Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Oollo Tea
Tea Description:
Alishan Mountain is known for its amazing mountain oolong teas however it also produces small limited batches of black teas. This particular 2014 harvest brews a prominent cacao chocolate flavour with wooden musky aroma.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Ohhh … lovely! This Limited Edition AliShan High Mountain Black Tea from Oollo Tea is absolutely wonderful – just exactly the tea that I needed this afternoon!
This isn’t as robust a black tea as an Assam or even a Ceylon might be. Instead, imagine an AliShan Oolong meets a top-quality Fujian black tea. That’s what this tastes like to me – like the love child of a marriage between an AliShan Oolong and a Fujian Black.
I get those sweet notes of cacao that I’d taste in a Fujian Black but I get the soft, almost creamy body of an AliShan Oolong. It’s rich and full-flavored but not as robust and aggressive as a typical black tea.
And it’s smooth! Oh so smooth. I am getting very little astringency and no bitterness. I taste notes of a woodsy flavor and the aforementioned cacao. Hints of sweet, buttery caramel. Notes of flower and peach.
A truly remarkable tea. This is the kind of black tea that I’d recommend for afternoon tea drinking – it isn’t as robust as I would want from a breakfast tea. But don’t let that dissuade you from trying this tea – because you really should try this tea. It’s so good!
Green Passion Fruit from Tea & All It’s Splendor
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Tea & All It’s Splendor
Tea Description:
If there could be one fruit that best represents a bright summer day it would be passionfruit! So naturally this green tea and passionfruit blend was the perfect fit for this edition.
The light grassy green tea is perfect for carrying the sweet and sour passionfruit floral flavours in a cup. If you’re the type that needs a sweetened cuppa, we recommend a drizzle of agave in this one. The agave flavour is gentle and pairs well with this tea.
Learn more about subscribing to Postal Teas here.
Taster’s Review:
Green Passion Fruit from Tea & All It’s Splendor is the third and final tea that I received as part of edition 11 from Postal Teas. And it’s a good one!
The tea leaves appeared to me to be a Chinese Sencha – long, dark green spears that looked almost like blades of grass – and there were some yellow flower petals in the blend. Probably marigold petals. I didn’t see any dried passion fruit pieces but I could definitely smell the passion fruit!
I brewed this in my Breville One-Touch. I measured 2 bamboo scoops of tea into the basket of the tea maker and added 500ml of freshly filtered water to the jug. Then I set the parameters: 180°F for 2 minutes.
The tea is sweet and fruity. The Passion Fruit flavor is well-defined without hitting me over the head. I like the way the flavor is represented here. It’s a strong, distinct flavor of passion fruit but the green tea flavor is the star of the show. I am enjoying a nice balance between sweet, slightly vegetative green tea and juicy passion fruit flavors. Delicious!
I also like that this is a very tropical tasting tea without tasting like every other tropical tea out there. It’s got that tropical flair without tasting like a muddled recipe of mixed fruit.
The tea tasted great served hot but I liked it even better as it cooled – this would be a great refresher for the summer months ahead! If you’re a fan of passion fruit, try this tea!
Acerola Cherry Fig Black Tea Blend from Tea & All It’s Splendor
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Tea & All It’s Splendor
Tea Description:
THIS. TEA. IS. RICH! It’s full of flavour, body and mouth feel. It’s like drinking a great red wine. We were blown away by just the smell of this well made blend. It was so amazing we had to check to make sure that it was all natural. Raelene assures us it is (along with all their other teas).
The rich sour cherry flavour, is sweet and fruity. The fig, adds a sweet and mellow brown sugar finish. This paired with a high quality black tea means you’re left with a warm cuppa that is perfect for novice and advanced tea drinkers.
Learn more about subscribing to Postal Teas here.
Taster’s Review:
My eleventh edition box from Postal Teas has finally arrived! Happy day! This eleventh edition focuses on a new-to-me tea purveyor: Tea & All It’s Splendor and this Acerola Cherry Fig Black Tea Blend is the first that I’ve tried from this collection of teas.
I mean, how could I resist? They had me at the word fig! And as I’ve confessed previously, I’ve noticed a trend in my tea drinking. When I’m given a selection of different teas, the type of tea that I’ll reach for more often than the others is black tea. Don’t get me wrong, I love other tea types. I’m crazy about Oolong teas and Yellow tea is my favorite, but there is just something so comforting about black tea. It appeals to an almost instinctual need for me. That need for tea and it’s caffeine.
And this tea is quite lovely! There is a tasty balance here between tart and sweet. The fig is sweet – almost sugary sweet and it’s a pleasing contrast to the jarring tartness of the acerola cherries. Beneath the cherry top note I taste the smooth black tea that’s not bitter nor overly astringent. I’m really glad about the lack of astringency here, I think that astringency would kill this blend for me because the cherry flavor is quite tart and a tangy, dry sensation would be a bit much for my taste, I think.
