Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Ette Tea
Tea Description:
Mango Sticky Rice is a blend of genmaicha, black tea, roasted barley, mango dices & candied coconut. Very much inspired by the Thai local dessert, the tea brews like a platter of roasted glutinous rice with the coconut and mango coming in towards the finish on the palette.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Mango Sticky Rice green tea from the Singaporean tea company Ette tea hits the nail on the head. I have not had a tea this interesting in a long while. The aroma of the dry leaf is underwhelming, but once you dunk those deep dark emerald leaves, teeny tiny toasted rice kernels, and the stray mango or coconut piece in water, something wickedly good this way comes. The aroma of the steeped leaf is also deceiving, but I must plough through! I still smelled normal genmaicha. Sigh. How could I have let my hopes up when I was feeling a bit betrayed? But then, I took my first sip. And was transported back in time.
I am sitting at a kitchen table, my nose barely peeking over the tabletop. It is a blistering hot summer evening. I must be what, 6? 5? My mother is stirring chunks of irregularly cut mangoes into a pot of rice, sweetened with coconut milk and plenty of sugar. I am absently chewing on the skin of one of her slashed mangoes, trying to suck out all the mango goodness. I wait patiently for her to finish, chomping on my mango skins and gnawing on the massive, surfboard pit. When my mother places a small bowl of mango sticky rice that she learned how to make from her mother, I eagerly grab a spoon and begin to devour all the sweet, fruity, coconutty goodness. I could lick a bowl clean in a matter of seconds.
To me, compliments could not be higher. This tea is so spot on with it’s sticky rice-ness, it’s light hint of mango, and coconut, that I am taken back in time. You know a tea is good by it’s time travelling qualities! I love how straightforward it is. I can pick out each flavor easily and distinctly. The name tells you what you’re going to get, nothing mysterious. But the only mystery to me is, “How did they make this tea so good?”
Sencha Green Tea by Whittard of Chelsea
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Whittard of Chelsea
Tea Description:
Beloved in Japan, this is a tea of spontaneity made for friends and strangers. Spring-picked, the leaves of our blend are steamed and rolled to keep their colour and capture their verdant herb-like taste. Pale gold when brewed lightly it can be drunk hot or poured over ice.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Sencha is one of my favourite varieties of green tea, so I was interested to try these tea bags from Whittard of Chelsea. I used 1 bag (approx. 1.5 tsp of leaf), and gave it 2 minutes in water cooled to around 180 degrees. As with many bagged teas, this one looks to contain primarily fannings. They’re a very dark green (almost black) in colour, which seems odd for a Sencha, but the resulting liquor is a more characteristic medium yellow-green. The scent is mildly vegetal and a little musty.
To taste, this one comes across as a smooth, mild green tea. There’s a hint of pepperiness in the initial sip that’s very pleasant and distinctive, but this fades quickly to a light, sweetly vegetal flavour. There are hints of fresh cut grass, and a vague hint of spring greens, but the overall flavour lacks definition. A longer brew time doesn’t solve this problem; one cup I left for 3 minutes to try and eek out some extra flavour, but it resulted in bitterness and astringency. This one is clearly on the mild end of the flavour spectrum by nature.
This one isn’t a complex tea, and it doesn’t have many layers to its flavour. It is light, mild, and refreshing, however, and so would makes for a refreshing cup on a warm day. It would also make a good introductory green tea for those just starting to explore. There are undoubtedly more flavoursome and higher quality Senchas out there, but this one is very palatable and fairly forgiving. Unless you leave it far too long, it’s hard to mess up the brewing of this one. Personally, I would like more flavour, but it’s a pleasant cup nonetheless.
Cantaloupe & Berries Green Tea from Southern Boy Teas
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Southern Boy Teas
Tea Description:
This super refreshing and delicious iced tea will definitely get you in the mood for spring. We’ve blended our sweet organic Chinese sencha fannings green tea with organic cantaloupe, strawberry, blackberry and blueberry flavors. Be warned, this will disappear out of your fridge really fast!
Learn more about this tea here.
Learn about SBT’s subscriptions here.
