The NecessiTeas

Sipdown no. 111 of 2018 (no. 467 total).

I was never really sure what possessed me to make this one of two tins in my Necessiteas order way back when after basically striking out with most of their teas. I don’t even like bread pudding.

But order it I did, and now it is gone. It made a decent, if a bit weird, cold tea — which is how I sipped down the last bit.

I can’t believe I even ordered this, since the thought of bread pudding makes me make a yucky face. I don’t like puddings in general on consistency grounds, but the idea of bread pudding is just gross to me. Of all the things one would make a pudding out of, why bread? When I was in college I lived in a co-op and one night a week I was the main dinner cook for something like 140 people. Bread pudding was pretty regularly something the menu planner had decided I should make and during the whole process of preparing the bread I kept asking myself why?

So it was only for the sake of completeness that I ordered a sample of this. And I say for the second time today, it works surprisingly well. Who would have thunk it? Probably the main reason it works, for me anyway, is it doesn’t really taste like bread pudding. It tastes like the ingredient profile that goes into bread pudding, but without the main objectionable ingredient: bread.

In the packet, the blend smells mostly of raisins and rum. Steeping makes the custard come out to join the other two flavors in the aroma and I’m glad that I can also smell a sort of full bodied sweetness that is the black tea. Liquor color is black tea against my white cup; looks a lot like the Coco La Ven sample’s liquor.

It’s nice. It’s not as interesting as the Coco La Ven, but it is well blended and flavorful. There are no sore thumbs sticking out here, none of the bitter rum flavor that plagued some of the Necessiteas greens that contained rum flavoring. It’s a raisin, cream and rum flavor with a solid base that supports it well.

As I close in on the last of my Necessiteas samples, I’m drawing the following conclusion: they’re best at rooibos, followed by black tea, followed by white tea, followed by oolong, followed by green tea. There are clunkers in each of the categories except rooibos, but for the most part, their black tea blends are worth trying.

ETA: I am at the end after all. I do have a weird mystery tea sample in my possession, but I can’t identify it. It came without a label, and it appears to be black tea. It isn’t Cafe Latte, because I ordered that and they refunded my money because they said they didn’t have any. All of my other ordered samples have been accounted for. At first I thought it might be Cinnamon Bear, but it can’t be — the cinnamon isn’t nearly as strong as the tasting notes here describe. So it will remain a mystery. Which is too bad. It isn’t as good as the Coco La Ven or this, but it was ok.

A strange little tea, full of surprises.

When I read the ingredients, I thought it sounded like a terrible mistake. Yet it actually works pretty well.

The dry mix in the sample packet smells mostly like vanilla/coconut and chamomile. The addition of water brings out the lavender. (The mixture in the infuser after brewing smells mostly like lavender and chamomile. Its nice. The association I had was with the smell of something that belongs in a sachet in my sock drawer.)

My glass tasting cups are all in the dishwasher so I’m having to view the liquor against a white background. It’s dark, definitely getting its color from the black tea. The aroma is mostly chamomile, followed by lavender, followed by coconut, followed by vanilla. I’m not detecting much in the way of tea.

The taste is extremely interesting. It has an almost minty taste and feel to it, a volatile coolness. I think this is the lavender. I can taste the chamomile, and it’s in the foreground, but surprisingly it’s not that mouthful of flowering hay taste chamomile sometimes reminds me of. The lavender and coconut (or maybe the tea) take the edge off, so it’s all of what I like about chamomile with none of what I don’t like about it. There’s coconut/vanilla at the end.

The main thing I’m not tasting is the tea. It’s strange, though. I’m not really tasting it, but I’m aware of its presence.

I didn’t try this with sugar and milk, as suggested. I will give that a try next time.

I am pretty impressed that this turned out as well as it did. Who would have thunk it?

I got in a beautiful package of teas from Lena today. She even typed me notes on her thoughts of each tea it was a really nice surprise (Thanks Lena you ROCK). In the samples was this one and I’ve been dying to try it and she mentioned she was curious of what my thoughts would be on this one.

