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This was a very tasty sample from Indigobloom that she sent along with the uber-nice order of Sweet Temptation that she put together. Much kudos for her on that one.

This is a really good white tea. I think this is the subtlety of white tea that is intended, as opposed to the subtlety of white tea that really means ‘weak’.

This tea is a little sweet, with a very peachy flavor, and just a hint of buttery vegetable at the end. Strangely, it’s lacking the peppery taste at the end that I’ve come to expect from white teas (so there’s not a hay flavor either, which tends to go with the pepper). This is quite lovely.

Thanks again for the sample! Too bad Teaopia is on their way out, I could see wanting to keep this around. Whoa, just looked at the price. Holy moly, Indigo, that was a nice sample you sent us for a tea that spendy!

Mm… mm… mm… Moroccan mint. Quickly becoming my favorite tea in ze world. Which is weird, because I’m SUCH a black tea drinker. Well, maybe not that weird, as it’s a gunpowder base. Anyway.

I ordered a large bag from SerendipiTea of this, because… well… frankly it will be awhile until I order from MarketSpice again, and I need a lot of this to get through the summer. A lot. MM is by far the most refreshing thing in the world iced.

Visually, the gunpowder is represented much more in the dry leaf. The pellets are larger, and there seem to be more of them compared to the mint flakes (tiny, tiny little pieces of ground up mint leaves in both teas).

This seems apparent in the brew as well. The gunpowder is much stronger in this brew, giving it more of the smokey, heady taste over the sweeter, minty taste that comes out towards the end.

So, still quite good, but more for people who want tea with a little mint, instead of a very minty tea.

No number tonight, for a couple of different reasons:

1) We brewed this at 200 for one minute, which isn’t what SerendipiTea asks for. We’re going to brew it again at their recommendation, and see how differently it comes out (though, we brew the MarketSpice version at 200).

2) I need to try it iced.

Well well, good afternoon folks!

Missy decided we were going to have a darjeeling face off today. We have a little bit left of this, TD28 Tindharia, and the Golden Moon darjeeling.

This particular darjeeling is a first/second/multi-estate super blend as far as I can tell. It’s like Captain Planet in tea form. Out of the three, it ends up being the lightest in color as well.

The flavor of this one is quite smooth, it’s very mellow with a slight fruitiness, I might consider it a peach flavor. It still feels distinctly darjeeling though, not just a nondescript black tea.

Overall, quite pleasant. I have some astringency right now, but as I’m sampling back and forth between three different teas… I don’t feel I can appropriately blame any of the three for sure.

Winner? I think this one, but only slightly better than Golden Moon. And I’d be lying if ‘availability’ didn’t come into play on this (I know I’m going to keep buying from Upton for other teas, so my Darjeeling might as well come from there, amiright?).

Missy decided we were going to have a darjeeling face off today. We have a little bit left of this, the TD60 blend, and the Golden Moon darjeeling.

This one is a single estate, second flush darjeeling. It’s a darker colored liquor. It’s kind of funny. We used to drink all of our teas in our big super mugs (~18 oz), but we just picked up a handful of clear glass mugs because Missy wanted to see the teas she brewed. So now that I can more appropriately ‘see’ the color of the teas, I feel like it isn’t fair of me to NOT describe the color of the tea. Maybe this makes no sense, but if you’re following me, you’re probably used to me not making sense!

The flavor on this one is VERY fruity. I know that darjeeling teas have the ‘muscatel’ flavor that is so coveted, and I think this one is definitely a good example of that. I don’t really like the name of that though, sounds way too poshy. It’s grape, people! GRAAAAAPE. Muscatel just confused people, and, well, makes your tea sound stinky.

Anyway, this one is kind of grape first, ask tea questions later. This isn’t inherently bad, and to be honest the fact that the flavor was a little more HI I WEAR PURPLE made me think it was better than the TD60 blend. More flavor = more betterer, right? Well, no. As I finished this cup (i.e. kept drinking it straight instead of flitting between three different cups of tea), the flavor really started to get… well, annoying. Basically, it was a lot better in moderation.

