We put our tea in your Secret Garden

We disobeyed Lori, we took our damn finals, we finally got some damn /t/ea.

Podcast 24: We put our tea in your Secret Garden


What: Secret Garden (Tea Embassy)
How much: $5.75 / oz
What kind: White, Green
Taste: Warm Juicy Fruit
Repeat Drinkability: 3/10  (1 steep and no chance of cholera)
Manliness: 1/10 (Like a mustache ride from John Waters)



What: Milk Oolong (Tea Embassy)
How much: $10 / oz
What kind: Oolong
Taste: Green tea with oatmeal... it tastes better than it sounds
Repeat Drinkability: 6/10  (In the words of Adam, "It's aight.")
Manliness: 7/10 (What's more manly than milk?)

Shh... Green Team

Podcast 16: First Matcha Sponsor and Tea_Pain does the Matcha Challenge

What: Top Leaf Green (Mellow Monk)
How much: $14.95 per 100-gram packet
What kind: Green Tea
Taste: A full meal for an extremely mixed-race family. Potato soup and watermelon for all!
Repeat Drinkability: 7/10  (Enough steeps for a green tea and there's a different taste to each steep. Goes from savory to sweet... like my victory over Tea_Pain in the chugging contest.)
Manliness: 8/10  (Because, Godzilla.)

What: Mountain Snow Matcha (Mellow Monk)
How much: $16.95 per 95-gram packet
What kind: Green Tea - Matcha
Taste: Like "Top Leaf", but only slightly chalky.
Repeat Drinkability: 4/10 (Convenient but only one steep. Think Crystal Light but with actual tea.)
Manliness: 9/10 (The Hot Pocket of tea)

SPONSOR: 99 problems but a Butiki ain't one

Click to play below.  Check the podcast for last week's troll poll results!

Podcast 3: 99 problems but a Butiki ain't one

What: Pistachio Ice Cream  (Butiki teas)
How much: $4.75 / oz 
What kind: Pistachio, Green
Taste: Like a Rachael Ray snack
Repeat Drinkability: 5/10 (see podcast)
Manliness: 5/10 (a mix between aerobics and deez results in 5)

What: Royal Golden Safari   (Butiki teas)
How much: $11.50 / oz  :-O
What kind: Kenyan, black
Taste: Dark chocolate malt
Repeat Drinkability: 7/10 (smooth like the barrel of a poacher's gun)
Manliness: 9/10 (you will make rhinos extinct if you drink this tea)

We'd like to extended a thank you to Joy's Teaspoon / Naomi for featuring us on Naomi's blog for Movember.  Check it out here.  Also buy some tea from our sponsors!

SPONSOR: The Stanky Leg, The Bernie, and now...

We're kinda mixing it up right now since we have 2 sponsors at once. We received a couple /t/s from The Tea and Jazz House after giving them some input on their new website.  Wait, you mean their /t/s are all named after jazzy people?  But I took a class on jazz musicians and only "Cole" pops out (notice how it has rooibos from AFRICA and CHOCOLATE, lolol), how are we supposed to drink based off our musical needs?  Easy. We chose the /t/ with random-ass names.  For instance, "The Krall", which I thought was probably a dance made up in low-income nightclubs in Atlanta.

First off, aesthetically, the tin is pretty toned down and simplistic: stainless steel with some laminated labels.  Looks like some guy just went to his label maker and slapped a couple on and shipped em out... not that that's bad or anything.  Once you open the container, you realize that physics has been bended.  The speed of smell far outpaces the speed of light and, for once, Stephen Hawking makes sense.  The smell is nearly to the point of overbearing sweetness.  Instead of the expected apple and pear smell, I was instead nasally assaulted by berries dunked in corn syrup with a honey glaze.  It's a stretch, but I guess this could be similar to a fruit cup, extra syrup.  Those chunks in there, after a personal taste test, were definitely pear-like and were still chewy.  Ok /t/, I'm expecting good things out of you. Shut up and get in the boiling water!

Pirates would love this tea if...

...if it had more grog in it.

Tea_Pain and I are in the middle of a divorce.  Because of the Dart girl incident.  It's funny cause his film shows more of my ass than anything remotely related to heterosexual intercourse.  We're not fighting over the cheating or the videotaping.  Basically, I'm trying to get him to go to film school cause he sucks.  And he doesn't want to go.  What a baby.  I offered him my left tit to suckle, and he said he wanted a divorce.  My answer: "Bring it fatty."