But even though the tart is very strong here, I’m not finding it off putting the way I tend to find tart flavors. I think this has more to do with the fact that the cherry flavor tastes so authentic. This is not your average cherry flavoring that ends up tasting like cough syrup. NO! This is a really tasty, true-to-the-fruit cherry flavor that tastes as though I’ve just bitten into a tart cherry. Except that thanks to the fig notes, I’m not puckering.
This. This is good tea. And as fantastic as it is served hot, it’s even better iced. Wow! What a great way to get back into the swing of things with Postal Teas!
Pomteani from Lemon Lily
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Lemon Lily
Tea Description:
Organic Ingredients: Black Tea, Pomegranate, Safflower, Orange Peel, Lemon Peel.
Learn more about subscribing to Postal Teas here.
Taster’s Review:
For this review, I felt a little bit at a disadvantage. This Pomteani from Lemon Lily was another of the three teas that I received in the most recent edition from Postal Teas’ subscription service, but because Postal Teas hasn’t updated their blog in a long while and because I was unable to find this tea anywhere on the Lemon Lily website, I couldn’t find any information about the tea – not even a photo of the loose leaf tea. (And my camera battery, of course, needs to be recharged.)
So, I’ll just wing this review without a description from either company and without photos. Hey, I can do this, I’m a professional. (No wisecracks!) Well, maybe I’m not a professional reviewer – but I pretend to be one on the internet.
First of all, I need to say that I don’t know how accurate the ingredient list is. I see the bits of lemon and orange peel, I see the bits of safflower petal and the black tea leaves. I don’t see any pomegranate arils, but what I do see is a powdery substance that reminds me a bit of the beet powder that I found in the Beauty & The Beet blend only this powdery substance wasn’t hot pink. It’s more like a pale blonde color. Is this the pomegranate the ingredient list speaks of? I’ve never seen pomegranate look like that before. But either this is, in fact, the pomegranate, or there’s another ingredient that the list above doesn’t include.
To brew this, I used my Breville One Touch. I added 500ml of freshly filtered water into the jug and 2 bamboo scoops of tea into the basket of the tea maker and set the parameters for 2 1/2 minutes at 212°F.
And I definitely taste the pomegranate. I also taste notes of citrus. The black tea is medium bodied tea with an even tone and texture, I suspect it’s a Ceylon. It has some astringency to it and it’s an astringency that seems to build, as I found the second half of my cup to be more astringent than the first half.
It’s a flavorful cuppa, and would make a nice afternoon tea. I guess it would also make a nice cocktail – or at least a very attractive one to serve for today: Valentine’s Day.
Overall, this tea is just alright. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I’ve enjoyed the other offerings that I’ve tried from Lemon Lily.
Cherry Blossom Green Tea from Lemon Lily
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Lemon Lily
Tea Description:
One scent of this tea will encourage your senses to indulge in this Japanese delight. One sip and you’ll be whisked away to Kyoto for the Cherry Blossom festival. *plane ticket sold separately.
Ingredients: Organic Green Tea, Organic Rose Petals, Natural Cherry Flavour
Learn more about subscribing to Postal Teas here.
Taster’s Review:
My tenth edition of the Postal Teas subscription arrived a few days ago, and I was happy to see that more of Lemon Lily’s teas were being featured, especially after having been subjected to three (yes three) herbal teas last edition. I’m glad to find that Postal Teas remembered about Camellia Sinensis.
When I opened the pouch, I was greeted with a very strong cherry scent. It smells a little like … well, it smells like cherry cough syrup. That’s immediately what came to mind when I took a whiff of the dry leaf.
To brew this tea, I used my Breville One-Touch tea maker. I poured 500ml of water into the jug and measured 2 bamboo scoops of the tea into the basket. I set the timer for 1 1/2 minutes and the temperature for 175°F. Then I let the tea maker take it from there.
The brewed tea doesn’t taste quite as much like cough syrup as the aroma lead me to believe it would. It does have that strong, sweet cherry flavor that you’d taste in a cough syrup, but it also has some other flavors that soften the strong cherry notes.
The green tea is light and fresh tasting. It’s not overly grassy but there are some subtle vegetal notes in the taste, as well as soft, creamy notes that are almost buttery.
I think that the rose is the real star here though. I taste really lovely notes of rose! I like the way the rose plays with the cherry notes, adding some dimension into what might otherwise be a very sweet, almost too sweet cherry flavor.
Overall, this tea is just alright to me. I’m not loving it as much as I usually enjoy cherry green teas. I do appreciate the rose notes, but I think that the cherry veers a little too close to the sweet, cough syrupy flavor.
Not bad, but not great either.