Exotic teas: What are your favorites, tea fans?

Loose Earl Grey, steeped properly.

I don’t get too crazy. I still stick with my all time favorite, gunpowder green tea. Let it steep freely in the pot, and then strain it into your teacup, the leaves need room to expand. Add a dash of good honey, and you’re done.

I LOVE any “Moroccan Mint” blend. That’s usually a green like gunpowder green & mint leaves. But, I drink the hell out of Sleepytime from Celestial Seasons.

My standard, Earl Grey, isn’t especially exotic and is kind of snubbed by tea snobs because of its added flavor. But I also enjoy genmaicha, which is certainly unusual. It’s a blend of green tea and roasted brown rice, which gives a rich nuttiness to the brew. Again, I think purists object to “adulterating” the tea with other stuff, but they can just keep their noses out of my cup.

I drink loads of tea. As to flavors, I am not fixated on one flavor per se. I like to try all different kinds….

As to brands, I don’t like the grocery store brands like Tetley, Celestial Seasonings, Lipton and the like….I have found some really amazing teas in (gulp!) discount stores like BigLots, etc.

Don’t use tea bags (filled with dust) if you can get fresh tea leaves. Brewing it is simple.

I also dry and brew mint leaves in the summer. Often I will add a few raspberries or blueberries or some diced peaches or nectarines.

Loose tea leaves – not hard and can be cheaper too.
I personally love Earl Grey (which is a black tea)

Black Teas – Strong. Good if you enjoy coffee and if you like milk with tea (obvioulsy can be drunk without milk as well which is how I prefer it)
Oolong – 1 below black
Green – quite light. Make very good Ice Teas.
White – Very light very refreshing.

Herbal Teas (mint, fruits etc) can be strange. Some I love i.e. Peppermint, whilst others I hate i.e. vanilla

Unless you’re off your head don’t get any decoration teas. Generally they’re lovely to look at but taste absolutely awful (i.e. flowers that bloom in the boiling hot water)

adagio is probably the best place to start looking for loose tea leaves.
Enjoy!

I enjoy Teavana teas. I use one decaffeinated tea for night time (Tranquil Dreams) and one for the day called Matevanna. I would go into the store since they have many samples to try and sniff as well as the staff is very knowledgeable. My boyfriend and I are tea newbies as well and are just learning.

While I mostly enjoy Trader Joe’s green tea, I will occasionally spice things up with rooibos red tea, made from a South African plant. While I would like to enjoy The Republic of Tea’s honey ginseng green tea more often, my budget prevents it. So I get less expensive ginseng from a Korean market and add honey and pollen purchased from a local beekeeper to Joe’s green tea.

I recommend Stash Tea—they have sampler packs of loose tea, and their tea is quite good. I echo Gail’s recommendation to avoid tea bags—the tea used for teabags is often of lesser quality. And you can control the strength of loose tea. It does help to have equipment—either disposable paper teabags, or infusers, or a proper tea pot.

If you’re just starting out with tea, or you’re checking out a new tea company, go for the basics—Irish Breakfast and English Breakfast are blended black teas, and you can get unblended Ceylon, Darjeeling, and Assam teas from most reputable tea shops. If the shop can’t make a good Irish Breakfast, they’re unlikely to get anything more complicated right.

You might also like flavored black teas – Earl Grey is the most well known one, but just about any fruit has been dried and added to black tea, and some of them are quite tasty. Some people look down on them, true, but they can brew their own tea if they don’t like yours. And Earl Grey is another one of those basic teas where if the shop can’t get it right then you should probably avoid their other teas.

(Generic teas are just “Darjeeling.” Higher-end teas will tell you what area the tea comes from—“Darjeeling Okayti.” The difference between black/oolong/green/white tea is how much oxidation (sometimes inaccurately called “fermentation”) has gone on—black tea is left to sit for a while before drying, and so the chlorophyll breaks down, while white tea is dried almost immediately.)

I’m also fond of jasmine tea—it’s green tea to which dried jasmine flowers have been added. You can get very frou-frou varieties of jasmine tea where the flowers have been carefully dried so that they unfurl in the teapot to make pretty decorations, but that’s overkill.

And there are “herbal teas” or tisanes—in some idiolects, including mine, it’s not tea if it isn’t some variety of Camellia sinensis. These are basically dried fruits, herbs, and other flavorings, and because there’s such a variety it’s tough to generalize. It’s worth distinguishing between tea with added flavorings (such as Moroccan Mint, which is usually green tea and some blend of peppermint and spearmint) and tisanes of mint, which have no actual tea in them, just mint leaves.

Another vote for Genmaicha here!

I like the Numi brand, as far as bagged teas go. Their Genmaicha is pretty good, and they also have a tea with rose petals in it. Yum!

I just started getting into teas when my wife brought me back some loose teas from her trip to China. Some were great, some were weird. Unfortunately, I cannot ID them, since all the writing on the tins is in Chinese!

Now I am hooked on Teavana. This is saying a lot, coming from a hard core coffee dog.

My favorite is red rooibos tea from South Africa. In it’s simplest form, it can be steeped for very long periods of time without burning or creating a bitter tea. It’s sweet, often fruity.

I’m also a big fan of most Chai teas. (Technically “chai” means tea, but specifically I’m referring to “masala chai”: black tea spiced with cinnamon, cardamom, ginger..etc)

Chai and Thai teas, ftw! I think I’ll always be a sucker for Celestial Seasonings Apple Cinnamon tea, though…

Moroccan Mint tea is awesome. I just got turned onto it by a Moroccan place near me, and i cant get enough of it.

The blacker the tea the better, no matter where it comes from: Europe, Thailand, India, or Turkey…etc. :D

Golden Moon Tea’s Sinharaja is my “house” tea-black, rich, earthy, delicious. I’m also partial to jasmine green teas,and a black tea with apricot blossoms. I make my own peppermint and ginger tisanes both of which happen to be good for upset stomach/nasea but also taste great. You can also grow apple mint or chocolate mint or many other varieties. Peel and slice ginger and dry it in a low oven.

I like the “Morning Thunder” blend from Celestial Seasonings. It seems that the yerba mate, while providing caffeine, seems to smooth the edges. I have also recently come to like “Mate Chocolate” (can’t get the proper accent marks, it’s pronounced MAH-tay Cho-ko-LAH-tay).

I like mostly black teas, usually with flavors. (I like to buy from small companies like SBSteas.com because they’re more adventurous with their flavors.)

However, I adore both matcha and jasmine green tea.

I’ve never really “got” white tea, and red tea tastes like grass to me.

I love ginger tea and green teas.

Just got back from Taiwan a few weeks ago and have so many delicious exotic teas to try. Cranberry, ginger root, ginsing…mmmmm!