SPONSOR: The dragonwell dries up

Even though we got one in the mail a looooong time ago, we still have yet to review a Dragonwell /t/.  And, well...  Duke is said to be back in the very near future after being released from JFK's detention center.  Apparently he and about 90 other passengers were stranded on a plane and so he started a kid-fighting ring to help entertain the passengers.  Think this, but with 2 year olds and parents screaming at them like they were losing a game of tee-ball.  According to Queens PD, what Duke did was illegal and, while he continued to state both children were fighting in self-defense, he had to stick it out for a couple days in a county jail and pay a fine.

Back to the point I was getting at before: Duke isn't the biggest fan of green /t/.  So I thought, before he gets back, why not review one kind I've been trying to review for awhile?  As the last /t/ they thrust upon our blag, BTC gave us a solid hundo of their Dragonwell.  Dear caffeine receptors, I am going to destroy you the only way the Chinese know how.  Let us begin.

Throw it in the bag

So I'm currently living without the internet and Duke is on vacation (woooot summer). Somewhat luckily, there's a nearby Starbucks with free Wi-Fi.  Actually, that's a lie- I was approached by an employee while sitting outside and was forced to come in and buy something to use the "free" Wi-Fi.  I decided that, hell, this would be a decent opportunity to do a review of a random Tazo /t/.  I ordered an Italian-named medium of what appeared to be something new from Tazo: Joy.

Now, if you've never heard of Tazo's "Joy", let me explain why you should be curious: it is the Captain Planet of /t/.  How so?  Is there the scent of a small, effeminate Amazonian boy in there?  Does a man who looks like Skeeter's superhero dad burst out of the cup and piss all over your SUV?  Do you really believe that the power is yours after finishing the most expensive cup of /t/ in the suburbs?  Fucking no to all of that (except a possible maybe to the first one).  This abomination is trying to make /t/ blends look bad, in my opinion. Rather than mix in a couple ingredients to enhance a /t/, Tazo decided to throw all their dildos in a bag and do a massive, plastic cockslap to the entire /t/ industry.  Even I was pretty insulted upon realizing I was handed a $3 cup of hot water with a "loose leaf" teabag (it doesn't matter what you say Starbucks, looseleaf in a teabag is not looseleaf. Keep trying though, it might catch on due to it being so ironic).

1) Riskopoly and Tea: Puppies, sunshine and rainbows

And so it begins... Our game of 5 players begins at the last sign of peace.  To celebrate the Gandhi-ness of the first turn, we steeped some Serene Green and got to work on building up our monopolistic empires.  Duke and I (race car and top hat)  Having played the game several times in the past, look to build upon past success in the monetary aspects of the game so as to royally screw over everyone later.  Undoubtedly, this should end well.  On to the Risk board...

Disregard Flowers, Acquire Real /T/

Tea_Pain: A while back, Woot had a deal where you could buy a new /t/pot and 36 /t/'s (4 different green's and Earl Grey) for about $25, all from Primula. I was intrigued. This was one of the better deals I had seen on this /t/ bundle so I decided, why the hell not, and bought in. About a week later, the contents arrived at my door... that event happened about 6 weeks ago. Since then, only the pot had been used (most recently in our latest Bigelow post) and the flowering /t/ was left sitting in a large box, waiting to be unwrapped. Since there are few loose leaf /t/s we have around, Duke and I decided it was finally time to experience something just as feminine as pu erh: flowering /t/.

C/T/G Presents: If Bear Grylls Drank /T/ It Would Not Be This /T/

So I went to Google to find out more about this Wu Yu tea that I'm reviewing.  It basically told me that I'm stupid and it's called Wu Yi.  Whatever.  Fuck off Google.  I'm sure China /T/oga Garage spelled it rite.  I also found out that "Wu Yi" tea was/is at the center of an epic fad diet.  It always makes me laugh when fat people think that they can lose weight by means other than diet moderation and exercise.

Ginseng turns men into...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Who Wants Genmiacha?

...because I now have a surplus.

So, a few weeks back we participated in a /t/ swap on Steepster. We received a genmaicha, and I, being the genmaicha virgin, figured I should lead the discussion as I am sometimes unbiased and uninhibited. Wikipedia tells me that genmaicha stands for "people's tea". Why? Because it has a bunch of cheap ass rice in it for filler. I fucking love rice for this reason. Maybe it's because of a college mentality or maybe I'm a stingy eater. Just know that I came in intrigued by having Rice Crispies in my /t/.

