Art of Tea

good strong rooibos…with chocolate sludge in the bottom?
i made 1 cup at a time this time, 2 tsp, 4 min

Steep Information:
Amount: 4 tsp
Additives: none
Water: filtered boiling 1 cast iron teapot full
Tool: Cast Iron Teapot with Mesh basket strainer
Steep Time: a little over 7 minutes
Served: Hot

Tasting Notes:
Dry Leaf Smell: Banana (MilitiaJim Fake banana) chocolate if you look for it
Steeped Tea Smell: woody
Flavor: woody, banana, sweet
Body: Medium
Aftertaste: banana
Liquor: deep cloudy reddish brown

This was a gift from Teaplz

I am sadly not getting any of the chocolate, very little of the banana (it might be a brief flirt at the beginning but then gone), the apple I think just sweetens it.

In summary, smells better than it tastes, it doesn’t taste bad it just tastes like rooibos and after that smell you expect and want something more.

I have enough left for another pot, perhaps more, I think I’ll try a shorter steep.

Post-Steep Additives: none

images: http://amazonv.blogspot.com/2010/03/art-of-tea-loose-leaf-rooibos-tea.html

I was right: to extract any flavor from this, you have to use a lot of leaves. I’m at 1 Tbsp per 12oz cup. This is sort of sensible: because the leaves are so big and fluffy and loosely packed, maybe this is actually less tea by weight than I use with other teas. I don’t know.

So the most amazing thing about this tea is still the smell of the dried leaves. It’s all vanilla-y and some citrus and wow. The tea, once brewed, tastes pretty much the same, albeit less so.

Maybe I’m still being unfair because the dried leaves smell of such promise: if someone just gave me a prepared cup of this tea, perhaps I would be more impressed, but as it is I’m still not loving this as much as some of the other folks here. Still, it’s not like it’s undrinkable or anything.

This smells so good. But it hardly tastes like anything (or, more accurately, it does not taste anywhere nearly as strongly as it smells). I used about 1.5 tsp for about 12oz water, but the tea is kind of loosely packed, so maybe this is not enough. I’m going to try it again with more tea and see what happens..

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, pear.

WOW.

Perhaps it is merely sense memory, but I swear this tea is textured like a perfectly ripe pear.

This is so good!

It’d probably be expected here to write something about how this tea is keeping me warm in the great big snowstorm we’re currently having here in New York. But let me be honest: I’m working from home and the heat works just fine. So let’s talk about the tea instead.

The best way I can think of to describe the tea is to say that it tastes like Earl Grey tea, only more so. They obviously put more than the normal amount of bergamot. (Also, has anyone ever seen an actual bergamot fruit? Do they have any uses other than flavoring tea? Why does the Firefox spellchecker insist that bergamot is not even a word?)

The vanilla, while present, is definitely secondary to the bergamot and the tea itself. It serves more to enhance these other flavors than to stand on its own.

Other posters here have suggested that this tea is especially nice with milk. I don’t usually like milk in my tea, but I suppose if I have some milk in the house then it might be worth trying.

Overall a nice, easy-to-drink black tea. I’ll certainly be drinking this a bunch in mornings when I need help waking up.

Oh man. Oh, oh man. Been looking forward to this tea after having read through everyone else’s tasting notes. Picked it up in Select last week. My first from Art of Tea.

Let me keep it simple: if you like pear, you’ll love this tea.

Now, I happen to be a big fan of pears so that works just fine for me. As far as the other elements, I’m thinking about the caramel in particular, I didn’t get much of that. Really, just pear. In fact, when I sought a particular flavor out that I thought might be coming through I was just hit with…more pear. Mind you, this is not a bad thing. In fact, this is easily one of the better rooiboses I’ve had in a while, if not my favorite. It’s a lot of fruit, without being too much fruit, if that makes sense.

If you’re looking for a nice fruit blend and have had enough of the citrus, apple et. al, definitely give this one a shot! Great after dinner tea.

Still more backlogging from the weekend, I slacked with posting this weekend severely, but never fear, I drank tea!

This tea could not be more aptly named. “Mandarin Silk” describes this tea almost perfectly. The mandarin is slight, it is extremely light in odor and flavor. However, it flows through the tea easily. The tea is creamy, smooth and silky. It is sweet without being sweetened and creamy without having any such product in it. I would best describe this silk as the creaminess and smoothness associated with milk chocolate; that melt-in-your-mouth texture and flavor.

The flavor is difficult to describe. You do not taste mandarin, but you can smell it. This is probably because the mouthfeel of the tea is overwhelming, the silky smoothness, is really the only thing you can absorb when drinking it. A faint sweetness lingers in the tea that makes me think more of a white chocolate confection than a tea at all.

