Nothing But Tea

Didn’t like it at all. I found this blend like a cup of hot water with just a hint of (bad) orange flavour and no sign of puerh aromas. Too weak for me, and very poor in taste.

The instructions are for a heaped teaspoon for one and a half to two minutes and water at 80°; so I made it with a heaped teaspoon and brewed for one and three-quarter minutes with water that had gone off the boil for a few minutes.

There’s a faint aroma of rust. In the mouth it’s quite mild: there are the merest hints of liquorice, greenery – reminds me of the smell you get round shrubbery and undergrowth after a sharp shower in hot, dry weather – and there’s a very tiny ‘bite’ – it’s difficult to place, not black or white pepper or ginger, not in anyway harsh or unpleasant – it’s perhaps nearer to the bite of lemon juice than any of those but it’s not quite that either. In spite of its mild flavour this tea has a quite ‘satisfying’ quality to it.

I made a second mug with the same tea: I lost track of it and left it about two and a half minutes, but it didn’t taste any different. The tea was still floating, too, so probably good for more infusions, but I didn’t want another cup.

I finished off my sample of this today. I have had this before, but forgot to post about it, which is a shame.

I liked this much more the second time I had it – I messed with the steeping parameters a tiny bit and it made all the difference. The first time, I steeped it at 80 C for 2 minutes, this time, 87 C for 2 minutes. The second cup had more balance between the oolong base and the rose scent, which was a vast improvement on the first cup because that was waaaay too rosy.

The second set of steeping parameters produced a smooth, almost buttery cup which I thoroughly enjoyed. The rose made the tea quite sweet, but not overly so. All in all, a very drinkable cup.

I ordered this as a sample with my most recent order. I have tried many sencha sakura teas in the past and most have been good, but not great, so I decided to have a go with this. The scent out of the bag is good, cherries and also a little cream (no idea where that came from). I can still detect the sencha though, which is a huge bonus. No point having tea if you can’t smell/taste tea, right? The taste is pleasant, I get juicy cherries (the taste of which reminds me of cherry Soother throat sweets, but without the horrid menthol aspect) and the green tea is also very apparent. Yay! I don’t think this is one I would drink everyday, but I might get a bag of itas a standby. It is definitely the best sencha sakura I have had.

A fresh, citrus-y tea. I’m not actually a huge citrus-in-tea fan, but I ordered this on a whim and made it iced. The lemongrass really pops and the green mate is a good base for this. i’m glad I ordered it.

Is it possible to be immune to caffeine? I drank quite a lot of this and didn’t feel any effect. It is the same with black teas and other highly caffeinated drinks. Does anyone have any insight on this?

Wowzee! The dry scent of this is VERY strong. Lavender, a hint of vanilla and also a little bit like aniseed. Weird. I used the recommended steeping parameters, but I think this would benefit from a little less leaf and/or a shorter steep time because this was ever so slightly oversteeped. It was still good though. The aniseed scent wasn’t present in the taste (I’m glad. I hate aniseed), instead the taste was dominated by the lavender. The vanilla and the white tea lurk in the background, but are clearly present.

I’ve just had a fresh batch of this, after being without it for some time, and I’m just drinking my first mug – a well-heaped teaspoon brewed for four minutes, boiling water.

It isn’t really much different to my last tasting notes except that, where I wrote of the taste of warm butter, I now think that element is better described as a touch of toffee.

It’s just as excellent as the last batch and really is one of my three, possibly four, all-time favourites.

Incidentally, I’ve edited the dealer information above but I don’t know how to edit the name of tea – it should be ‘Natela’ with an ‘e’.

I can’t resist writing another note on this. The last one was on a small sample I had and I liked it so much that when the site got more in stock I ordered a couple of hundred grammes. This is my first mug of that order.

I used a well-heaped teaspoon. This is difficult to judge as it’s very light and long and straggly (I doubt I could get a 100gms of it in one of my 200gms caddies) and difficult to spoon out; but I put in what looked like a good spoonful and added a little more to be on the safe side. I steeped with boiling water for three minutes.

It’s an intense but clear brown-orange in the mug with quite a difficult-to-pin-down aroma. I think I get warm butter (as on your hot toast), cooked cauliflower, a metallic tinge and, possibly, nettles.

