New Tasting Notes
I tried this tea after getting a sample at Teavana :) I wish I enjoyed it as much as I’d hoped I would. It’s a little bitter with the acai, and the flavor really doesn’t last – the berries are good for one steep only. I prefer teas that I can re-steep and really savor cup after cup.
Preparation
I liked this tea. You could really taste the raspberry flavors in the tea and it made an excellent thing to come home to after wandering around outside doing errands on a particularly cold day. If you want an inexpensive tea that tastes pretty good, I would definitely suggest checking out Raspberry Zinger.
No notes yet. Add one?
Preparation
A guy drinking rose tea. I love it:)
I wasn’t planning to. This was on the bottom of my basket, well I tossed the basket aside and replaced it with a plastic carton. The basket was a bit too feminine =D and it didn’t go with my cardboard box aka cupboard. It messed with the feng shui or something. Kidding. Err, about the feng shui and not the basket. If GM didn’t include it in the sampler, I would of never had tried it.
Yay! You joined our little e-tasting!
And how dare you get your A&D DFTs before me!!! Of course, I haven’t checked the mail yet so maybe? Maybe?
YOU CAVED AS WELL!?!?! Haha, I bet teaplz secretly did too, but she’s spent so much she doesn’t want to tell us. UPS just left it on my front door. It’s NYC someone could of stolen it! They even left my front gate open, argh!
I totally caved! Seems like when I try to suspend tea buying to clean out my pantry, I end up buying more tea!
More companies just have to offer 1-2 cup samplers of all their tea selections like GM. That would make life easier.
Or more dangerous.
It’s okay, I’ll just steal your pantry afterward you make a purchase. On that note, which tea to have next!
I love the label on the Dragonwell – so awesome! ;)
I totes did not cave on the AD stuff. I caved on TeaGschwendner and Harney & Sons instead. EVIL.
Are we admiring the tea or the label ;D. Oh Andrews & Dunham, how you’ve done such a good job marketing. We all admire the labels, maybe a tad too much!
I bet they ran out of stock before you had a chance to purchase it =P. You can’t deceive me! Oh, did you purchase the dessert tea as well :D
I haven’t caved on the dessert tea… yet… >.> <.<
I hate you people.
Still a chance to get it before Christmas =D
Still haven’t tried your DFT yet, Ricky? I couldn’t manage to wait until the next morning, even with a headache.
I’ve been looking for a perfect Jasmine for a long time and tried a lot of teas. Most of them left me disappointed, they were either too sweet or too heavy or too perfumy. This one is as close to perfection as it gets. I’ll refrain from giving it 100 for now because I might find a better tasting tea but I seriously doubt it.
This is how Jasmine should be done. It’s a bliss in a cup. It smells absolutely natural – fresh jasmine flowers that haven’t been picked yet and are blooming on a bush surrounded by lush green leaves. I definitely get some bitterness but it is light and blends well with the flowery aroma.
The brew is very refreshing, it feels thirst-quenching and at the same time leaves my mouth dry and I’m craving for more. The description is right to the point saying that the taste is crisp, it is very accurate. It’s green, crisp and fresh. I’m not getting much sweetness though, maybe just a tiny bit on the background which is a good thing for me because I didn’t find it to work well with jasmine flavor in other teas and discarded them for this same reason.
Preparation
I agree. This is one of the better balanced teas, unlike the Jasmine Flower Tea, and lighter than the Jasmine Pearls that they have.
I can’t really compare this tea to other jasmine teas BP carries because it came as a part of a green tea sampler which contained only one more Jasmine tea (jasmine slim green tea) but I haven’t figured out the proper way to brew it yet. If you know, please share…
The jasmine slim is a Kudin tea, which has a very bitter taste by nature. One stick per cup, and I usually brew for < 2 minutes.
What temperature do you use to brew it? Thanks a lot for the info, by the way.
A little birdie that goes told me I should try this one so I thought I’d brew it up. The jasmine smell is lovely but I’ve become a bit cautious (and pretty darn picky) with jasmine flavored things, so we shall see.
This sampler has 4g of tea, so I’m making a big cup. The packaging states that this is green tea but that it should be brewed in water ‘just below the boiling point’, which I am taking as 195° (and water that has been freshly boiled ‘but allowed to cool slightly’ I’m taking as 175°). But since it is green tea, I want to do it at 175°. But I’m not. We’ll see how it goes. And in fact, the leaves don’t look super green. More dark olive maybe. And once the leaves are wet, I think they’d definitely be classed as olive.
On one hand, that’s good right? Not a super-green leaf so it should be happier at a higher temp, yes? But at the same time… olive? I would be lying if I weren’t starting to get just a little concerned. After all, GM has to strike out sometime, yes?
Hmmmmm…. I’m a bit torn. It definitely isn’t a strike out, but I don’t know if I love it. It’s different than what I was expecting and from what I’ve had before but I can’t quite figure out why. There’s an additional flavor there that I don’t normally get with jasmine teas.
