Tea Reviews | It's All About The Leaf

Posts Tagged ‘Loose Leaf Tea’

Product Description:
As the most gentle among green loose leaf tea, Snow Sprout delivers tender young buds that give a light infusion of serene clarity. Delicate herbal notes are followed by a lingering sweetness.

Tasters Review:
Snow Sprout from Golden Moon is just yummy and sweet and juicy and Delicious!  It’s very sweet and very refreshing…thirst quenching, even!  I would have to say this is one of my FAVORITES from Golden Moon so far!  It has almost a slight minty aftertaste to it to that I really like! 

You can purchase the Snow Sprout directly from the Golden Moon Tea website.

Dry smell of the leaves brings forward a “sweet” wafting.

Dry appearance of leaves: At first glance, it appears to be just broken tea leaves, but upon further inspection you notice the small black pellets known as Gunpowder. Gunpowder is made up of leaves hand-rolled into tiny pellets. These resemble gunpowder, thus the name! (Now, that is a cool fact). Small green Mint leaves against the black Ceylon leaves and the blackish pellets create a nice mixture. I admit I did not notice the gunpowder pellets at first, but now they are what I see first! It is funny how your perspective can change when you have gained new facts.

I was curious about the gunpowder pellets so I took just one and put in hot water and watched in amazement as this teeny little speck turned into a tea leaf that measured over 1″ in length! As I am watching the agony of the leaf, I realize that whatever amount of gunpowder that is in my infuser basket has not unfurled all the way. I can see a second and perhaps a third infusion in my near future and that is what makes loose leaf tea so affordable. Not only are you getting a better cup of tea, it is also cost efficient costing just pennies per cup, NOW that is a bargain!

Brew this tea like you would a green tea. A quick 2 minute brew and my first sip is a mild peppermint sensation. The more I drink the more I notice the peppermint taking center stage in this blend. Not the lead role, but certainly a good supportive role. Since this is a blend the astringency was masked from my detection radar.

I do not taste the Ceylon base or the Green tea base, one over the other. It is just a mild peppermint in a good tea base. I have been drinking black and green tea blends lately and I like what I taste. The bitterness of a black tea base is camouflaged by the often times grassy taste of a green tea and vice versa. Separately I have to put additions in most black teas and I pour out most greens that I brew. But together, they forge a mild tea with a lower caffeine level that is most enjoyable after a meal. As this cools down the peppermint is less noticeable and the black Ceylon has come forward to take a bow.

As I finish up this pot of tea, my mouth has become very dry. One way to combat the amount of astringency in teas is to brew at a lower temperature and/or a shorter amount of time. My last sip is much cooler and a bitterness has set in that I did not notice when I first started this review. I like this tea well enough to play around with the brewing parameters a bit until I find just the right combo for my finicky taste.

I do agree with TeaFrog, this tea should be a staple in every tea lover’s cabinet.

You can purchase the Asian Mint directly from the TeaFrog website.

There seems to be more and more tea infused chocolate products coming to market. We have reviewed Matcha Chocolates here before, and this time, we have the chance to review some tea infused chocolates from a local company, Tea and All Its Splendour.

The owner of the company, Raelene Gannon, has a professional background in the chocolate and confection industry, and is also a certified tea sommelier. Combining the two, she has created Chocolate t – tea infused chocolates!

We received a large sampler box from Raelene, a mix of packaged-for-sale chocolate bars, and loose sampler type squares. There was plenty for tasting here, so keep an eye out for future reviews from some of our other reviewers, who have it in their expert hands (mouths?) now In the sampler was Dark Chocolate Raspberry Black Tea, Dark Chocolate Ginger Black Tea, Milk Chocolate Temple Chai Tea, Milk Chocolate Passion Fruit Green Tea, Milk Chocolate Cream Earl Grey Tea and White Chocolate Matcha and Sencha. They all smelled incredible, and while I know personally that the While Chocolate would be my personal favorite (without even tasting it!) I also enjoy Chai blends, so that is the first one I decided to go with.

The very first thing I noticed was that the chocolate had bits throughout, and as I looked at all the other chocolates, I noted them in those ones as well. As it turns out – these are the actual tea leaves! Raelene not only infuses the chocolates with the tea flavours, but also the actual loose leaf tea its self – what a unique concept! The chocolate its self is in a bar – that is, flat with ridges, not truffle type shapes like the Matcha Chocolat ones were. This makes it more commercially viable, and probably easier to produce consistently.

The scent I get from the chocolate is that of a fine Milk Chocolate, with a bit of a clove’y, spicy scent – what I would expect from a Chai – but of course, more chocolaty I am the kind of person that eats chocolate by melting it in my mouth – I love the feeling of smooth chocolate on my tongue, and I did exactly that with this chocolate.

