28 Tasting Notes

99
drank Jardin Bleu by Dammann Frères
28 tasting notes

I adore this tea. In general I tend not to like highly scented, flavored, or floral teas and prefer the pure stuff. But this very scented and flavored tea is almost addictive to me: it tastes like Provence in a bottle or liquid Provence. It’s intoxicating. However, I gave some of this to a friend and she hated it. So I think it’s the kind of thing one is likely to love and hate. If you like Monet you will probably like this tea.

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68

A good basic white peony. One of my staples.

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100

Fabulous! Exceptional oolong with deep, rich, penetrating, complex, dark flavor. Yummy!

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100

This is probably the single most delicious black pu-erh tea I’ve ever had. Rishi Tea is accurate in referring to it as their espresso of pu-erh teas — it is the closest thing I’ve had in teas to the experience of espresso, even though it doesn’t have a coffee flavor. But it would probably work as a way of getting an espresso drinker to appreciate tea.

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99
drank White Peony King by Shang Tea
28 tasting notes

This tea is superlative. I would have to say that it’s my favorite of all of the white peony whites I’ve ever tasted. I’ve never had a bad one, because white peony is my favorite of all teas, but Shang’s White Peony King, which is his top grade grown on his own white tea farm in China, is perfection.

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73
drank Gen Mai Cha by Silk Road
28 tasting notes

I am one of those people who in general doesn’t really like green tea. I love white tea, red tea, yellow tea, oolong tea, and pu-erh tea, but I rarely encounter a green tea that I enjoy. This particular tea, with the toasted rice and popcorn flavor, is one of only two or three green teas that I really enjoy, even though I feel as though I’m “cheating”, because in a way it’s like drinking liquid popcorn. But that’s not really fair to it, because it does have a hearty, complex flavor. I wouldn’t drink it daily, but it is a treat.

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100

Fabulous oolong tea. Intense, strong, pungent flavor. And there’s an additional pleasure of watching the ball expand when you steep it. Before the first steeping, it’s just a little ball at the bottom of the teamaker. By the 3d or 4th steeping, it has expanded to fill up the whole vessel! Also great for travel, because you can just pop one into a cup without having to measure it.

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100

This is currently my favorite of all red teas and is what I tend to have when I get up in the morning. It has a rich, warm, round flavor that is heartening.

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Bio

I “converted” to tea" in March 2008, along with my friend Shelley, after decades of drinking espresso, while on a trip to Santa Barbara. In my 20’s I went through a phase of drinking oolong tea all the time, but basically hadn’t drunk tea in decades. Discovering the world of tea, in concert with my friends Shelley and Linda, under the guidance of Shang Zehua of Shang Tea (a walking encyclopedia of tea knowledge as well as generous and friendly) and with the encouragement and friendliness of Catherine Heagerty of Silk Road Teas and Greg Glancy of Norbu Tea, has been transformational in my life. After almost three years of tea immersion, I still feel that I am a novice in a large and complex world of human culture, history, and experience, but I am enjoying it, as well as noticing the beneficial effect of tea on my physical and mental life. I keep on coming across new pieces of research about the amazing health benefits of tea. I currently drink about two quarts of tea per day. I mainly have red tea in the morning, white tea throughout the day, and pu-erh tea in the evening, sometimes with oolong thrown in in the mid-morning or early afternoon.

Other pertinent things about me: my greatest passion in life is classical music (especially Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Morton Feldman); I’m a vegetarian; I love cats; and I love travel, especially to Mediterranean lands, especially Provence. I also love philosophy and am stimulated by information technology.

From being on this site for a couple of weeks, seeing how other people think and write about and evaluate tea, and therefore reflecting more on my own intuitive and previously unarticulated approach to and criteria for tea, I realize that I have a particular orientation to the teas I have (which I also realize parallels my relation to other pleasurable things in my life) that shapes my comments and evaluations. Namely, for every major kind of tea, I like having one or more really good staple or basic ones, and one or more exceptional, outstanding ones. I don’t like to drink only the most exceptional or outstanding ones. I prefer to mainly drink the good staple, basic ones, and then have the exceptional ones when I’m in special or particular moods or on special occasions. So, for example, if I rate a tea as an 80 rather than as a 100, it doesn’t mean I have a low opinion of that tea and that I’m thinking of it as less than what it should have been (e.g. that it ideally would have been a 100). Rather I’m thinking of it as really good, but that I’m aware that there is a tea that is even better that I reserve for special moods or occasions. To take a parallel example from the rest of my life: I really like to eat in diners. When I’m doing so, I’m not thinking of it as inferior to eating in a gourmet restaurant. I’m completely enjoying it (assuming that it’s good diner food). Then, when I eat in a gourmet restaurant (if it really is one), it’s like enjoyment to a superlative degree, especially because someplace in my awareness is a comparison to really good diner food, which even at that moment I’m not thinking of as inferior. Anyway, this is the kind of orientation that underlies my evaluation of teas. I wouldn’t want to drink only teas that I would rate as 100, it would seem unbalanced, decadent, and lacking in perspective.

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