This tea was delicious, however, the body and aroma of it were not my cup of tea (pun intended). Worth a try, but I am glad I did not buy it.

I decided at the last second to throw this on my Art of Tea order and I’m really very glad that I did.

From dry leaf to steeping liquid to final product, this tea’s scents remained rather consistent for me, excepting a variance in intensities. That, and the wet leaf took on an unsurprising vegetal quality. What I smell is, also unsurprisingly, mandarin orange. It mingles somewhere between actual mandarin oranges and those mandarin orange gummy slices, but as I enjoy both of them it’s not an issue for me. The warmly fresh and sweet citrus scent combines with the scent of some kind of baked good. This tea uses pouchong, which I am beginning to identify as one of my favorite types of oolong, and I’m pretty sure that’s where the bake-y portion of today’s tasting is originating.

How many people have had fruit tart? Raise your hand.

Sorry, that was very Blue’s Clues of me [though, if you actually raised your hand, then please wave it around like you just don’t care]. The reason I ask is because the taste of this tea made me think very much of the base pastry that has been used in fruit tarts that I have had. If you haven’t fruit tart, then imagine, perhaps, a sugar cookie with about half the sugar. If you haven’t had either of these, may I suggest that you expand your dessert repertoire immediately.

Mandarin oranges have always had a bit of softness around them in the taste as opposed to navel oranges, which aren’t biting in flavor but read as sharper to me in flavor and acidity. The orange taste in this definitely treads solidly in mandarin orange territory, and the rounded flavor of that meshes very nicely with the warm, buttery, doughy qualities of the pouchong.

I went two steeps deep on this one, and the flavor had noticeably faded on the second steep. When I have more time, I may try lengthening the steep time on the second steep even further to see what that does, but the tasty first steep is reason enough for me to keep this tea around and perhaps even re-order once it’s gone.

I haven’t been impressed with some of their other offerings, but with mandarin silk and caramelized pear on my tea shelf, I don’t really need anything else from Art of Tea to wow me. I’m pretty happy here.

Oh yeah, I’m drinking dessert tea for breakfast and you can’t stop me!

…This tea tastes and smells exactly like banana taffy! And yet my teeth aren’t stuck together. Tea for the win!

I bought with my Dessert Tea Sampler pack from Art of Tea, and it’s my least favorite from the medley of other flavors they provided. By itself, it’s an interesting fruity rooibos with a hint of weight (chocolate + peppercorn + banana). However, I think the fruity notes and heavier ones get muddled and don’t come through with enough clarity. The brew is slightly cloudy with a lingering banana note.

It’s a balanced brew that doesn’t leave the mouth dry and doesn’t overwork your tastebuds, but doesn’t wow you either.

Pleaseexcusemyomgit’scoming…. tea*GASM*. Phew thanks. I just needed to break the ice with that.

Well this little ravishing thing is definitely a tease on the taste buds. I had the ecstasy of taking a sip of this tea a few days ago paired with a bag of Archer Farm’s Cinnamon Apple Pie trail mix. Um, until this point in time, I’ve always considered myself a prudent girl… however this whole little threesome between the tea, the trail mix, and my tongue was enough to make me into a permanent sinner.

I bought this along with a few other teas in a Desert Sampler set from Art of Tea. I haven’t gotten around to them, but if all the teas in that set are half as good as this one I might just quit my day job and take up teanography. Hmm.

The first few sips are a lovely heavier bodied rooibos with a hint of cinnamon. Later gulps (cup licking?) result in a fantastic end note of pears and other sweet ditties I just can’t place. It’s definitely smooth on the way down, not a single thought of dryness. (Haha.. dryness… smooth… [AHEM]).

Me and my little friend went for about 4 rounds (i mean cups, naughty thinker ;]), afterwards it degrades into a plain ’ol rooibos. I am definitely ordering more than 2 ounces because this little sample pack is NOT going to tide me over.

MMMMMMM!!!

This Earl Grey is the BEST tea to make a latte/milk tea out of. It has plenty of body and flavor to stand up against the milk and sugar, yet still soothes the tongue with bergamont in a pleasant non-citrusy way. (That makes the tea sound heroic, don’t you thinkk?)

This is basically the gateway tea for me in Art of Tea’s other loose leaf. I CANNOT WAIT until I get my dessert tea sampler set.

I got distracted from this tea (I know, I know) and forgot all about it until an hour after it was brewed.

I don’t find it anywhere near as good cold. You can taste hints of caramel and fleeting bits of pear, but overall the rooibos comes out more – which does not endear it to me.

I’ll need to make more tomorrow night to remind me of why I like it. (Oh dear, I have to drink more good tea. Boo hoo! :) )

Still feeling sick today, and even though I’m dead tired, I didn’t want any caffiene. And I had a small container of this at work. So I’ve been drinking pears all morning. It’s just as good as I remember. Yum. I think I’ll try sweetening with honey for my poor sore throat rather than the splenda I usually use for my next cup.

