This one is my favorite so far. It’s mostly a hazelnutty flavor with like, the aftertaste of a strawberry, which gives it an unusual taste.
Their lemon grass was better a decade ago. I don’t expect lemon grass to have a strong flavor, but there’s almost nothing to this, regardless of how long it sits. Wish I had some lemon juice to mix in.
This is nice but I’d like it better mixed with some (decent) lemon grass because the berries are pretty strong.
This reminds me of a less sweet version of Harney & Son’s Paris, which is weird because I think that’s supposed to be earl grey (i hate earl grey with a passion, but i really like Paris) with vanilla and caramel flavors. I mix this with the hazelberry tea.
I was going to try the Christmas, but it smelled a little bit spicier (as in cinnamon) than I was in the mood for for right now. The Aries tea tin smells very strong – it’s definitely some kind of chai and I’m not the biggest fan of chai. I prefer slightly malty tea or tea that smells like a sweet pipe tobacco (like rooibos or fruit teas) and don’t really like “sharp” stuff like chai or strong floral stuff like chamomile (though I can tolerate chai more than I can tolerate chamomile or earl grey; i say i don’t like floral but i enjoy rose and violet and lavender flavors and stuff, but chamomile just tastes so weird and off-putting and earl grey to me tastes like something ancient and old and deteriorating – like what I imagine the pages of my great grandfather’s ancient, yellowing hardback dictionaries taste like).
I got this stuff a couple months ago and have made it a few times. It is little individual serving packets of tapioca pearls and concentrated tea-flavored syrup slurry. You keep it in the freezer.
Open one up,
dump it in a cup, and then
microwave for a minute;
dump in some ice and
fill’er up with milk.
That’s 'yer boba, bucko. It comes out surprisingly adequate.
If you’re feeling fancy you can whip up some cheese foam, put some heavy cream and cream cheese and maybe sugar in a bowl and use a hand mixer on it for a while, but not too long.
Turns out I love cheese foam now. I think the first couple times when I didn’t the places were just going too hard on the cheesey salty-ness, you know what they say:
Whole lotta salt, who is at fault?
Creamy and nice? That will suffice.
Here is a painting I made of my churched up microwave boba, you can use it as a reference to pretend you are tasting it’s highly-engineered, natural and artificial flavors.
I broke my gaiwan’s lid some number of weeks ago. I think I have broken 4? gaiwans, over the years.
Anyways to replace it I bought an unglazed shiboridashi produced by Gyokko pottery. A satisfying object.
In the attachment included above, you can view a demonstration of its use as a ‘gamer’s aid’. I am brewing the tea hotter, lighter and quicker than recommended, and darn was it good to taste.
I am not magically ‘getting good’ at Mini Motorways but I am lovin’ it, I wish I could just buy it for $20 or whatever. In the attachment included below you can view the fail-state of my best attempt thus-far.
I need help stepping my tea game up. What’s the best way to get a hot, but not boiling temp from water without a special kettle? I guess I could just put a pot on the stove, wait five minutes and test different settings…I’m just not getting much of an oomph out of my teas!
you can use a tea thermometer, if you have the time to spare.
Use a dripper and filter if you have hard water, the first time you see what kind of color your tea didn’t have.
If you have a ceramic dripper, you may wanna filter the hot water while pouring, that can take off ~5 to 10°.
I had to replace our kettle recently and I went with one of those zojirushis that keeps 3L of water at 90c all day and you just refill it overnight, they’re often overpriced but I got a really good deal.
wife did not like it at first but kettles take so damn long to boil at 120v, it’s a lot easier especially if you need to make cold medicine or anything other than a full pot of tea
Here I did 3 infusions, each at about 30-40s at 170f, mixed into the same cup. You get, say, 50-55ml of juice out of the tiny shibo per pour, usually I’ll drink one’s worth a couple times a week, keep caffeine intake low, but today is special, today is 150ml big gulp day.
The fresh and powerful wet grass aura invigorates my mouth, nose and belly, yum.
I got some of that artisanal stuff from Catspring Yaupon and it’s alright. They sent me a variety pack with unroasted, lightly roasted, and fully roasted tea. It was fun to try them all, and they do taste quite different from each other. I think the light roast is my favorite. There’s a sort of subtle caramel sweetness to it. Thing is, when I want a light, heavily caffeinated tea, I’d much rather drink yerba mate.
It’s not bad though, and not that expensive. I could easily imagine someone really liking it.
I enjoy the squat, compact, specialized machinery. Their spindly widelegged stances, the proto-robotic complications’ whirring and sucking and blowing.
