2036 Tasting Notes
Sipdown no. 13 of 2021 (no. 633 total). A sample.
I didn’t have enough of this to steep in the Breville western style so I had to add a bit of tieguanyin to it to make up the difference.
My ATR samples are definitely dwindling, and one might say it’s about time since ATR went out of business years ago. But I’ve hung on to the higher rated ones because that is how I am. And it makes me sad to see them go. But all things must come to an end.
Mostly what I’m getting in my Western-style au revoir to this is asparagus, with a hint of nuts. I think the rating is about right.
I’m trying to remember if I have others of this variety in my stash. If not, that’s too bad because it’s a nice change of pace from other green oolongs.
Yes, I like the ginger tea better.
Not enough orange in this for the first word in its name to be orange, and while the chocolat is predominant, more sweetness would be good, and more depth. It reminds me of how the bits of flour taste in a flowered cake pan where a chocolate cake has been baked.
This is not a sipdown, but I missed ginger day so decided to start with some this morning.
What intrigues me most is in my first note I said I liked this better than Orange Chocolat, but I rated this lower? Obviously a mistake. I am going to have some Orange Chocolat now to validate.
I do like the soft gingery flavor of this and am bumping its rating a tad.
This is not a sipdown, but I missed apricot day yesterday, unfortunately. I hadn’t read about it on the discussion board until yesterday, when I was done drinking caffeine for the day. Better late than never?
It’s a nice note to end my flavored black teas on for the day and I’m glad it won’t be a sipdown candidate for a while. I want to savor it.
I remain a staunch fan of French flavored black teas. Having just sipped down a German one, I have in my head a very clear picture of the difference between the French ones and all others (including those from the US). I am sure I’ve said this before, but the difference (to me, anyway) is that there is really no delineation between the base and the flavor in French blends. The flavor and the base are blended and inseparable.
Non-French blends, more often than not, have a discernible separation to my palate. The base is the base, the flavor is on top of the base.
It’s, as with everything, a personal preference, but I much prefer not being able to tell where the base ends and the flavor starts.
Between a month of Dammann Frères advent teas, and a few flavored blends from Marriage Frères and Theodor, I agree with your assessment. The French teas create a whole picture, one that celebrates both the tea and the flavor without separating the two. That, and at least with Dammann Frères, mouthfeel is taken highly into consideration.
I wonder what they do differently to achieve this effect?
Sipdown no. 12 of 2021 (no. 632 total).
I haven’t had too many teas that billed themselves as just raspberry as opposed to mixed berries or red fruits or whatever, but raspberries are pretty up there for me as far as fruit flavors go. So I remember being really happy to find this.
And I do think it grew on me, though not enough to bump the rating. I probably wouldn’t have sipped it down if not for the fact that it was an easy sipdown as it had just two spoons left.
While I think it is still true that I prefer some of the French berry blends, as I mentioned in my original note on this, I enjoyed it more in the last few cups. That papery thing I mentioned is, I think, the personification of the astringency of the tea base.
I don’t know if I’d get this again, despite a relatively high rating. It’s high rating is mostly because it is in a class by itself and it doesn’t fail to represent raspberry black teas. If I could find another raspberry only tea that I preferred, I wouldn’t get this again and I’d likely bump down the rating. The only reason I’d get more would be to have a single note raspberry tea in my stash.
Sipdown no. 11 of 2021 (no. 631 total).
Why did I rate this an 83? I’m enjoying it far more than I’d expect of an 83. Bumping the rating.
But it was sitting at 83 so I sipped it down. :-(
Bready, grainy, smooth, a little grapey/pruney, and yeah, chocolatey. Medium-light bodied. Quite lovely. Next to Yunnans, I think Golden Monkeys are at the top of my personal black tea pantheon.
Not sure why I rated it so low originally. I just looked back at my original note and my impression then wasn’t much different than now. Maybe I had just had so many teas I liked better around the time of the original note. Who knows.
Sipdown no. 10 of 2021 (no. 630 total). Sample tin. Backlogging from yesterday.
Continuing with the sipping down of samples project, this had just enough left for a western steep in the Breville.
Mostly what I got this time, which I didn’t in my multi-steep extravaganza recorded in the initial note, was nuttiness. Almondy/chestnuty nuttiness. Which is interesting because in my original note I had it pegged as pecan. I suppose there was a bit of that, too, as I think about it.
I enjoy tasting teas I’ve written about a while back and then comparing what I thought with what I wrote. Nuttiness ftw with this one.
It was a nice afternoon drink. I’m not going to second guess myself but I’m not sure I would have rated it quite so high this time. Then again, I didn’t take it through multiple steeps and part of my oolong ratings are based on how many steeps they’ll support and how interestingly they change from steep to steep.
Sipdown no. 9 of 2021 (no. 629 total).
This is sort of a fake sipdown. I have more packets of this, but we killed one of them last night.
I have mentioned before that the BF is a big peach fan. Last night I had him do a blind taste off between this and the Harney Peach fruit tea. He picked this one, hands down.
Then I felt a little bad because I’d told him one of these wasn’t something we could get anymore and it was the one he picked, but I later discovered that this particular Teavana blend can still be ordered through Starbucks, apparently.
In any case, I am bumping the rating. I had rated the Harney higher because the flavor is juicier, but on reflection, I think the BF is right that this is a better peach tisane. I enjoy Harney’s fruit blends, but on some level they all taste pretty much the same (because of the base) with slight essence of the target fruit to differentiate them.
Sipdown no. 8 of 2021 (no. 628 total).
I remain fairly unimpressed with this one. I had wanted to love it, but the flavors weren’t strong enough to overcome the rooibos base sufficiently to make it work for me.
To be honest, I liked the Lupicia one I sipped down right before this, La Vie en Rose, a bit better, so I’m bumping this one down.
It wasn’t unpleasant, just not something I need to have in my cupboard long term.