And now, Tea_Pain tells a story...

Ahem, let me just take you through the experience that was my first sip of genmaicha:

1) Hm, this smells exactly like a bag of popcorn and Smacks. Where's the green /t/? I UNNO!

2) Oh, here is the green /t/. Just in case I needed proof that it wasn't fake, I tested it out in my french press. You can tell it's real green /t/ because it looks like I put my piss in the microwave.

3) Another whiff. Smells like popcorn from a ghetto movie theater. You can get a whole bucket of this stuff for $1 and gorge yourself while watching a Samuel L. Jackson-knockoff take out all the honkies.

4) Holy shit, they make water out of popcorn now?

5) Wait for it... waaaait for it.... hold on- yup there's a little hint of rice in there.

5b) (30 seconds after swallowing) Oh hey, a green /t/ aftertaste! The one thing nobody ever wants from their green /t/.

ENHANCE. There's so much dust in this /t/ that I think it'll reassemble in my large intestine. On a scale from one to fiber, this is a wool sweater. Tell gramma to screw prune juice and get some of this shit. It's not like she'll remember how it tastes 5 minutes later anyway. And if you're looking for a smoother green /t/, you're better off with some canned Arizona-brand off-shoot than this stuff. Hell, Lipton might be able to go down easier than this stuff.

I found my mind drifting off while working with this /t/. For instance, when I opened the bag, I wondered if all that stale popcorn in my cupboard would taste the same if I ground it up and mixed in some water. Shortly after the third swig, I started reminiscing about how many good-tasting /t/s I've had in the past. Or, say, when after the fifth choked-down gulp I wondered what could undo the permanent damage to my tastebuds caused by this /t/. Hell, I even tried to resteep this to see if the green /t/ flavor would come out. Luckily this pours into the sink just as fast as it brews. *And there was much rejoicing!*

What: Genmaicha (Porto Rico Importing Co.)
How much: $2.50 for ~4 oz
What kind: Green - rice
Taste: Like eating stale popcorn.
Repeat Drinkability: 1/10 (Drink directly from a rice patty, no chaser)
Manliness: 6/10 (Reminds me of this little ditty)

Life In a Teacup Part 2 - Jasmine's Pearl Necklace

DukeOEarl: Our second /t/ smelled like Necco Wafers before brewing. Not bad. After brewing it was definitely a jasmine tea. There was no mistake about that. Smelled like fucking flowers and Arabic princesses. Yup, fuck oil, I know what the US military actually wants from all these wars. Speaking of oil, this /t/ was immediately darker than the weed oolong. Wtf a darker green tea?

Tea_Pain: Yeah, definitely a ton darker. I'm almost to the point of calling the weed /t/ a white /t/ if we were comparing the two. This close. Anyway, I'm pretty familiar with jasmine /t/. This stuff is essentially what roped me into the loose leaf world and probably pushed me to join forces with Duke. Even though I've since moved on from this very floral /t/, I still find myself enjoying a cup every now and then. I'm a big fan of pearls as you generally get more for your buck (because of all that expansion while brewing) and, if you're a caffeine junkie, you can use them like chewing tobacco. That's right, you can still be a man and not get cancer. Fuck yeah.

DukeOEarl: Yeah, this is pretty generic-tasting for a jasmine /t/. I'm not a fan of green /t/ea. I can see how some people would like this, but I still personally cannot. It is definitely better than the average green /t/ even with the sketch, condom-like packaging. Give these to a girl who smells bad and you'll almost get a pu erh.

Tea_Pain: Damn it Duke. I just had a flashback and my nose inverted. As a final note, these "pearls" weren't so much pearls as they were...spitballs. These would've been perfect ammunition for middle school when we had those small straws for Capri Sun and shit. Above all though, this is still your average jasmine pearl /t/ but with a bit more acidity and a little less jasmine bite. I'm not convinced I'd ever need more than a sample of these when other tea shops have products that are easily just as good or, more likely, better.

What: Fragrant Pearl Jasmine Green Tea (Life in a Teacup)
How much: $1/sample
What kind: Green - Jasmine
Taste: Very jasminey. Like a spoiled Arabian princess.
Repeat Drinkability: 6/10 (For the price, it isn't outlandish for jasmine, making it the Lipton of jasmine pearls. Con...grats?)
Manliness: 3/10 (If this were any manlier, it would have a unibrow and make Jasmine look like Frida.)