First off I have to say I am majorly over steeping it as per all of yall’s reviews I decided to follow suit. The first taste that hits me is angel food while I don’t really taste any strawberry at all! Hmmm I wonder what’s up with that? I like it and it leaves me with a sweet cakey taste I miss the strawberries though I want my strawberries with my angel food cake you know what I mean?? It still tastes good though! Thanks again Lena!! :)

Had the end of the sample tonight and it wasn’t nearly as good as the first time around. I think mainly because there was a lot of dusty stuff the closer to the end of the packet I got and I’m guessing the orange flavoring sifted down to the bottom of the sample some. It was a lot stronger and not as pleasant this time. A fair amount of the dust escaped the Breville. I went through two infusions but had no desire to do more.

I’m torn because on the one hand, I remember being so pleasantly surprised the first time around that this didn’t come near sucking. But this time it was pretty disappointing. I wasn’t planning to order more anyway, but I’m glad I found out about its darker side.

Knocking it down a few points, but I don’t feel it’s fair to rap it too hard since it was obviously a problem mostly caused by the dregs of the leaf.

A slightly oolongated (sorry!) detour from the Golden Moon project while the water was at the oolong temp setting.

This tea is crowded. There are a lot of little oval cream colored flower buds in the sample, perhaps even more flowers than tea leaves. There’s a grainy looking greenish powder which I’m guessing is the lemon myrtle, but it looks as though it has been put through a pepper mill. The packet has a strong tart orange peel scent. I’m speculating that The Necessiteas ended up with a lot more orange ingredients than anticipated as their offerings are seeming heavy on the orange flavor lately.

The oolong must be pretty green as it delivers a fresh butter colored liquor that has a buttery aroma. There is also a suggestion of flowers, and a citrus note that seems out of place here. The citrus note worries me.

But I shouldn’t have worried, at least not too much. It is present in the taste of the tea, and it isn’t destructive or distracting as I had feared. Mostly, it’s effect is to steer the flavor of the tea away from the dominant buttery floral I would have expected from a green oolong and inject a more piquant flavor. Surprisingly, it’s pretty good.

I’m not sure what the lemon myrtle contributes, exactly. Maybe it’s what keeps the orange flavor under control. The jasmine flowers don’t seem to be contributing much either. There’s no identifiable jasmine note among the generic floral.

Second steep: 3 mins. More orange in the aroma and a powdery, perfumy quality as well that is vaguely lemony. Must be the myrtle. These two qualities dominate the flavor as well along with the generic floral and a sweetness on the back end with just a tiny bit of butter.

Third steep: 4 mins. Not terribly different from the last, except that the mouthfeel is less soft and feels more like water.

I’m actually quite surprised that this tastes as good as it does. If I wanted to have a green oolong, though, I’d be more likely to go for one that didn’t work so hard at muting the qualities in green oolongs that I really like (butteriness, creaminess, flowers) in favor of some other flavor(s). Still, if you’re not an oolong purist and/or are addicted to variety, this comes in a sample size so you can give it a try without a huge investment.

Sipdown no. 27 of 2017 (no. 308 total).

Another hoarded blend from one of my very first orders — yikes! Still tasty after all these years.

I kept threatening to come out of lockdown on non-tea blends — fruits, herbals, etc. — and don’t look now but it could happen in our lifetime.

A hit with both peanuts! No. 2 more than no. 1, but both said they’d drink it again. No. 2 is the strawberry fan in the house, and as the strawberry is very much the main event here, I’m not surprised.

Delighted to see that this is still for sale at The NecessiTeas site in case we find ourselves needing more!

I wasn’t able to get the kiwi to do a solo using the rest of the sample, but I have the feeling that even though my view of it is somewhat obscured, it’s in the back of the room raising its hand. There’s definitely something going on other than strawberry and apple, and it isn’t rose hips or hibiscus. It’s a nice drink.

I’m noticing that unless they’re too tart (unless you like tart, in which case substitute the word “sweet”), fruit blends can basically be described as “nice drinks.” The heat of them is calming in the evening which makes them more comforting to drink than juice, and without the calories. They’re also generally less in-your-face-fruit than juices are. It’s hard to say one is terrifically better than another apart from which side of the sweet/tart dichotomy you happen to fall on, and which fruit flavors you generally prefer. I suppose one could give extra points for a particularly satisfying blend, too. But that’s about all I can see to distinguish one from another. Anything I’m missing?

Stressed and tired, so not up for a magnum opus tonight. Tomorrow maybe. It’s work at home Wednesday and I think my big project may finally be done, so my stress level should go down and I may actually get to enjoy some tea instead of gulping it down while distracted. But after my earlier yucky face experience, I wanted to end the evening on a higher note.

