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I got a proper full sample of this tea – enough to brew an entire pot. So I brewed it!

Yup, that is indeed a Juniper Ceylon all right. The juniper flavor is nice and strong without being overpowering, the ceylon is perfectly acceptable, and now I have a tea for when I’m missing the juniper syrup that Starbucks made for exactly one holiday season and then discontinued (stinkers) and also don’t want to get punched in the face with sugar. Quite pleasant.

I’ll keep a small tin around; not going to be an every-day tea, I think, but definitely one I’ll keep fro when I want to taste the smell of the woods in my mouth.

Hm. I love vanilla. I love black tea. This one…doesn’t do it for me.

I can smell the vanilla. I can taste the tea. But they are just sort of “there” and not doing anything in particular together. It probably doesn’t help that the tea tastes like garden-variety blended tea – I suspect it’s made of a bunch of different teas all melded together, and I’ve developed a sufficiently discerning palate regarding “tea” that it now just tastes like nothing in particular. It’s generic.

It was not helped by the fact that I had to brew twice as many leaves to get my usual strength.

This is why I like to buy samples. It means I’m not too sorry when I find one I don’t go for.

Final verdict: meh. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing to strongly recommend it either.

Ah, spring, when a woman’s fancy turns to “it’s been almost three months since I finished my advent calendar of teas and I want to try new ones” again.

Since Steepologie figured out how to make sample packets again (they had some problems where their sample packeting machine broke, and so they delisted all their samples for a couple of months) I figured I’d better jump on the wagon and try all their teas before the machine got broken again by all the orders coming in. I trawled through their site, looking at all the blacks, oolongs, and greens I could find – because that’s what I drink. Rooibus? Not a chance.

…except.

I love Mexican Hot Chocolate. A lot. It’s a fondness I developed when I was a tweenager, and it’s never gone away. And when I was in their store the first time, I was very sad I couldn’t get a sample of their tea, because it’s a rooibus and I was NOT going to get a full tin of a tea I was sure I was going to be disappointed by.

And the sample-generating machine was fixed.

And I had a coupon code from my advent calendar.

So I got it. And what do you know, it actually does taste like Mexican Hot Chocolate, and it does NOT taste like rooibus-trying-to-pretend-it’s-actually-camellia sinensis! WOW. It’s actually good! Apparently, given the fact that I also liked Fire Nation (and once upon a time, I liked RoT’s Rooibus Masala Chai, before I got tired of teabags) the answer to my problem with rooibus is “cover it over with so many spices that you can’t taste it anymore. Ideally, chili peppers.”

This tea definitely has a kick to it. (I like chili pepper. I don’t get it nearly as often as I used to because my kids have undertraumatized taste buds.) It also has a strong chocolate nose. I’m sure that the chicory is helping there, but that’s probably the fact that they added chocolate extract to the whole shebang. What it does not have – and I’m pleased by this – is actual chocolate; cleaning actual melted chocolate skum out of the inside of my teapot is one of my least favorite things, no matter how tasty the tea.

This is one I may have to get more of. I have too few naturally decaf teas in my inventory, and since I try very hard not to drink any caffeine after six (messed up sleep is not my friend) having another one in my arsenal is definitely welcome. I don’t even feel the need to mix this one with a decaf black – it’s fine as it is. Score!

This was an unexpected tasting packet that came with an order I made ages ago, and it sat on my shelf, unnoticed for a while. I grabbed it for a quick trip since it was sealed and could be trusted not to spew leaves inside my backpack, and brewed it up when I figured I had time to brew a different pot if I didn’t like it.

Pleasant surprise – I liked it quite a bit! I don’t usually go for smoky teas, so it was lovely to find one where the smoke was there as a pleasant accent instead of being the entire point. It also had a nose of slightly caramel scent to me.

Like most of my teas, I did not brew at 212F/100C – much too easy to stew at that temperature – but instead at 185F or so. Dash of milk, and I’m good to go.

Our tea cabinet is too full right now, but hopefully sometime soon we’ll get space and I can pick up more of this one.

I opened the bag and it smelled like peeling an orange. Which was fantastic. I love oranges. I brewed the tea and it smelled like…tea and an orange? I drank it, and I tasted…oolong. With maybe a hint of orange.

And then I burped and it was all oranges.

I am very confused as to how this tea hides all the orange taste while it’s in my mouth, and produces it in such copious quantities when it is anywhere other than my mouth. But there is no doubt that there are oranges in there, because I could smell them, and I could taste them – after I’d drunk the tea.

I’ll drink my way through this sample, and be confused by it, but I don’t think I’ll order this one again.

I tried this tea, and went, “What am I tasting?” in a sort of confused delight. I’ve now drunk it twice, and I am really enjoying it. The pollen in it gives the honey flavor a robustness that I don’t usually get when I add honey to my tea, and a floral overtone that is pleasant in an unexpected way.

I was not expecting to enjoy this tea nearly as much as I am – I got it because it was on deep discount and I thought it looked interesting; as it is, this one may need to go into regular rotation, which is kind of a problem because my tea cabinet is currently full. Oops! :sweatdrop-grin:

It tastes like summer to me, and in the midst of a ten day span with only one day of blue sky, I really needed that. I will enjoy my 2 ounces, and buy more.

This is a perfectly acceptable masala-chai style tea, done with Pu’er instead of standard black assam which made it rather more mellow. The cinnamon was the most noticeable flavor, but all of the flavors melded together well, with no notes sharper than the others.

I have other chais that I like better, so I feel no need to buy more of this one, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

I got this tea as part of the Four Nations pack, and as it’s an herbal, I went in with zero expectations of anything.

It is a naturally sweet tea (that would be the date pieces) and it is VERY lemony (that would be the lemongrass). The other flavors blend nicely together in the background, but I found them somewhat overpowered by the lemon.

As a hot brew, this would be a very good tea for a day when I had a sore throat (I did not have a sore throat when drinking it) and it doesn’t need additional honey at all. I suspect I’d also enjoy it as a sun-brew on a hot day?

It’s not one I need to drink again, but it’s a good herbal if herbals are your brew of choice! :-)

I do NOT like the taste of rooibus. At all. I have never quite forgiven it for not being actual tea, and so when I was stranded at a location where I could not get my hands on decaf black, but where I desperately needed a cuppa for the evening before bed, I grudgingly said, “OK, fine, I’ll try it. It’s better than nothing, after all.”

Friends, it was way better than nothing, and better than something, and while I will probably not keep a large stock of this tea in my house at all times (because I can’t forgive the rooibus) – it was a rooibus where I drank it and I did not instantly hate it.

I actually liked it.

Joking with a friend, I said, “It’s the Fire Nation, it’s sure to be a disaster.” And the friend replied later, after also trying the tea, “Wow, the Fire Nation really has it together – wait, did I just say that?”

So, shockingly, it’s a rooibus I recommend. But do give it a splash of milk, or the peppercorns will probably go after your mouth like an Angry Fire Nation Person.