Teaopia

Mixed it with green tea and some honey. It was good for my sick stomach :)

This tea is one of my absolout favourites. it has a great pina colada taste, i have had a hard time tracking down more of it though as the teapoia near my place closed down. if anyone knows where i might be able to get my hands on it could you please let me know.

Made a glorious pot of this for friends last night. I am REALLY fond of my new glass teapot! I do have to clean out the infuser by using floss, however, which took me a while to figure out.

Anyway, this is always a comforting classic. Fragrant, elegant, beautiful liquor.

I so wish I could get my hands on more of this. As it stands, I think I have maybe two cups worth less, if I resteep what little I have left from my sample (by the third resteep, it loses some of its vigour). So warming and spicy, and the oolong adds depth to the blend. I’m going to miss it when I’m out.

Sipdown, 808!

This is pretty interesting! I think I was under the impression that it was a pepperminty rooibos, so had been avoiding drinking it, but it’s actually pretty citrusy and refreshing. Kind of reminds me of DT’s Razzleberry, but without the icky stevia. The lemongrass works very well here. Probably would be great cold-brewed, actually! Thanks for some of this one Indigobloom!

I love this tea! I miss it!

I love this tea, and am a little guilty of hoarding it. I enjoy how bizarre it is to drink something hot with no sugar added and taste coca cola.

Bad: It does NOT wake me up. Had it as my first tea of the day instead of the usual breakfast go-to, and I was drooping at my desk by 10.39.

I ended up with this matcha when we got sent some old Teaopia stock to clear out. It’s…okay, but doesn’t froth well, and I am pretty much using it up in lattes and such.

Yesterday at Second Cup, I noticed they have some syrup flavours out for sale that I do not have yet. I currently have their soda vanilla, caramel and peppermint, but they were selling some others including orange and toasted marshmallow…so I picked those up.

Today, I made an iced orange creamsicle matcha latte! About a cup of matcha with a half-cup of milk (more tea to milk, I wanted the tea to be stronger), a half-teaspoon of the vanilla syrup and one and a half teaspoons of the orange.

Pour the matcha and syrup over ice, shake well, strain into a big icy mug.

Froth the cold milk in a separate cup, top up the mug with the cold frothed milk.

NOM. A bit indulgent (90 calories from the syrup, probably around 10 for the matcha, plus whatever milk you use), but totally worth it when it is boiling hot out.

Now I’m trying to figure out what I can do with the toasted marshmallow.

Blackcurrant tea is not something I crave very often, but occassionally I do crave something with a sharp tangy fruit taste that is not an early grey or another citrus base. This one is quite a nice one as the currant is tempered by a sweeter berry base.

The scent is quite strong especially considering this tea is over a year old and it probably makes a nice ice tea. It smells like a fruit compote with mostly berries, including currant and gooseberries with a touch of grapefruit. The liquor is a translucent reddish brown.

Warm blackcurrant is the strongest flavour note with the elderberry adding complexity and sweetness to it. This is underlain by a fairly robust black tea base with bitter cocoa notes along with red fruit notes and a bitter vegetal note from the blackberry leaves. The base and flavouring do a nice job of balancing each other, and the fruit flavouring is not puckering. Nicely Done!

well, my insurrectionist tendencies (ie: plying samples of verdant and butiki on the staff at teavana… hee hee hee) yielded me a very surprising result: one of the women with whom i was sharing brought in A SHOPPING BAG of tea in thanks!!! previous to teavana she had worked at teaopia and had samples from there as well.

i have samples from tiny little tea shops in china town, teavana, teaopia…. although i may now have concerns about the samples from teaopia. apparently that store shut down half way through 2012? and while this tea smells persuasive, i am not persuaded.

what to do when assessing a tea under exceptional circumstances? well, for me i will comment honestly but will refrain from assigning a numerical value…the tea was a lovely thought, but i’m wondering if it is stale.

i love almond, i love the taste of baking in tea! alas, i do not love this tea. i saw the chocolate and caramel bits (reminds me of david’s teas), the slices of almond, the small black texture of the tea, however very little of what i see i can also taste. a lovely idea, and i’m not sure if it’s as a result of being stale, but for all my steeping and my awesome stainless steel basket technique…. i’m really getting nothing.

in order to lick my wounded tea persona with an appropriate level of stylishness i am going to toss out the rest of this mess and try my american tea room ‘formosa plum’. (very well to do… apparently they’re out of beverly hills, fancy fancy!)

