Steep Me A Cup of Tea
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I drank a full mug of this in like five minutes during a meeting yesterday, and yet I remember literally nothing about it. In my mind, I could have literally just been drinking hot water. It was there, and it was caffeinated so it at least served some purpose… but damn forgettable.
Steeped gongfu midweek, but underwhelming session…
It was just sort of flat/stale tasting and I think that’s probably just more representative of Kenyan purple tea in general more so than this particular Kenyan purple tea. Most comparable to a boring Chinese green in terms of taste. I steeped four infusions, then got bored and just cut the session short.
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHqSIziYQuY
At least the music was good.
Made this for myself earlier in the week, as an iced tea.
I splurged the day before, and I bought a couple “rock sugar straws” from a local coffee shop; basically they’re straws where the ends have been dipped in a flavoured rock sugar so that when you stir them into a drink/drink out of them they flavour the drink! So when I made this one, it was specifically with the intention of pairing it with one of the rock sugar straws and creating a flavoured iced tea, apart from the cucumber in the tea itself.
The flavour I selected was pineapple; and really I am a total sucker for anything pineapple flavoured but I also thought that since this is a white tea that isn’t overly flavoured and that has a bit of a more natural flavour then pineapple would be a great accompaniment because it would really stand out without over complicating the drink. I think it was a stroke of genius on my part because the tea itself is super cool, and crisp with all the sort of vegetal/cucumber notes that I LOVE but the pineapple added a really nice sweetness and tropical spin to the flavour that catapulted this tea into such an elevated level of tropical, refreshing goodness!
YESH!
Cold Brew!
Sipping this one currently and I’m enjoying it a lot today – it’s got a light and sweet balance of blueberry and red fruit notes but then finishes with a crisp and vegetal cucumber flavour from the Shou Mei base used. Light, refreshing and pretty summer appropriate!
Cold Brew – for the 4th of July…
It just felt appropriate to brew this on the 4th this year, even though I’m not American. I was on a heavy white tea binge anyway – and it was as good an excuse as any. It was refreshing, because cold brewed white tea is basically always refreshing, but not particularly great tasting/flavourful aside from that point. Just a muted/wonky tasting artificial berry vibe…
Kind of just like a sweet and generically fruity white tea – nothing terrible but nothing remarkable either. I have much more of this left that I realized so I might try to cold brew some of it to burn through it a little faster. It’s unfortunately a bit of a forgettable blend; teas that tend to just be super mediocre versus horrible or fantastic tend to fall into that weird place where they just totally escape your attention…
Revisiting this one last weekend; it’s been a while since I last had it. The pomegranate flavour is actually pretty nice, but the white tea that’s used as the base is definitely lower quality and is pretty dull/flat – sort of a papery taste? It’s a shame, ‘cause this could be a fun concept if the base was nicer. To be fair, I don’t recall it being that expensive at all so it’s probably decent all in all for the price…
Cold Brew!
Sometimes you just really need a sweet treat, so I definitely PILED this cold brew with whipped cream, and while I know that got into a little bit of the tea and acted as both a sweetener and a little bit of a “cream” of sorts, if we’re being completely honest almost all the whipped cream was consumed before I even started to drink the tea…
It was good though; way better than the first time that I tried it out. The flavour was a little smoother, and I felt like I could really taste the pomegranate in the blend; mostly ‘cause it had a sort of grenadine like sweetness. Definitely not a lot of blueberry though, and I wouldn’t call this one a super high quality white either. However, an improvement is an improvement and I think it’s better to focus on the wins!
Couldn’t resist buying this one on vacation in late November; it seemed like a missed opportunity to not get at least one overly American themed tea whilst in America. Plus, the flavours looked interesting too!
I don’t like this one nearly as much as I do the other white tea that I purchased from this company and have already tried (I believe I have one more white tea I’ve yet to try still), for me I just got the impression that the white tea base used in this one was just of a lesser quality overall? It was sort of choppy and dull, with really flat straw and cucumber skin notes that seemed to drag the whole cup down.
Like, the blueberry notes and hints of pomegranate were nice and I wanted to focus in on them and let them sort of guide the experience but I just sort they were so overwhelmed by that base that it was almost impossible to get any sort of focus on those elements and that was disappointing. I don’t really think it was a bad tea overall; but it was just less than I’ve come to expect from flavoured white teas at this point in my tea drinking career and I wanted more from it. I think all in all I’d probably call it just slightly less than average.
I do remain hopeful that I’ll find a positive use for the rest of the ounce I purchased though; perhaps cold brewing will bring out some more desirable tasting notes! At least, I think that’s where I’m going to start the further exploration!
Iced Sipdown (645)!
This is a bit of a sad sipdown for me because I just found this blend so interesting and unique overall, and really tasty. It’s still just a little crazy to me to think that I found arguably the best purple tea blend I’ve ever had at just this random tea store I decided to visit while I was on vacation.
This brew specifically was really currant flavoured; sweet black currant though and not medicinal in any way. It reminded me mostly of black currant jam over anything else. I added a little agave, and that seemed to punch up the flavour of the tropical fruits in the blend a little too; so more of a sweet and jammy currant and pineapple blend. Medium bodied, and refreshing as an iced tea. Made sure to enjoy every drop as I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to retry this tea…
Iced tea.
This continues to be completely delicious and impressive; and I’m going through the tea leaf way too quickly. Like, I can’t emphasize enough how much I wish I had really stocked up on this one. I just… had no way of knowing how much I’d like it.