This is a surprisingly nice fruit blend. It has chunky pieces in a nicely harmonized color combo/continuum of very dark purple to light brown. Its variations would be nice in one of those eye shadow palette compacts. It smells like tart strawberry in the sample packet. I brewed it double strength in about 16 oz of water, and it made a pretty, hibiscus-influenced magenta-like liquor.

In taste, it is not at all tart or bitter. In fact, it is sweet, undoubtedly from the strawberry. Apple notes poke through every now and then, and neither the rose hips nor the hibiscus seem to have much influence on the taste. The kiwi is tricky, but I do notice a sort of cooling flavor that comes after the strawberry and doesn’t seem to be the strawberry simply morphing into another variant. I think this is the kiwi. I’ll focus on it more when I next try the rest of the sample and see if I can tease it out a bit more.

I haven’t had that many straight mixed fruit blends, but I like this one better than the Teavana Lemon Youkou because it doesn’t require sweetening.

Better the second time with more water and less tea, and also a bit less steeping time, but not a significant enough improvement to merit much of an uptick. Still mainly a bitter orange peel flavor, just a little more watered down this way. Adding a couple of points.

The red and purple of the rose petals and hibiscus, the grey-green of the tea, the light yellow-green of the lemongrass and the tiny blocks of orange peel make this a colorful tea to look at. In the sample packet, the dry leaves smell strongly and almost exclusively of orange peel.

I think I oversteeped this — I set the timer for 5 minutes but got preoccupied, and it may have been longer than 6 by the time I got back to the tea. It had steeped to a really lovely peach color and still smelled strongly of orange peel.

The taste, however, had a single, sour/bitter note: orange peel.

I will try one more time with the rest of the sample and move the slider if things improve.

Hello rooibos my old friend [?], I’ve come to talk with you again. Ugh. Now I have Simon and Garfunkel rattling around inside my head.

One thing I think I can say with certainty is that as much as I haven’t cared for the Necessiteas flavored greens and have even had a strike out with one of their flavored blacks, they do rooibos blends pretty well. I am hardly an expert on the point, but I suspect that rooibos is pretty forgiving when it comes to being a base for blends. Still, I’ve had ones that were too noisy, so it’s obviously not a foolproof base. Or perhaps some people just like noisy rooibos and find those blends successful and the ones I like the disasters instead.

Be that as it may, this one did remind me more than usual of the covering of the bottom of a hamster cage, but I think it is because of the huge honking hunks of orange peel in the mix that make the rooibos look so backgroundy. And the chocolate poking up from underneath. Which as it turns out, is an accurate visual representation of the taste.

The aroma, though, is somewhat orange-medicinal, like a kids’ liquid medicine.

The flavor is a strong orange flavor that isn’t sweet, rich, or candy like as the orange flavors I’ve particularly enjoyed are. This one is slightly tart and a tiny bit bitter, but not in an entirely bad way. It basically has the character of orange peel, which is to say it tastes like what it is. No surprise there. Behind the orange is the rooibos, an appley note that stands between the orange and the chocolate which isn’t really much more than a warm cocoa undercurrent. Sometimes the rooibos and the chocolate change places. It’s not consistent, though.

The aftertaste is pretty strong on the rooibos. Which is not the best way to end.

I preferred the Peppermint Pattie, but this isn’t bad if you like flavored rooibos.

I wasn’t intending to write about this one yet since I tried it for the first time this morning during a rush to get the kids ready for swimming lessons, but I had to change my mind because of the comments coming from the breakfast table after I poured the water over the mixture.

Picture the mixture (there’s a photo at the top of the page of the black tea leaves, white coconut strips, chocolate chips). In the packet it has a v. strong scent of “lime,” a really acrid smell that borders on chlorine, with some not sweet chocolate underneath and some sweetness that may be the coconut in the corner. It’s on the kitchen counter having just had water poured over it.

Now picture the scene. Two boys, ages 4 and almost 6, eating microwave French toast from Trader Joe’s and drinking orange juice, and the boyfriend about to sit down with them while I am puttering making my own breakfast.

Boyfriend: “What’s that smell?”

Me: “Tea.”

Boyfriend walks over to cup and sniffs. “Caramel?”

Me: “No. Lime, chocolate and coconut.”

