New Tasting Notes

Advent Tea! Not sure what makes this Jolly or Fig, but the green is smooth. Mostly cinnamon, but some sweet fruity notes here too. Glad I got to try, but I like my cinnamon with other flavors.

I bought Heritage Honey Oolong from Mountain Tea 8 years ago, sipped it once or twice, and have kept it stored in a sealed jelly jar since then. And it STILL tastes great! Today, I brewed 2.5g in 8oz boiling alpine spring water for 4 min (after a 10s rinse), which allowed the huge leaves to unfurl nicely in the steel infusion basket. The aroma is intoxicating and the flavor powerfully divine! Floral and so very sweet, with strong tropical fruity flavors on the top of my tongue. I can’t call out a single fruit, so let’s call it ambrosia salad! The long, long-lasting aftertaste lingered, keeping a smile on my metaphorical mug. A second long steeping (like 10 minutes because I got distracted) was equally enjoyable. If one were to better limit the infusions to a couple minutes each, I’m sure this would have gone for 4-5 great rounds, and possibly more if starting with cooler water. I don’t remember why this got pushed to the back of my cupboard — surely not for lack of merit! Checking the Mountain Tea website I am shocked to find it now on clearance at a sweet price meaning my full session would now cost a quarter for the leaf, and I spent more just for the spring water! Mountain Tea does not transparently track lot numbers or production years for it, but I see prior reviewers from a few yr ago also mentioning clearance events on this tea, so they must just be making room for the next shipment. Here’s an opportunity for you! I hope you like it as much as I do. I’m rating it as a 95 only because of my prejudice favoring black teas.

Mmm… I kind of forgot I had restocked some Keemun black tea a while ago, and as the Pineapple Express is rolling through here in the western US, this robust Chinese black is really hitting the spot against the dreary and wet weather. I wouldn’t say it is exemplary among Keemun blacks, but it is exactly what I was expecting… Rich with malty notes leaning into a savory flavor of leather and smoke with an overall brassy mineral quality and a hint of bittersweet cocoa at the back of the throat. It’s also very smooth rather than tannic or drying. I really enjoy this type of tea!

Just finished another Moomin tea and there is already a note that I wrote before? Yep, I recall it a bit.

In my cup I got quite well the blueberry muffin notes, as promised. Pastry and blueberries. Or candy blueberry is maybe a better descriptor.

Either way, it’s enjoyable and brings back memories. Maybe the latter affects me a bit more than I want to admit.

I was intrigued when I noticed cantaloupe in the ingredients for this one. When I opened the bag, I was hit with the scent of fresh cantaloupe, which was very promising. The flavor leans more toward the cantaloupe as well, despite raspberry being in the name. I really don’t mind because raspberry teas have historically been some of my less favorite ones from 52teas, and I almost never see cantaloupe teas. I drank this cold with sugar and a splash of milk, and it’s so fresh tasting and lovely. I have some cantaloupe juice that I made in the fridge, and this might be even nicer than that. The resteep was incredible too. I vote for more cantaloupe teas! The second time I had this, I tasted more black tea and less fruitiness. It was still lovely, but I wasn’t as wild for it as the first time.

Sipdown

This is a decent rock oolong, but I wouldn’t consider it to be complex and award winning. That could be my fault – maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to it or something but it just hasn’t had a wow factor for me. Deep roasty notes, which I enjoy, are the main attribute of this tea. Most of it was taken to work by Ashman, but I finished the last teaspoon today.

Finished off a 25g bag. Very sad day. It’s a pretty pricey tea- $17.50/25g, but I really enjoy it, so just ordered another bag. One of the few teas I really measure and savor.

Sipdown

A delicious Earl Grey cream style tea with rich flavor. All the quality you expect from 52teas.
So glad to have tried it!

Calming in times of national peril. Fortifying when courage is required. So says the product description on the Rare Tea website. Considering family events of late, I’d brew this by the gallon on that guarantee alone :)

But fortunately, it has a lot going for it beyond the description. At just a two-minute steep (heresy!) it is strong, bready (dark pumpernickel), and slightly sweet. Those of you who prefer tea that doesn’t wear combat boots would want millk.

