Featured & New Tasting Notes

I love this tea — I got it to try a different Chinese tea than my normal types and went for the generic Keemun (figured I’d start at the bottom), and I am very pleasantly surprised. It’s a perfect morning cup for me; plenty of flavor but not overly astringent.

Its perfect for the winter months – the blends of cinnamon are incredible – needs no sweetness- check this out even if you aren’t a tea drinker.

The curled emerald green leaves of this tea have a lovely sweet smell to them before brewing. The bright golden liquor smells lightly of fresh greenery, with a taste to match. Just a small amount of sugar brings out grape and plum notes that dance on the tongue.

After picking up a few tips from the forum, I took their advice and used 1tsp or just under of leaves, dampened with cold water, then added boiling water. I added cinnamon (prob 1/2 tsp) and it tasted okay. On the four steep, it’s tasting nice even without the cinnamon, but it’s only very weak now. It’s still not my favourite, but it’s a big improvement on what I had before and I will probably finish the 50g I bought before I retire (in 35 years’ time)

My cousin donated this for me since I don’t have tea at my parents’. I’ve never had a black flavored tea before. It’s much more fruity than black teaish.

Mmmmm, yum. Haven’t had more of this tea in the last week until now….I forgot how good she is!! Hail to the Queen!!! Nice blend of blacks giving me my ideal malty and fruitful notes. Added a little milk and sugar and voila – Niiiice! Really delivers a wonderful tasty mugfull. I bumped my original rating up a bit to where it should be! :)

Well, yesterday was an insane tea day – 7 different teas for me and multiple steeps of most of them. So that’s BIG for me. And I liked it. So I decided to carry over the tea bounty on to today. I’m not going to hit 7 – maybe 4 if I’m lucky – but still. Yay tea!

Brewed this up in my handy dandy ingenuitTEA using filtered water from home. I’m pretty sure that makes me a big ole dork, bringing tea water to work, but the water here is nasty and using bottled water makes my tea flat.

For some reason, the leaves smell of fruit. Some sort of berry. I think when I first got this tea, it was sitting up against a plastic bag of black currant tea so I’m guessing the smell soaked into it a bit. Which is weird. But at least it doesn’t carry over to the brewed tea. It smells comforting – kind of like dry grass plus a little spicy and bit of baking chocolate. Plus, I get to drink it out of Totoro so how can I go wrong?

Yep, I’ve definitely got a sore throat which is usually the first warning sign I have if I’m about to come down with a cold or fly virus. This tea, if nothing else feels nice on my throat – I added a teaspoon of wildflower honey for extra ‘lubrication’. ;)

Its taste isn’t really remarkable in any way; it’s pepperminty, but it’s a mild peppermint, not the full-on cold, mouth numbing sensation I usually get with straight peppermint tea. Its also got a slightly herb-y sort of quality to it, though nothing near so obnoxiously ‘good for you’-tasting as RoT’s Get Clean tea.

I have more to add, but initial impressions:

Smells like cardboard but tastes a lot better than that! By far there are more rooibos than black tea leaves in there. I think thats why I smell the cardboard. Plain rooibos smells like cardboard to me. I added a cube of brown sugar and enjoyed this! Not something I’d reach for often though.

I like this both hot and cold. Had 1 of each tonight…YUM!

Caramel and hay in the scent of long, twisted, dark-brown dry leaves. I put a lot of leaves in my little clay pot, so 30 sec was long enough to make tea. A very ‘yang’ taste, but low astringency. Found definite cinnamon and a touch of bitterness in the finish. The golden liquor shifted from allspice and leather, early on, to a deep, pu-erh-like, peppery taste in later infusions. Sweetness was mostly in the aroma rather than flavor, with richness imparted mainly by the body of the liquor. By the 6th infusion, at 2:00 min, with temp raised to boiling, the big leaves were still going strong, with the tea mellowing out to a sweet, faint linen and leather, and the bitterness vanished.

This smells so fresh buttery that my mouth is watering. Literally. I’m drooling.

Tried this at a lower temp to see how that adjusted the taste. Still has the bright, Darjeeling-esque notes of muscatel that I tasted at the higher temp but there is more of a buttery taste to it, too. Not quite as much as the smell, though. Also, the Darjeeling aspect of the tea isn’t as hard hitting as at a higher temp. Now it tastes more like a softer oolong, maybe grown in the same region. There’s still a hoppy note at the end, but it seems to blend better with the softer taste of the tea. Almost gives me flashbacks of the Schlafly brewery tour and tasting from yesterday, but not quite.

I definitely like it better brewed at 195 so far due to the slightly softer taste to the tea and the addition of the buttery taste that, to me, seems to pull the flavors together a little better. I think I have enough for one more session with this and I might go down to 180 just to see how it does there.

Sharing this one with the husband. He said it tasted like an oolong plus herbal but then he’s not really had much experience with Darjeelings so I think the fruity Darjeeling flavor is hitting him as fruity herbal. He didn’t try this one at a higher temp, just 195 so can’t compare that way, but overall gives the tea a 4/5 stars. I think if I could get a little bit more buttery out of it, I’d make it a 4, too. Again, I’ll see how the last bit does at about 180.