Boyfriend: “Ahhhh. It’s the coconut.” He starts to sing: “Put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up, put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning. Wasn’t that Harry Nilsson, the same guy who did The Point?” He sits down.

Boyfriend: “God, that smells awful.”

6 Year old: “I can smell it from here. I don’t like it.”

Me: “Really? I don’t think it’s so bad.”

4 Year old (Mama’s boy, bless him): “I don’t think it’s so bad either.”

Boyfriend: “Who thinks it smells bad, raise your hand.” Raises hand. 6 year old raises hand.

I take a sip. It’s identifiably lime, coconut, and chocolate, but mostly the acrid lime that tastes a lot like it smells and is throwing the mixture off kilter. I put some milk in it and try again. Slightly better, still way too heavy on the lime. I look at the packet. Chocolate Coconut Lime. I am wondering why it isn’t called Lime Chocolate Coconut?

Me: “It doesn’t taste that good.”

4 year old: “Can I taste it?”

Me: “No.”

4 year old: “Is it tea?”

Me: Pause. Is it tea? Answer. “Yes.”

Sort of.

Having this tonight and I made up a mug for the hubby too. His exact words: “Odd. Not something I would expect to be hot.” He’s still drinking it though XD

I am impressed, this really does taste like rootbeer! Not getting the “float” part of this but I am perfectly ok with that. I’ll just sit here with my rootbeer-flavored drink and my chocolate cake covered with confectioner’s sugar and Cherry Dr Pepper flavored syrup and recover from my disaster-filled afternoon. Soda flavors abound and there’s not a co2 bubble anywhere in sight!

For my 200th note, I thought about celebrating by pulling out a Steepster favorite and giving it a try. Maybe Jackee Muntz, or Florence, or Dawn or Dragon Balls. Or what about waiting for that Hawaiian tea Auggy just wrote about, and that I sent off for this morning? Nah. I’m much too compulsive to wait that long. ;-) And it’s late, and I have a 7 a.m. conference call tomorrow. And there’s always no. 300. So this instead, as I figure it has minimal caffeine, and that’s what I’m about right now.

I had them toss this sample and another rooibos, and a fruit blend into my last order of samples for the sake of completeness, because that was all that was really left by way of samples once I’d ordered all the green, black, white and even oolong samples. I figured it would give me something to taste and write about at times of day when I had no business drinking caffeine.

This one, as it turns out, is all over the map.

The mixture is colorful: red rooibos, green mint, dark brown chocolate pieces, light brown dried apple. Yogurt? I didn’t see anything that really identified itself as yogurt though I saw some little white chips which were probably it. Dry, it smells like chocolate mint, which was promising.

After steeping it’s a cloudy, red cider color and mostly smells like apples and rooibos, which was not at all promising.

But then, there’s the flavor. In the initial sips, my fears were allayed. Chocolate, mint, and rooibos, in that order. The chocolate tastes dark and isn’t very sweet, but it goes well with the mint. The mint isn’t overpowering, but it is tasty. The apple and rooibos are present, but well below the screaming rooibos threshold. This is promising.

But, as the cup goes on, the promise fades. The rooibos stopped sitting quietly in the corner and made me aware of it, in its woody, tobaccoey way.

Then, it has the audacity to end on a high note: the aftertaste isn’t rooibos at all, but mint and chocolate!

Thanks for making me earn this one, Peppermint Pattie. I can’t rate you as high as your Rootbeer friend because you’re so confusing and inconsistent, but you were better than I expected. I would think flavored rooibos fans would like you just fine so I rate you with that in mind, and not as a reflection of my personal intentions toward you.

The scents of bergamot and vanilla are strong in the packet and seem to be duking it out between themselves. Steeped, the aroma is more of the creme than the bergamot. The flavor of the underlying tea seems to me similar to the Tazo Earl Grey. It’s a fairly stark, strong, bergamot, though it is mediated to some extent by the vanilla and therefore generally more pleasant.

This is my first Necessiteas black blend sample and I think it is a real step up from their green flavored teas, though it still seems to feel much more an assembly of individual flavors than a true blend.

There are nice big pieces of orange peel and smaller, pretty reddish petals in among the tea. In the packet, it does have an orange smell (in a baby aspirin orange/creamsicle sort of way), and although I do get the note that is called cheesecake, I am smelling, more than cheesecake, a fairly strong coconut scent.

