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Continuing with the project to get through all the teas in my cupboard and write a note about them, I am almost to the end of 15 out of 21 cupboard pages. w00t! And even more yay because until this morning, I had 22 cupboard pages. But with a spidown I cleared out that pesky page with only one tea on it. So there.

And I’m not fully neglecting my samples either, those little packets that don’t get a place in the cupboard but still take up space in tea world.

Even with all that, I don’t feel like I’m making a terrific dent in my supply here. Sigh. All I know is I haven’t bought any tea since I replenished my (gone) herbal/fruit blend stash months ago. So where they come from I have no idea.

This one is quite smoky in the tin. A woody smoke, like the remains of a wood fire in the fireplace. Charred wood, but not ash, which is fortunate. Not much resin, and no meaty-bacony smell either. Also fortunate.

After steeping, the smoky aroma spreads out and mellows some. It’s still there, but it’s more subtle. Not so much at the center of things as the edges. The color is very pretty, dark reddish-amber.

The tea has sweetness to it, and the flavor isn’t overly smoky though there’s a hint. It’s surprisingly smooth and gentle on the stomach. I would call it a medium-bodied to light bodied-tea. The mouthfeel is smooth and soft.

It’s enjoyable, for when you want a hint of smoke but lapsang is too much. It’s at least as good as I remember the Mariage Freres Lapsang being, though different. Rating accordingly.

Sipdown no. 122 of 2018 (no. 478 total). I wonder if I can make it to 500 sipdowns by the end of the year? Probably not. I do think I’ll have something on the order of 10 more, though, if I hit the samples.

I sipped this one down Wednesday. It had become my take it to work tea.

After looking back at my original note on this, I don’t have much more to say about it other than to agree with myself that it did make a nice work tea.

Sipdown no. 121 of 2018 (no. 477 total). A sample.

I took this to work on Thursday. I hadn’t yet figured out what my next take it to work tea would be, and so this was an interim pick.

True confession: I still don’t know what my next take it to work tea will be. But this got me through a very tough, very busy day.

Thank you, Yin Zhen (Silver Needle)!

Very wonderful caramel smell in the tin, with some cocoa and even vanilla notes. The steeped tea is dark brown-burgandy color and smells like caramel candy with a malty Assam note.

The flavor isn’t as sweet as I would have anticipated from the aroma, but it’s not bitter or sour either. It’s a little on the stout side, full bodied, hearty (some might say heavy) as Assams can be.

I ate breakfast before having this but I suspect if I hadn’t, it might have sat less than calmly on the stomach. Still, it’s got great flavor and is well-blended, a great example of “that French thing” I find so hard to explain.

No. 2 loved it, too.

Last caffeine of the day and close to the last flavored oolong in my stash. I think. I know of at least one other. But the problem with having too much tea is I end up finding things I forgot I had.

I will again embark on the forced oolong ritual for the first taste of even a flavored oolong, i.e., short steeps in the gaiwan starting at 15 seconds after rinsing. Even though in all of the flavored oolongs I’ve tasted this way, it’s only really seemed to matter for one of them. Most seem to change not at all on subsequent steeps so it’s Western style from then on.

This tea has some mixed reviews here on Steepster, and the consensus seems to be it’s just ok and not one of The O Dor’s best. I’m trying to remain unbiased, but the smell in the tin is pretty consistent with that assessment. More than anything else, it seems rather generic. General (and very faint) floral, generic and (and very faint) fruit, generic and very faint oolong smell.

This is surprising, because given what is in this tea I’d expect a very strong aroma out of the tin. Pineapple if nothing else. But I don’t smell strong pineapple or strong anything, and that is not a great sign.

The tea is a dark, rosy amber. It smells a little spicy and a little citrusy (bergamot, I am guessing) but there’s nothing special about it. It has an almost generic earl grey flavor, except that in and among the bergamot is some other fruit that keeps the bergamot from actually being bergamot — there’s no bitter citrus zest note to this. The other flavors, none of which I can really taste separately, are likely exerting most of their effect in tamping down the bergomotness of the bergamot. I do taste something that is vaguely like passion fruit, though.

It’s not that this is terrible, but I agree it isn’t the best of The O Dor. It’s more that it lacks anything that makes is special than that it is bad.

I’m sending this directly to the cold brew queue. I have a feeling it might find its special something there.

The last of the Harney oolong sample tins. The tea inside smells lovely; floral, buttery, lightly vegetal.

I rinsed and then started with 15 seconds in the gaiwan increasing in 5 second increments.

The tea is a clear lemony-yellow color and has a strong creamy, buttery, aroma with floral component. Gardenia, more than anything else.

The flavor reminds me of everything I love about green oolongs. It may be my favorite kind of tea overall, though I hesitate to go out on that limb because the minute I do, some wonderful green or black tea comes along and makes me rethink myself.

