Tea Reviews | It's All About The Leaf

Posts Tagged ‘High Quality’

There are toys you can get – the “amazing expanding dinosaur” or “mermaid that really grows” – compressed sponges that once soaked in water grow something like 400%. This tea is just like these toys. Put in two teaspoons of tea, get an entire cup of giant whole huge tea leaves. A co-worker asked me why I had a cup of wet spinach. And the leaves are good ones too – unbroken and high quality.

And the oolong these beautiful produce is pretty high quality too. This tea tastes like a less oxidized, greener brew, and has a lot of vegetal notes to it. But it also has the buttery mouthfeel you get in some oolongs, the floral notes, and the spicy aromas. Lots of things going on in that cup! It’s a complex tea, but manages to balance the various flavors into a cohesive whole.

Or, to put it another way – Yummy! This is a really nice, solid oolong.

You can purchase the Imperial Gold Oolong directly from the Mark T. Wendall Tea Company website.

The Grand Tea company is a tea company that I am growing some respect for. I’m even asking to review their tea, so that is a good sign that they have something of higher standard to offer. Generally, pu-erh tea that comes from the Xishuangbanna mountains of Yiwu in Yunnan, China is considered to be of high quality. The 2009 Yang Pin Yiwu Pu-erh tea is made in the form of a tea cake. It is considered to be “sheng”, a raw or uncooked tea, naturally fermented and is aged a little bit more than 1 year. Aging removes much of the bitterness. However, with such a young cake tea, we can expect some bitterness. Grand Tea describes this tea as medium hard pressed, with a fresh and flowery aroma.

The sample was 11.5 grams and contained not only leaves flaked off from part of the cake, but there were also a few pieces showing the layers of the cake. This gave me a good feel and a visual reference for the quality of the cake. The smell of the sample was delightfully fragrant and floral for a pu-erh, with a high note of leather and other complexities.

I wanted to use my Gaiwan rather than a Xishing teapot as I don`t have one strictly for pu-erh yet. I poured off the initial two steeps as that is required for pu-erh tea to both wash and rehydrate the tea. I used half of the sample or 5.5 gram in 100 ml water for 15 seconds on the first drinkable steep and 10 seconds on the 2nd steep but a little less water as I wanted it stronger. My notes from a pu-erh specialist say to use 7 grams in 100 ml water and I tend to agree. I noted the golden brown liquor and that there was a slight earth smell. I examined the wet leaves and compared them to another blend, noting the size of the leaf in comparison was smaller and chopped. I made about 6 steepings and sampled each one to check on strength of flavour. It did not give up its flavours too soon so this type of tea is perfect for sharing among others with confidence.

As for tasting notes, this tea isn’t totally young but isn’t the damp foresty pu-erh you get with aged tea either. It has the mild sourness of a younger pu-erh, but is also transitional to a more mellow naturally aged tea. It has a unique floral note that sits on the tongue after the bitterness dissipates. There is also a fullness in the mouth that gives this tea another dimension of enjoyment. It`s rather interesting to think the manufacturer has made the decision to sell at this point because you can either drink this tea now, or tuck it away for another few years, perhaps sampling it at intervals to see what characteristics are developing further. However, it remains to be seen if a few more years would actually develop this tea. I think the delicate floral flavours may be compromised by time. I like the packaging as well. If you are going to have a cake around for a few years, you’d want it to look a bit artistic with some elegant calligraphy, rather than with cold industrial printing. As this cake is not a tightly compressed as other traditional tea cakes, you may want to turn to a more highly compressed cake for long-term storage purposes.

The price of this tea is 400 gram cake for $16. USD and is very inexpensive, making about 60 servings from a 7-gram, remembering you will get multiple steepings. I recently paid more than that for 50 grams of pu-erh. Go ahead and get a stack of 5 cakes for $96. You’ll enjoy this for while or give the cakes as gifts to those who appreciate sheng pu-erh. Drink this tea alone to enjoy its qualities and remember to smell the warm empty cup for the floral aromas.

You can purchase the 2009 Yang Pin Yiwu Pu-erh directly from the Grand Tea website.