A tangy, tarte, yet fruity tea! Cannot be made into a latte. I actually prefer it hot, but it is great cold as well. I enjoy how it isn’t sickeningly sweet, however, wish there was more of an herbacious note.

Cold Brew!

Currently sipping on this one tonight while I crack out these tasting notes. I obviously had to stop my Momo’s booth at the festival because I’m always so, so impressed with her flavoured green tea blends. In fact, her sencha is the only sencha I actively go out of my way to try because the quality is just soooooo good that I can’t turn my nose up at it even as an incredibly picky person when it comes to green tea.

I realized though that I owned every flavoured except for this one, which is her signature. So obviously I rectified that. I knew it was peach flavoured because momo means peach in Japanese, but I didn’t realize until I was setting up my cold brew this morning that it also has rhubarb in it. Kind of a game changer for me personally as a bit of a self professed rhubarb slut.

Sipping on it now it’s exactly what I want it to be. Very, very smooth and silky with buttery, unctuous notes of sencha couple with fragrant, floral and sweet Japanese-style white peach and just a little bit of fleeting tartness from the rhubarb. I’m finding it really well balanced and refreshing. There are certainly other teas from Momo that I’d reach for over this one like the melon sencha or budo sencha (ie. the grape one), but they’re just all soooo, so good!

Had this at work today and it was not bad! I didn’t really remember it as something that I’d enjoyed before, so my expectations were lower and maybe that factored in slightly. Quite hojicha forward but I enjoyed that toasty roasted cereal/grains goodness a lot, and even didn’t mind the subtle brassy/mineral twang that accompanied it. The coffee notes are present but very cream-laced and somewhat alcoholic in a fake-y kind of way. I get where the tiramisu direction comes in though, but it could be a little richer and/or more authentic.

Sipdown (2791)!

Finished this one off at work today and really, really enjoyed how smooth and jammy the mug was. Full bodied from the black tea, and with a surprising punch of cinnamon. I think there was A LOT at the bottom of my bag, though. But the star of the show continued to be that wonderfully thick, cranberry jelly type of note. Probably best not to keep hoarding this one, but I will miss it. Maybe we’ll meet again in a future year’s countdown box or something like that!

Sipdown (2792)!

I was excited to see Nepal Tea Collective at the Toronto Tea Festival this year – they were really kind to speak to, and so generous with their sampling as well. I ended up getting their 14 tea sampler box as well as a box of one of their reserve teas.

It’s going to take me a while to get through the box, but I wanted to start with this one because the inclusion of Szechuan peppers was really fascinating to me. I’ve had two or three teas now with them included and it’s always a really distinct taste and mouthfeel that I adore. Westholme Tea’s “Boom” lapsang blend that includes them is maybe my favourite example of this.

Opening up the tea packet, the dry leaf smelled incredible. So fresh and aromatic with really distinct, lively notes of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and citrus. It made me nose tickle/burn, but in the good kind of way! Steeped up, those three spices definitely still come out the strongest initially without a whole lot of the turmeric. It’s also more of a hot ginger than an earthy one, which in this context I enjoyed alongside the very aromatic, soothing and slightly cooling notes of the cinnamon and cardamom.

Immediately I felt the numbing sensation of the szechuan peppers with my first sip, though it started light before getting quite tingly and intense near the end of the cup. If you’ve never felt it before, it really does feel like the food/liquid version of static electricity. There’s a citrusy note to it as well, which was doubled down on by the sort of grassier citronella-type taste of the lemongrass. I did kind of feel like the aftertaste was a little soapy though.

You definitely lose the notes of the white tea pretty completely, though I think it probably is adding mouthfeel. Without the white tea I think the liquor would be very thin feeling. Still, I wish I got a little more tea and maybe just a bit less spice? It’s such a unique blend though and that mouth sensation for the szechuan is something I feel like everyone should try in a tea at least once.

Sipdown (2793)!

Finishing off the other sachet of this tea I was gifted because after bringing in so many new teas this weekend I kind of needed the easy sipdown win. Honestly, this felt great on my incredibly raw throat if nothing else. The flavour was tart but with a soothing cinnamon spice undertone and some very lively citrus notes too. It’s a nice tea, but nothing I’ll particularly miss.