The flavour has good basic tea in it. It has a warm, round element which has touches of rum, liquorice and the smell of loose tobacco to it – something in the middle of those three, say – and the buttery element again, giving a pleasant ‘smoothness’. All this warmth and smoothness is balance by a slight, invigorating ‘bite’, something like the smell of nettles but more fruity – perhaps half-way between the smell of nettles and the taste of oranges.

I know everyone’s taste is different, but I really can’t praise this highly enough – it’s really captivated me.

I made this with a heaped teaspoon brewed for three minutes.

It’s a dark but clear orange-brown in the mug with an odd aroma, slightly metallic and slightly liquorice. In the mouth it has good basic tea flavour with a slight touch of toffee, a hint of liquorice and the tiniest hint of good sweet orange. It’s very satisfying, a pleasing balance of rich and mellow – a really excellent brew.

Unfortunately, they’ve sold all they had and I’ve only got a teaspoon or so left (I had a sample only), but I’ll be looking out for it in future.

My tummy is feeling a bit eeeeurgh today. We had mexican food for dinner last night and I ate like a pig! Stomach ache followed, obviously. But it was so good! I know not to eat that last helping, but I can’t help it.

So something light and gentle is in order which caused me to dip into the sample basket looking for green or white. Like with the untried pure blacks the other day, I thought I had much more of that! Oh well.

I picked this one eventually. Actually I fished a number of samples out of the basket and ippy-dippied them until I reached this result. I’ve tried this company before and have had some rather good stuff from them, so I’m quite curious about this. Also because I’ve only just in recent years managed to come to terms with African produced blacks, but the concept of an African white is completely strange. Even stranger than an Indian white. Haven’t managed to get my head around that yet either. (I’ve seen them. I’ve even had some. I just still think it’s somehow a little bizarre…)

But if good black teas can be produced on the African continent, the Kenya Milima we had the other day being an excellent example of one, then why not good white teas? With this thought and my trust in the company, we proceed.

I’m always suprised at how darkly white teas brew up. With that name I keep wanting them to produce a pale colourless cup, not something that looks like a dark oolong… It gets me every time. (Why do tea refuse to behave the way my brain wants it to behave? Why does it insist on behaving like tea?)

But colour aside and speaking of oolongs, this actually smells rather similar to the Clear Jade Orchid from Shang Tea. Not quite so much of creme brulee but it does have that same sweet melon-y aroma. It’s not a very strong aroma though, and it takes a good deal of sniffing at it before I feel certain enough about it to make any sort of conclusions such as the above. Apart from the melons I also eventually found a touch of caramel and a some floral notes.

Surprisingly, considering how flighty the aroma is, there is lots of flavour here. It’s very sweet and mildly caramel-y. It still, rather surprisingly reminds me of that Clear Jade Orchid. I don’t get it. They’re completely different types from completely different countries. How can they both have that melon-y sweet flavour profile? The biggest difference is just that the Clear Jade Orchid is much stronger and oolong-y earthy rather than this bright, floral whiteness.

Because all similarities aside, it does taste like a white tea. It has a slightly nutty aftertaste, reminding me a little of unsalted peanuts and pecan nuts and slightly apricot-y overtone to it.

(I know 52teas did the apricot fusion which was white and oolong (I think) with apricots and something else, but has anybody ever met an apricot white? I suspect those flavours would go rather well together.)

I’m definitely not disappointed by this. In fact I’m really rather pleasantly surprised. I went into this because I wanted something light for my tummy and I tripped over a diamond.

Un té vietnamita negro con reminicencias de sabor a darjeliing sin astringencia, al principio un poco amaderado y ligeramente ahumado.

I thought I would try this iced, seeing as I have just received an iced tea maker from Nothing but Tea! I honestly didn’t think I was going to like this one, I generally can’t stomach ginger in teas. Suprisingly, though, it’s nice! The ginger isn’t too overpowering annd the orange adds a fresh quality to the tea. Overall, it make a very refreshing, summery iced tea!

For the first time trying this, I had it hot. The dry leaf smells very strongly of strawberry but there is a certain warmth from the pepper as well. I love pepper in tea! There is tons of strawberry pieces and peppercorns in the leaf. While this was steeping, my sister came in to the kitchen and asked where the jelly was – this smells exactly like strawberry jelly cubes!

