New Tasting Notes

80

Martin’s birthday countdown AKA Your Daily Tea Cup Advent Calendar

Day 5

Expectations: smoky tea, with some kind of spicy notes. Mulled wine? I am fine with that.

Reality: Mulled wine? Is Dutch mulled wine that different? Could be. But for me it was a mildly roasty tea with flavours of cookies and cookie dough. With spices and hazelnuts. Cinnamon mostly. Well, as a festive tea, I feel it is great. In this gray summer afternoon, it’s fine.

Flavors: Cinnamon, Cookie, Hazelnut

Preparation
205 °F / 96 °C 3 min, 0 sec 10 OZ / 300 ML

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drank Provence by Harney & Sons
3226 tasting notes

My best friend loves white tea. She doesn’t love strong flavors most of the time, although her favorite teas are Blueberry Green from Harney, Hot Cinnamon Spice from Harney, and Chocolate Strawberry Puerh from Lupicia.

Other than these, she drinks milder teas. I got the email for the release of this tea from Harney and informed her right away. It was listed as sold out. I signed up to be notified when it was back in stock so she could try it and very shortly got an email that it was. I let her know and clicked the link. BOOM. Sold out. I signed up again. That night I tried to order it again and it was in stock! I got her tin and decided to revisit the site the next day. Sold out again.

I guess the combination of flavors sounds very appealing to a lot of people or the cocktail recipe I saw in the description must sound really good. I hope this means that they will consider making this available in loose leaf.

The flavors are apricot, lemon, lavender, honey and vanilla. What I taste is the mildest apricot that I have experienced from Harney teas, with zero lavender, a hint of lemon, and a hint of vanilla. I tried making a second steep and combining the two as a sweet tea for Ashman but it was so mild that I threw some fruit and ice in it and made him an “Icee.”

For my friend and myself, I made it hot and we both enjoyed it. After she left I tried to resteep the bags and it was drinkable – a light tea but even milder than the first time around.

Maybe I need to play with it a bit more to make the flavors stronger. Based on how strong their other apricot and peach teas are, I am surprised this is so mild.

It is quite good and I would love to buy it loose leaf if they make that happen, but be aware that it is mildly flavored. No punch you in the face fruit here. I am going to experiment because these flavors sounds awesome for iced tea, but it wasn’t strong enough for Ashman imo.

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2023 sipdown no. 72

Freshly steeped, this smells summer sweet, like fresh nectar from a flower. However, as the tea cools, it just doesn’t sit quite right with me — that sweetness borders on cloying (as much as a completely unflavoured tea can) — I’m being quite picky here, but this one steeps up either perfectly, or in this weird way that doesn’t agree with me. I do think there’s something to be said for drinking this as soon as it’s at a drinkable temperature (as hot/warm as possible).

Preparation
190 °F / 87 °C 2 min, 0 sec 3 g 13 OZ / 384 ML

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drank Provence by Harney & Sons
3226 tasting notes

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70
drank Winter Wake Up Tea by Trader Joe's
87 tasting notes

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Preparation
205 °F / 96 °C 3 min, 0 sec 10 OZ / 295 ML

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65
drank Witchy Watermelon by DAVIDsTEA
2285 tasting notes

I unfortunately find this one to be lacking flavor. The color is beautiful, but the flavor is quite light. When I overleaf, there’s more flavor, but it’s still mostly empty. I get some fruitiness and starchiness, but not one particular fruit.

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77

TeaTiff Traveling Tea Box | No. 33

I love coconut chai blends, my favorite being from Satori Tea Company. This doesn’t quite reach that level for me, but I’m really enjoying the creamy coconut goodness.

Flavors: Coconut

Preparation
Boiling 6 min, 0 sec 2 tsp 8 OZ / 236 ML

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Y’know, I’ve been trying to do tasting notes chronologically and yet I still somehow managed to miss writing one of the Vancouver shop teas we tried!

Treasure Green actually ended up being one of my favourite stores we visited. Though I didn’t get a whole lot of tea, I did walk away with a beautiful gaiwan and the sales rep was probably the best and most enjoyable to talk to of any of the shops we went to. You could just really tell he was having the best time being there, and was super knowledgeable and friendly.