Nod goes to TD60.

Missy decided we were going to have a darjeeling face off today. We have a little bit left of the ones we bought from Upton, and the one from Golden Moon.

I evidently never reviewed this one before, silly me. Golden Moon refers to this as an ‘Autumnul’ darjeeling from the Makaibari estate. As far as I can tell, Autumnul is a third flush, which is kind of amusing to me for whatever crazy reason. Of the three darjeelings today, this one was the darkest, looks more like standard black tea.

The flavor of this tea is good. If you really like that grape flavor of darjeelings, but don’t want it to overpower (I’m looking at you, TD28!), then this is probably the tea for you. The fruity flavor is prominent, but is a little bit earthier, and co-exists with the tea flavors quite well. It still tastes like I’m drinking a black tea, which makes me happy!

There’s also a sweetness to this tea, actually to most Golden Moon teas that I’ve tried seem inexplicably sweet. Supposedly this is a straight darjeeling, but it wouldn’t surprise me if part of their blending process involved sweetening their teas. Or, as an alternative, they only source teas that are naturally a bit sweeter than others. It’s totally possible (and probably an excellent business strategy, really, since you’re catering to all of us pre-diabetic americans).

Of the eight teas I’ve tried from GM, this is easily the best. It is definitely a solid tea that I would enjoy having around.

The TD60 from Upton gets the nod for darjeeling-I’ll-keep-in-stock. Though, they are distinctly different enough that both could fill out a well rounded tea cabinet. I just happen to want a lot of other teas from Upton kept around, so including the TD60 seems the easier route.

Hrmm…

The coconut and licorice in this tea do some weird magical trick to almost end up tasting like nutmeg. It’s a little interesting.

Not good, necessarily. Just interesting. As it cools a little bit, the coconut becomes more prominent, which makes me think this might be a completely different tea once it’s iced.

(a few minutes pass)

This really is getting better as it cools. My rating of it ‘hot’ would be way lower than my rating of it ‘luke-warm’. Which, well, makes very little sense in my head. So, I’m not giving it a number until I try it iced.

To call myself ‘uneducated’ on green teas would be an understatement. A few months ago, reading the reviews on many of the higher quality green teas here on good old Steepster was somewhat confusing. Most of my green tea experience was the green tea Sobe that my sister always bought, or the occasional Jasmine Green that you get from Chinese restaurants.

With that, a lot of my ‘thinking’ on green tea still runs familiar tracks, and tries to discern the differences. In my head, I often say “this tastes a lot like x, but the differences are a, b, and c”. Sometimes I say that out loud. If I’m lucky, Missy is within earshot and I look less like an idiot babbling at himself.

Take this Dragon Well, for example. This tastes a lot like the Tai Ping Hou Kui from Teavivre that I drank a few days ago, except it’s a little less flavorful. It has the same sweet tones to it, but it’s significantly less sweet. It has a very roasted vegetable flavor to it… but it’s a little less buttery, toasted vegetables, and a little more steamy, swampy vegetables.

All in all, it’s pretty tasty for a green tea. However, I can’t see ever going for this while that Tai Ping was still available.

Has anyone else had both a Dragon Well and the Tai Ping Hou Kui? Are they remarkably similar, just of varied degrees of excellence?

To me, green kangaroo has much lighter of that typical woodsy aftertaste found in it’s more crimson tinged cousin. So, in a lot of situations, I enjoy it. This one has pear… and creaminess… and the sample was like a dollar!

Upton says to brew this for about 8 minutes. Missy uses a little android app called Tea Tips (I think) to set little individual timers. After what I’m guessing to be about 15 minutes, I realized that the timer wasn’t going to go off ;). So this was a little overbrewed. But you know what, it didn’t seem to hurt anything at all.

The pear on this is a little bit on the sour-candy side of pear. It balances the sweet woodsy kangaroo flavor perfectly though, with just a light touch of the cream at the end to tie it all together (the cream may be a lot stronger when not steeped for seven epochs). This is really quite delightful, and probably one of the best kangaroos I think I’ve ever had. This is totally worth keeping around.