Silver Leaf Tea

This was my first pu-erh and was definitely impressed. I will definitely have to be getting more. It lasted 10 steeps very well (probably would have been more but I got busy for a minute and let the 8th one brew for 2 minutes ooops) and all were distinct and delicious

Drinking this amazing tea this morning!

So tired out and my feet hurt. Really, wearing a long wedding dress (mine was teal!) made wearing pretty heeled shoes pointless, but I did anyway and regret it. My husband and I went to grab food near the end as our feet both hurt and didn’t want to fetch food! His feet hurt as his shoes were too small and there was no time to return them to amazon.

Nice and floral tea! Mmm, I should look for a jasmine and rose bath salts to fake bathing in this tea! I usually like a stronger black, mate or guayusa in the morning, but I got a post wedding dim sum lunch. I will drink a pot or two of tea there (and watch the husband eat chicken feet, wahhhhggg!)

I was shuffling through my teas in person and on Steepster and realized I never added this one to the cupboard or reviewed it. I swore I added it to the database in Steepster long ago.. oh whatever.

Lover’s Cup – there’s a story to this. This was around when I was starting to drink more tea, mostly bagged stuff. I was with my now-husband (then almost boyfriend) visiting him in LA. We were at the Farmers Market (“T” Tea Shoppe) and at a store that sells Silver Leaf tea. I buy a few packets (brain not understanding non-metric so I didn’t get much tea) with the last $10 cash I had left for my trip.
I discover that the tea “Lovers Cup” was flipping amazing when I got back home to Canada. I drank it all and was all sad it was all gone. Every time I visited I demanded to go to the shop and I’d buy more. My guy, being the sweet-heart he is (but he dislikes tea and is completely clueless about tea) buys a POUND of it and takes it with him as a gift when he visited me… also getting in crap with Canadian customs as apparently you really need to claim tea and it was a little nutty he had a pound of it.

The problem became now I had a pound of tea that I used to use sparingly because it was hard to come by. Very good tea, but having a cup or two a day wasn’t denting it. My coworkers were tea drinkers too, so I started giving lots of it away and one LOVED this tea and swapped me for some yummy teas from Victoria, another giving me a good tin of fruity tea. FYI, the husband doesn’t know I often trade this tea or give small samples to friends/family, he thinks I drank through a pound of tea.

Annoyingly, the store didn’t give me steeping times for this tea, so I wing it. Overall, don’t oversteep or go for boiling so the black doesn’t nuke the tea.

DRY: Floral. Rosey, jasmine. The mix smells interestingly sweet and peachy.

STEEPED: Light brown, very floral smell.

TASTE: Perfumey floral. A bouquet of rose and jasmine. Flavors of jasmine green come out with hints of black tea.

WHO’d LIKE THIS TEA: Floral tea lovers, you know who you are. Also people who are into green teas.

COMMENTS: I’m not sure why jasmine + rose teas = peachy smell.
I find this tea pretty simple but a great pairing. I love floral teas, and mixing different types of tea is awesome too. On a side note, I tried this tea iced and it didn’t work so well.

A similar tea is DavidsTea “Three Wishes” which smells more fruity (mysteriously) but with much stronger black tea (and more fidgety with temperature to combat bitter black tea) compared to Lovers Cup, which I think has more green tea in it.

This tea is a regular of mine and high rated more out of memories – I continue to purchase more of it too. It’s my go-to when I was tea and have no idea what to have, despite having so many other teas.

Trying this from TTB1… I am starting to wonder if I just don’t care for darjeeling as much as I’d thought I did, because I don’t really care for this. It’s not terrible, the flavour just isn’t appealing at all. It’s on the lighter side, in both colour and taste, and honestly there’s not much else to day about it!

After reducing the steeping time I noticed that the tea tasted less tannic and astringent, though it loses a bit of that sweetness as well. I’m still not tasting the pepper people talk about when they describe Yunnan teas.

Another tea out of the Travelling Teabox – I imagin I’ll be trying many of those as I try to decide which teas from the box I want to keep and which ones to send on. :)

It smells like a typical Yunnan – that sort of slightly smokey, slightly tannic scent. People have likened it to tobacco (not cigarettes), though since I avoid tobacco on principle I really don’t have a good idea what it smells like.