Yay.
Oh yay.

I ordered this on a whim after reading the other glowing reviews. I like pears, and I LOVE caramel. Rooibos – not so much. I’m not into the wood flavor.

Opening this bag, I actually swore out loud in joy – it SMELLED SO GOOD. So totally pear like. So yummy. When I walked it by a co-worker this morning, she said it smelled like pear skin and honey.

Brewing, it’s a beautiful brown-red. And then the flavor was amazing. When I first tried it, I wasn’t as excited as I was once I added a tiny bit of sweetner. I do like my teas sweeter. And for me, adding the half pack of splenda made it sing. The pear jumped out, and the caramel was extra creamy then.

I like this tea. I like this tea a LOT. Yum!

This is the most pleasant smelling tea I’ve smelt. It has sweet fruit and floral scents.
The tea has a nice hint of citrus, very light and refreshing. The goji berries really add a lot to the tea and give it distinct flavor that I haven’t tasted in any other tea. To date this is my favorite white tea.

WHAT IS THIS.

This tea is bizarre. And weird. And unnerving. And completely different tasting than it initially suggests.

Ugh.

The leaves. Well, they smell great! There’s sweet, fruit-like scents, but the dominant smell is definitely mint and chocolate and rooibos. Not bad at all. I figured it’d be a mint chocolate tea with a smooth consistency, right? Right?

WRONG.

I should have known when I smelled the wet leaves and it smelled almost tart and pungent. And I thought to myself, what’s going on here? The cup smelled faintly minty, but there was definitely nothing chocolate-like going on.

So I took the first sip… and I’m mainly getting rooibos and stale apple. Like those dehydrated apple chips but not as sweet and more tart. Dehydrated Granny Smiths. There we go. This is followed not by the taste of mint, but by the sensation of mint. But it’s not a fresh feeling. Instead, it’s almost tingly, and at points, was making my throat scratchy. No chocolate was anywhere to be tasted, even though I definitely saw cocoa residue in my filter. And the touch of vanilla? Not there at all. Just weirdly tart apple mixed with pencil shavings and chased by year-old Listerine tinglyness.

Blech. I mean, it wasn’t really as offputting as it was just ultimately bizarre. My mind was expecting one thing, my taste buds were sensing another thing, and everything was upside-down.

Now I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing with the rest of it. It’s too weird to drink.

Much thanks to teaplz for the chance to try this tea! Honestly, since it is rooibos and banana, I never would taken the risk of buying this on my own. But is has ‘monkey’ in the name, so I really wanted to.

Right off the bat I’m a little nervous. The leaves smell like it has gone off. I don’t think it has actually gone bad. I think that’s the rooibos. And the fright grows once I pour the tea into my cup. I was hoping for some chocolate or even some monkey. But instead it looks like I get full on rooibos. I’m scared. Hold me.

Sipping it’s not quite as horrible as the smell. There is… taste… before the rooibos hits. The problem is, when the rooibos hits, it hits hard. And it doesn’t blend with or accentuate the other flavors that pop up at the beginning of the sip. It battles against them and kicks their collective butt. The initial smell is now banana and rooibos and then the sip is banana and then rooibos and then ROOIBOS. Where’s my chocolate? And I can’t pick out the apple (though maybe that’s some of the sweetness at the beginning with the quick banana taste) or the pink peppercorns (and they are pink! I wanted to pick them out!)

Ultimately this is too much rooibos for me. The other tastes in the tea are too mild to make the rooibos step back so it just ends up being too much for me to deal with well. I’ll be able to finish the cup but I don’t think I’m going to be crying out for more rooibos monkey.

All right y’all. I have 43 days before I move to California, and after a discussion with Auggy in which we were bemoaning the number of samples we both have banging around in our respective cupboards [what a problem to have, truly] I realized that I have a whopping 125 samples left from trades, vendors, and the like. One hundred and twenty five.

And thus, we decided to extend a challenge to one another. One sample a day, completely finished no if, ands, or buts [these kids got GUTS] about it. Except after doing a tally I realized that in my case, to be finished with all of these samples before I move, I am going to have to drink three a day for forty-three days. Daunting? Absolutely. Impossible? I think not. And so there we have it – our own personal Julie & Julia type situations laid out before us.

Of course, you know what this means. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me on Steepster. So much, in fact, that you may very well get sick of me, but I am doing this in the name of tea and I think we can all agree that this is a pretty worthy cause, no? So, while Auggy is going to be my Official Sipdown Accountability Buddy I do encourage you all to provide anything from gentle nudging to verbal abuse should I begin to lose steam or fall behind my 3-A-Day goal. I am, of course, assuming that you all deeply care about all of this. [Also, it may go without saying, but for an indefinite period of time I will not be able to participate in any tea swaps.]

