Category: Review

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DavidsTea’s Buddha’s Blend

Buddha’s Blend by DavidsTea
White and Green Tea / Flavoured
$10.90 for 50g

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First Impressions

Buddha’s Blend was recommended to me one day when I was in the DavidsTea store and wanting to smell some teas (as one does). I asked the sales representative for some recommendations and she must have pulled down like twenty different teas for me to waft towards my nose. Buddha’s Blend intrigued me because it’s a white and green tea blend. Plus it has such beautiful floral notes and big (very obvious!) hibiscus flowers that just add another layer of delicacy to the tea itself.

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Buddha’s Blend consists of: white tea, green tea, jasmine pearls, white hibiscus blossoms, natural and artificial flavouring. The dry tea has this amazing floral taste (from the mixture of jasmine and hibiscus, I would assume), but it also smells like peaches and pears, which is interesting to me because those ingredients are nowhere to be found on the ingredients list (unless it’s part of the “natural and artificial flavouring”). It is a very beautiful tea though, the mix of ingredients is lovely to look at!

Preparation

DavidsTea recommends steeping Buddha’s Blend in 80C (176F) water for 2-3 minutes. I opted for closer to 2 minutes since it’s so easy to over steep white teas and end up with a bitter cup. If you’re steeping a tea blend and there isn’t any guidelines for steeping, always opt to steep for less time because you can always steep it longer (but you can’t turn back time).

First Taste

Buddha’s Blend smells amazing. It doesn’t smell as strongly as a juicy peach or pear (like it did in dry leaf form), but it’s still there. It smells fruity and floral with underlying notes of sweetness. Buddha’s Blend steeps to this lovely pale yellow colour and it has such an inviting fragrance! On first taste, I can taste the jasmine for sure, the floral taste of jasmine is so very present and it doesn’t taste like peaches or pears (which is a bit of a disappointment. The tea base itself is a bit lost in the blend of ingredients, although there is a mild astringency to the end of each sip. 2 minutes may be a bit too long for this blend, despite it being on the low end of the recommended steeping time. I tried steeping a fresh spoonful of Buddha’s Blend for around 90 seconds and the astringency is gone in the taste of the tea. There’s also more obvious tea notes in the cup that was steeped for only 90 seconds in comparison to the one steeped for the full 2 minutes. It’s a tasty cup of tea!

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A Second Cup?

Buddha’s Blend tastes like floral water for steep #2 (for the leaves originally steeped for 90 seconds) and it’s bitter. I would say that Buddha’s Blend is only good for one steep.

My Overall Impression

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I thought that DavidsTea’s Buddha’s Blend was just okay. It makes for a fairly pleasant cup of tea – if you don’t over steep it and it’s unfortunate that the directions say to steep for 2-3 minutes when I found steeping for 2 minutes resulted in a sub par cup of tea. Overall, the taste of the tea is good if you don’t over steep it, and the dry tea smells amazing. I just wish the flavours of peaches and pears was more present in the tea itself after steeping. There’s a slight sweetness to the tea that I enjoy. I would have another cup of this tea (which is a good thing because I probably have about 20 more grams of it), but it probably won’t become a staple in my tea stash. It’s a little finicky in the steeping times, and while it smells delicious, it doesn’t do well for resteeping and it doesn’t taste as good as it smells which lends to (bitter) disappointment.

Curious about the cup rating system? Click here to learn more.

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3pm Oolong Tea’s Mint Oolong

Mint Oolong by 3pm Oolong Tea
Oolong Tea / Straight

This is a review of a tea that I received for my birthday in 2015. I won’t be doing too much digging into the costs of the gifts that I’ve received. For Mint Oolong, I genuinely couldn’t even find the product on the company’s website.

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First Impressions

The presentation of Mint Oolong is really nice. It comes in a clean, clear glass jar that comes with a glass stopper. The jar holds 50g of tea, the label has information in both Chinese and English – and there’s even a nutritional label in English and French on the bottom of the jar. The design is really nice, and I really appreciate how pretty it looks (the glass stopper even has some nice design elements to it to keep it interesting). The fact that it is clear glass makes it not the most ideal tea storage container, but as long as I keep it in a dark place I’m okay with it because it has a great air tight seal to it.

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The tea itself smells delightful. Very minty, and you can see the mint leaves in it, but it isn’t overwhelming the natural fragrance of the oolong. It’s quite a refreshing fragrance though, as a lot of minty things often are. The tea itself is quite fragrant, the stopper on the glass jar is quite snug to help keep air from getting in with the tea, which is a great feature since it helps to prolong the shelf life of the tea. The tea is very simple with two ingredients: oolong and mint.

Preparation

3pm Oolong Tea recommends steeping in boiling water for 3 to 5 minutes. I steeped for about 4 minutes.

First Taste

Mint Oolong steeps to a golden yellow colour, it smells more of the oolong base than it does of the mint leaves. The tea itself is pleasant and enjoyable. Steeping for about 4 minutes yielded a nice cup of tea that is smooth with no bitter notes at all. I found that the mint wasn’t as pronounced in the taste, although there is a hint of it at the end of each sip. The oolong plays the starring role in the tea, as it should given that it is an oolong tea. It’s very enjoyable, and tastes great hot. I allowed the second half of the cup to cool down and it’s really enjoyable as a cold tea as well (I didn’t have it concentrated enough to try it with ice).

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A Second Cup?

Mint Oolong does amazingly well with one more steep. The flavour of the oolong is still very much present, the mint plays less into the overall flavour and it continued to dissipate with each subsequent steeping. I found that the oolong did well for about four steeps altogether and the smoothness of the oolong got more enjoyable with each cup.

My Overall Impression

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I liked 3pm Oolong Tea’s Mint Oolong. I love how well this tea does with resteeping, it really showcases the quality of the tea when it can be resteeped and still taste really great. I really wish that the enticing mint that I could smell in the dry leaf was more present in the tea with the oolong flavour because it didn’t really do much for me. I felt it was a bit of a let down that the mint didn’t have more a presence in the overall tea flavour, but the smoothness and the pleasantness of the oolong made up for the fact that the mint didn’t have a bigger role in the flavour profile.

Curious about the cup rating system? Click here to learn more.

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DavidsTea’s Tea Filters

Being able to make my own tea bags out of any type of loose tea to take it to go is a really nice concept. It makes it easier to remove the tea leaves when they’re done steeping, and to also make it easier to travel with as I can make the tea bags in advance. I’ve been using the DavidsTea brand of tea filters. There’s often a package of 10 filters in some tea collections, and they also come in boxes of 20 or 100. I opted for the 100 count box because it worked out cheaper ($5 for 20 or $10 for 100).

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The packaging mentions that the filters are “made with biodegradable, chlorine free, compostable manilla hemp”. Having it be biodegradable is important to me – I go through so much tea that it just makes sense to be able to put the entire thing into green waste when I’m done with it, rather than having to separate wet tea leaves from a filter bag.

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The back of the boxes show the simple 3 step process – pour tea into the bag, pull the drawstring, and then steep the tea. It’s a fairly easy process.

Some things I like about the filters:

  • Clean design, they’re easy to use
  • I really like that they are compostable and will biodegrade rather than sitting in the landfill

Some things I don’t like about the filters:

  • I tend to set my tea bag aside in a small dish when I’m done steeping (and I will often resteep tea leaves shortly after the cup is done), but the moisture from the wet tea leaves will wick up the bag and up the string, leaving me with a wet string to touch. I know it’s science and DavidsTea has noting to do with the law of capillary action, but it still bugs me.

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