Taken Plain.
Usually Golden Moon never ever misses with me. I can open up anything they send and adore it absolutely. Not this one. It is a very nice scented green but I have had better. I’ve had a TON worse and this is in no way a bad tea… but Ive had better. I’m just disappointed that this isn’t as good as the vast majority of their other teas.

What I was looking for was a deep toasted green base to add depth paired with the bright floral notes extending down into the base to pull it up into the light. The green tea feels like it is living up to my expectations but the jasmine seems to be the part falling short. It seems almost two dimensional and weak next to the base. Not weak as if you couldn’t taste it but weak like brittle. It does not have depth into the lower notes of jasmine flavor that would add richness to the blend and a more full mouth feel.

It’s ok. It is what they promise but I know that they can do better because they usually do. If you are looking for a light, pleasant and unoffensive Jasmine blend definitely give this one a shot. If you are like me and you want to be dazzled by new, bold and exciting flavors you might think this one is too calm.

I had genmaicha with my tofu breakfast, though I’m not sure it was this one. The quirky local brunch joint has an extensive tea menu, mostly loose leaf, though they don’t tell you which company’s tea you’re drinking. Since I have this in my cupboard, I’m labeling this way. Yum!

The leaves in this tea are a deep gorgeous green and no stems to be found in this tea. The ratio of leaves to rice is high which gives the final product a beautiful green colour. In comparison, I have some cheaper genmaicha which is full of stems and mostly rice and the outcome is a less flavourful yellow product; not nearly as nice to taste or look at as this comforting tea from lupicia.

My new shipment is even a little bit better than the tin that took me about a year to go through

This tea brews up a lovely amber color and has a subtle malt flavor. Hints of earthyness add to the boquet. Overall a good cup, but not the best Yunan Provence tea I’ve tasted.

This is my first real venture into Gyokuro. I’ve tried it before, but when I last purchased gyokuro I was still in the naive mindset that all green teas are brewed the same way (3 min, 180 degrees), and so I’m pretty sure that I butchered gyokuro the last time I had it. That being said, I now have learned that most gyokuro are steeped at extremely low temperatures (this one I steep at 104 degrees!) which brings out a completely different taste than you get at 180 degrees and I also brew it in a little kyusu now.

In this case you get a very sweet taste with slight vegetal hints, but not nearly as much as you would get at higher temperatures. The flavor is so different to me that I really don’t know how to describe it right now, but when I have a chance to try more Gyokuro, I’ll make sure that I report back

Great pick-me-up. The nice thing about this tea is that it tastes good even after it’s turned lukewarm, making it a nice thing to have by your side while reading/using the computer.

Finally was able to try a cup of this today. Didn’t need to add anything to it- no bitterness, just ginger peachy goodness with a good tea flavor. Going to buy a tin tomorrow. This will become a regular tea. It’s nice to find a black tea that can be so refreshing!

Chocolate? Mint? My middle names! I like this tea and it’s good straight up and also with a bit of sugar and milk. I am drinking the loose leaf but this also comes in tea bags. It seems to be a very reliable, pedestrian tea. I will finish it and enjoy it in the evenings. So far my favorite chocolate tea (not that I’ve done a wide sampling) is Florence by Harney and Sons.

If you like chocolate and mint you will inevitably enjoy this tea—the mint seems stronger than the chocolate. I suspect that there are better ones out there, but I would happily drink this again.

The more tea I drink, the more I start to make judgments about just how I would line individuals types up on a scale. If I could select just one Earl Grey as my favorite, from those I have tried, I could do it. If I could select just one strawberry flavored black tea and just one strawberry flavored rooibos, I could now do it. That does not mean that I will quest to try all of them.

This Chocolate Mint Truffle is very nice; there are days when meat-eaters would prefer a hamburger to a steak and this might just be the hamburger of choc/mint teas. But it’s a good hamburger—not a fast food one, but a hamburger from your local pub that prides itself on making a fantastic hamburger sandwich.

I think it’s time to try a second infusion.

I should start by saying that I truly got into green tea when my college roommate came home from study abroad in China. She brought home a few bricks of green tea and we spent the rest of college (1.5 years) drinking green tea sunk to the bottom of a cup of hot water. This was crude, but it was college and we were obsessed. When the bricks ran out, we ran to Teavana and chose Dragonwell as our replacement. I have been drinking that as my green tea since.

Recently, I was introduced to this tea and I have been won over. It is a delicate tea with gentle flavors, similar to a white tea. It is fantastic. I highly suggest getting a sample to try for yourself. I have been sharing the joy of this tea since I got it with all of my tea drinking friends and family and everyone has thoroughly enjoyed it.

(Drank hot, no sugar necessary)

This is an absolutely exquisite, wonderfully beautiful tea. I fell in love with it as soon as I opened the box and the scent wafted out, distinguishing itself from it’s box-mates, intoxicating my olfactory senses. It’s a breezy tea with a refreshing breath of mint,a whirlwind of delightful chamomile, and a flutter of the rooibos flavors.