Inti Zen

Solid earl grey tea with a well balanced touch of rose. I only had 1 teabag of this, so I didn’t see any steeping instructions. I first steeped for 2 minutes, but wasn’t getting of the rose flavor. I steeped for another minute or two, and I ended up with a nice brew.

I received one teabag of Patagonia Bee as a sample via Taste the World. The flavors seemed promising. I like Vanilla, Honey and Chocolate.

I may have steeped this too long ( I forgot about it while it was brewing), but I am not a fan. It kind of tastes what I imagine a Burt’s Bees chapstick tastes like. It tasted mildly of honey and vanilla…. and to me, it tasted a little waxy. I couldn’t detect the Cacao in the taste, but it was there in smell.

The packaging is so luxurious. And the taste just takes you to another dimension. The flavors are amazing! And can be made as Iced tea which is even more beautiful

Sipdown, 127. It’s been an exhausting couple of days. I got sick a few days ago but refused to let it slow me down on my few days back in NY, so now that I can slow down I am totally exhausted. It’s really hot, but fortunately we have AC currently and so I am having the final of these teas that I brought with me. Hopefully it will perk me up a bit.

I always drink chai sweetened with milk, and I decided this one would be no different. Before additions it smells very spicy and kind of like Christmas… Clove, cinnamon, ginger. I think I can smell the cardamom too, and it adds a “roundness” to the spice mixture, keeping it from being too sharp. With additions, this tastes to me like a fairly generic chai. Then again, I’m not a chai person normally, so I don’t know if I’d be able to pick out the intricacies of the spice blend. But it’s pretty tasty, and I can feel the black tea giving me energy already.

Sipdown, 129, and backlog.

When I brewed this up it smelled like candied mangoes. Pretty tasty smelling overall and nicely tropical. I don’t know if its partly some interaction with papaya or what, but in the sip this almost taste peachy! There is a bit of hibiscus in this but it is deployed with a deft hand and it’s not very noticable. Overall a pretty decent tea for the afternoon.

Sipdown, but I apparently never added this to my cupboard. Oops!

Green tea, chamomile and orange. This tasted mostly like chamomile, with a bit of grassy green tea. As it cools, I got a hint of orange, but other wise it was ok but less successful than the other Inti Zens I’ve had today.

Sipdown, 130, and backlog.

This is an English Breakfast, and in the past I have shied away from English Breakfasts because I haven’t really liked them. There was a period of time where I actively despised them, actually. But I’ve been enjoying Chinese teas and the components of English Breakfasts way more lately, so I was cautiously optimistic that I would like this one. And what do you know, this was pretty good! I was shocked that it was actually sweet when I took a sip! Malty and grainy and yum. Not very complex, but satisfying and way more than I expected from a tea bag.

Sipdown, 131, and backlog.

Microwaved water, old tea bags, and a microwave that permanently smells like indian food… what could go wrong??

Well, surprisingly little, today. I brought all my Inti Zen tea bags with me on this trip for easy brewing and to use them up. They aren’t soooo old, only about a year and a half, but they are close to using up and a trip was a good excuse to sip them down. I’m back at my old office and there is no kettle here, only the microwave. Fortunately, the mug I was using is somewhat roughened on the inside and I think it helped with the water.

I have another mate + jasmine blend and I like it, so I chose this one first. It tastes pretty similar, although the other one has jasmine pearls and is a bit more refined. This was pretty decent, all things considered.

Sipdown, 160.

I’ve been MIA this weekend because I’ve been super busy on a recent trip to Chicago. I did bring a pile of Inti Zen tea bags with me on the off chance I would have time to drink some, and I drank the one tea bag that I had of this one yesterday. I brought an Inti Zen mix pack back with me from Argentina because the flavors sounded good, but they’ve been a tad lackluster so I haven’t gone through them.

This one was ok, but it didn’t have a ton of flavor. I am wondering if these bags would be better two to a cup. It smelled nicely of caramel and red fruits, but the flavor was weak. Well, at least it wasn’t bitter or astringent. Glad to be getting back to my tea tonight!

I am not a professional tea taster but I know what I like. This tea has a wonderful fruity taste without any bitterness and I love it. I bought it at our local market but they no longer carry it and I can’t find a supplier. But, I won’t give up because this tea stands out among all the many brands of tea that I have tried.

This is my first Yerba Maté tea. It smelled mostly like Jasmine but with a hint of something else, something foreign, something good. It tastes like green tea but it made my eye open wide (it’s a rainy morning and I was sleepy), I liked that!