The orange/coconut also comes out in the aroma of the steeped tea, while the creaminess associated with cheesecake comes out more in the flavor along with a small amount of orange. I did not find the tea discernible except for a slight bitterness in the finish. The liquor is yellow-green with suspended particles in it.

The orange flavor in this doesn’t have the strength and sweetness I recall tasting in the Orange Creamsicle, but I do find that these teas differ from cup to cup depending on how the flavoring agents have been distributed.

That said, this is one of the more flavorful of the NecessiTeas flavored green teas I have sampled, probably behind Raspberry Jasmine and Orange Creamsicle, and maybe Strawberry Lemonade. But my standards have become somewhat pickier since I sampled those.

Biggest Loser Bob sold me on Extra Sugar Free Gum, so I have tried just about every flavor they have including their Strawberry Banana, and boy howdy if that wasn’t exactly the smell that I smelled when I opened up the sample packet. There were big hunks of crispy dried banana chips and smaller dried strawberries (with green tea leaves stuck to them) among more green leaves that looked like sencha.

After steeping, the tea was a very pale greenish yellow color with an aroma of sweet strawberry and banana. I got all excited because I thought I might actually be about to experience a flavored green tea success story. But the taste was not nearly as sweet (or indeed, as intense) as the smell, and there was an almost bitter downward turn at the finish. There was something else that was interesting; a marine taste that reminded me of a very mild fish oil, like in omega 3 capsules. It must have been from the tea rather than the fruit. I’m open to such tastes in tea, particularly green tea, as many of them are said to taste like kelp or other seaweeds. But it wasn’t the best pairing with strawberry and banana.

I thought this tea had more flavor than the Strawberry Daiquiri of last night, but it still didn’t have the depth of flavor I was hoping for. I noticed in the description there’s a suggestion of serving this iced. Honestly, I don’t think it would stand up to icing.

Tonight, steeped at 1 minute instead of 1.5 to see what difference that might make.

Either it’s the steeping or it’s the luck of the draw of the flavoring agents out of the sample packet, but this time around I’m getting less sweet and more suggestion of rum. It’s a darker note, but it’s present in a faded sort of way so it gives the overall impression of less flavor.

Some people bang themselves over their heads with 2×4s. I keep trying flavored green teas. When will I learn?

I placed this order for samples from The NecessiTeas mostly to try some of their flavored blacks since my success rate with their greens had been so low, but while I was at it, I went ahead and ordered samples of the greens I hadn’t yet tasted. There were only three, so it didn’t seem overly masochistic.

Having experienced more and different kinds of green tea between my original set of samples and this one, I can now make some observations about the tea I wasn’t prepared to make then. I now recognize the green base (at least for this tea) as sencha. It has the leaf shape, and yields the green/yellow liquor color with little particles suspended in it I recognize from my Den’s sampler experience.

This tea, however, doesn’t have anything like the flavor that the Den’s had. There is no juicy, vegetal goodness — it’s just a green whisper in the background. The main flavor is strawberry, but it isn’t a robust strawberry, certainly not the strawberry I would expect in a daiquiri. It, too, is a mere whisper. To be more precise, it’s not even really strawberry so much as a vague strawberry-flavored sweetness, like a Jolly Rancher that’s been dissolved in at least a bathtub’s worth of water. This is unfortunate, because in the packet, the dry mixture smelled promising — a strong strawberry flavor and an identifiable undercurrent of rum.

There was no appreciable difference in flavor after steeping 1.5 minutes as opposed to 1 minute.

This was only so-so. I am still sampling some decaffs and rooibos for evening potations, and this seemed to lack flavour. I’ve had decent chocolate mint black teas, so maybe it was the rooibos standing in the way of a tasty experience.
Worst than meh but not so bad that I wanted to toss it.

Yet another sampling from Doulton! I’m trying to drink up all my samples to make room for some new tea once my month-long ban on buying tea is up. A new job = regular income = new tea! How nifty!

Anyway, this tea really did smell like root beer! Root beer is my favorite kind of soda, even more so than Mountain Dew Live Wire, so I was really psyched when Doulton sent me this. After that smell, I wasn’t surprised when it tasted like warm root beer. You know that feeling that your tongue gets when you drink root beer? Not the carbonation feeling, but the prickly root beer feeling, like little pockets of goodness are popping on your tongue? It’s a different feeling from all the other kinds of soda. Yeah, this tea gives you that.