Sitting down to review a couple of teas from Kalahari Tea, one from their Energy Tea line and the other from their Chocolatte Red (Rooibos) line. Both teas are bagged but I’m open minded and I have had high quality teas that happened to be prebagged in the past (usually tear them open so I can watch the leaves dance freely -yes, I’m easily amused).

I’ve been wanting to try this tea for awhile and am thrilled to have some in my hands now. The description on the packaging sounds so uplifting- “Ruby Grapefruit White Tea – Fatigue Fighting Brew”.

Opened the packet and studied it a few minutes before deciding against opening the bag. From an outside look, all I could make out was a lot of monochromatic dust, not even any pretty bits of grapefruit. Weird. Checked the ingredients list again and I’d apparently missed the word ‘flavor’ that falls after ‘Natural Grapefruit’. Now I’m not sure what ‘flavor’ means exactly (natural chemical agent number 12321?) but whatever the flavor is, it sure has a nice citrus smell so I’m going to pretend that I think that means they squeezed some grapefruit pulp around the Bai Mu Dan. I love white tea but (obviously) couldn’t discern the quality from an ‘outside of the bag’ look, though I can say that I’ve never seen white tea dust before…

Anyway it really did smell nice so I steeped it for four minutes, anxious for the energy boost. The brew color was really dark compared to other white teas I’ve had (back to the ingredient list), must be the Eleuthro Root darkening things. It held the citrus smell but it wasn’t a ‘crisp’ smell like I’d hoped it would be and it didn’t make me feel energized hmmm. Inhaled the deepest smell I could, still hoping for the citrus zing, but it was flat. It tasted really watery, unsubstantial, zero complexity, but I fought the urge to toss it and let it sit for a few minutes – maybe it just needed to cool.

Right, letting it cool was a horrid idea. I went from zeroness to a chemical aftertaste that lasted through three glasses of milk before I could shake it. From meh to bleh…

Note: we could not find a link to purchase this on the website, but you can see the packaging for the tea here.

I love Tea Forte. Every single tea that I have tried to date has been flavourful, without being overwhelming. I also quite enjoy Oolong Tea. To date, I have mostly focused on the darker, more oxidized Formosa Oolongs, and enjoy the robust flavours that they produce. With that in mind, I reached for the Tea Forte Silk Oolong this morning to give it a try.

First of all, Tea Forte has packaging nailed. The Chest that was sent to us contains the teas nicely, and the pyramid tea bags and wrapping are minimalist enough to let you focus on the tea, while giving you the impression that, even tho this is a teabag, you are about to embark on a high quality tea experience. In the past, I found for the most part the bags give enough room for the teas to expand, so I was not too worried about this here, even tho it is an Oolong that should expand enough to release all the flavours.

I have to say, that this is the first Tea Forte that has disappointed me. Perhaps my expectations were too high going into it. First of all, clearly there was not enough room for the tea to expand in the tea bag. After brewing it at about 195 deg F for about 3 minutes, the tea leaves were straining the confines of the bag. Usually, you can get a nice scent of the tea through the bag, and certainly once it has hit the water, but here, I found the scent to be very muted and almost undetectable.

The tea it’s self is nothing to write home about. It is very light, bordering on almost tasteless. It is certainly smooth as the name “Silk Oolong” implies, but has no interesting aftertaste that lingers, and is overall, unmemorable. Perhaps being used to stronger Oolong infusions I was prepared for a stronger tea, but this certainly is not that. It leaves me feeling indifferent enough to it that I am not even going to bother with a second or third infusion.

Maybe if you steeped it for much longer, you could coax more flavour out of it, or even cutting the leaves out of the bag, buy why do that when you receive it in a bag? You can purchase the loose leaves from Tea Forte directly, but for the price (Tea Forte teas can tend to the expensive side), I don’t see the value on this tea.

Overall, Tea Forte is a fantastic company producing fantastic teas, but in this case, it is one tea that I would remove from the lineup, as it does not seem to fit into the flavourful, memorable teas that I have come to know Tea Forte for.

You can purchase Tea Forte Silk Oolong directly from their website.