Tea District

Thanks to brandy3392 for sending me a sample of this. I can’t say I could taste very much plum flavor. It was there, but only just. It mostly smelled and tasted like a typical oolong, which isn’t bad, but I was really hoping for a more detectable plum flavor. Oh well.

This one is very popular at the Wells Tea Time Club! Everyone loves the extra kick the cinnamon gives to it.

All the goodness of a chai paired with the flavor of a really good Darjeeling makes my mouth happy!

This tea has the perfect balance of spiciness. It’s very strong, but I like that in a chai.

I have tried many kinds of chai since becoming a tea drinker, and this is my favorite kind. It’s so spicy and delicious, and a little bit of sugar and milk makes it absolutely perfect.

The rest to a friend…see previous notes…

I prefer this luke-warm to cool – the flavors of Mango and peach out better for my liking after cooling at room temp for a while. Everything is subtle about this. It’s tasty tho!

Wonderful idea to add chocolate to the already wonderful Pu Erh!

Nutty with an almost chocolate aftertaste. This has all of the hallmarks of a better than average oolong.

This is a really lovely Moroccan Mint, with a strong mint presence, but still a nice balance between the gunpowder green – which is fresh, sweet, and buttery – and the zesty mint flavor. It is crisp and revitalizing. Really nice.

This is a very nice cup. The Peach tones are sweet and delicious. The mango contributes a slight tropical note to the cup, fortunately the peach and mango are very harmonious together.

The white tea is crisp and light, with a nice fresh, airy kind of taste to it.

A very smooth, sweet, calming cup of tea. Nice.

Very pretty. I can smell the floral aromas. The tea is very light. It is very pretty but more of a novelty then an every day drinking tea.

This smells wonderful – very berry – but it smells more intense than it tastes. Which…the more I think about it is GOOD because that means the Hibiscus wasn’t too much to handle…it was nicely done. A nice partner to the berry. The berry notes ARE louder than the green tea but the green tea is sweeter and not grassy so that’s a plus, too, I suppose, in this case. The word that sums up this tea description is…pleasant! I’m drinking it HOT but I think COLD would be just as nice if not better! Pretty good! I will be sharing this one with Ashley!

This time made a new batch as per instructions.

Scent is much the same except I’m getting citrus from it.

The tea actually seems a little watery this time. The apple-cinnamon is still the main flavor and on the front of the tongue. There is a tart berry-ness in the back of the mouth when swallowing. The tiniest bit of floral notes come out around the sides of the mouth mid-sip and linger in the finish.

I like it better the way I made it before.

I didn’t make this per instructions given here as I made it before I came to this page and the bag didn’t have them on it.

The scent is all the things listed together: fruity, spicy, and floral. A bit of apple-cinnamon mixed with perfume mixed with a bit of sweetness.

The taste is light to medium in body. The apple-cinnamon is the main flavor but it’s not intense at all, really very light. There’s a tartness in the middle of the tongue. It has a short finish.

This is a flavored tea where the flavor is truly in the tea, not just smelled or hinted at. It is definitely a white and the other flavors are gentle in it. I like it and look forward to future cups, not sure if it’s a buyer or not. Maybe. We’ll see how I feel after this bit of it is gone.

I’d have to say this wasn’t a great cold steep. There wasn’t much apple or pear flavor that came through; in fact, I’d say there was pretty much no truly identifiable fruit flavor coming through. It tasted like green tea, which isn’t bad, but not what I was looking for. But also not exactly like green tea, more like green tea with something else. What that something else is… unknown. I couldn’t put my finger on the flavor. Definitely disappointing, as I imagine that a pear iced green tea would be awesome.

This is truly one of the last tea samples I’ve gotten recently that I haven’t tried yet. Guess I’m going to have to go back to drinking all the teas I actually have, oh the horror! But seriously it will be good to go back to some of my favorites again.

The dry leaf of this tea smells a bit fruity, and definitely like green tea, but it also has some unexpected minty notes. Brewed, however, those minty notes disappear (thankfully), and it’s a much more straight up green tea with fruit in aroma. The fruit smells not like pear or apple individually, but some kind of hybrid pear-y apple-y fruit. Like, it’s not berry, and it’s not citrus, and it’s not tropical, so what’s left? Apple-pear.

The taste is much the same. It’s pretty light; a bit of green tea and a bit of fruit, but not much. I really prefer my tea to be more flavorful than this, so perhaps I will up the leaf or steep time next cup to see if I can improve it. Otherwise it’s pleasant enough, but not very satisfying.

This is the other oolong from my Tea District order. I think I chose it before I realized how much stuff it really has in it; it’s not just plum and oolong, but all kinds of other things including some crazy berries I’ve never heard of, hibiscus, rosehips, black tea(!) and osthmanthus flowers. It’s a dark oolong, and the leaves are long-ish and twisted, but not super long. I can see the smaller pieces of black tea fairly easily in the steeped leaves. The dry tea smells fruity and berry-ish, but with some other hard-to-place aroma; it’s almost medicinal, like berry tums? Which doesn’t sound very pleasant, I admit.