Oh, and should you be wondering where the name for this came from it’s because that Europe song [you know the one] has been stuck in my head all week and it is somewhat appropriate even though it doesn’t really make sense [like the best things in life]. Please feel free to imagine that bitchin’ 80’s synthesizer track playing in the background as you read on. And now, it’s time for…

The Final Sipdown: Day 1.1

Unable to choose a tea to start this off, I shut my eyes and grabbed at random, closing in on this one – a sample that I received from teaplz a while back. [Actually, all of these samples are going to be from “a while back,” but do I get points from keeping them sealed in a cool, shut off from light area?] In an effort to keep things fresh, I am going to refrain from reading my prior log, but it’s starting to rush back to me in a not-that-great-way. This tea smells of medicine. Hot theraflu and…cedar?

Sipping it, I get a shot of slightly sour lemon surging through the liquid. The berry taste floats around it, not really loud but not quite soft either. I’m unable to pick out anything specific, except maybe not-quite-ripe-raspberry. The lemon flavor, I’m thinking, is from the hibiscus and maybe tempered by the berry a bit. No vanilla to be found, I’m afraid, though at the back of my tongue I am getting a hint of chalky milk chocolate.

Oh, there we go. At the tip of the tongue, as this tea cools, a smidgeon of vanilla. The mouthfeel is somewhat creamy, and this tea is trying ever-so-desperately to be pleasantly blended, but it just isn’t cutting it. The nice mouthfeel is offset by the now distracting sourness and every time I bring the cup up to sip it I get a whiff of medicine smell. Now the aftertaste…the aftertaste could be nice. I actually get more of a vanilla flavor on the aftertaste than I do with the tea, but sitting naggingly on the back and sides of my tongue is that bitterness that pervades the tea. Drat.

This tea is, indeed, flavorful, but simply not for me. I think it’s rated about right for what I think of it, though, so I’m not going to change it. So there.

And that’s tea number one down! The journey begins! As I just said to Auggy – this is either going to be brilliant, or a hot mess. [THERE IS NO IN BETWEEN!] Certainly, there will be a lot of peeing. But no time to worry about any of that, because I have two more teas I have to drink tonight and now I get to remove this sucka from my cupboard. Who knew that clicking a button could feel so fantastically rewarding?

Samples Downed: 1

There was something off about this tea.

The smell reminded me of medicine, for one. I think that it had to do with the fact that so many medicines are “berry” flavored and the vanilla aspect of this for me contained the alcohol-ish aspect of vanilla extract.

The taste was marginally better, though what I mainly got berry out of this and I wanted more vanilla. The vanilla taste that I got, when it occasionally decided to surface, gasping for breath in the sea of nondistinctive berry flavor, didn’t really taste like vanilla. It was more extract-like, to begin with, but even the creamier aspect of it wasn’t quite vanilla flavored. Looking at the list of ingredients, I think that it’s because this contained white chocolate [which I usually like, but am not sure how I feel about it in tea]. I also think that a lot of the medicinal taste came from an unfortunate combination/balancing of the hibiscus, the rooibos, and the currant that are all supposed to be in this tea.

Maybe I just got a bad spoonful. I’m hoping that’s part of it, because I couldn’t resist trying Caramelized Pear again and it wasn’t nearly as good the second time around – not as rich and caramel-tasting, mainly pear, and the rooibos was coming through that time around. I think it was mainly because I was getting kind of the dregs [I didn’t have any apple pieces in that one, though teaplz isn’t to blame as the sample she sent me was taken from a sample].

I apologize because I’m beginning to confuse myself here as I’m kind of behind on logging the new teas I’ve been trying. To put this into some semblance of order, I tried Vanilla Berry Truffle, was disappointed, then had Caramelized Pear a couple of days later and realized that it might be because I wasn’t getting a good array of physical components into the actual tea.

Though, re-reading teaplz’s log, she wasn’t terribly happy with this tea either. So…

I don’t know. I’m having a weird day. I’ve been having these moments where I get songs stuck in my head, and then I hear them over loud-speakers when I go out or to run errands [often muzaked]. It’s been making me feel like I’m on an extremely boring version of the Truman Show. And trying to transition from doing f***-all to studying is leaving me murky and smogged. My chi has been Los Angeles’d. Does any of this even make sense? What is a horse shoe? What does a horse shoe do? Are there any horse socks? Is anybody listening to me?

I wasn’t taken away by this tea, but it wasn’t horrible. It was bizarre and imbalanced, not unlike this review. It was yellow slanty-mouth on the Steepster sliding scale. So that’s where it’s going.