1428 Tasting Notes
Krampus, A limited edition holiday blend
Everything from Kobold’s cup is so unique! This bag, in particular, is thanks to Mark. We did a tea trade, and I feel like I need to send him more. I was very surprised that he sent this! Thank you!
The dry aroma is all over the place. Sweet, citrus, holiday, herbal, and vanilla. Don’t get too close to your aroma beak, or it will clear you out.
The liquor aroma is a mix of chocolate, vanilla, and a slight anise note.
Flavor-wise, it’s a mix of cranberry, chocolate, herbal, and a hint of citrus. At first, it wasn’t really above a 65 for me, but the more I sip it, the more it’s growing on me.
The wet leaf is my favorite part, I think. Reminds me of those potpourri bags you find at craft fairs sometimes.
This was not my originally intended afternoon tea. A new can of matcha from Yunomi with a ‘new’ FB marketplace chawan was my intention. But suddenly I saw the last bit I had of this peeking out of the package, and I knew it was time. Being born in the 80s, I felt a nice jive with this one. Grammarly, wants me to make jive into vibe but I’m not doing it…
The aroma of the dry leaf seems to have faded, but the intense 1800s house of the wet leaf is still there. And quite pungent. This is the type of tea that you need a snack with. It’s a bit heavy in the tummy. WOW, that smells so old! I know that sounds terrible, but anytime I open the gaiwan, I’m immediately hit with old decaying wood, mushrooms, some dark cherry wood, a bit of grandma’s basement…. I just had a sad realization that I don’t have a grandparent’s basement to recheck that smell anymore…
More tea. I made a video. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dbqTScIZKs0
Every time I open up these packages, I forget that there is a tea bag within. They look fancy, but each bag I’ve taken out so far has ripped in some fashion. Makes me feel less bad about wasting them by cutting them open.
No dry aroma. Generally, I don’t expect much aroma from a tea bag, though.
The dry leaf is decent-looking. Very small rolled leaves. You can tell it’s a roasted oolong by how brown it is.
Flavor: Roast notes, a bit of charcoal and toast, but also plasticky? Plaster… Something unpleasant is sitting on my tongue.
The wet leaf aroma is musty, slightly wet charred wood, and a bit of deep forest berries.
I asked my mom if she had any black tea bags for a class I was teaching. She brought this. I had a slight laugh, explaining to my mom that not all tea bags contain black tea.
She picked this up on a trip to Croatia and said she wasn’t going to consume it. I will not pass up the chance to try something new. I only steeped it for 5 minutes because I used half the amount of water, but I think it still could have used the full 10 minutes. Overall, I find this quite lovely. A nice savory herbal for any time of day.
Steepster seems to be getting worse. Is anyone else having major issues?
They say this is honey-scented, but I am blasted away with chocolate notes. Ghirardelli milk and dark chocolate. Chocolate shavings. Cacao. At the end, there are some savory honey notes. After smelling my 3 honeys (Manuka, wildflower, and raw beekeeper honey), I think it’s more like a chocolate-infused honey I had once.
The flavor is sweet. Lots of chocolate notes with a honey after note. The mouth feel is silky smooth.
I received these as a gift from one of the ladies who comes to the MN Tea Society meetings.
I found out why it said I wasn’t following two people I have followed for a long time! It is randomly signing me out as I navigate from page to page. My pic will be gone even though it says “You” instead of “Sign In”. When the pic is gone, it has logged me out and the only way to log back in is to exit entirely or just refresh the page or go back a few pages, sometimes more than once, to get it back on track.
Although page loads have been on the slow side for me, the constant log-out problem has gone away (knock on wood). I haven’t had to log-in for several days. I wonder if it’s related to my recent update of the Firefox browser on my tablet? I’ve been pretty attentive to keeping things updated, so I won’t put all the blame on the browser. Also, I have noticed when reading some reviews that I’m given a button to mark the user as spam, labeled “moderator tools”. I have never clicked it, and don’t believe I am actually a moderator, and it doesn’t appear for all users, just occasionally. Weirdness.
Page loads have been very slow for me lately!
I’ve been getting extremely slow page loads and Cloudflare server timeouts consistently for months now… and I honestly believe Adagio themselves are to blame for it, since the problem seemed to start up once they started using bots/scripts to insert links to their commercial tea site all over old forum posts to increase their SEO…
I haven’t been having many login issues, but pages have been very slow to load and sometimes I get gateway timeouts. I think it’s more of a problem during the day when people are using Steepster, but honestly, this isn’t such a large community that our access should be causing these issues. Mastress Alita might be right that bots are to blame. A similar thing has also been going on over at TeaForum.
Sip down. Kamairicha is unique. It has roasty and toasty notes like hojicha, but a bit more astringency like a black tea. Overall, I prefer hojicha, but I won’t pass up trying a kamairicha if given the chance. I’d also be interested in trying this one alongside a light roast Kamairicha.
Dry leaf: Lightly twisted. Dark chocolate, dusty brown.
Dry Aroma: Roasty and toasty. A bit of caramel and char.
Flavor: Charcoal. Burnt Toast. A hint of squash.
Wet Leaf: Really unique. I can’t quite put a single note on it because it changes and evolves so quickly. Buttery, then roasted nuts, then slightly burned raisin bread, toasty, roasty, WHEEE.
Sounds wonderful! I’ll definitely need to try kamairicha, even though I am not very fond of hojicha. Maybe I need to give hojicha another chance, from a different vendor. Thanks for the encouragement, @Skysamurai!
Oh man! I absolutely get it! I have two hojicha’s in my cupboard one I’m not a big fan of but the other I quite like. So definitely try some different companies or even years.
This is a lovely oolong. I’ve infused it in a mug and gong fu style. Western is great for those short on time but I found that the subtle notes didn’t come out as much until I tried this gong fu style. This is my last sip down of this tea. I quite enjoyed this one.
Wet Leaf and steeping aroma: Raisin cookies. Raisins. Roast notes. A bit of cream.
Dry leaf: Muscatel and mineral.
Flavor: Mineral. Wet Rocks. Floral. Gardenia. Sweet wood. Palo Santo. A bit of roasted wood and toasty raisin bread.