I can taste soft strawberries – not tart, but not too sweet either. The pepper adds a good kick at the end of the sip. I didn’t think these two flavours would mesh well, but the bite of the pepper really compliments the strawberry. The flavours don’t overpower the tea base either – it is slightly earthy and very robust. Very good!

I made a mug of this with a moderately-heaped teaspoon (it’s one of those long, straggly teas – difficult to spoon out accurately) steeped for two and a half minutes with water that had been left for several minutes to cool (the instructions are for 80°C and two to three minutes).

I thought at first that I’d brewed it a bit weak as it was very pale in the mug – rather like a green tea – but there was a quite pronounced aroma to it: somewhere between good soil, rotting wood and freshly ripped-up cardboard. There may have been a hint of chocolate just on the very edge of my sense of smell.

The very first word into my mind on tasting it was ‘satisfying’ – as in that advert where someone sips the tea, goes “Aaah!” and relaxes back into their chair. It had good basic tea flavour, earthiness, an Oxo-like meatiness and a bright, fruity element that I can’t quite pin down, but is somewhere between cherry, grape and, possibly, liquorice. Again, I thought I detected just the tiniest hint of chocolate.

I really enjoyed that mug – complex, satisfying and relaxing. Having said that, I can’t really say the same about the second and third brewings. The tea is described as suitable for multiple infusions and I made two more mugs, brewing exactly the same way, with the same tea. I don’t really know what’s going on here: the second and third mugs had all the same elements as the first, perhaps with the chocolate being a little more noticeable, and I couldn’t detect the third as being any weaker than the second; but they were both definitely weaker than the first, especially the aroma. The result was that they didn’t have for me that mellow, satisfying thing going on.

ETA – I forgot to mention that with the third mug I thought the fruity element was developing a touch of bitterness.

There was a mix-up at Nothing But Tea’s suppliers and this note was on a brew made from tea mislabelled as China Oolong (o) (OC04), so I’ve cut and pasted the note to where it belongs.

I used a moderately-heaped teaspoon and allowed the water several minutes to go off the boil and steeped for two minutes. It was a quite pale, clear yellow-brown in the mug, with a slightly rusty aroma – possibly a little musty, too, like a second-hand book shop, plus the tiniest hints of chocolate or coffee and of the smell of beef roasting.

The flavour had reasonable basic tea taste and elements of chocolate and of the black, crusty bits on the surface of a good roast joint of beef.

I made a second infusion, the same way, with the same tea. I couldn’t detect any diminution in flavour and, if anything, it was more complex as now I detected a tiny hint in the flavour reminiscent of the smell of grass on a warm, humid day and this gave a tiny ‘edge’ to it. I’d actually class it as a slightly better brew than the first one.

I couldn’t resist a third infusion just for curiosity. This time the basic flavour elements are a little weaker (strangely enough, the tea doesn’t seem to smell any weaker) while that ‘smell of grass’ hint has strengthened towards a root-ginger ‘bite’. It’s now a somewhat different cup of tea and, to my taste, not quite so pleasant.

Quite a difficult tea, this one – I rather enjoyed it, yet I wouldn’t categorise it as anything special – quite robust elements to the flavour but no real complexity. I know this is not very meaningful, but I’d describe it as a ‘satisfying’ or, even, ‘comforting’ sort of brew.

I made my first mug of this with a moderately-heaped teaspoon but I may have left the water a little too long to cool (they recommend 80°). I brewed for three minutes. I was slightly surprised that the tea was still floating at the end. I could detect absolutely no aroma. To taste it had a touch of the basic tea flavour and a touch of butter and I didn’t really get anything else.
I made a second mug with the same tea and with the water a little hotter, again for three minutes. Again the tea was still floating at the end. I thought I detected a hint of roast beef in the aroma, but it wasn’t noticeably different to taste.
I made a third mug with the water perhaps a little hotter again. This time the tea sank to the bottom of the infuser immediately but I didn’t detect anything different about the flavour.

I made a second brew of this with rather more tea – a well-heaped teaspoon rather than moderately-heaped, but I couldn’t detect any differences.

I found this pleasant enough to drink, but with nothing memorable or impressive about it.

