Bar Harbor Tea Company

This is okay. Not my favorite vanilla blend but not bad by any means. Would probably be better with sweetener/milk.

Sipdown 21 – 2024

This was fine. The black base was actually better than expected and the maple flavor wasn’t too overwhelming or cloying.

Sipdown 3 -2024

This was surprisingly good for a bagged black tea. Nice and malty with no bitterness.

Sipdown 2 – 2024

Bought this on a trip to Maine and just finished it off. Really tasty blueberry flavor! No astringency or bitterness either.

It’s probably been at least 5 years since I’ve been up to Bar Harbor. I definitely wasn’t aware there was a tea shop up there at the time. This one was a birthday gift from a friend and she choose well. I love blueberries, especially wild ones. Last weekend the mountains were full of bushes with wild blueberries. They’re great for snacking while on the trail.
I have had this tea iced and hot. Both are good. This morning, I sipped it hot as this week mornings have been starting off at cooler temps. Steeped for about 5 minutes and took my favorite mug out on the deck to watch the hummingbirds. The blueberry is strong. There is a decent black tea base. Noted no bitterness and the sweetness from the blueberries was just enough for me. Perfect tea for an August morning.
I also like that the string on the bag is long enough for my travel mugs and that the bags are compostable. Yay!

Sipdown 22 – 2024

Yup, still kind of tastes like generic red fruits.

Working on finishing this off. It’s fine but doesn’t read as particularly cranberry. More generic fruit. Blueberry is preferable over this one.

I was very excited to go to Bar Harbor Tea Company on my recent trip to Maine. Unfortunately, they don’t sell the seaweed teas anymore! cry

I still got a few of their blends to try, this being one of them.

It’s okay. Kind of a generic berry black tea.

1.8 g in 12 oz of water. It sure would be nice to have the accurate amount show up in the box down there.

I chose this tea because I wanted something a bit stronger so I could get three infusions from it in my 12oz tetsubin. Usually I would then pour all of it into my giant 16oz teacup (yes, teacup, it is not a mug, it just happens to be the size of one :P) and add a teaspoon of sugar. Unfortunately my giant teacup has an embarrassing little problem: it stains easily and the stains are impossible to fully remove. I do #teaoftheday posts on instagram and between the stains and the size of the thing I just didn’t want to deal with it. There are only so many angles at which you can get photos of a giant cup like that and not have them all start looking the same!

So, I decided to use a smaller cup. That meant forgoing the sugar I would normally put in because I’m lazy enough not to want to go out to the kitchen every time I re-filled my cup and because there is not enough room on my laptop stand for the sugar bowl. It’s a bit (ok, more than a bit) cluttered over here.

This tea doesn’t need sugar.

Maybe going sugarless with my gaiwan use has finally changed my tastebuds enough that I don’t need sugar. Maybe this tea really is that naturally sweet. Probably it’s a little bit of both. Sweet and mild, a touch of some sort of fruit note and a tiny hint of wood. Like sun-bleached, well weathered wood shingles on a misty spring morning.

This takes me back to that little cottage just beyond Cutler. Hidden waaay out beyond miles of blueberry fields on the edge of a little cove. Civilization was left far behind and it was just the sea, the land, and the sky.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aikoafriel/3217389567/in/set-72157615853119194

A nice smooth tea with a very strong blueberry taste. Perhaps the strongest blueberry flavor of any blueberry tea I’ve tried. I think I’d actually prefer this as iced tea to hot.

Backlogging

The bright yellow liquor has a delicate peach flavor, like the flavor of the flesh just under the skin, not the tarter, stronger flavor from next to the pit.

Can anyone say “procrastination”?

This tea never tastes as good as it smells. But that’s ok. It smells flipping fantabulous awesomely amazing, so it’s only natural the taste falls a bit short.