We samples of the their iced tea recipes while there. He did give us a run down of how it was made and what the ingredients were, but I can’t recall all of them. Only that it used one of their green teas iced as the base with additions of honey and freshly muddled mint among other ingredients. It was really refreshing with a crisp, cooling minty finish and the perfect amount of sweetness from the honey to make the more vegetal and grassy notes of the tea really pop and feel lush.

It was strange because, stylistically, the iced tea menu was so different from the types of teas the shop was selling (kind of like Paragon), but it was just so good and you could tell that there had been a lot of care taken to make sure it wasn’t made with just any green tea but, rather, using one that would really specifically compliment the other fresh ingredients.

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drank 1001 Nights by Special Teas
15575 tasting notes

This was another one my mom picked up. From my memory, it’s a green and black blend with jasmine and either peach or mango? I think peach. I found it a little underwhelming. Fruitier than floral but still managed to be kind of perfumey and off putting in its finishing notes, which made me think of licking a Lush Bath Bomb. Not the worst cosmetic you could lick, but I still wouldn’t recommend doing it.

Overall I think it’ll probably just be a forgettable tea among the thousands I’ve tried.

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Cold Brew!

This is the one tea from Special Teas that my mom and I both bought. I ended up cold brewing it to sip on during one of the days in Victoria where our primary activity was outside the city as I knew I’d want tea for the road.

I liked chilled Genmaicha a lot, so predictably those toastier notes were as delicious cold as I’d expected. It’ll be interesting to see if the flavour balance is the same or similar when hot, but cold I thought the sweetness and bright notes of the apple popped more than expected but with that pleasant maple finish. I love the idea of a maple genmaicha, and maple and apple also taste wonderful together. As a blend, it’s sort of like DT’s now discontinued Movie Night but toastier.

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After we took the ferry into Victoria our first stop was a perogie bar for lunch. As we were leaving the bar, we looked across the street and not four feet from where we’d parked was Special Teas – we’d completely missed it initially in our rush to fill our bellies!

Special Teas was a store I’d actually ruled out of my shopping list because I hadn’t heard of them before and I needed to balance my desire for tea shopping with my mom’s desire to do other shit. However, the fates must have been smiling down on me so we took advantage of the convenience of already being at the store to check this one off the list as well!

I picked up a decent haul of teas, but my mom actually grabbed a few things too – all green tea blends, which was surprising. Like I did with her Murchie’s haul, I made sure to steep a cup of each of them during the remainder of our trip. Aside from our one overlap tea we had both purchased, this was the one I enjoyed more from her two others. I didn’t expect to like it, the ingredients list is sort of wild and all over the place. However, when my initial sips were surprisingly just as creamy as they were fruity I sort of softened to the blend…

It tastes a little like vanilla custard, but if you crossed it with just a little bit of bubblegum and a handful of different tropical fruits – possibly the strongest of which was the sweet ripe pineapple note that poked through. I didn’t taste either the moringa or spirulina, for which I am thankful. Definitely a weirdly “smoothie bowl” type of vibe. I doubt I’d revisit this one, but seeing as it was essentially a free cup of tea I also can’t really complain about it. Weird as it was, it was pretty solid!

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As I mentioned in a previous tasting note, it was actually kind of hard to find local RTD companies that were tea related so when we came across this company on our first full day in Victoria I seized the opportunity.

They’re actually not a tea company, as you may have guess from the name. What they make is “honey water”. Definitely not my first time seeing these types of honey beverages, but it was my first time trying one. The drink was actually less sweet than I had braced myself for, but the honey note was strong with more of a creamed honey/honeycomb kind of vibe where you can sort of taste the beeswax just a little. In contrast the Earl Grey notes were light, but I did feel the bergamot was distinct in its unique citrus flavour with a equally present vanilla note as well. Subtle, but more refreshing than I’d expected it to be and I was kind of just happy to be getting more of the taste for local RTDs that I’d hoped for initially.