Spicy /T/ Helps Men Reach First Base on Venus

As a man, women are often confusing to me.  However, we at the Blag have noticed that we are better than most men at deciphering their complex language and behavior.  In time we will try to share this knowledge with our fellow male readers and hope that our female readers don't alter their secret culture based upon our discoveries.

Lesson one about women.  When women say yes, it means yes; when women say maybe, it means no; when women say no, it means maybe; and when women don't say anything, you're doing it right.

Sometimes to understand women, it's necessary to go undercover.  I don't mean wearing a bra like my uncle does or dancing to WHAM! when no one is watching.  I mean occasionally pretending to be invisible and eavesdropping on conversations or even trying to be some woman's friend (yes I went there).  I know, it's unspeakable.  But at least I didn't mention they who shall not be named.  On rare occasions, going undercover means drinking candy coffee, i.e. mocha frappuccino lattes, using conditioner (I know, I know), or making your own sandwich.  Well today was one of those days.  Your Duke decided to go undercover and try the girliest of all /t/s, a chai green tea.
 

Chai Green Tea by Stash.  The /t/ bag smelled like this.  Was I going to get that just brushed clean feeling from this /t/?  Oh god I hope so.  I have a hot date later with Ms. Jones.  Anyway, after steeping, the doublemint cinna-spolsion smell was still there but more subdued than before.  First swig down, this had the consistency of pea soup.  And.  It looked like Mr. Green.  Props to anyone who actually remembers what that was like.  Shit was delicious.  Like Dr. Pepper except with ginseng and a sewage color.  AND A FUCKING LIZARD ON THE FRONT.  Well pea soup /t/ was starting off to be aight.

After several swigs, the same mute cinnamon taste from the previous Stash Chai appeared like a god damn Pidgy.  FUCK PIDGY.  No one cares about Pidgy after the first two minutes of Pokemons.  No one cares about the lame cinnamon taste either.  The mint smell had entirely disappeared and the mint taste was fleeting.  This was shaping up to be slightly less "meh" than normal green tea.  I have a feeling Stash put the artificial cinnamon flavor in one of their /t/s and it sold well.  Then they were like, "What should we do next?" "Hurr durr, to the cloud!  Let's put cinnamon flavor in all our /t/s!" "Brilliant!" "Brilliant!" "That's brilliant!" "Capitol!" "Brilliant!" Then, spoiler alert, Severus kills Albus, a hunter kills Bambi's mom, and there's no such thing as a happy woman (or a good green tea).

What: Chai Green Tea (Stash)
How much: $5.45 a box (30 tea bags)
What kind: Green - Spiced
Taste: Like someone poured an apple pie into your pea soup
Repeat Drinkability: 4.5/10 (About half a notch above "meh")
Manliness: 4/10 (Spices are a plus, men still love Big Red gum, but no caffeine makes me sad)

Ironic /T/ is Ironic

Tea_Pain: A couple weeks ago, we decided it would probably help us be more "worldly" to get in on a /t/ swap. Steepster was hosting one at the time and we ended up receiving a couple bags of green /t/ from a guy in New York. Pretty SUPER haul for a swap. I opened the bag of the SUPER Kashmiri Green Tea and swore I opened a pack of SUPER Craisins. Also, the /t/ shop this is from is located in the East Village of New York City. SUPER irony.

DukeOEarl: At first, this /t/ looked SUPER meh. I mean srsly; the leaves looked like little green turds. After we poured in the scald-your-dick hot water, well they looked like they came from a grow your own (sea)weed kit. The SUPER cranberry smell gave way to a more subtle cranberry aroma as we pour the /t/ in our mugs. As expected, it tasted like SUPER cranberry juice. This is like the /t/ you drink when you have a urinary tract infection and you're seventy years old. Or if you're a SUPER slut and you're like 19. Speaking of fertility, the Kashmir region of India is widely contested because of it's fertility. That makes this /t/ from the SUPER octomom of India.

Tea_Pain: Though it looks like you're drinking piss, you're actually drinking a bag of Craisins. I fucking love Craisins. When it comes to Craisins, my mouth turns into some kind of SUPER Kirby-like suction device and I end up eating 2 pounds in one sitting. It's a shame that the second steep wasn't nearly as SUPER. I wanted to get my Kirby on and chug some more but a whole mess of things went wrong. Sure, it still tasted relatively similar to the first steep, but the /t/ got SUPER dryer and the leaves broke apart to form floating crud. I felt like I went from drinking Fiji water to something resembling Lake Michigan.