I like earl grey teas, this one is pleasant. The rose adds a nice note to it.

I am an official fan of Earl Grey and adding roses just makes it better.

I’ve decided that my guts have recuperated enough that I should be able to handle a cup of black tea. I’m putting off trying some of the new samples I have, particularly a bunch of puerhs, until I seem to be at 100%, but I should be able to handle other teas now.

An inti zen mix box of tea bags was one of the packages of tea I picked up in Buenos Aires before I came back. I tried their Earl Grey early on in the trip, and when I saw the mix box I really wanted to try this tea when I saw the list of ingredients, with honey, vanilla and cacao. The tea bag has an intense scent of beeswax-y honey, with a slightly odd herby note. Brewed, the aroma is kind of odd and complex. That beeswaxy honey aroma is still there, but it’s joined by what I guess is a combo vanilla/chocolate note, but it’s hard to separate them.

It tastes ok, but yeah, that honey flavor tastes more like eating a honey beeswax lip balm than actual honey. The tea itself has a bit of a bite (apparently it’s an assam), and it almost seems like there is more spices hidden in the tea; it reminds me of a light chai or something. I don’t get distinct vanilla notes, and the chocolate seems to meld in with the black tea. There’s a slightly musty, hay-like note in the aftertaste. I’m also reminded that I don’t much care for assams. And tea bags make me much more sad then they ever used to… I don’t mind sachets, but tea bags are just always so disappointing. Well I’ll be back to my collection of loose leaf at work next week.

Sipdown, 128. This tea was the whole reason that I bought the variety box from this company, because I had a pot of it in Argentina and enjoyed it. I was hoping this one would surprise me like the English Breakfast one did, but it was a decent but fairly mediocre earl grey with some notes of rose. Not something I will miss too much.

Greetings from Argentina! My most recent world travels have brought me to Buenos Aires, and then on to a number of small towns throughout the country. I ended up being delayed a day in my arrival because of Hurricane Irene (no damage to our house, but we still don’t have power!), so today was a crazy day of trying to make up lost time. Tonight I went to one of the big malls here to get a sim card for my cell phone, and spied a cafe where people were sitting with tea pots. Score!

I chose this one, which was intriguingly labled as Inca Rose, subtitle “Italian Bergamot Black Tea” and then later Earl Grey scented with Rose Petals. I was shocked to see it here on Steepster already! It’s apparently an Argentine tea company.

I brewed this one for 4 minutes, then left the tea bag in the pot for the second cup for an extra minute. I’m pretty sure the water wasn’t boiling when I got it. The tea bag smelled strongly of rose with a hint of bright bergamot, and that was born out in the tea itself. This tea was really primarily rose scented black, but that was fine with me because it was very tasty. It was definitely a sweet rose flavor. With the second cup, brewed 5 minutes, and as it cooled, the bergamot made itself known in a subtle way… it added a brightness to the end of the sip, and a hint of citrusy flavor. All in all, a very tasty tea, especially for a bagged tea, and I want to try and find more of their teas while I’m here. And here I thought I wouldn’t find much selection besides maté!

According to the ingredients, it is black assam tea with all “natural” flavouring of honey, cocoa and vanilla. A fair description apart maybe from the naturalness of the honey flavouring. It smells very strongly of honey before brewed, true, but it reminds me not of how true honey smells and taste but of “honey” lipbalms (particularly The Body Shop´s defunct honey lipbalm) and other “honey” products. After brewed it thankfully tones down a bit, the honey is still uppermost, but there is a nice aftertaste for the cocoa and vanilla. I like it a lot for that aftertaste, I wish the honey was not so intense, and dislike the assam tea base underneath, which seems a bit tanninic and bitter to me. In all I did not hate it, but both the flavouring and tea are a bit too strong for me.

Green tea with camomile and orange peel. I can not smell the orange, but it is lovely as it is. Camomile flavour is very strong, green tea less strong. I find it a really pure kind of drink.

This is probably too old or something – though it shouldn´t and the tea bags are sealed hermetically in a nice sealed packaging. But while it smells very nice (caramel though not really dulce de leche and red fruits) it tastes like nothing. Trying to rescue it thought to add milk. Bad bad idea, by some weird chemistry it now tastes almost dusty, slightly smoky but in a cigarette way, not a pine lapsang souchong.

Considering tossing this.

A black tea with supposedly red fruits and dulce de leche. Sounded lovely. Frankly I can not taste the dulce de leche with any steeping time. Nice but nothing special.