So I made a pot of this with two heaped teaspoons brewed for four and a half minutes. It doesn’t strike me as noticeably stronger, yet it strikes me as a slightly better mug of tea (I suppost I’m going to struggle to explain that).

There’s nothing new to the aroma – pizza base and ‘pine-fresh’ disinfectant.

I’m getting a strong impression of the flavour as very well-balanced: there is butter, conifer sawdust, wood-smoke (and the proper ‘tea’ taste, of course) – but none of them prominent and to the fore, but each in balance with the others – and tiny hints of cut grass and mixed, dried fruit. The tiny hint I mentioned of white pepper or root ginger is more felt than tasted – it’s just the tiniest ‘bite’, and is just right at that, giving that ‘invigorating’ thing to the tea.

I don’t know why I gave this such a (comparatively) low rating as I really love it – so I’m upping it to 95.

Do the words ‘rich’ and ‘mild’ go together? They are the first words that came to mind with this. Having said that, I may have made this a little weak – I used, for the teapot, a heaped teaspoon and a heaped half-teaspoon (I’ve found lapsangs quite strong in the past). I brewed it for four minutes.

In the nostrils it has a touch of pine-scented disinfectant and a touch of pizza base. In the mouth there’s an element like the smell of conifer sawdust, another of butter, a tiny ‘bite’ – somewhere between white pepper and root ginger and just the tiniest hint of mixed dried fruit.

This is pretty good as it is but I’m wondering would be better made rather stronger – I shall find out in due course.

I bought this ages ago and I forgot I had it, but the eNews from Nothing But Tea reminded me I still had it. I used 1 tuocha for 300ml water. After rinsing (30 seconds, boiling water), it had started to disintegrate and the wet leaves smelled very strongly, like peat and moss. I was a bit unsure of how to steep this, as the instructions say 5-10 mins but I usually steep pu-erh for a much shorter time. In the end, I settled on 3 minutes.

The liquor is very dark, almost black, like an espresso. It actually smells like coffee too, but this is only a slight note under the earthy notes that dominate the aroma. The taste is very strong, I should have used more water, but it tastes very…dark. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it has a very deep flavour that reminds me a bit of mushrooms and earth. It has absolutely no bitterness, though, and it is very smooth.

Dry, this tea smells very strongly of strawberries, and of very little else. The scent of the infusion itself is very different: there’s an odd vegetal note in the scent that I assume to be the bamboo. There are notes of mint and strawberry (not at all as overpowering as in the smell of the dry leaves) which mix very well.

The taste is very complex. There is a definite sweet note of the strawberry mid-sip, but it’s not as strong as the smell would suggest by far. The coolness of the mint comes through as an aftertaste, which is very pleasant and refreshing. It’s very smooth, with no astringency. I definitely think the mint helps in this regard. I don’t really know what bamboo tastes like on its own, so I can’t really pick it out: there is definitely a vegetal element to the taste, but as this is a sencha-based blend I can’t rule out that this is the grassy taste you expect of Japanese greens.

I like it, overall. The flavour lasted well through three infusions, prepared as I would a regular sencha. It’s definitely a good summer tea – I haven’t tried it iced yet, but I may put the rest of my sample to this use.

The first infusion I made of this was very weak – the ginseng powder coating didn’t dissolve enough to let the leaves unfurl much. I tend to do short steeps of a small volume of oolong, but for this tea I think a much longer steep is required just to give the ginseng time to dissolve.

Because the infusion was so weak, the oolong flavour couldn’t really shine through, which was quite disappointing, but I was pleasantly surprised by the aftertaste (Angrboda calls it licorice-y and I think this is an accurate description).

The second infusion was much better, having a really nice orange-brown colour and smelling sweet with an odd woody note that I can’t quite place. The taste is slightly earthy, and the licorice aftertaste is more subdued with this infusion, but it balances out the slight astringency of the oolong nicely. I ended up with lots of bits of ginseng at the bottom of my teacup though, so the last few sips were a bit powdery.

I bought this as a sample, and I’m not sure that I would buy more. It’s not bad, but it’s not the level of awesome that makes me want more. The difficulty in getting the first infusion right isn’t helping either: perhaps if it was oolong with separate ginseng pellets, rather than oolong coated in ginseng, it would be easier to get the flavour balance right.