The first taste that hits you is the smooth, sweet milky chocolate. You can tell that this is a good quality chocolate base, as it is not waxy or tasteless at all. The milk chocolate taste is quickly followed up with a spicy flavour – I would not say that it is clearly relate-able to a chai blend – since there can be such a variety of this type of tea, but it is more of a sense of spiciness, but not in a hot, burn your mouth way, but in an exotic, not familiar to my everyday meal palate, kind of way.

The next thing that strikes me are the crunchy “bits” in the chocolate – which I know now is the actual loose leaf. With my first couple of tastes, I crunched them, and found it not quite a pleasant experience – I like my chocolate smooth! But with my second round of tasting, I let them soften in my mouth without chewing, and it released more of the chai spice flavour, which was quite enjoyable! If you have ever eaten actual tea leaves – well, it is not a good tasting experience, but these leaves have mellowed enough to be a real treat!

Overall, this was a good tea infused chocolate. I got more chocolate than tea, but it IS a chocolate, not a condensed tea. I personally would have preferred to get more of the spiciness that you can get from a good Chai – but by the same token, this is probably would appeal to a wider audience, like an introduction to Chai.

This is not the only one I have sampled to date, and not my favorite of all of them, but it is a great starting point, and it is exciting to see more and more of these products coming to market – and great to see one local to Toronto! Stay tuned to this website for more reviews of the Chocolate t products from myself, and our other reviewers!

You can purchase the Milk Belgian Chocolate with Temple Chai Tea directly from the Tea and All Its Splendour website.

One of the perks of being married 25 years come September is the marital right to stick just about anything under your spouse’s nose and say, “Smell that!” without getting clobbered. In the case of nice tea from India, the response was “Wow! There’s something clove-y going on, isn’t there?”

While neither of us have a professionally trained tea nose, we did pick up some nice spicy, fruity notes in the dark dry tea. I suspect it has something to do with the area in which Banaspaty tea is grown — evidently the perfect greenhouse environment for teas.

The fruity tones come through loud and clear when this tea is brewed. Because I prefer my Assams on the meatier side, I let it steep a full four minutes before a taste test. Assam Banaspaty has the nice thick heft you’d expect from an Assam tea, but was surprisingly mild in flavor. While I don’t think milk and sweetener would harm this gentle brew, it certainly doesn’t need to be toned down any.  This would be a good introductory selection for someone new to the world of fine loose leaf tea.

You can purchase the Assam Banaspaty Organic directly from the TeaFrog website.

When I was contacted and asked to try the Celestial Seasonings Fast Lane Black Tea, I readily agreed. Celestial Seasonings was the very first company to respond to our inquiries when we started IAATL, and sent our very first batch of teas for review, something for which I will be forever grateful. Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea is also the tea that started it all for me, back those ummhurummph years ago, when I was but a wee child of 5 or 6.

Apparently, Fast Lane Tea was, a number of years ago, a tea that Celestial Seasonings discontinued. Since then, the legend goes, fans of this tea have petitioned sufficiently to have it return, albeit for a short period of time! This tea is ONLY available online (at http://www.fastlanetea.com or from Celestial Seasonings Tea Shop in Boulder (see the website for details).

Now, to the tea. This tea is a caffeine packed punch in the gut. With a black tea base from Indonesia, we get cinnamon, eleuthero (a variety of ginseng), licorice, nutmeg, and an EXTRA shot of caffeine! This is the very first time that I have see caffeine actually listed as an ingredient!

The smell is spicy/sweet. I can detect the cinnamon and licorice for sure, not so much on the ginseng or nutmeg however. Brewed up, you get what you would expect, a dark liquor, and almost Christmas Spice-like scent to the tea.

It tastes pretty much what you would expect – not particularly strong, a very middle of the road, spicy with sweet notes of the licorice. It is not an amazing, blow me away Darjeeling/Assam/Ceylon single estate loose leaf tea flavour with complexity, but it is also not a bitter, pour it on the neighbors weeds to get rid of them tea. Pleasant and non-offensive, a little passive for my personal tastes, but certainly of higher quality than you would expect from a bagged store shelf tea!

As for kick? Well I wrote this review in 5 minutes at 3:00am, after drinking the tea at 3pm – what do you think? Seriously tho – I can sense that it does have more caffeine than I am used to in a black tea, but I don’t get the frenetic mind warp and massive crash that I get from a triple espresso either – this would be a great tea to study with – students take note!

Bottom line – while it is not a “don’t miss this tea” it is well blended and will appeal to a wide range of people – keep it in the cupboard for when you need a boost.

You can purchase the Fast Lane Black Tea directly from the Celestial Seasonings website.