Tea Reviews | It's All About The Leaf

Posts Tagged ‘Red Leaf’

I’ll start off by saying I wasn’t exactly sure how to brew this tea. The sample packaging had no steeping parameters on it, so I tried the website and didn’t find any suggestions. I decided to brew this a little on the safe side and stick to 2 minutes at 195 F and used 16oz of water to 2 teaspoons of tea leaves.

Steeping with these parameters allowed for a vibrant red-orange liquor. I stopped at 2 minutes because of the darkness of the brew. I’m enjoying the aroma of this tea. It has a deep berry scent, possibly blackberries or currants, and I can still smell the black tea in it.

I taste sweet strawberries as I sip this tea. Similar to a strawberry cream scone we have at a nearby bakery; a sweet bakery strawberry rather than a ripe fresh strawberry. There is a hint of darker berry to the undertones of this tea. Something that makes it more complex than just strawberry black tea.

I would serve this tea over brunch with pastries and other sweet treats, or maybe as an afternoon tea. I enjoyed this sample, and am going back for a second mug.

You can purchase the Silver Star directly from the Red Leaf Tea website.

Ginger Peach is a popular flavor combination.  It’s also a very difficult one to pull off.   Too much ginger and the peach will disappear.   Too much peach and any discernible ginger is gone.  Sometimes popular dessert combinations do not translate well to tea blends.   Red Leaf does a better job than most with their Ginger Peach offering.

The dry leaves have a distinct peach aroma and it’s very difficult to pick up traces of ginger.   But that’s a good sign:  the ginger should not overwhelm the peach in the tea liquor.  After a three minute brew, the leaves looked bright green and I wondered if Red Leaf had mixed some green in with the black tea.   The underlying tea is certainly black, but the short, choppy green leaves were attractive.   The dried peach and ginger bits had expanded, of course, and looked quite nice.  The scent of the steeped tea proved a contrast to the dry tea in that the ginger stepped forward and claimed its primacy.  It was not a very strong or tangy ginger.  The aroma was more subdued and not at all piquant.

The tea is a pleasure to drink.  The ginger and peach seem to be engaged in a stately gavotte in which each flavor takes the lead by turns and then politely turns over the position of primacy to the other.  I’ve never experienced a ginger peach that was as successful in allowing each flavor to shine so distinctly.  

I recommend this tea for a quiet afternoon drink or as an accompaniment to a meal that includes some ginger components.  It would also be a great choice to serve as a dessert tea and would be brilliant for a themed dessert.  Whip up some Ginger Peach Pandowdy or Ginger Peach crumble and serve this tea with it.   You will have a sensational hosting moment!  The tea does not need sugar, but I added some for my second steep and the sugar did not overcome the tea at all but enhanced it nicely.   Red Leaf has another success to add to its already impressive resumé of teas.

You can purchase the Ginger Peach directly from the Red Leaf Tea website.

A white tea whose dry leaves remind me of a silver-leaf maple tree. Some of the leaves are silver and some are dark in color. The leaves are whole little seed pod looking things.

The brewing directions from RedLeafTea:

Hot (not boiling) water for 4-8 minutes

I had the leaves in hot water for 4 minutes. The taste of this tea is floral with a hint of jasmine maybe in the background. If you don’t like flowers in your cup, you will probably not like this tea. I can’t really put my finger on why I don’t like this, but the perfume in my mouth is screaming at me, so the floral notes are going to be the downfall of this delicate white tea.

You can purchase the Silver Needle directly from the Red Leaf Tea website.

This has been a week fraught with multiple incidents of hamster-heart, battery-acid-in-the-veins panic. In deep need of a tea to soothe my frazzled nerves, I pawed through my stash of samples and decided Red Leaf’s Eight Herb tea might do the trick.

This herbal tea is ground fine and looks like oregano or an Italian seasoning blend. Had a nice clean smell in the packet, but I couldn’t place any of the components in my introductory sniff. But the flavors really started to pop after a good strong steep (a generous teaspoon to an 8 oz. cup, water at a good sound boil, five minutes in the cup).

I tried to guess the ingredients before I peeked at the Red Leaf website to confirm. My stressed-out palate caught the lemony taste (lemon balm) and something minty (spearmint), but I missed the rest: rosemary, linden, eucalyptus, wood betony, eleuthero, and blackberry leaf, contributing to a nice sweetness that you don’t find in many herbal combos.

Curious about the mystery ingredients, I checked out eleuthero–which is evidently an “adaptogen,” something that helps the body adapt to stress. Wood betony is a folk medicine that is purported to lower blood pressure and reduce anxiety.  Linden is believed to have a sedative effect. (Ahhhhh! Deep cleansing breath.)  I don’t know if a single cup will erase a week’s worth of scream-inducing stress, but I’m certainly enjoying the experiment.

You can purchase Red Leaf Tea Eight Herb Tea directly from their website.

When I poured the contents of the sample bag into the filter I noticed that there were a surprising amount of fannings in the as well. A certain amount would be expected in a full bag, but having them in a sample does not give a promising preview of the tea on sale.

The brewed tea doesn’t have a particularly strong smell. The initial taste is fairly bitter, which I would consider typical of a black tea, but the aftertaste has an even stronger bitterness, which I do not consider pleasant. This tea would be better if it had another flavor to distract from the bitterness, but otherwise it does not seem much different from a mass produced bagged tea.

You can purchase Red Leaf Tea Black Night directly from their website.