Decent black tea base that doesn’t get bitter at the drop of a hat. Nice, natural blueberry flavour that isn’t sickly sweet nor watered down. This will never be a favorite of mine because I like milk in my blacks and this one doesn’t really mesh with milk. But still a solid blueberry tea, which seems to be a reaaaally hard thing to do * cough * DAVIDsTEA * cough *

Technically, it’s a good thing I’m not in love with this tea – they don’t ship to Canada. No broken heart like with the fabulous Arbor Teas :( Awww great, now I’m sad!

I only have a teeny bit more left =( I’ll have to order more.. This tastes a lot better than other flavored green teas I’ve had. More memorable.

This is such a great grind tea, it makes me feel so peaceful =D Such a nice taste!

So I bought this during my trip in Maine over the summer. It was pretty pricey for the amount I got, but it was my own little souvenir from the trip!

The tea leaves themselves smell predominantly of cinnamon, and stays strong even after brewing. Adding a splash of skim milk cooled the tea down enough to drink so here goes!

Interesting. The spice is the immediate flavor but the vanilla and almond are also pretty taste-able. It’s not a bad tea, but I wish it had more body to it. The spice of it is really good though. I picked this tea with the intention of having it help warm me up with a comfortable home-y feeling, and that definitely comes across.

I am a little underwhelmed though.

For some reason I was craving this tea this morning. And then I nearly over-steeped it. Need tea timer with a nicely annoying buzz/beep/whatever.

Back-logging from this morning.

So, I stopped at the Bar Harbor Tea Co shop on my way home from work last night (huzzah! I don’t have to pay shipping for this stuff! Na na na-na na. Ahem…) with the intent of picking up a Bodum travel tea press. I got the press but figured I’d pick up a new tea while I was there. I had smelled this one during my last visit (to pick up a new tin of the chocolate chai) and had been amazed at how much like the native blueberries this smelled. So I snagged a small tin.

Now for those of you who have not spent time in Maine or the Maritime provinces of Canada, there are two kinds of blueberries. Most of you are likely familiar with the big, plump, bursting-with-juice blueberries commonly found in the grocery store. Those are called highbush blueberries. What we have here in Maine is called the lowbush blueberry. The plants grow right down flush with the ground, no taller than 15" and usually more like 5"-10", and the leaves and berries are smaller than those of the highbush berries. But what Maine blueberries lack in size they greatly make up for in flavor. No highbush berry can compare to the sweet/tart/juicy fruits of the lowbush blueberry that grows wild in the acidic soil of the region. Yes, wild. While there are indeed fields where these berries grow and are harvested they grew there naturally, with no human hand to plant them, no field equipment to water them.

It is of course the flavor of the native, lowbush wild blueberry that is used in this tea. The bright, red-amber liquor is redolent with the aroma and flavor of these berries, even more strongly in the aftertaste. And I would love to know what variety of black tea was used as a base for this as the steeped leaves are quite colorful. Large, though broken, and green, but with red-brown veins and stems.

And writing this has made me want another cup of this tea!

On my way home from my new job I stopped by the Bar Harbor Tea Company shop (it’s just a few doors down from the gallery I’m working at) to pick up a new tin of this since I finished up the old tin a couple weeks ago just before they re-opened. This is what I used when I gave my son his first taste of tea. Yes, I gave caffeine to a three year old, no, he wasn’t bouncing off the walls afterward, yes, he absolutely loved it. And he still loves it, had some with me this morning.

As the description says, it’s not super chocolaty, but you can definitely taste the chocolate. It, and the black tea, is more of a back-up singer to the lovely duet of the cinnamon and cardamom. I also usually add cloves to this but decided to go without for the purposes of the review…I’ll definitely be adding them next time though. I need cloves in my chai.

I’m mixed with this tea. It’s very potent with the blueberry flavor (it’s very fresh tasting and not too sweet) but not enough of the tea aspect comes through. I think that a longer steep time is better for this one. The blueberry flavors stay but the tea flavors really shine when steeped longer.