365 Days of Tea - Day 11: Climber's High.

Today I spent some time trying to reach out to other companies for review products. If you're interested in sending me some products for review, whether you're tea company or a fan, please contact me on facebook/twitter. Also I was originally gong to do matcha green tea today, but when I opened the packaging it was completely empty. I guess it spilled all over the box. Oh well!

From the looks of this, and a bit of online research this tea promises quite a bit of complexity as expected from The Tea Spot. According to the website the tea was original conceptualized with the idea of getting used to higher altitudes. Which is totally cool, and you know it. 

I decided to upload two images this time. This is my blog, I do what I want. There is a lot going on here. Bark-y bits, cardamon seeds, even a bit of saffron. Actually, for the first time ever I'm going to list the ingredients on the website instead of guessing because this is a lot. 

Contains: Roasted yerba mate (Yerba mate is actually related to holly, and has a bit of caffeine, potassium, magnesium, and manganese. Its super good for you.), black tea, green tea, white tea, pu'erh, ginger root, cinnamon, green cardamom (Which is actually yellow in color.), licorice root, eleuthero root,saffron, black pepper, clove, fennel, safflowers, peppermint, tulsi, and vanilla flavoring.

Its literally a treasure trove of favor. Tiny fact: Ginger does help with dizziness!

Typical golden tea color. NECTAR OF THE GODS COLORED.

Smell - Unexpectedly, the smell isn't very layered. Its a very simple smell, like "spice", but I wouldn't say its a holiday kind of spice. Its more like its coming right out of your spice cabinet. Its not a bad thing though, Its pretty calming, and mellow. Which is good, because you don't want to blow your nose off if you're hanging off the edge of a cliff. Maybe I'll climb a hill, but I'll need a nap after.

Taste - There is a million things going on, but its not confusing in the least bit.Almost every sip I can taste something new, and different. Its the first time I've ever experienced an evolving tea favor. One sip, its a very mild green tea favor, with a hint of ginger, and cinnamon. Another sip, its black tea with saffron, and pepper corns. I feel like I'm having many different teas at the same time. Its good.

Overall - Although I wish the smell was more like the favor, I think its a really good tea. If you like a treasure trove of evolving, complicated favor, then you're really in for a treat. I suspect that with these ingredients, if you're having issues with dizziness, or sick you would benefit from this.

(3 out of 5 tea leaves.)

Can be found @ 

365 Days of Tea - Day 7.

I've sort of realized by now that I probably wont be able to acquire 365 teas by myself, and although I might be growing in readership, I'm not growing financially. So that means that at some point when the review products stop coming in and when I'm out of money to spend on this project, I'm going to have to mix some teas, and create my own infusions. So maybe I should make Friday's posts always be custom infusions. (Infusion Friday) Today's tea is actually a blend (another name of an infusion) of 3 different teas that teavana sells. This is their own blend and nothing I came up with.

Body + Mind is a blend of  Monkey-Picked oolong with Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearls green tea and Mao Feng white tea. Which can all be bought separately on their website or you can buy this blend. Supposedly monkey picked oolong used to actually be picked by monkeys that were trained by monks, but now its picked by human hands. According to the website its considered one of the highest gradest oolongs. This probably means that there isn't very much in the blend to save costs.

You can't really see it in the image but there is some jasmine pearls that look exactly like the pearls from the other tea. The black-ish green bits are the "legendary monkey picked oolong", and I would assume that the threads are the white tea. White is picked young and isn't left to oxidize nearly as long as other teas. Its usually extremely delicate favor. I don't have any images of the tea itself, it brews the same color as the last one.

Smell - The tea offers a pretty similar scent that most jasmine teas have. Jasmine itself is pretty strong so I imagine it would be hard to have a tea containing jasmine that would smell like anything but. It is a lighter jasmine smell, but only because it is blended with other teas as well. None of the other teas give off a strong enough scent for me to pick up anything other than that. I still enjoy it however.

Taste - There is a lot of potential complexity here, the oolong implies a woods-y favor, the jasmine gives a flowery favor that slowly rolls onto the tongue, and the white tea allows a gentle but subtle favor of the forest to carry all the back notes. Only this isn't really the case, though. The jasmine favor is there, and the other favors are very subtle. You can barely taste anything but jasmine, although it isn't a strong jasmine favor. It is a very light-favored tea. There is two real favor components here; the jasmine that weakly tingles your pallet, and the "tea" favor. If you took the jasmine favor out, it might be more complex.

Overall - Although I did generally like this tea, I expected more from something that contained so much. This is one of this "less is more" things. I had much higher expectations, for something containing "Monkey-picked oolong" but perhaps I need to experience it by itself to fully judge this tea better.

(2 out of 5 tea leaves.)

Can be found here.