When steeped, the color of the liquor is a medium reddish-amber, and it smells a bit like pot smoke. Seriously. I wasn’t really expecting to feel like I’m at a rock concert in the city when smelling this tea. I’m not a fan of the aroma of weed, so it really doesn’t make me want to try it. I doesn’t taste like it smells, which is probably one of my first experiences with that; often people talk about pu-erhs smelling awful and tasting fine, and I wondered how it could be, but here’s an example (though not a pu-erh). I wouldn’t say this tastes quite “fine” though; the pot aroma does leak into the taste, which otherwise is very, very tart (hibiscus-y) and somewhat plummy, with a bit of a smoky aftertaste. I even like hibiscus but I don’t see why its necessary in this tea. Maybe if you didn’t mind the smell this tea could be enjoyable. Overall, I feel like why would you take an osthmanthus oolong (ostenstibly), then throw all this stuff on top of it? A couple of plums, maybe, would be fun, but it all seems extraneous.

A tl;dr side note: Tea District says this is their own blend (which is what they say with all of their teas), and they really go out of their way to mention it in the description of this tea. They make it seem like the blend was completely designed in house by their tea blender. However, this tea minus the black tea is identical to teas of the same name from Rishi and Arbor Teas, and similar to others with less complete descriptions. I mean, how many people could really think, “I know, this plum tea needs schizandra berries!”?? I could believe they sell the blend wholesale to other companies (though it’s not exactly their blend that appears elsewhere) but not to a huge company like Rishi. And I really doubt the small amount of black tea does much for this blend.

I understand that every tea company has to make teas seem like their own if they want people to order from them and not just some other company that offers the same tea, but I don’t like it, I feel like I’m being deceived. If you didn’t blend that tea, tell me who did. It’s up to you to distinguish yourself by your customer service, your packaging, other offerings, whatever. I’ll still order from Tea District because their Lavender Earl Grey does seem to be unique and I love it, and I’ve had good experiences with their teas and the company otherwise, plus they constantly offer groupons. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I like to know where my tea actually came from!

Mango is one of my favorite flavors, and I’ve casually been on the lookout for the perfect mango black tea. Ok, so I haven’t tried that many yet, but I decided to order a sample of this tea with my last order. The black tea has a ton of little calendula petals, but no hunks of dried mango like Upton’s Mango Indica, for example. The dry tea certainly smells very mango-y, but a bit more like mango candy or even sweetened dried mango than a juicy fresh mango.

This tea brewed super dark. It’s a deep dark brown like the finish of walnut furniture. The primary aroma is really the black tea: strong, a bit malty. A juicy, somewhat concentrated mango smell is present, sometimes in the background and sometimes melding more with the black tea aroma.

To be honest, whenever I get a black tea aroma that strong it worries me because sometimes it means a tea that contains whatever black tea variety of blend that I really dislike. However! Totally not the case with this tea. For one thing, the black tea carries with it not a smidge of bitterness (confirming my other experiences with Tea District blacks), and though it’s fairly bold, it’s also very smooth. The initial part of the sip is a slightly tart mango flavor, which quickly is joined by the malty, rich black tea, which reminds me of a Keemun. The mango flavor is present throughout the sip, but it doesn’t ever completely overtake the black tea. I was hoping the calendula flowers might give it a floral note, but they didn’t seem to add much (except making the tea look very pretty). Overall a nice blend, though I might wish for a bit more fresh mango flavor. Otherwise it’s another tasty tea and I continue to be impressed by my selections from Tea District.

I was reading the water sourcing thread in the discussions, and it made me start to question the water I use for making my tea. See, I have a sink in my office that bascially was never used before I moved in, but the water that comes out of the regular tap is disgusting, often slightly brown or yellow. Also it is clearly extremely hard because a slow drip has left the inside of the black sink covered in a whitish scale that doesn’t respond to any kind of acid. I wouldn’t even want to drink it after running it through a Brita filter. My whole time here I have always drank the deionized water that comes out of the other tap; it’s clear and tastes fine. It’s also what I use to make all of my teas. But deionized and/or distilled water is supposed to be really bad for making tea because it’s very “flat”, lacking dissolved ions from minerals and such. I find it hard to believe that the water I am using is very deoxygenated because it comes out of the faucet with such pressure that it must immediately reoxygenate itself, and I don’t know for a fact that the water is truly deionized; someone in my department tested it from a different faucet and found that the pH was off from neutral. Anyway, I started thinking about how it would affect my tea, so I wanted to try a back to back with it and some bottled water I had left over at home from the “hurricane” a few months ago. I wanted to try a somewhat delicate tea I thought might show off the differences, so not a heavy black or something, but also a tea that was inexpensive enough and that I had in a large enough quantity. This fit the bill, so it will be my guinea pig tea.

