Tag Archives: vital tea leaf

Big Red Robes… FIGHT!

Last weekend, I was finally able to breathe through my nose again and, thus, was able to TASTE things again. What a relief it was (and is)! As a special treat to myself, I had my first side-by-side(-by-side) tasting of the same kind of tea from multiple vendors/sources.

(I’m about to go on a bit of a tangent, so if you want to skip ahead to my actual comparisons, click here!)

You know what… somehow I think I’ve managed to write this blog so far without really discussing what types of teas are my personal favorites. I’ve always enjoyed a nice black tea blend (especially the British blends so common in the UK) and oolong has worked its way up my charts in more recent months. Sometimes pu-erh is my favorite, but at the moment my tea life is dominated by oolong – more specifically, it’s dominated by Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe) oolongs.

My first experience with Da Hong Pao was within the last few months. I received a glorious box of tea in the mail from my brother (currently living in Wuhan, China). I knew he was sending a package, but thought it was going to be quite small with a few samples for me to try. Boy am I glad I was wrong! It was a larger box than I expected and every last inch of it was PACKED with tea and teaware! It’s true… my brother is amazing.

In any case, one of the teas was listed on his helpful notecard as “Da Hong Pao: An oolong from Fujian across the strait from Taiwan – Spicy red flavor.” The idea of a “spicy red flavor” in tea was extremely intriguing to me and I ended up loving it. Since then, I picked up an oolong sampler set from Verdant Tea which included the Wuyi Mountain Big Red Robe and enjoyed some tea at Vital Tea Leaf where I ended up bringing home a good amount of their Aroma Red Robe.

I had read a bit about how one of the great ways to really develop your palate with tea is to have side-by-side tastings of the same tea type from different sources to get a solid feel for how the flavors can vary. I had wanted to do this ever since and was super excited when I realized I had 3 different Da Hong Pao teas in my cupboard!

And now… onto the actual comparisons! Continue reading →

Ahh! How Lovely It Is To Breathe Again!

I wholeheartedly admit that I fail this week. Sorry!

While I have my Monday NovelTea and Friday Photo ready and scheduled for the week, my more formidable post (about Rooibos and Honeybush… just you wait until you see the post title next Tuesday. It’s a good’un!) has been postponed to next week because I’ve been gnarly sick until just the past day or so! (This guy just below is demonstrating how I’ve felt for the past 10 days!)

The worst part about my super cold wasn’t the perpetual cough, the stuffy nose, and the headaches – it was the fact that I couldn’t indulge in my favorite relaxation technique… drinking tea.

I discovered this unfortunate fact the first day of my sickness by thinking, “Oh dear! I seem to be getting a cold. The best possible thing I can think of to make this feel better is a lovely pot of tea.” Upon making this pot of tea and beginning to sip it down, I realized that the general astringency from the black tea seemed to agitate my throat further, bringing upon me another coughing fit. I later discovered that even smoother teas led to a similar response, so I had to give it up.

Not to mention the fact that with how stuffed up my nose was, I could hardly taste my food, nonetheless the subtleties of tea!

Continue reading →

Tea In Review

Introduction to Tea In Review

Each Saturday, I will be posting a list of links to each tea, tea vendor, and any teaware I may have reviewed in the past week. Some of these links will be internal to previous posts, but others will be to other sites, like Steepster (for those of you unfamiliar, Steepster is like the Twitter of tea reviews… with more than 140 characters per note).

I will also make an effort to feature at least one of the teas I enjoyed in the course of the week. This will likely result in at least one image that is less amazing than what normally appears on the site, as it will have been taken by myself with the only camera I’ve got… a lowly point-and-shoot Canon!

The Reviews!

First, allow me to share with you the list of links so I hope you enjoy the tea reviews from this week!

Featured Review

To get things rolling, I would like to feature the Zealong Black tea I was able to sample as an early release tea from Ya-Ya’s House of Excellent Teas. This tea is from a plantation that is somewhat renowned for its oolong teas, and this is their first real black tea produced, as far as I understand (please correct me if I’m wrong, Jo!). Zealong, by the way, is a New Zealand tea plantation (since they’re known for their oolong teas, now you can see where the name comes from, right?)

Continue reading →