The name of this company drives me insane. I keep thinking I should say it 3 times and then get up and start dancing. And for all of those completely logical reasons, I have never bothered to sit down and try Numi tea before.

However, after pilfering through the Numi tea stocks at a friend’s corporate office, I have to say, I will never discount a brand based on its packaging of impressionist African wildlife ever again!

Numi Red Mellow (Rooibos) – The first one I tried, and got me back for more. Rooibos at it’s best; ever so slightly sweet.

Numi Sweet African Red (Green Rooibos) – So this was kind of weird. Very -very- light brew, basically flavorless. Reminded me a bit of white tea in a way? Probably would not try again.

Numi Bushman’s Brew (Honeybush) – Interesting! Never had this before. Relatively light, the flavour of the honeybush is released rather slowly in the brewing process. Its a tad sweeter than the rooibos, but otherwise tastes fairly similar (a taste, that I apologetically cannot find words to describe). Will definitely have to try more of this intriguing tea in the future.

Numi Monkey King (Jasmine Green Tea) – An extremely fragrant green tea. The jasmine comes out strong, straight from the tea bag, and stays there throughout the drink. The green tea, though, I think, brews a bit heavy. My mom liked it quite a bit, but I thought it was pretty unbalanced.

Chinese Breakfast?Yunnan Black Tea) - I doubt the authenticity of this… but I could be completely wrong and perhaps somewhere in China people actually do drink black tea for breakfast. Regardless, it tasted OK. Actually kind of like a heavier green tea that happens to be brown colored once brewed?

Simply Mint (Moroccan Mint) – its peppermint, not spearmint, and that makes it wrong in my book. but otherwise, its a fairly innocuous combination of mint and green with the right amount of mint (just enough to get a whiff) and a good heaping of gunpowder green tea. Sometimes I think the amount of gunpowder that people use in these pseudo-Moroccan mixes are too much, or at least, the type of gunpowder is too heavy, and this blend was no exception. Add one more to my list of Fail for American Moroccan tea.

All in all, I would say that Numi teas, based on the 6 I tried all yesterday (jeez i tried a lot of them), that they’re particularly strong on the African herbal teas/tisanes/teasanes (whatever makes your marketing director happy), and not tragic on everything else. I will definitely have to pick up more of their rooibos and honeybush teas in the future, though!

The lady didn’t like the blackberry stuff, but I do. Perhaps my palette is damaged, perhaps we simply have differing opinions on how blackberries are supposed to taste (and let’s face it — on my budget there aren’t many fresh berries in my life).

It is a tad bitter, though at this point it seems that most of the things I drink are — perhaps that’s my problem? I’ve definitely had better fruit teas (all courtesy of Dandan; god only knows where she gets all of them). But, to me at least, it does a pretty serviceable job of tasting like blackberries and giving me something noncaffeinated to drink at night. I’m even somewhat convinced that if I had steeped it for less time it would be less bitter, but that might not be true.

Oh but don’t spill it anywhere, because it’s actually the purplest thing in the world. I may have to boil the pair of pants I was wearing to get the stain out.

So I guess what I’m saying is: you should try it if you want something adequate and aren’t physically inept.

Just call me Mr. Positive.

I had rooibos tea (pronounced roy-boss, or if you’re me, roo-bose) first during my grad school interviews (now that I think about it, that was a major turning point in my tea drinking habits…). Not actually from the tea plant, but instead the African red bush plant, grown in one small location in South Africa, this is considered an herbal tea.

The flavour is strikingly like a nuttier and lighter hybrid of black & white tea, but still yet unplaceably different. I’ve always had it in tea bag form, and my favorite brand of that is Twinings African Rooibos Red Tea (in fact, I’ve generally enjoyed everything from their Origins line, well, minus the Lapsang Souchong, but that’s really not their fault). I went through a half year phase where I had a cup of rooibos every night before bed, and knew I needed to run to the Upper West Side to stock up on tea whenever I got to my last box of rooibos.

So, of course, as part of my first order of loose-leaf teas from Adagio, I had to get a box of the rooibos and see how it compares. I tried it last, after I had tried the various green & black teas, nearly all of which had astounded me with their quality & taste. The rooibos? Not so impressed…

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gramstand http://www.gramstand.com/

214 Avenue A (btwn 13th & 14th st.)
New York, NY 10009
East Village

hours (their words not mine ;))
M-F: 7:30am until rather late
Weekends: 9:00am until rather late

Review after the cut! Read the rest of this entry »

Doctorate qualifying exams. Imagine that grad school is like a fraternity; qualifiers is our version of a hazing. It comes from a somewhat bygone era when intellectual inquiry was the main reason people went to get graduate degrees. And maybe there was indeed such a time that existed when people didn’t mind taking 6 months off their regularly scheduled lives to complete a 12 page research proposal that they fully intend to never carry out. Or maybe professors just want us to go through the exact same hysteria-inducing pain that they went through half a century ago (ok, maybe just 3 decades).

Either way, I have 12 pages of science stuff to write over the next 3 weeks. I could try working from my apartment and inevitably get nothing done, I could go to the school library (which I adore and love to death), but all of those will probably get old after a few couped up days. So I figure that while I’ll go to the library in the evenings/nights, this might be a good opportunity to scout out all those lovely coffee & tea houses in the city that I would never go to otherwise once I’m full time in the lab.

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Upon going to college I realized a lot of habits I had taken for granted as being normal was actually only true for the bizarre family environment I grew up in. Apparently normal people do take showers and that the showerhead isn’t just for decoration and poor urban households that couldn’t afford a bathtub. Apparently normal people don’t eat the unfortunate animals that decide to winter on your front lawn. Apparently normal people don’t go eeling on the weekends. And apparently normal mothers don’t drink an average of 4 teapots of green tea a day. I didn’t drink tea or coffee growing up, so I always shrugged it off as an adult thing. But after one of our first family vacations, I realized that normal families usually lugged around a camera instead of a portable tea container complete with shoulder strap and tea leaf filter.

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Y’mean not everyone keeps them in empty pork fu containers?

Happy lunar new year! Xin nian kuai le, gong xi fa cai, etc, etc. I have to confess — I am pretty terrible at being chinese (unless I’m awesome at being chinese, like… when getting food freebies in Costco). I decided I wanted a small little Chinese new year get-together chez moi and I ended up having to call my mother…

Me: “Mommy? What do chinese people eat on chinese new year?”
*Mother audibly signs* (some things you can only ask mothers)

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I have a terrible impulsive of buying tea everywhere I go, even when I haven’t had good experiences with the particular merchant in question. This weekend, I found myself gaping at a whole wall of tea at the Edgewater Trader Joe’s and perhaps it was just the luxury of standing in a TJ’s without being shoved into walls by Manhattanite yuppies that pushed me over the edge of rational decision-making, but I ended up buying 2 packs of Trader Joe’s tea, even though my two previous TJ tea experiences have been bad, bordering on terrible. Ahh, why do I not learn from history @_@;;.

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If the Virgin Mary can appear on toast, can the Flying Spaghetti Monster appear in a glass of Arizona iced green tea? And if it did, how do I manage to preserve it for 10 years till I can sell it on eBay for $28k?