All of these cups are brewed identically except for the water source (new leaves each time of course), so I’m putting them all in this note. First, the “deionized” water from the tap. This is my baseline, so right now it just tastes like it always does. Floral, a bit vegetal. When I had this tea a while ago it was still early in my oolong journey, and coming back to it now is interesting; the buttery sweetish flavor that I really love finding is only very faintly present. I do still really enjoy how floral this is and the magnolia, which is such a lush, rich floral.

Next, bottled water (Dasani, “purified and enhanced with minerals”). Can I tell a difference? Yes. Is it super dramatic? I am relieved to say no, not to me. The flavor is a bit brighter, somehow, like this water brought out the “greenish” notes more. I can’t even say that I prefer this water; I like the bolder florals I got with the first cup. Also I can kind of tell that this bottled water is harder than my DI tap water, but the extra minerals weren’t necessarily an improvement to my tastes. Like I said, I don’t know that the water is actually deionized that’s coming out of my tap, so it may not be as “flat” as it normally would be, but I don’t think it’s seriously affecting the taste of my teas, and that’s really what I wanted assurance of.

It never fails, I always forget on Friday afternoons that the tea I put in the fridge to cold steep will be there for several days. Always! Last Friday I decided to cold steep this magnolia oolong, since I should be getting a full 2oz of it soon in replacement for the disappointing Lavender Earl Grey. I think that the 72 hour steep is more successful with black teas, but this one was pretty tasty just the same. It was intensely floral; just lifting the lid off my steeping cup resulted in a wash of sweet magnolia aroma. The liquor was fairly dark green. The lengthy steeping (I think) caused it to be a touch bitter, but only a little, and otherwise it was tasty. I’d definitely cold steep this one again, but I think I’d go for only one night next time.

My newfound love of oolongs led me to order two samples from Tea District with my recent order. This one is actually new to Tea District’s catalog as of July 2011… I knew there was a reason I put off ordering so long! I love floral teas, but I’m not familiar with magnolia (as a flavor… I’m definitely familiar with the tree) or magnolia oolongs.

Tea District describes it as similar to jasmine, and I can definitely smell the resemblance in the dried leaf. It almost smells like a jasmine green (or oolong, I suppose)! Once again, I have to wonder what TD is smoking saying 1 tbsp of leaves per 8oz, especially this time since I’m pretty sure the leaves would expand to fill the entire space of an 8 oz cup. 2 tsp was almost too much for my Kati cup because the leaves expanded rapidly and greatly. They’re nice big, whole leaves and they look high quality.

Steeped, tea is a nice dark yellow and it has a wonderful aroma. This is one of those teas that you smell immediately upon pouring on hot water, and the aroma kept wafting around during the entire steep time. The jasmine-like aroma takes on a darker character (because it’s not jasmine, it’s magnolia) and the floral aroma is very fresh, like you’re smelling a full-bloom magnolia. The somewhat vegetal aroma of the oolong is hanging out in the background, grounding a very floral cup.

The taste is very floral, and very delicious. It really does remind me of jasmine pearls, but it’s darker, richer, fuller. This is a lightly oxidized oolong, so the flavor is fresh and light. When still pretty hot the oolong doesn’t compete much with the magnolia, but it makes itself known more as the tea cools, providing vegetal teaishness that makes itself known between the magnolia in the initial wave and the aftertaste. There’s a light sweetness, mostly in the aftertaste. The second steep is equally delicious, and actually a bit sweeter! Overall I’m very pleased with this tea, and I can definitely see myself ordering more after my sample runs out!

Happy A Dance With Dragons Day! The latest book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is released today, and it’s been a long time coming. I am very excited for it!

Yesterday I got another package of tea, this time from Tea District. Yet another groupon purchase! Last time I ordered from Tea District I got my small 16oz tea pot and a sample of their Lavender Earl Grey, which I adore. This time I finally ordered a full size of that tea and a bunch of other samples, this being one of them.

The tea is mostly rooibos with a few black tea leaves mixed in. There are also some chocolate and apple pieces, and a fair amount of shredded coconut. It definitely smells chocolatey and occasionally I get whiffs of coconut and apple. I went ahead and brewed it for a full 5 minutes since it was mostly rooibos, and I wasn’t that concerned about the black tea getting bitter anyway since it showed no inclination to do so on the Lavender Earl Grey. Tea District recommends a tablespoon per 8oz for their black teas (and this one), which seems a bit excessive to me, so I just use my normal amount (approximately 2 tsp per 12oz).

The tea brewed up a really dark reddish brown, and it smells like roasty toasty chocolate. The taste is quite chocolatey, with hints of coconut and a woody, nutty rooibos undertone. There’s also a very light sweetness from the apple pieces, but it doesn’t taste appley. I’m not sure what the black tea is contributing here, and this could very easily be just a rooibos. That’s fine (though usually I like a black tea in the morning, which is why I chose it), it’s very tasty as it is. I’m guessing there’s little enough black tea that it’s not giving it much caffiene, and this would be fine to drink in the evening.

This actually turned out to be a very tasty night time tea. Very soothing and relaxing after a very long day. It has a really nice peppermint taste to it too.