It’s not as ‘dense’ a tea as other Yunnans I’ve tried have been, instead it’s quite smooth and surprsingly light. It has a surprisingly sweet note in the middle of each sip before it trails off into a more tannic sort of aftertaste. It’s a little bit drying on the mouth I find, but not too bad. I may or may not keep this one.

Finishing up the last of this tea today….it is alright. After reading reviews about Golden Monkey, I really expected this one to be maltier, fuller, just more of everything. If nothing else this tea makes me want to find that PERFECT Golden Monkey, but sadly this one just isn’t it. I’m slightly adjusting the rating downwards due to this revelation.

After returning home from my errands today, I couldn’t decide which tea to have – the possibilities were endless since I now have milk!!! I perused the tasting notes for a bit and became inspired by JacquelineM so I’m now having Golden Monkey.

This tea smells so malty and delicious once milk is added that I am in love before even tasting it. There is a slight caramel edge to the end of the sip that is so unexpected and lovely. I think Golden Monkey is a perfect breakfast tea for me (even though it is 3pm). Where has Golden Monkey been all of my tea drinking life?

This rating will be boosted because it really needs milk to reach its full potential and I did not have any last time.

I started my day with this tea and it was decent. The leaves weren’t as golden as I had hoped given the name but the smell was very malty. The tea ended up being very smooth, slightly earthy, and malty with a slight chewy quality. It sort of reminded me of the Golden Bi Luo but less earthy. I really like this tea but I think I would enjoy it more in the afternoon as the tea is not very strong for a breakfast tea.

Flavor is very faint, almost non-existent. Makes a nice ice tea, by the cold brew method, using a LOT of leaf

I’m having a Mini Cup of this now…

Now much for aroma but it has a nice mellowed-out Oolong Color.

Considering it doesn’t smell like much this has a great taste. Very flavorful! It is sweet and floral – much like described – I would say more sweet than floral. This is a lovely cup!

Mini Cup

Fairly light in color for a black – not much for scent

Gently toasted nutty and floral in taste. Pretty good

I am doing a lot of mini cups…about half the size of my normal cup size just for samples so I will be logging a lot today.

This is sweet yet peppery, on the verge of chewy, too. It has a nice medium-brown color with orange hue to it.

This is a yummy cuppa

I’m having a small sample of this and logging before sending the rest in the next TTB 1.2 thanks to DAX. :)

This is a peppery-chewy type taste. Not overly bold but still pretty good.

This is an ordinary tea. Simple, but good, black tea flavored with coconut flakes and chocolate chips.

The coconut flavor and aroma is present and will certainly please coconut lovers. It could, perhaps be a little bit stronger. The biggest disappointment is the chocolate. Silver Leaf uses mini-chocolate chips to flavor their chocolate teas (probably the bittersweet kind). Chocolate chips are far too weak to properly give tea a chocolate flavor.

The biggest disadvantage they have is their size and weight. Chocolate chips don’t blend well with dry tea leaves. In scooping out the tea for the pot, we found that we only had 2 chips in the mix. This required reaching back into the bag and plucking out the chips individually to ensure we had some more in the pot. On top of that – how many is the right amount? The fact that we have to think about the balances of tea blending in a tea that is already supposed to be blended is a no-no.

Lightly ground cocoa beans would be a more refined and flavorful way to add a chocolate flavor to tea. The size and weight of the ground cocoa would blend more thoroughly and easily with the tea leaves giving the drinker a more consistent cup.

On average, because of the issues with blending chocolate chips with tea this tea if much more often a coconut tea than anything resembling a chocolate flavored one.

This was only a good tea. Wanted to try it simply because of a licorice craving. The licorice flavor was subdued by the black tea and needed longer steeping to bring it out. Of course, by then, the tea was too bitter.

Need to experiment with steeping times. At 2:30 minutes the licorice taste was too week. At 3:30 minutes it was stronger, but often black tea starts to get bitter right around then.

Not the best licorice tea out there – doesn’t really satisfy the craving for it. Otherwise, it is an ordinary tea. It seemed to taste better with a good chocolate bar than it did with a cookie. Licorice is too refined a taste to accompany a cookie.

I added a little splenda and a little organic milk. It’s wonderful like drinking a peppermint patty.