Taster’s Review:
If you’re a frequent reader of our site, then you’ve probably already read a review of this Cantaloupe & Berries Green Tea from Southern Boy Teas! A few of the sisters are fans of Southern Boy Teas!
I recently acquired a new iced tea jar. I’ve been looking for either a half gallon or gallon sized glass jar (not a pitcher but a jar) and I’ve finally found one. This search started several years ago when I was still yearning to make sun tea – before I discovered the joy of cold-brewing tea.
Note: sun brewing tea is essentially the same thing as cold brewing tea. The big difference is that with cold-brewing tea, you don’t leave the jar out in the sun, you stash it in the fridge. This bestows one obvious benefit onto the brewed tea: it’s COLD when it’s finished brewing. I don’t think the sun actually ‘brews’ the tea. The steep in the water brews the tea. I don’t know that the sun actually does anything to the flavor. But, I don’t think you could have convinced me of that a few years ago before I actually tried cold-brewing tea.
So I don’t know why it was still important for me to have a jar. I have an awesome iced tea pitcher that works great for cold-brewing tea. And to be honest, I prefer my awesome iced tea pitcher over the new tea jar, primarily because this jar has a very annoying lid. It screws on, the way most jar lids screw on, but the threads don’t line up as easily/nicely as I’d like them to, making it more of a chore to screw on/unscrew the lid than it needs to be. It’s a minor annoyance, certainly, but, because my awesome tea pitcher doesn’t have this annoyance, it makes it the preferred iced tea vessel.
But one advantage that the new tea jar has over my awesome iced tea pitcher is that the tea jar has a 1 gallon capacity. Therefore, I could hot-brew a whole GALLON of this tea all at once and didn’t have to stash the tea bag in the fridge to resteep. I got my full gallon during one brewing session. (Well, technically, it took four infusions to fill the gallon tea jar.) Plus, it freed up my iced tea pitcher for another tea so I can have 1 1/2 gallons of iced tea in the fridge for the warm weather ahead.
So, yes, I brewed a gallon of this tea. I steeped it one quart at a time, bringing the water to 170°F and then allowing the bag to first steep for 1 1/2 minute and adding 30 seconds to each subsequent infusion.
Refreshing! I like the combination of cantaloupe and berries. The berries offer the strongest flavor – with strawberry and blackberry dominating, but not by much. I also get a nice amount of blueberry flavor. The berries are sweet with that familiar berry tart note. The cantaloupe offers a sweet, delightful melon note that contrasts nicely with the tart and tangy berries.
The green tea is a little lost in this – but I do get a hint of buttery flavor as well as a hint of that buttery mouthfeel. I also get just a hint of a fresh, grassy taste. These notes are subtle and even though I think I’d like the green tea flavors to be a little more distinct, I found this tea very enjoyable overall.
Thé Vert Violette Framboise from Jardin du Thé
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Jardin du Thé
Tea Description:
Mélange de thé vert sencha et de thé blanc White Monkey accompagné de framboises entières et de fleurs de violette, un mariage équilibré.
Blend of Sencha and White Monkey accompanied by whole raspberries and violet flowers, a balanced marriage.
Learn more about this tea on Steepster.
Taster’s Review:
I’m very fortunate to have a friend currently travelling abroad in Europe (shout out to MissB) who has been sending back teas to several tea-crazy Canadians, including myself and this is one of the teas she was kind enough to pass along my way. I’m not really a green tea person; but lately I’ve been opening up to the green stuff considerably and Spring time is probably when I receive it the best anyway, so I was pretty excited to get to try this one!
It’s perfect for spring; it’s light, fruity and floral which is all of the things that have been hitting the spot this last week with my daily cold brews. I’m sad to report that I made a bit of a mistake measuring it out though; by which I mean I sneezed as I was pouring, and half the sample fell on the floor. NOOO! So, my cold brew was very small compared to the typical 25 oz. I usually make at a time. This was probably a lot closer to 12 oz. if not 10.