I drank this one yesterday, but actually not as a latte despite the name. Instead I added a ton of the powder to a bottle of ice water and shook it all up until I had a beautiful, soft pink bottle of iced tea. The flavour is incredibly delicate so it still barely tasted like anything despite how much I included but I did get a little bit of that lightly floral and sweet cherry blossom note on the backend of the sip. More than anything, this was just refreshing though.

Thankfully I took yesterday off work as a comp day for the time I’d spent working over the weekend because when I got up in the morning my voice was so shot. I truly sounded like a dying toad.

I used that extra time off for rest/recovery, but also to add my grossly shameful Tea Festival shopping haul into Steepster. Plus I drank a lot of tea – including this one which was something I’d sampled at the festival and liked enough to bring a bag home with me. It was a nice tea to sip on during the lazy morning of logging teas into the datebase.

I wanted to check out Selicious Teas last year at the festival (it was their first year attending) but their booth was so packed I never got a chance to wiggle in. This year I was looking before the show floor actually opened to the public so I had a quiet environment to sample in. This one stood out to me because the cinnamon was so smooth, without either being cloying/sweet or drying and woody. I also found that the tea had a really pleasant custard-like flavour. Not vanilla/cream which would give this a sort of cinnamon bun profile, but specifically the type of golden custard you might have in a flan. It felt kind of unique in that way!

After I’d done my shopping, I spent the entire rest of Sunday at the festival working the DT booth. I was really there to be our on site tea expert and answer any questions the attendees has not just about what we were sampling but any of our teas in general. Though, I spent most of the day doing live cuppings of different teas and talking about them with anyone who wanted to try them. We switched it up at different points of the day, but the teas I was primarily sampling were our Jade Tieguanyin, Simply Maple Breakfast (the SimplyNailogical collab tea) and… this one!

It’s fair to say that the cat’s out of the bag now, and that sometime this March we’ll be formally releasing our second manoomin based tea with the lovely folks at Tea Horse! We debuted it at the festival as a sneak peak, though! I also drank quuuuiiittte a lot of it myself over the coarse of the afternoon. Have to stay hydrated, after all! I want to do my proper write up with the full story of how we came up with this flavour profile, what it tastes like, the giveback partner for sales of the tea (because it’s different from last year’s partner for Manoomin Maple), and just all the lovely details I normally share – but I’m going to wait until the tea formally launches online/in stores first.

For now, suffice to say that I think people were really receptive to this blend and that a lot of people who were familiar with Manoomin Maple from previous years we’ve highlighted it at the festival also seemed to really, really enjoy the flavour of this one and find that commonality with the roasted wild rice.

Also, this is my last tasting note from at the festival or really from the weekend in Toronto in general! As things wrapped up, we did our tear down and then rushed to the airport just in time to have a shitty airport meal of cheese and chips before flying home. I think I literally went all of Sunday only eating a donut, a mochi ball, three cheese strings, and half a bag of sour cream & onion chips – so truly I have to credit caffeine and adrenaline for getting me through it all.

I slept so soundly when I got back to my apartment.

Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.

Cold Brew!

I love travelling with cold brews, and I did find myself really glad to have brought and prepped this one. I started steeping it Saturday night when I got to our hotel and then I strained it when I woke up Sunday morning.

We left the hotel to go pick up the TOTD Brewers for sampling at the festival very, very early in the morning and once we’d collected them we went straight to the Toronto Reference Library to set up for the day. I didn’t get a chance to shop at all on Saturday since we got there late in the day, so I did my circuit of shopping first thing Sunday. I actually started before the event officially opened to the public since some vendors were already ready to take payments – it was really nice not feeling so crowded for the bulk of it. I bought waaayyyy too many things, but I’m sure if I’ll get into that as I review them.

We hadn’t actually had a proper breakfast in the morning, so while shopping I grabbed a matcha mochi donut from Hokusan and I scarfed that down while finishing the last of this cold brew right as I was finishing shopping – kind of make shift breakfast of sorts before going straight into sampling. I really love how juicy and smooth this cold brew is. It really does just taste like straight forward, sweet strawberry juice. No complaints on my part!

After our tea blogger dinner on Saturday evening I went straight back to my hotel, finally checked in for the day and just enjoyed the last few quiet hours of the evening to decompress and mentally prepare for tomorrow’s full day of working at the DT booth for the tea festival and then the inevitable tear down at the end of the night before flying home.

