sherapop select Send Message

In today’s pot of Sencha Shizuoka, I used a bit more tea, with the result that the liquor had a detectable spinach taste to it. Delicious!

I love how every sencha has its own unique personality. Yes, they are similar, but they are also individuals as varied as separate human beings!

second infusion: tasted even more like roasted spinach—with a dash of pepper

I rarely bother with a third infusion because often it’s too weak for me. This one was better than usual: still faintly reminiscent of roasted spinach, this time even more peppery!

Am I a minimalist or am I a simpleton? Either way, this sort of tisane really speaks to me. As simple as simple can be, yet refreshing and delicious. The only ingredient is peppermint leaves, and yet it tastes complete!

Who had this idea first, DavidsTea or Teavana? I’m wondering because Caramel Almond Amaretti is very similar to Forever Nuts: right down to the fluorescent red color imparted by beetroot. I gather that the color of this almond-centric hot beverage would otherwise be repulsive? Why else would this color be added to this flavor? Is beetroot the only thing (aside from Red Dye No 5) capable of covering it up?

Unsurprisingly, I don’t like this flavored-water beverage very much either. Almonds are present and accounted for, but I don’t really detect much in the way of caramel or amaretto. I ground up the dried chunks of stuff in a coffee grinder to make sure that the flavors of the natural ingredients would be well represented and not overwhelmed by the artificial flavor. It still tastes weak and reminds me of a holiday version of Vitamin Water.

Has anyone tried infusing this in milk (regular or soy or almond), and boiling it on the stove? Are people adding sweeteners? I don’t know. What’s really missing here is tea. I might try mixing this with some Assam CTC…

This was one of the Teavana 12 Holiday Teas collection—of which, I might add, seven contain zero tea! To be honest, I am a tea lover, and this whole flavored-water thing takes some getting used to. One issue that I have with the idea of these beverages (no, they are not tea…) is that the dried blends always smell so fantastically yummy that the brew can only be a let down.

So it is with Cococaramel Salt Herbal Tea. The problem I find is that it ends up seeming like some sort of diet beverage. It’s certainly not tea. But it’s also not the taste of luscious salted caramel, as featured in such delicacies as Talenti Sea Salt Caramel gelato. Basically, aiming for such a flavor can only lead to disappointment when the high-calorie competition is so decadently delicious.

But I’m not on a diet! So if I want the splendid experience of sea salt caramel, I can just grab one of the wrapped candies from the bin I picked up at Whole Foods around holiday time. In fact, why don’t I go do that right now?

I realize that I’m starting to sound like the Grinch who stole Christmas, but the truth is the truth.

Perhaps I should I infuse this with milk next time?

My Norbu Ya Bao is from spring 2013, but I’m posting my tasting note here because I don’t have time to erect a new tea profile. Does Ya Bao vary enough from year to year to warrant separate entries? Perhaps for connoisseurs. I’m a serious gringo, however, and this is the very first time I’ve even HEARD of this wild tea.

To prepare these unique buds—which bear zero resemblance to tea, I might add!—I rinsed them first with hot water then steeped them at about 180C for three minutes. The liquour is extremely pale—only barely tinged green. The color is more green than yellow, as can be seen if the glass is held up against a sheet of white paper. (I’m using a Bodum double-walled clear glass, as I usually do for green and white teas.)

The scent is ever-so-slightly vegetal and astringent. The taste is perhaps mid-way between a very light green and a white tea, but it doesn’t really taste like any particular green tea or any particular white tea to me. The texture of the liquid on the tongue is silken, just like the dried buds feel to the fingertips.

I bought a package of this hoping that it might be caffeine free, since it looks nothing like tea. However, it appears to derive from a tea-esque plant, so now I’m not sure… I’ll find out later tonight, when it’s time to go to sleep.

second infusion: tasted, smelled, looked, and felt just like the first!

It’s official: I’m addicted to post-lunch sencha!

