41 Tasting Notes
Believe it or not, I got it at Ross! I’m in Northern California for the holiday season and my wife wanted to do a little shopping. Ross is a very interesting place. Mostly clothing, but some furniture, household decor products and kitchen items. I was surprised to find some off-branded tea there. I bought this tin of 50 bags for @2.69US (I took the photo because I couldn’t find it ANYWHERE online). Since I’m a Ceylon freak, I was excited to try it.
Let’s just say I’ve added it to my “don’t-ever-buy-this-again” list and tossed the brittle leaves into my mother’s garden. I tried three different steeping times, but all were equally horrendous. Overly bitter and lacking any Ceylon character whatever. Neither milk nor sugar added any solace to this disappointing brew. Thank goodness that my mother knows I’m a Bigelow and Tetley fan. She has plenty of both!
Addendum: I discovered that Nottingham is actually a pseudo-brand by Amazon called “Tea for Life.” I find that description to be accurate since this tea is now helping my mother’s garden grow. :)
I just bought three boxes of this tea from Bigelowtea.com – should get it in a few days. Review coming soon…
Finally got my order from Bigelow. It only took a week this time! This is one of the better bagged Ceylon teas that I’ve experienced. Normally, I buy Green Island Ceylon but that is expensive and takes weeks to arrive. This is equal to that brand and immeasurably less expensive due to quantity. Thank you, Bigelow Teas! The flavour is lovely and slightly bitter. A classic Ceylon taste in a beautiful amber brew. This is one of the only black teas which I will drink without milk (the other is Constant Comment). I’ve only had this tea for 24 hours and I can’t stop drinking it!
Back home in Liverpool, a box of PG or Tetley (or both!) are in nearly every household. In a pinch, I’ll take it if Tetley isn’t available. I love my tea strong, dark and bitter so the milk and sugar blend well without overwhelming the brew. In my house, PG Tips can’t do that with only one bag. Tetley, with their ingenious pouches, do just fine. The PG Tips taste is famous across the pond, but I haven’t purchased it in years because there is so much more tasty tea available in the Great White North.
My wife’s penchant for herbal experimentation keeps me in constant surprise with items such as this. “A truly authentic Canadian experience?” I beg to differ. I’ve been in Canada for 18 years and the only thing Canadian about this is the thought and effort. Oh, and the cute little maple leafs. Adoreable. I have an idea: instead of adding water to this herbal error, pour an ounce or two of milk into a small bowl and add some of this stuff, grab your spoon and take a big bite. I’m assuming that eating it would be better than drinking it. Great idea, poor execution.
This is my evening tea. I drink it every night without fail. If I’m going out of town or commuting, I bring both the leaded and unleaded versions in a tin. I take my tea strong and with milk, so I’m often using multiple pouches and I go through a box rather quickly. I buy in bulk so a case of six boxes of 40 pouches per box cost me $22.00. Pretty good price!
My brother gets involved in many business opportunities. Lately it’s been Organo Gold Coffees and Teas. Technically, they only offer the Organic Green Tea label and the rest is coffee. Check this out: it cost $32.00 for 25 sachet bags of this garbage. I admit some of their coffees are pretty tasty and I employ two different blends at my shoppe but their green tea is terrible. Have you ever tripped and landed face-first into your backyard lawn and received a mouthful of crabgrass? That is similar to the aftertaste of this tea sans the dog sh*t. It seems this company just offers this one tea as a token of solidarity. I am unimpressed.
First of all, I live in Canada. I appreciate the nationalist pride here as well as the locals’ capacity of making everything with Canadian products. But this is taking things too far. Without an ounce of sugar and/or sweetener, this infusion is nothing but hot mouthwash. The peppermint is slightly overpowering, making the berry and apple into a sour mush. Yucky.
Another in a long line of cheapster-style teas which I often grab blindly off the dusty shelves of private food stores or at small grocers in my continued attempt to support “the little guys” and to expand my tea palate. I steeped four bags in one-minute intervals (one bag for one minute, one bag for two minutes, etc.) and none of them were consumable. In fact, the leaf fannings were so dry that they appeared more like tobacco than tea. This one tasted so stale that I would wager that the expiration date was near the end of the Korean War.
My wife saw this at a local grocery outlet today and brought it home for me. I immediately brewed two cups (one at three minutes and one at five). Seriously, this tea tastes like it was bagged with nothing but fanning from the dirty floors of a tea processing factory (much like Lipton). To be fair, this may have been on the shelf awhile as it was fairly stale. Poor taste, poor aroma, poor finish…you get the picture.
’Tis the season, as they say. But why should bad, seasonal herbal infusions have to dominate the shelves thusly? This is yet another poorly fathomed attempt by Celestial Seasonings to pervade a wide-open Christmas tea market. Any black tea, even filtered through a dirty sock, would taste better in comparison. Fail.
