Year: 2005

Yunnan Jig Tea from Adagio Tea

As mentioned previously, I signed up with Adagio Teas for their Link Reward offer. Over the weekend I received an email from one of their reps, thanking me for the link and saying that my reward was on the way. Privately, I was having doubts as my track record with freebies, trial offers and rebates is extremely poor.

Then today after a pretty average day at the office, I got home to find that my doormat was hiding something. The first thought in my head was “I wonder what eBay auction Ariesna won this time?” Much to my delight, my first thought was wrong and instead I was holding a package from Adagio! I hurried inside, tossed the groceries into the fridge and cracked open the box. I was most pleased to find that an 8oz tin of yunnan jig tea and one of Adagio’s IngenuiTEA teapots. After taking the IngenuiTEA out of the box and plastic wrapping, I could feel that the plastic it’s made of has a solid feel to it; so I don’t think I’ll be accidentally breaking it any time soon. Still, if I were going to purchase one of these things, I think I would prefer the main body be made of a heavy-duty glass. *shrug* I don’t know that glass would really work any better but it would give the IngenuiTEA a better heft and feeling of quality. Still, it looks to be a quality product and it’s definitely a very clever idea. You toss your loose tea leaves into the IngenuiTEA, fill it with hot water, wait for it to brew and then set it on top your cup. The IngenuiTEA will then drain your fresh cup of tea into the cup for you; while automatically straining out the leaves. If you’re still confused; go watch the flash video on their website and it’ll all make sense.

Adagio has this to say about their yunnan jig tea:

Black tea from the Yunnan region of China. Yunnan tea is easily identified by its luscious soft leaves, and a unique peppery taste. It is a very forgiving tea; will not taste bitter when over-steeped. Yunnan tea is arguably the most underrated of Chinese varieties. If you have yet to try it, we would recommend it highly. Our ‘Yunnan Jig’ would make a great introduction.

I found it slid smoothly across the palate. When it initially hits the tongue there’s an earthy flavor to it, but swirling it around in my mouth for a bit that flavor settles down to be more smoky than earthy. After swallowing the tea, there’s a slight but distinct hint of black pepper. The first cup I made was too hot, so I threw a bit of ice in it but the tea tasted… off once it was cold. It wasn’t just being watered down; it just didn’t taste right. On the 2nd cup, I was more careful on how hot I let the water get and this time drank the tea without ice. That worked considerably better and I’d definitely recommend this to anybody who enjoys drinking black tea.

So the final verdict? Adagio seems to be a very cool company with tasty tea and a nifty gadget for brewing the tea up. Does this mean CoffeeBear.net will become TeaBear.net? No, but I’ve no doubt I’ll be buying more tea from them once this sample runs out (some of those green teas and the flavored teas sounds really good.). 🙂

I just noticed that my contact form is currently busted, but as I’m at my day job; there’s nothing I can do about it for now. I’ll try to get it fixed either over my lunch hour or later tonight. In the meantime, if you absolutely must contact me the easiest way will be to post a comment to this entry. Thanks!

Update: I’m home for lunch and just tried to fix this but didn’t have any luck and it’s about time for me to head back to work. I’ll try working on this some more later tonight.

Update (08 April 2005, 1:47pm: I did try last night to get the contact form up and running again but didn’t have any luck; so that page is down until further notice. Currently, I’m looking at a different solution for having the page when I upgrade to WP 1.5 which shouldn’t be too far off.

Adagio Teas

I’m normally a coffee drinker. Heck, let’s be honest here; I’m more than just a coffee drinker. I’m both a coffee addict and a coffee snob. I’ll gladly pay ~$5 for a well brewed cup of espresso with a shot of flavored syrup in it and I regularly buy fresh beans from Gevalia rather than try to choke down that crap my office claims is coffee.

But for all that, coffee is not my exclusive poision. Particularly in the warmer months, nothing is quite so refreshing as a cold glass of ice-tea. To make my ice-tea, I generally put 5 bags of Lipton into a 1 gallon glass jar and stick it in the window for a few hours. It’s slow, but it turns out wonderful. Why am I talking so much about this?

Well, I had been reading through the various blogs on my portal page, when I saw an interesting note over at shades*of*grey. He mentioned an interesting marketing technique from Adagio Teas. Far too interesting to resist in my book, so I’m linking them up here –and in my sidebar– hoping to get a freebie. 🙂

This morning while I was booted into windows and checking on the weather; I noticed that there was a high chance of thunderstorms. Having had enough trouble of late with my computer, I decided to shut it down while I was at work1. When I got home from work this evening, I let it try booting into Linux again as I wanted to grab the exact errors I’ve been getting so I could do some googling for a solution. Much to my surprise, it booted straight into Linux without a problem. Then I ran YOU and had it reload the latest kernel from SuSE and this time when I rebooted to complete the install; it came up perfectly. *schweet*

Of course, staying home to fix my computer means I missed another Mindbridge meeting but I doubt they’ll really miss me there as usually I just sit there silently. Hopefully next month, I’ll be able to make it to a meeting again And come to think of it, I probably won’t make it to next month’s meeting as that’s awful close to my wedding day. *shrug* You win some, you lose some.

1 Usually, it’s up & running either grabbing new, fansubbed anime via BitTorrent or transcoding video files for burning to disc.