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Had this in the evening after our second Vancouver Day! Definitely a simple blend, but I liked the semi-sweet lemon notes and the fresh, natural taste of the zesty lemongrass. I’ve not really had the “citrus jelly” that the tea is inspired by to compare, but I thought there was a sort of lemon candy meets limoncello type of quality to this blend that was nice albeit simple.

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Tea Lemonade!

We spent most of our second day in Vancouver at the Granville Island Market where we enjoyed several baked goods, some beer, a really cool ceramics studio (where I bought some teaware) and, of course, the Granville Island Tea Company! I did pick up tea, but I also grabbed one of the tea infused lemonades they were selling since it was a suuupppeeerrrr hot afternoon.

I thought the white tea lemonade, made with their Pai Mu Tan, sounded the most interesting so that’s what I got. Sadly the white tea was so delicate that the bright, zesty notes of sweet and pucker inducing freshly juiced lemons just totally eclipsed the taste of the tea. A bit disappointing, but I guess it was at least technically a caffeinated lemonade?? Small condolences.

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drank Random Steepings by Various Artists
1541 tasting notes

Made a glass pot of this mystery herbal tea my aunt picked up from the bazaar in Istanbul last year. The handwritten label starts with English “anti” but then morphs into what looks like Arabic script, but it also kinda looks like “anxiety.”

It brews a rich shade of dark blue-green thanks to the butterfly pea flowers. The other components are pink and white rosebuds, jasmine buds, orange peel and clove. No ingredients out of the ordinary to me, but the combination wafts from the cup as something soothing and divine, exotic. Taste is vibrant and sour thanks to the orange peel and without the weird notes that butterfly pea flowers can impart. The perfume, especially the soft and sensual clove and rose notes, lingers in the mouth and gently intoxicates. Mmmmmm. Would this be equally as excellent as an iced tea?

ashmanra

That sounds like a beautiful blend!

gmathis

I love the story behind it!

Martin Bednář

Trying to imagine it and well, it’s not very easy. But yes, it seems lovely (and story is always part of the tea).

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This was the other tea my mom picked up from Murchie’s and, of course, I made sure to try a cup for myself one of the mornings we ordered breakfast in to our Air B&B…

It’s a straight forward blend, and since she was mostly just looking for something really coconut forward she could add milk to I think she’s going to be really satisfied with it. I found the very slight oiliness from the coconut fat to be somewhat distracting as I sipped the cup, but the taste was really nice. Just a rich, creamy coconut balanced by a brisk black tea base. Delivers exactly on what it claims to – nothing more or less.

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78
drank Citrus Zing by T2
15575 tasting notes

Cold Brew!

I brewed this one overnight in a travel tumbler to drink on our second day in Vancouver – it was nice to have something really punchy and lemon zest heavy but with a deeply menthol cooling minty finish. Ultra hydrating as we drove around to the day’s various activities – many of which were just visiting tea shops.

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This was the boba that I ordered!

I would have loved to taste through their entire menu, but that just wasn’t realistic. I picked this over the many others than caught my eye because it was a seasonal offering, so I guess I’m secretly holding out on some hope I’ll someday get to revisit this boba shop.

Honestly though this was delicious! The bottom portion of the drink, before I swirled it together, was filled with a black cherry puree mixed into milk that tasted sort of like an extra cherry forward pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream. Rich, fruity but also dense. The top portion was freshly whisked creamy matcha with a bit of a unctuous yet floral quality. Definitely sweeter than the Dalgona Honeycomb my mom had ordered, but when you mixed the two parts together it balanced really well!

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During the trip we mostly focused on tea stores, but we did hit up a couple of boba shops. Boba Run was very high on my list; they just seemed to have so many really amazing sounding flavours. This is actually the one my mom got, and I’m glad because it was on my short list too – so I got to try some more than just the one I’d ordered!