Not really fond of this one. Having had a cup of each today, I definitely come down firmly on the side of Teaopia’s White Pear, which ought to have been named ‘Wonderful White’ if you ask me. Which no one did.

I cold steeped this for about 4 hours. I figured no matter what it looked like it was going to taste like hibiscus, and I want something cold now. It did smell like sangria when I poured it into the jar.

I added honey, since that’s the best thing there is to use at my boyfriend’s, wow, don’t even bother in a cold tea unless you like to stir for 5 minutes. I think there may have been some kind of contamination with this one? It tastes nutty. I honestly do not have that many teas that are nutty so I am confused.

If I slow down on a sip it’s actually the fruit flavors all turning into that…there is so much going on it has like a peanut taste to it. It starts off tart, then I get mango and pineapple, maybe a couple other things, and it fades into what seriously tastes like peanuts and then back into so tart it tastes metallic.

The honey at least brought out the fruit. The jar is still about 1/3 full and I think I am just going to dump it. This isn’t enjoyable and it does not taste like sangria at all. Thankfully I used all I had on this steep.

Thanks, Kittenna!

You were a good tea.

Thanks Aimee Popovacki for parting with a few cups of this for me :)

This is a lovely tea. Both the raspberry and mint are present. Neither are overwhelming and compliment one another nicely. I’m chilling a second steep in the fridge to try cold, but the hot tea is awesome. I’m sure it can only get better.

Update May 9/13: The second steep chilled is great, and I also had the third steep hot last night and that worked out wonderfully also!

I was drinking this yesterday afternoon but it was so terrible I only drank a quarter of my glass before heading off to the Ritz (ohmygod). They just kept pouring wine. I had to hang around there for like an hour longer before I felt ok to drive except then I was super sleepy! Since I was there and it was free I tried oysters and seabass tartare but I was not a fan of either.

And I found people who really want to do fancy afternoon tea with me there! So now I just need almost $60 to pull that one off. Jeez. A bunch of Yelp people are going to Fogo de Chao tonight and that’s $50 a person and I had been like that’s two weeks of groceries. But I guess since I’ve been there a couple times and like tea more than hot Brazilian men bringing me steak (okay when you say it that way, momo…) and it’s an experience! I guess it’s time to save up.

Ok back to this terrible tea. I have no idea why I bought it other than ooh green rooibos, cool name, might be good iced tea.

I was excited to see pear. Then I saw raisin. And carrot. And lemongrass. No this stuff can’t possibly work together, but I’m going to try it anyway.

Ugh it was just awful. I should have probably sweetened it, but you would have though the fruit pieces might have done that even just slightly.

Maybe cold brewing will make it better.

Thanks jessiwrites!

I’m trying to finish off all my one or two cup sample bags before we leave next week – and trying to get as many swaps in the mail as possible – with any luck all the teas sitting on my counter waiting to leave will be in the mail by the weekend.

This smells quite lovely steeped. The black tea base tastes like a breakfast tea, which I love. The peppercorns are so great in this just adding enough spice to make this perfect. I can taste the cloves as well, but I’m not so sure about the orange peel.

I’m really enjoying this tea. It’s a nice mid-morning tea that isn’t a plain black but not too flavourful either. A great balance.

jessiwrites sent me this :)

The smell is so delicious — banana and chocolate. And not a hint of rooibos! I would actually consider keeping this around in smaller amounts.

I’m definitely getting banana and chocolate, but I don’t think I’m really tasting any nuttiness. Perhaps an ever so subtle hint of coconut in the background.