Dry, this smells amazingly fresh with super intense and realistic raspberry notes; definitely reminded me of picking raspberries from my Grandma’s garden as a child. We’d get cut up by the thorns from the seemingly endless raspberry patch (which as an adult I now realize was probably only like five by five feet), but it was all worth it to lick that sweet, sticky red juice from our grubby fingertips after collecting an ice cream pail worth of berries for the night’s dessert. I don’t smell the violet in the blend; but this is already earning ‘nostalgia’ points. The liquor is a really pretty almost lime-y green, but with a bit more of a yellow tinge to it. It smells very fresh, and very fruity.
The taste is spot on; I taste the raspberry first and foremost and it’s everything I’m remembering from those vacations at Grandma’s. The green base cuts through it a little bit and it a touch grassy with a little bit of the chlorophyll/fresh cut lawn taste. Both flavours compliment one another quite well though; it makes the whole ‘garden’ imagery I’ve got going on significantly stronger. And at last the violet in the blend is making an impression! While it IS present throughout the entire sip way down underneath the raspberry and base, it comes through the strongest near the end of the sip after the initial sweetness of the raspberry has started to subside. I don’t think it’s necessarily distinctly violet; but it is nice and very natural. Floral things seem to get chemical tasting quickly, even when they aren’t artificial but this stays away from that. Finally, I think there are some extra notes in here that are a little softer and sweeter; my initial impression was something like sugar cane but by the end of the cup I was definitely leaning more towards honey.
So all in all, I was very impressed by this tea! I just wish that I’d been able to steep up more of it because it was fresh, and juicy with that sweet sensation of nostalgia and all the elements necessary to invoke the imagery of a Spring time garden! Unfortunately, I don’t see it listed on the JDT website, otherwise I’d seriously look in to picking up a little bit more for my personal stash – I’m wondering if it’s one of those blends you can only buy in store? The JDT website is pretty hard to navigate, and there seem to be quite a few blends missing from the samples that she’s sent my way.
And that’s truly such a huge shame.
Pineapple Sencha from Den’s Tea
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
This tea is available from Amoda Tea.
Tea Description:
Loved by anyone who tries it, this tea is a must-try. There is a perfect balance between the fresh, grassy taste of a Sencha (a Japanese green tea) and the sweet tropical pineapple. Very natural & authentic fruit flavour and a buttery creaminess make this tea an example of how flavoured tea should taste! Great as a cold-steeped tea.
Learn more about subscribing to Amoda Tea here.
Taster’s Review:
I was really excited to find Pineapple Sencha from Den’s Tea in the March box from Amoda Tea! It’s a tea that I’ve been hearing so many positive things about on Steepster and one that I’ve had on my mental list of teas to try but one that I’ve not yet gotten around to ordering for myself. So, I’m really happy to have this opportunity now to try it.
The dry leaf looks very much like what the picture above depicts – it’s bright, jade green Japanese Sencha tea leaves with bits of dried pineapple. Some of the pieces of pineapple look a little darker – almost orange – and it almost looks like maybe that could be papaya or mango instead of pineapple. The ingredients list only Sencha, pineapple pieces and flavoring, so maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me.
But rather than actually sampling a piece of the fruit, I just poured the contents of the packet into the basket of my Breville One-Touch tea maker and added 500 ml of water to the jug and set the parameters: 170°F and 1 1/2 minutes.
This produced a very light tasting cup of tea – subtle but lovely! The pineapple is a prominent flavor but I can also taste the light, fresh notes of the Japanese Sencha: slightly grassy and with a hint of butter. There is a nice sweet and savory contrast going on between the two profiles.
And because this is a Japanese Sencha, you know I went in for a second infusion!
The second infusion is even stronger in flavor than the first was. The first was somewhat delicate and with this second infusion, the flavors have developed. The pineapple is well-defined. Sweet, juicy and very true to the fruit. There is no mistaking that this is pineapple! It doesn’t taste candied or artificial. It tastes bright! It tastes like fresh, delicious pineapple! YUM!
The Japanese Sencha adds a compelling contrast to the sweet pineapple notes. The Sencha adds a little bit of savory to the cup, balancing out the sweetness. It also offers a slightly creamy texture to the cup which is quite pleasant.
Overall, a spectacular tea – one I’m really happy that Amoda Tea chose for this month’s box! Thank you, Amoda!