DukeOEarl: Tea_Pain's Kirby suction is also good when you have a golf ball stuck in your garden hose, but I digress. This self-proclaimed SUPER /t/ is good for maybe two steeps. On the second go, it was much soupier and rather meh, i.e. green tea. This is a probrem because I don't like green /t/ usually. It's really rather flavorless IMSUPERHO. This Craisin shit was an exception on the first steep. Maybe I'll drink this when I'm older, sitting on my porch with Tea_Pain, sipping Schlitz, shooting at kids, and yelling "git off my lawn!" while we piss into dialysis bags.

Tea_Pain: Look at it. Like I said, you're drinking a pissy, seaweed beverage right there. Fucktastic. Beyond the obvious shortcomings of the second steep, I could still find myself drinking this regularly. This is a model green /t/ as it is loose-leaf and doesn't taste like powdered swill. The cranberry definitely makes the tartness of green /t/ seem SUPER reasonable and I could see this being a great base to work with when creating other fruit-flavored /t/s. In other news, SUPER no longer appears to be a word with any meaning. You're welcome.

DukeOEarl: This would probably rock shit like Robert Plant singing upside-down at a KISS concert high on speedballs if some cranberry honey was added. Or, holy shit I'm going to patent this, if we added a few drops of cranberry concentrate. This would be dank as shit, and well you'd never have to worry about kidney stones or using condoms.

What: SUPER Kashmiri Green Tea (Dual Specialty Store- NY)
How much: $3.75 for 3 oz
What kind: Green - Cranberry
Taste: Like swimming with your mouth open in a cranberry bog
Repeat Drinkability: 7/10 (Doesn't destroy your mouth like a normal green /t/ and it's decently refreshing the first time through)
Manliness: 4/10 (It's a green /t/ from the same place your sister's wool sweaters are made)

C-c-c-combobreakerrrrrr!!!!!1!one!1¡

So I'm in the store buying groceries on my magical, free money card, some people call it Visa, and I look over and...holy shit...there's a dragon.

A FUCKING DRAGON!!! ON SOME TEA!!! Is this a sign from /t/ Jesus?! Or /T/sus as I like to call Him. What could this mean?! There's only one way to know, so I bought the /t/ with the magic, free money card and drove home. The first thing I did was turn on the hot water or as I like to call it the microwave. Time stood still as I waited to try this dragon tea.  The water could not heat fast enough.  I still had to steep it.  Ugh.  This was going to take too long.

Finally, after what seemed like about a week, I could drink this tea.  In my passion for this tea, I burnt my tongue.  Drinking boiling water minus three minutes of cooling equals a burnt tongue.  Maybe that's why it's dragon tea, cause it burns your tongue.  It didn't taste like much with my burnt tongue.  Mostly like a lot of water.  Didn't look like much either.  I did notice that there was a ton of sediment on the bottom of my cup, either from the crappy string-less bags or from the minced leaves.

Well I guess I should try it another time, since my sense of taste was pwn3d by the burninator.

Ok, so I tried it again the next day when my tongue could sense things again.  Hmm...Houston, can haz probrem.  There's still no taste.  Where is this dragon that is supposed to ravish my tongue with awesomeness?  I'm waiting for it to surprise me like I will be surprising T Swift next week.  I guess there is no dragon.  I'm as disappointed as I was when I saw Mulan for the first time in which there was NO DRAGON or when I realized that Santa actually drives a Geo rather than a sleigh with reindeer.  This tea has flavor like French people are hardworking.  Asking for this tea to have flavor is like asking for light beer to have flavor.  It is the Coors Light of tea.  It lacks taste and drinkability (har har har).  Typically you can describe a beer by hops, malt, alcohol, fruitiness, etc.  Coors Light has a discernible bearing for taste description like this tea has flavor.  I'd rather drink the hard water that we have here in Madison, which will give me cancer in seven years because of all the chromium.

I guess you could drink it for the antioxidants.  You could also limit your oxygen intake by deciding not to breathe.

What: "Authentic" Green Tea (Celestial Seasonings)
How much: $2.79 per box (this is entirely too much for 1.4 oz of this shitty tea)
What kind: Green - "Authentic"
Taste: Less taste than steeping grass clippings in water
Repeat Drinkability: 2/10
Manliness: 2/10 (Fake dragons FTL)