Kiani Tea

Kiani Tea Advent Calendar 2021 – Day 2

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy having a (generally) unflavored advent calendar? Well, I’m mentioning it again. :D

This isn’t on the website, but it’s a lovely Chinese green tea with a gentle flavor. Lots of creamy beaniness going on, perhaps edamame and snow peas mixed with cooked green beans. Smooth and fairly delicate, but there’s also a touch of savory smoke in the background that gives it slightly more heft. I’m also tasting some raw grain notes that contribute a bit of “chew” to the mix. Then there’s a light minerality that reminds me of drinking water from a rocky stream, and just a kiss of apricot skin at the end of the sip. I don’t taste much of the sweetness of the apricot, but the flavor and texture of the skin is there.

A very pleasant gentle Chinese green! I’m not sure there’s anything all that special about it, but I also steeped it Western style which tends to obscure some of the subtleties heh. Lovely relaxing tea for the afternoon! :)

Adventaggedon Day 1: Tea 6/7

So this tea absolutely wins the award today for prettiest tea in the advent! I cracked open the sample and much to my surprise the tea leaf was coated in a generous amount of golden luster dust. Steeped it just made for a stunning cup of tea with large swirls of golden glitter – memorizing to watch!

It was a bit trippy to taste because it did just taste like a pretty robust and sweet English Breakfast with the typical malt and raisin notes. Delicious, for sure! However when you see something as glitzy and out there are plumes of golden glitter you kind of expect more… flavour? Maybe it’s just because most luster dust teas I’ve come across are SUPER flavoured but having that natural tasting black tea and the tasteless glitter was weird. Pleasant. But weird.

I’m now VERY excited to see what else Kiani has in store though!

Kiani Tea Advent Calendar 2021 – Day 1

Yay, I’m so excited to have a mostly unflavored advent this year! I know Kiani Tea isn’t really known around these parts, but she’s fairly popular with some of my Instagram tea friends as a purveyor of mostly single origin straight teas. And this is her first year offering an advent calendar!

Starting off with a bang on day one with this sparkly breakfast blend. It’s the same as the regular breakfast blend she offers, just with some added pixie dust! This blend is made up of Assam and Darjeeling teas.

I quite like it! I can taste the Assam and yet it’s quite mellow and smooth for a breakfast blend. The raisiny goodness and caramelized brown sugar notes are there, as is a smooth bready quality from what I assume is a second flush Darjeeling. Flavorful yet very smooth and easy to drink. The glitter is pretty for the holiday season, but not something I would want on a regular basis. Very slight astringency at the end of the sip, but not in an unpleasant way. It adds a bit of dimension really.

Sipdown (1548)!

This was a free sample included in my advent order from Kiani tea and, well, to be perfectly honest and blunt it just was not good. I think there’s something to be said about the few pros: the liquor colour is a gorgeous deep blue/indigo colour and it frothed up excellently. However, the reality is that butterfly pea flower generally just doesn’t taste good and so straight ground butterfly pea flower is exceptionally worse. Very chalky and alkaline mixed with bitter almost kale-like notes.

Could maybe see it working as a SMALL addition to another matcha or flavoured tea or something like a smoothie, though.

Sipdown! (22 | 226)

Saturday afternoon gongfu session! This was a sample I got from a countdown box that I participated in on Instagram, and it’s taken me a couple of months to get around to trying it! It’s a Yunnan black tea harvested from ancient wild trees.

I used the whole 8g packet for about 200ml of water and did six steeps – 5s, 8s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s. I obviously could’ve gone longer, but there was Chick-fil-A waiting to be devoured… :O

This tea actually really reminded me of a Fujian black. It had some lovely thick bread and caraway notes to it, as well as malt and wood. There was some musty hay in the first couple of steeps, but that dissipated quickly. Starting at about steep two, there was a lovely deep bitter cocoa note that persisted for the entire session. A couple of steeps after that, I noticed some hints of dried fruit, specifically dried cherries.

Quite lovely, though not what I expected! I will say I would probably just steep this Western-style if I had more of it, just because I didn’t find that much of a change in the flavors over time. Enjoyed the opportunity to use one of my yixing teapots though!

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