencha just vary on the amount of shading before harvest. More shading = more theanin (an amino acid) = more umami flavour. Would recommend trying this.

Wanted to give it another try but still not a fan of it.

I’ll admit this is way past its expiry, so I decided it was a great candidate for my tea soup experiment tonight. Steeped this at 3x strength and added rice, pork, mushrooms for flavour, and broccoli to make a soup. It turned out a bit on the light side still, so maybe next time I should use a heartier green tea.

This tea is very light tasting, with a toasted, sweet grass flavour. It actually reminds me of steamed vegetables. Even the brewed leaves were a medium green that looked like steamed/boiled veggies. The leaves are buds plus 1 or 2 leaves, which is a pretty great pick. Great light tea for a light meal.

Had a fun fun friday because I got to visit the local Google office for a training session…and they of course, being a tech company, have kombucha in their amazing cafeteria – they had this Hibiscus Rosehip one, and the Ginger one from Rise, plus a 3rd I could not remember.

This was a pretty good kombucha in terms of the ingredients content – only 62 calories in the whole bottle, and it wasn’t overly sweet so I could taste the tea more. There was not a lot of sediment though which I don’t know that means a difference in probiotic content?

I liked that they had a ‘pre-drink prep’ instruction that tells you to flip the bottle over, swirl slightly, before opening. For one the instruction was laid out so that step 2 (after you flipped the bottle) the text was inverted – its nice to see companies take care of small details.

Also the instructions though detail oriented, are handy because with the effervescence, you really don’t want to be shaking up this bottle, and yet with the sediment that most kombuchas have, the human nature just wants to shake the bottle to mix it up.

I found this particular flavour to be a bit tart though, so given the chance I’d rather try another of their flavours.

Got this from the Toronto Tea Festival as I’m trying to cut coffee derived caffeine on work day mornings (really not a morning person…) and switch to tea derived caffeine instead. This looked promising, since it had a combination of coffee and tea. It has loose leaf puer and coffee beans, mixed with brown granules that I would guess is sugar and perhaps some other flavours. Trying this now just brewed in water, but I think this could work nicely as a latte. Taste-wise I find its still more puer than coffee, and thats probably because the coffee beans are still kept whole in this blend, so I can’t imagine a lot of coffee extraction going on.

I also found that because the leaves and coffee beans are quite light relative to the sugar granules, it takes a bit of work to scoop out a nice even blend of the tea, coffee and sugar. The one improvement suggestion I’d have is to have the sugar separately added which avoids this problem from happening – I think it’ll be quite uneven once I approach the end of the blend.

Slightly effervescent, sweet tea with a lemony flavour. Very drinkable. A bit on the sweeter side though, so if you’re looking for something with less sugar this might not be it.

Just ordered a tea latte at Holts Cafe and this was the tea bag that it was made with. Tastes amazing though it could be biased by the deliciously creamy milk they used to make it with :) Definitely ordering this latte again, but would love to see if Holts has this in store as well on its own.