The hotel we stayed in was pretty nice, and it actually had HUGE bathtubs. Maybe an overshare here, but my apartment only has showers so I took full advantage of the situation to have a loooonnnggg bubble bath and soak my tender feet. Sometimes when I’m travelling I bring a kettle with me in my luggage, but since this was such a short trip I decided not to. To my delight, the hotel actually had an electric kettle in the room – and a pretty nice one. Not the gross keurig as a hot water source situation. So, I was able to steep up one of the sachets I’d brought with me for the trip and enjoy a decadent hot cuppa during my soak.

Though I did find the mouthfeel of this tea pretty oily, I loved the taste a lot. It was the perfect balance of rich milk chocolate, golden caramel, and toasted coconut. Very, very much like the Samoa Girl Scout cookies, which was so comforting and nostalgic after such a long day. Probably one of the better teas I’ve had from Almost, and I’m not even a chocolate tea kind of person typically.

After the festival ended on Saturday I went out for supper with several friends from the tea community that I look forward to seeing each year, but before heading to dinner I did make a quick stop at a nearby convenience store to grab something cold to drink. Not a ton of options, so I picked this one out since honey appealed to me given I’d been speaking non-stop all day. I can’t decide if this tasted good because it was good or because I was just dying of thirst/overheated and it was more refreshing than anything else. But hey, no complaints with a quick fix!

The dinner was lovely, and I had some really great non-tea related food and drink. I really needed that time to just sit, have some good conversation, and mellow out after a PACKED first day in the city.

After our event at the Eaton Center ended on Saturday, we immediately left for the last few hours of the Toronto Tea Festival. It went by quite quickly, even though we had a slight technology issue with some of the kettles that had been brought which prevented us from doing live cuppings of teas during the day.

We thankfully had prebrewed TOTD thermoses filled with Turmeric Chai, Wild Grown Rooibos, and this tea though – so we were still able to sample something during Saturday’s activities. This was definitely the overall crowd favourite and honestly maybe my favourite of the three teas too. I had a travel mug with me and I ended up pouring myself some of it to sip on in between talking to people at the DT booth. I was very, very thankful not just for something caffeinated (I was SO TIRED at this point) but also really delicious. That brighter more lemony citrus/bergamot note was invigorating and I felt like the yerba mate/ginseng combo was also very mentally refreshing – something I needed after such a long and busy start to the day.

We sampled this tea on Sunday in the brewers as well, and it was still easily the crowd favourite of the TOTD offerings. Though, we did fix our hot water issue so I was able to do live cuppings of about five other teas as well – so we gave it a really good run for its money. It held its own very well though, and it was really amazing to get to hear live feedback (mostly positive, but even the critical too) as people tasted it for the first time. I really, really do love this tea.

Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.

When I landed in Toronto on Saturday morning around 8:30AM I basically had to head straight to the Toronto Eaton Center to immediately go into event prep mode for our first of two events for the day which was the fan “Meet & Steep” for our collaboration with Cristine/Simply Nailogical for Simply Maple Breakfast and the Nordic Mug and Holo Taco nail polish line.

The only stop I made was at a Starbucks in the same mall to get a cheese and egg sandwich (first food of the day) and a vanilla bean frap, which I promptly mixed a stick pack of this matcha into for a super delicious and refreshing “blueberries and cream” frap. Best of both worlds with combing the starbucks drink with even more caffeine and my matcha fix of the day.

The Meet & Steep was awesome though! I got to the mall to help with set up around 9AM and there were already fans gathering to wait in line hours before the event started. The energy was just awesome though, and every single fan who came during those very, very packed couple of hours (we started around 10:30AMish and went until about 3PM) was nothing but patient, kind, and very, very fun. Seeing all the nail art was INCREDIBLE too.

If you happened to be at the event and are seeing this later, I was the one on phone duty very kindly asking you to have your cameras ready on your phone and then taking pictures with fans and Cristine. I did my absolute best to make sure everyone got at least one photo with Cristine where everyone was in focus, and without any DT staff in the background – everyone who waited deserved to have that special keepsake. So thanks to all the Holo Taco fans for being so patient as I very, very rapidly learned to use what felt like a million different phone cameras.

Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.