The problem with tasting so many teas over such a long period of time is — I forget what the things I love in each genre taste like over time. I can’t remember the others in the category well enough to say how this stacks up against them. I can just say that I’m getting a cup of wonderful here and now.

The tea becomes crisper with subsequent steeps but otherwise remains deliciously buttery and floral. The vegetal note is juicy and sweet, but not distracting.

I had this again very recently in both a cold version and a hot, and I believe I gave it short shrift when I first tasted it. If you like coconut, this is a very good way to experience that flavor without it tasting fake, or off, or otherwise weird. The coconut in this blend is none of those things and I stand by my recent hypothesis that pouchong is a particularly good delivery vehicle for flavors in tea.

Bumping the rating by a whopping 10 points!

Sipdown no. 120 of 2018 (no. 476 total). A sample.

A sample of this has been staring at me for quite some time. I has just never seemed the right time to give it a try. Ordinarily, this would be the part of my tea tasting day where I’d be writing notes about a couple of greens that I’ve just opened, so that when I sip down the next take it to work tea I’ll have another choice for the one after that. But since I already derailed that project when I found the Canton silver needles sample, I thought what the heck. There’s just enough in this sample to both try the tea and sip it down.

First let me say that despite the description, I was extremely surprised by how fruity this smells in the packet. Pineapple and hibiscus is what I smell, even though as best I can tell there is no pineapple in this. Maybe it’s one of the flavoring agents? Under that is something floral. Even though I’m a major jasmine fan, I can’t say what I’m smelling is jasmine. It’s the strong fruity smell that is making it hard for me to discern the subtleties of the floral aspect.

I steeped according to the packet directions. As this is a mix of white and green tea, it looks like David went with green tea temperature and white tea steeping length.

The steeped tea is golden yellow and clear and has an earthy, hibiscus scent. I expected, because of that, for the tea to taste uncomfortably tart or even bitter. Happily, that is not the case.

What it does taste like is harder for me to describe. It’s easier to define it by what it is not. It isn’t terribly fruity, though I got so much fruity smell from the dry tea. There is some light, tropical fruit flavor around the edges which again reminds me of pineapple. The floral aspects of the tea open up more in the sip, and I do get some jasmine, but it is not a stand-alone jasmine so much as a contributing flavor. There’s a mild green-ish tea flavor underneath. Not super vegetal or super grassy. And also something like stone fruits in the mix.

It has a lot going on. I find the name a bit ironic, because I find it hard to let go of the busyness of this tea and just let it be.

I thought I’d tasted all the silver needles in my stash, but then I ran across a sample of this. So I’m taking a minor detour from the taste all the things in my cupboard exercise to taste this and probably another sample. I don’t put samples in my cupboard because it seems sort of a waste of time under ordinary circumstances. Of course, given the sheer magnitude of tea I have at the moment, this may not be true. It takes a while for me to sip down even the samples. Sigh.

I stuck this in the Breville and hit the white tea setting — 185 for 4 minutes. I was surprised when doing that actually got some color out of the tea. The description mentions champagne — mine is slightly less yellow than most champagnes, but it is light yellow and clear nevertheless. In the packet, the leaves smell like slightly pungent, sweet hay.

I don’t know whether it is the power of suggestion or not, but if I stretch out with my feelings, Luke, I can see what the description means by melon. I can get a vaguely honeydew aroma and flavor. As the tea cools the melon seems more like cantaloupe. I also get the creamy thing that everyone else is mentioning, though for me it isn’t so much about flavor as mouth feel.

Now, my taster is seeming a bit off today — I am getting less flavor out of black teas today. But somehow, this one isn’t as disappointing as most white teas are for me. Faint praise, but there you have it.

I wasn’t able to drink tea and write notes yesterday because I was out of town, so today I’m continuing with the project to taste all the teas in my stash and write notes about them.
I’m just really tired of seeing a bunch of “no notes yet” in my cupboard.

I don’t know whether my taster is off this weekend or what, but both the Fruits D’Alsace I had earlier this morning and this seem to me like they need to be stronger. It is possible my taster is off. I had a stuffy nose last night and something going on with my right ear. But I woke up without any of that, so I thought I had nipped it in the bud.

The smell in the tin is fairly faint to me, but it smells mostly, but not richly, of chocolate. There is some mint, though I’m unable to discern what kind. I think it’s likely to be spearmint which I find to be less aromatic than peppermint.

The aroma has less chocolate, more mint, and a sort of malty tea smell that makes me wonder if there is Yunnan in the blend. Its a dark color, orangish-brown. Not a lot of red.

The flavor, too, has more mint than chocolate. I wonder if this is a what got into the spoons issue, or whether it’s an age issue, or whether this is just how the blend is. It’s a very subtle flavor all around, both the chocolate and the mint. So if you like subtle, this is probably a good choice. The aftertaste has a nice blend of chocolate and mint.

I tend to like richer chocolate, so that’s reflected in the rating. But it’s still a quality blend.