New Tasting Notes

LOVE this tea especially the gingery notes. It is a nice compliment to stir-fry and makes an EXCELLENT ICED TEA. I made iced tea from the 5th and 6th infusions, put in glass bottles and went off on a desert hike….very refreshing on a hot day!

So I’m not the biggest fan of RoT, but when I am at Panera or somewhere that serves it and I have a tea craving, I usually go for the Mango Ceylon. The other one I really like is the green tea with ginger and peach. Like I said, I don’t drink these every day, but they get the job done in a pinch.

Out of the many teas Teavana has discontinued, this one is one of the few that I liked a lot. It’s been about a year since I had it, but I can remember the natural sweetness the tea had and the beautiful reddish hue of the brew itself.

I am enjoying another cup of this tea. On the second steeping….no bitterness! lovely!

It’s not yet afternoon, but I decided to try this. I love my man, Jackee Muntz, and know that I have a limited number of dates with him. Will the famous lodgings of Baker Street bring me any joy?

And the answer is a resounding yes. This is a good smoky tea. I can see it joining the permanent cast of characters in my life. And it does conjure up a feel of the Holmsian sitting room. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have been down in the country for a while tracking down the hound of the Baskervilles and the sitting room retains that masculine flavor of smoke; the Persian slipper containing the pipe-tobacco still hangs, but nobody has lit up for several days so the air is redolent but not noxious.

Upton Teas has an excellent blend here and it makes me eager to pursue my love of smoky teas.

Finishing up my sample today :( My poor husband is home with some kind of virus (at least I think it’s a virus because he feels so feverish and is queasy and his head is killing him) and I am feeling like I am not too far behind in the queasy department. My new friend mint to the rescue! (the running joke in my house is that next I’m going to start liking sushi! The three things I hated were coconut, mint and sushi, and here I am CRAZY about coconut and now mint!!!). ANYWAY!

This tea is really hitting the spot today. I can’t even think about the idea of milk without my stomach churning, and this combination of green and black teas with a touch of comforting vanilla and tum soothing mint? Absolutely ideal and very, very delicious. I am so sad that I don’t have any more leaves left, but will definitely be making another steep for medicinal purposes. whimper!!

needed something to soothe my throat this am. this is doing the trick!

The dry leaf smells like warm fruit in a humidor.

The wet leaf, I kid you not, smells like beef, brown gravy and egg noodles.

The cup smells like brown beer. It is not as dark as yesterday’s golden pekoe, but is certainly closer to amber than to goldenrod. Let’s call it chestnut?

This is one of those teas that is too open, in dried form, to measure by volume, and so there’s a chance I didn’t use enough, but I actually felt like I might have put in more than I needed, really. The opened wet leaves take up about 1/3 of the pot, which with big, full leaves, is about normal for me. This may be a tea that is just all in the nose not on the tongue.

The cup tastes very gentle, hence my concern about enough leaf. A mild roast and dried fruit in the sun. Like trail mix on a hike, sitting on a big, dark rock on the summit. Old, weather worn, but solid, and full of dormant energy. This tea fits today very well. A bit overcast with storms on the way, and a long afternoon of quiet, somber reflection.

Now, I will confess that a week’s worth of singing for hours every night in a church full of incense has made me rather congested. So I could be completely wrong about all of this. ;-)

Also, I discovered that people are willing to take even tea too seriously, after thinking just yesterday how nice it was to have a social networking site where people didn’t go out of their way to pick fights with you. So much for that. If you find me reticent to interact, don’t take it personally. I’m really, really burnt out on this kind of thing and had hoped to just have some fun over here.

I think I’ve worked out the formula to brew three “varieties” of this one in one pot: just under three minutes for me, another minute for my husband, yet another minute for what he’ll ice down at work (he likes the bitter bite of oversteeped green…go figure). At the three-minute point this morning, anyway, I’m catching a little bit of nutty-sweet to balance the greenness.

The aroma of this tea took me back to childhood. My father used to open up a can of “fruit cocktail” and carefully divide everything into 6 identical servings. He had to use a knife to break down the coveted cherries and the grapes into smaller pieces. After about an hour he would triumphantly serve 6 identical bowls up to 6 little maws.

The aroma of cache-cache reminds me of those canned fruit cocktail treats of the Dwight and Mamie era. Cache-cache is a very fruity black tea. It is the opposite of smoke and the opposite of vegetal. It led me on a petite Madeleine moment for which I am grateful. It manages to be both upscale and bargain basement in its affect. It seems like a confection from Rumplemeyer’s (off Central Park and a paradise for children) and, at the same time, something from one of those bashed-up tins that you see your co-workers donating to “Food for the Homeless”. I may be imposing an identity crisis that the tea does not deserve. I think that the tea is perfect for parents and grandparents to serve children at an exquisite tea-party. I also imagine that it will elicit and draw out memories of childhood. The name means “hide and seek” in French, another evocation of childhood.

I don’t think I really fooled anybody with my post yesterday… As Lena pointed out, I should probably have left out the hibiscus bit.

But I can assure you all that my infatuation with smokies is unchanged and there is no force on the planet that could make me give them up.

(Which is kind of odd, really, considering my strong dislike for tobacco smoke)

Had a cup of this one this morning and it was yummy.

still a favorite of mine. added a dash of milk today.

Alas and alack. My jasmine blueberry sample is devoid of blueberries. Seriously. I looked for them everywhere and it appears not a single one made it into the sample. Sob. Sniff.

But the dry leaves do smell like blueberries, and of course, of jasmine, though these are underneath the cough syrupy thing that the Tropical Green also had. The tea steeps to a dark yellow and has, as Stephanie said, a blueberry aroma — that distinctive, tart smell that comes from berries that have been baked into something and are fresh from the oven. There is jasmine mixed in as well, which brings to mind breakfast outdoors under a vine-adorned arbor.

I am disappointed with the lack of blueberries. I don’t feel I can evaluate this properly without them. The tea is tasty enough, but I’m left with the feeling that what I’m tasting is just the blueberry flavoring, and wondering what the taste would be like with the actual berries….

Rawr my tasting note got eaten :( shorter version then:
Smells and tastes like what it is – a good Formosa Oolong. Roasted, slightly fruity; coppery color. Ample leaf + short steep times = many steeps.
2nd at 195°F for 45 seconds is both a little more astringent and fruitier