I took up this tea tonight with some trepidation, as my memory was that I did not like it at all. Somehow Detox seems a lot better than my memory of it. The golden brewed liquor smacks unmistakably of ginger, black pepper, and licorice root. As for the rest of the list of ingredients, I cannot say that I would ever have guessed most of them. Perhaps sarsaparilla, since there is a vague waft of root beer quality.

Like most of the functional health benefit teas, this one tastes better the longer it is brewed, and that’s of course how best to extract the maximum health-conferring properties as well.

Apparently the two key detox ingredients in this blend are dandelion and burdock. I have no idea what either one tastes like in a straight brew, but there’s probably a reason why they have been buttressed with hard-hitters such as ginger, black pepper, and licorice root! Yogi loves black pepper, by the way. Just a caveat for those who do not. I find that it adds quite a zing to their blends, including this one!

This afternoon I brewed up a pot of Adagio Sagittarius, a raspberry and vanilla-flavored black tea. It tasted pretty good. The scent of the dried blend is truly splendid. I also love the appearance of the leaves dotted with adorable little red safflowers.

The taste and scent of the brew cannot really compete with the scent of the dried tea, but it’s certainly enjoyable to drink. I find that fruit-flavored China black (I’m assuming…) teas all merge together to participate in a single Platonic Form of Fruit-Flavored China Black Tea. The fruits are never really identifiable in the final brew. At least not in these Adagio Zodiac teas. In Sagittarius, there is more of a vague fruitiness than a marked raspberry flavor. Because of the vanilla and the bergamot, this one overlaps a bit with Harney & Sons Paris. However, I find the Paris tea base to be better than this one.

A nice cuddly afternoon tea with light cream on a cold day!

A comparison of the Harney & Sons Japanese Sencha sachet with the filter bag:

The dried tea in the sachet really does look very close to loose leaf sencha, except that it’s broken up a bit more. It’s not really possible to see the tea through the opaque filter bag, but it brews up nicely into a light greenish-yellow clear liquid.

The sachet brews up the same hue but cloudier, and there is more particulate matter in the bottom of the glass. Perhaps I should be unsurprised, then, that the brew also tastes a bit brothier—thicker, if you will. The sachet provides a tea with more substance to it, so if one regards brothiness as a positive quality, then the sachet would seem to be the winner in this contest because the taste is otherwise very similar—as it should be, since the tea is apparently the same, only the format has been changed.

The flavor of the brews is very similar, but the filter bag has a slightly cleaner taste. Is it cleaner or is it lighter? The sachet-produced tea certainly does not taste dirty, but it does taste more substantive, with an almost food-like quality. All things considered, I prefer the sachet, but I still must say that the filter bag is excellent.

I’m going to do something unprecedented for me right now: a second infusion of these wet sencha bags. I’ve never done this before, but the sachet contents look so much like loose leaf, that I’m pretty sure that it will produce a second cup. Not sure about the filter bag, which interestingly enough expands much more than the sachet and is also heavier wet…

second infusion of the sachet was good but lighter

second infusion of the filter bag was basically colored water (but no one ever said that filter bags were multiply infusable!)

Today’s another big steep-off chez sherapop, this time between Harney & Sons Japanese Sencha filter bag and the sachet, of which I also have a few.

I have learned from testing perfumes that only a direct side-by-side sniff off the skin allows a fair comparison between two similar perfumes, because uncountably many uncontrollable factors always bear on one’s reception. The weather, one’s mood, the alignment of the planets, the time of day, one’s current BCC (blood caffeine content), whether and when one has eaten, how much sleep one got, if there are distracting troubles brewing in the air…

Recognizing that many of the same factors may bear on tea reception, I’m brewing these two side-by-side to cut through all of the factors which might unfairly slant my evaluation. Same water from the same kettle, same glass, same time of day, same mood, same amount of food consumed by the imbiber… Here goes:

The first thing I noticed is that the dried tea in the sachet has a form much closer to loose leaf. That’s obvious, I realize, since it’s supposed to be that way! I’ve already reported my fondness of the filter bag, so perhaps I should continue this discussion at the other Harney & Sons Sencha profile…