AH! I’m a dork! I just figured out what that end taste/aftertaste is! TEA! There’s the blip at the end, right before I swallow, that is almost all green tea and then it reappears in the aftertaste when I inhale (after an exhale of jasmine). It makes this one of the more deeply flavored jasmines that I’ve had. Samovar’s had a good depth to it but a more cookie depth. This one has more of a salty, almost astringent Chinese green depth which, as it flows back into the jasmine, gives a bit of a tang for me. Of course, along with being hard to please with my jasmines, I’m hard to please with my Chinese greens.
So, is it good? Well, it’s not fake tasting or heavily done so sure. It’s good. Is it in the same class as there coconut pouchong, sugar caramel oolong or rose? Nope. It’s a good jasmine that I don’t hate and it has a brilliant scent to it which is so delightful that I could probably smell my cup for days. But I like Samovar’s jasmine pearl better for a jasmine tea with depth and I like Adagio’s jasmine silver needle best for a soft, fluffy, light jasmine. I think both of those are better done than this one, at least for my own personal tastes.
That being said, I might enjoy this more if I had done it at 175°.
ETA: Resteep at 175° for 4mins. Still good but not in love. This one reminds me a lot of Adagio’s Jasmine #12. That’s a good thing.
Preparation
Preparing the entire sample, gutsy:)
I think that GM’s plain tea are good, not amazing. It doesn’t help that you’ve been drinking their blends lately =P. See this is why I wanted to drink all their plain tea before moving onto the blends.
@Cofftea, Well, it was either do the whole sample or have a tiny cup. Give me a big cup!
@Ricky, I don’t think I’d call this a plain tea though. Well, or a blend either. I have been drinking flavored stuff from them so far – 3 for 3. I do need to branch out and have some unflavored stuff, though!
@Auggy, I agree- but since you were leary about this one I thought you might go w/ a smaller cup so you could do 2 sets of steeping parameters.
Very true! But ultimately I’m a more ‘damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead’ kinda gal.
Sorry, my definition of plain is when the only ingredient is a single type of tea leaf. Jasmine Pearl, Gunpowder, Sencha, though I’d call English Breakfast (plain). I guess plain meaning standard types.
I also interchange the term blended tea with flavored tea, because it’s a blend of different ingredients.
Ahh, this reminds me of anthropology ;)
The evolution and deconstruction of words and meanings! Hehe! Sometimes I include jasmine (and milk) flavored teas in with the ‘normal’ teas but I’m not consistent. I should work on that. Be decisive.
I know, there needs to be an official Steepster Wiki. Then again Rose Tea could technically be considered normal. I noticed it was being offered on the menu at two places I visited today. Oh the dilemma!
Wheee! Well, it didn’t win any prizes, but it was still halfway decent! This one SMELLS SO GOOD. And it was my first jasmine, so I have nothing to compare it to. But it didn’t taste like old-lady-perfume, which is good!
I let my water cool for a good three minutes before I steeped this one, which probably put the temperature probably around 180, so maybe that’s why I liked it a bit better? I didn’t get a salty green taste… I got more of the traditional green sweetness. Interesting, though! Still, above average and YAY SAMPLES.
I think there are 3 categories:
plain tea
flavored tea
blended tea
Wikipedia lying to me =O. That’s absurd! They have an article on blending / flavored tea and it’s TOGETHER!
But what about a blended Earl Grey? Would that be flavored? Or blended? Or will my head just explode???
And I’m with you Ricky – blended is not flavored! Well, unless it is blended AND flavored. But I refuse to think about that.
AHHH! I feel a headache coming.
Here’s how I see it:
plain: one type of tea, no additives.
blended: different types of tea, no flavors (i.e. Irish Breakfast is Ceylon and Assam blacks)
flavored: additional add-ons to either a plain or blended base (like a coconut pouchong)
What’s Tippy Earl Grey =D
Ingredients: Black Tea, Oil of Bergamot…
Is it plain? Or is it flavored? I mean they do all lavender into it.
I’m gonna go with teaplz on the classifications (and try to get jasmine and silk oolongs in my mental “flavored” category – because they are). And so EG would be flavored. Yes?
So I think now I’m going to get a blended (?) herbal tea. Multiple herbals, no flavoring. Is blend, yes?
I agree that jasmine is a flavor, BUT if Jasmine is a flavored tea. Then what is it’s base tea? Green tea, but what type? Just like Gunpowder is a green tea. And what is Jasmine Pearl? I’m so confused!
Foxtrot from Adagio would be a blend. It’s made up for multiple base tea (chamomile, peppermint, rooibos).
The tea base on a jasmine could be anything. I’ve had green, white and oolong teas scented or flavored with jasmine. And I think GM has a black jasmine tea? Which I really want to try.
Wait, but would there be a difference between a jasmine that’s been scented/flavored with jasmine flowers and then the flowers removed and a tea that has jasmine petals blended in?