Essentially it was kind of like a normal matcha boba – milk based with the standard tapioca pearls. Very fresh, smooth matcha as well. Not sweetened either. Well, that is, not sweetened aside from the many shards of broken up dalgona honeycomb that they topped the drink with. Picture the dalgona candy from Squid Game – exactly that! It was cool because they slowly dissolved into the drink, and as they did they added a little burnt sugar/sponge toffee type flavour that gradually increased the sweetness level.

Very tasty, and also beautiful looking before they started melting into the drink.

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We actually went to two Murchie’s locations during the trip – one in Vancouver and one in Victoria. The Victoria location was the one I was most interested in going to as it’s their flagship store, and the space is just beautiful looking. However, we were a little worried we might not have the time in Victoria among our other activities and I really wanted to make sure I got to buy a bunch of AJ’s new blends, so we slotted in one of the Vancouver spots to shop at as a safe guard.

This is actually one of two teas that my mom picked up for herself but, as our Air B&B had an electric kettle, I took advantage of getting to try a few more teas than the ones I bought for myself by brewing up a cup the ones she had purchased in the mornings the following days.

We had a bit of a fun tasting and guessing game with this blend as we tried to figure out the different flavours in the mix. It made for a pretty solidly full bodied cuppa with just a nice little bite of tannin, though that might be more from my penchant to overleaf and over steep black teas. Both fruity and floral, it was interesting how it simultaneously tasted very distinct in its tasting notes but also perfectly ethereal for the name. We both tasted strawberry, but my mom also tasted blueberries and lavender in her mug. For my part, I got more of the bergamot than the lavender but also found the florals reminded me of the lush, sweet taste of parma violets. I see now, also, that sweet pea is one of the tasting notes in the copy and I find that pretty apt.

I don’t think this is a blend that I would personally want for my stash as I feel I have some stylistically comparable blends that fit the same need this would. However, I see why my mom was attracted to it as someone who really loves bergamot, lavender, and (in general) fruit tasting teas she can still add milk to.

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Gongfu!

This was our last tea of the guided tasting – it’s also Lincang material so Geoff had pulled it for us to compare with the sheng we had just finished tasting made using the same material. It was my favourite of the three teas served. From steep one I found it so aromatic and flavourful with rich notes of spices and jammy red fruits. Those red fruit notes only got increasingly more potent with an almost over ripe pungency and tangy quality to them. Plums, red apples, pomegranate molasses, and tamarind. Actually, lots and lots of tamarind. Maybe even a bit of a tomato-y kind of umami explosion with both sweetness and a sort of acidity.

I really wanted to pick some of this up after our tasting, but the shop was sold out of sample sizes and only had full 200g cakes left. At $265 for a cake, the price was a little steep for me considering this was only the second tea shop we’d visited on a list of over a dozen, so I passed on the cake. In hindsight I really regret that because I’m still drooling thinking about this tea, and unfortunately it looks like it’s now sold out in the week since this tasting – at least according to their website…

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Gongfu!

This was the second tea brewed for us during our O5 tasting. To be honest, I found the first two steeps to be somewhat forgettable tasting however I did really like the thick yet smooth texture of the liquor. The later steeps were more to my taste with a mineral woodiness alongside peachy fruity notes and a little bit of a floral lychee kind of undertone. I’ve been loosely interested in Lincang as a region lately, so I did appreciate getting to add another lincang production to my Rolodex of teas I’ve tried.

What was really interesting to me was that my mom, who generally HATES pu’erh, actually really liked this one. In fact, it was her favourite of the three and I think actually one of her favourites teas she tried of the whole trip. If I genuinely thought she’d have brewed it for herself I probably would have picked some up for her, but instead I think it’s best for me to make a mental note that she might have more of an interest in similar sheng to this so I can brew something like it for her when I visit later in the summer.

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96

additional notes: SO! This is one of the blends I love from Maya Tea and I wanted to order more during the sale. I did notice that the site now does not include coconut shreds in the ingredients list. I was a little worried it would be an entirely different blend without them. But I don’t think so! Maybe there is an element missing, but I think it is better for the longevity of the blend to leave the coconut shreds out of the tea. Otherwise, it still pretty much tastes like the blend I originally loved. Awesome. The banana isn’t candy banana, which I love.

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