Mellow and refreshing overall; the fruit notes are all so juicy and natural though! Like, really ripe, perfect version of their actual fruit counterparts. Mostly lychee, but also pineapple top notes and black currant undertones. Gives me this sort of ‘tropical/exotic Ribena’ kind of vibe. It’s REALLY good!
From the vacation I took late October/early November.
I was really excited when I found this one – it seemed like a really unique find to see any purple tea at all in such a small tea shop in such a weird little town, but to find a purple tea that was flavoured in an equally unique way was so fascinating.
I bought very small amounts of everything, but this is one that now that I’ve tried it I’m kicking myself for not trusting my instincts and anticipating how much I’d be into it. It was very good, and I don’t know that a few more cups of it are going to be enough for me to be happy with the experience. Or, maybe the better wording is not enough to be satisfied with it…
This is totally one of those blends where the things in the blend almost entirely mask the taste of the tea base itself – it really doesn’t taste at all like other purple teas I’ve had save for a very light bordering on vegetal/beany kind of undertone. Hard to pick out, though. You could definitely ignore it easily by just focusing on the fruit in the blend.
Those fruit flavours are very bright and lively too, with aspects that are very natural but also a little bit of a candied sort of taste to them too. And I don’t mean like pineapple flavour candy, for example, but actual pineapple that has then been candied. There’s a big difference. Notes of pineapple, lychee, and just a little bit of currant. Really, really tropical and a little bit exotic, with floral undertones from the lychee – such as hints of a jasmine-like floral aspect.
If you’re even around Fargo, ND then this is something that I recommend trying out because it’s a really well done fruit flavoured tea with some great flavour!
The shou pu’erh base is soooo funkyyy. It’s been quite some time since I last described a shou as tasting “fishy” because my language/tasting vocabulary has sort of evolved past that, but…
This is fishy.
It’s also peachy and sweet, which makes it a bit confusing on the palate to sip on. I want to really hate it, but it’s not totally irredeemable in its funky flavour and thus I find myself still slowly sipping away at the mug over the course of this morning.
Drinking this now and it’s not bad at all; kind of candy peach without any tartness/acidity. Something about it is a little syrupy, and the liquor feels quite slick. The shou is helping a lot though – I’ve been having some cluster headaches all week, and shou is REALLY relaxing/de-stressing for me, so this was the perfect cup to make to ease some of the built up tension…
Really tasty cup – which was surprisingly given a somewhat shaky/questionable track record for this tea with past steepings of it. It was actually very smooth though, and well balanced between that earthy/thick pu’erh note and a sweeter and juicy fruit note. No funk at all, and nothing overpowering to the cup. Only critique is that despite a sweet/juicy fruit note you really couldn’t differentiate what the fruit flavour was – even with knowing it’s supposed to be peach/blueberry.
The first tea that I made in the new apartment!
It was honestly just a completely random pull from one of my boxes as I was unpacking, though it’d been a while since I last had it so I don’t think it was a bad selection. It was definitely really, really robustly earthy with kind of that muddy sort of earthy note than not super great quality shou has – but a splash of agave brightened it up a bit and helped smooth out some of the edges, and definitely made that peach note stand out a little more. It’s not that it’s not a nice peach flavour, because it actually is really nice: I just think that the base here detracts from it in a really negative way because of how dense and thick the earth notes are…
Hmm…
Picked this one up when we were on vacation because the sample of it that I smelled in the store was really, really juicy and robustly peach scented and I thought that was something a little more unique for a Pu’erh base. When I cracked open my package of it at home though it wasn’t anywhere near the same degree of juiciness that sample had smelled like. Steeped up it’s ok; it definitely does have peach notes but the blueberry is missing and the pu’erh base itself is just a touch fishy. It was drinkable, but disappointing overall.
Cold Brew Sipdown (669)!
Happy to have finished this one off – definitely feels like I’ve accomplished something. It was a nice tea at first, but it aged a little bit roughly and a lot of the flavouring was lost over time. This brew was majority white tea, with a bit of tropical fruit undertone but no sweetness. It’s not the most high quality white tea base, so without the flavouring to help mask some of that it’s good but not exceptional.
From last week…
Usually I really enjoy this tea, but this particular cup was somewhat underwhelming. It did have passion fruit notes to it and a hint of something floral and pleasant – but mostly it just tasted pretty stale/flat, with an almost “papery” note to it.
First tea of the morning.
I’ve been drinking a lot of bubble tea lately, topped with those little passion fruit jelly cubes; today this is smooth with a mouthfeel that’s very lush – definitely coating my tongue. The taste is exactly like those passionfruit jellies – but with a bit of a floral element (not overly) and a little bit of astringency from the white tea, which I over steeped by a minute or so. Still really nice – a gentle start to the day.
Cold Brew!
This is weird today; still has the sweetness of passion fruit and a mix of very gentle floral rose notes and hints of creaminess in the body of the sip – the weird part is that it’s also quite sour on the top of the sip. Not vinegar or hibiscus sort of sour, but more this sour grassyness!? It’s pulling me out of the overall profile, and is kind of unpleasant paired with the creamy floral elements.
Hmmm…
Cold Brew!
I really, really should do a side by side of this one and 52Teas Passionfruit de la Creme because after I’d strained this cold brew it was practically indistinguishable from the aforementioned 52Teas blend – complete with candied fruit notes and even the vanilla. It was very weird, ‘cause while they are both white passion fruit teas they don’t share any other overlapping ingredients…
I mean, I liked it a lot though. That sort of creamy passion fruit is an awesome flavour!
