Wrote this up a couple of months ago but never posted it!
Day 19 of the Dammann Freres advent calendar. One nice thing about finishing this advent calendar so late is that I feel like a lot of these fruity teas are better suited for hot weather. This one, for example, begs to be tried iced, but I wouldn’t have done that in December. The dry leaf smells like fruit salad! Kiwi, apricot (or possibly the combo of mango and bergamot if experience with DF’s Bella Blanca is any guide), and something else I can’t place. Looking at the ingredients list, it’s kiwi, orange blossom, violet, bergamot, and peach. So my sense of smell clearly still isn’t 100% where it was before this latest bout of covid, and/or has trouble distinguishing between their yellow/orange stone fruit flavorings. Nonetheless, onwards to the tasting!
Mostly I taste kiwi, stone fruit, and bergamot. As it cools, the bergamot gets even stronger, which… why?! Either the bergamot is too heavy-handed or I’m really sensitive to it. I keep thinking the base tea is chun mee, but I don’t really know that or have any specific basis for believing it, just some little signal in my brain that keeps wanting to label it that – even though I haven’t had chun mee in years!
Hopefully your smell is back at 100% soon!
Thanks! It’s doing much better now – when I wrote this, I was just a couple of months after my second bout with covid. It took a while for my sense of smell to recover and it’s probably still not FULLY back to the sensitive baseline it had been before but it’s pretty close now!