Earl Grey could technically be BOTH a flavored and a blended if there is bergamot AND multiple types of tea in there. But I’m pretty sure it’s normally just flavored.
Green is the base of jasmine tea, but just like we don’t know what exactly the base is. Pearl just refers to the shape that it’s rolled into, I think.
I’m pretty sure that Harney & Sons classifies all their teas like this.
Yes, yes. Jasmine is a flavor, but you can’t call green tea, green tea. I mean Sencha, Dragonwell, Gunpowder are all considered Jasmine. I guess my question is what is the green tea base that GM is using as it’s labeled “green tea leaves”. I mean Ceylon is a base (right?), it’s black tea leaves, but the base is Ceylon.
Ahh the confusion!
Jasmine scented would be flavored? Physical Jasmine petals = blended?
But wait, would that mean Adagio’s flavor teas are really blended teas? Uhoh.
No. Taking teaplz’s definition of “blended: different types of tea, no flavors.” Therefore, Jasmine is a blend! Not a flavor! Oh wait, okay I’m totally confused. Can we just go back to interchanging the two words like our trusty source wikipedia?
Ehh, ignore the confusion in the first part of my previous comment. I was typing it up before your explanation of Jasmine / Green base showed up.
teaplz. The voice of reason in a mind-hurty world.
Well, I wasn’t thinking so far into it as to include stand-alone herbals, but I think that if an herbal is blended with a tea, then it’s a flavored instead of a blend. A blend still creates a standard tea taste. Like Irish Breakfast or English Breakfast. Those are blends. But when you add any other additional components on top of the tea plant itself, I’d say that it’s flavored.
http://www.harney.com/Black-Teas/departments/2/ Look at the way Harney organizes its blacks. This is how I see plain, blended, and flavored.
Okay, you linked to that specifically so I’d be even MORE tempted to get some H&S samplers, right? Because that is what you accomplished.
Upping the rating to the repurchasing level and even above.
This tea’s comfortable bitterness has finally conquered my taste buds and it re-steeps nicely.
Great tea but requires some time to adjust to it’s unique “brown” taste.
Preparation
I actually had this yesterday while at work, but then went out drinking with work people, and well, then all hell broke loose. So now that I’m awake, I’m logging.
I love this one, helps my stomach and just tastes good. Such a bite to it, puts some fire in your belly, and warms the rest of you too.
My afternoon tea is this interesting tea from TeaSource. It’s a first flush black tea that’s got a slight vegetal flavor like a green tea yet it’s oxidized as a black tea. It’s has a pleasant flavor with fruity and honey notes that is rather enjoyable.
Preparation
Another comforting tea, this time from my childhood. One of the teas my mom always had around, and one of my first exposures to tea. This is a guilty pleasure, purely because of sense-memory. I know there are plenty of other, better blackteawithorangespice combinations out there, but…it’s kind of like Alpha-Bits. Older and presumably wiser, I know that I don’t want to know what’s in those marshmallow chunks…but they still taste good as they chalkily deliquesce in my mouth, you know? ;)
Preparation
My mom always kept this around, too! It’s been a lonnnng time since I’ve had it, though.
I think I gave in and bought a box…mmm, maybe 5 months ago? Finished it fairly quickly, especially with how much tea I tend to drink in a day. I keep looking for nice black/orange spice blends. And I find them, but they’re not the same. XD It’s kinda trashy, I know, but comforting at the same time.
I’d never drink it every day, though. Only when in the mood for nostalgia.
I know it’s hardly the best tea in the world, but this and Constant Comment evoke warm, fuzzy memories. That can’t be bad, surely? :)
When properly brewed, and taken with a little milk and sugar, this tea is actually really fantastic. It’s like dessert with caffeine, and it got me through many a looooong day spent in Technical Services when I used to work in an academic library. It brought some much-needed sweetness to cold, dusty afternoons. Although there have been plenty of teas before and since that have been better, this is still immensely comfortable. Like an old plush bathrobe. It may not be pretty to anyone else, but you’ll still wear it around your house and feel utterly at home while wearing it.
Preparation
It certainly has a strong almond smell and taste, but little vanilla, and really nothing that exciting going on. Might pair well with some cookies. I think it’s funny that the manufacturer suggests a strong brew could withstand pairing with milk, because milk challenged all vanilla notes in my cup. The brew is really rather weak.
Since steeping ginseng green w/ Premium Sencha perameters went so well, I decided to try it w/ this. 1/2TB leaves, 2oz water @ 160 degrees, steeped for 90 sec. I like these perameters for steeping because it makes a green tea shot or green tea espresso type drink. Lots of flavor, caffeine, L-theanine, and tannins in very little water.
I just need to smell this to know this serving is different. While there is still a bit of sweetness on the nose, it smells much more savory than my past attempts. The flavor is very much like the the nose- very compact. Strong, but not bitter. Mainly savory, but w/ a hint of sweetness.
