BrutaliTeas
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Mastress Alita’s Sipdown Challenge (October) – “A dessert tea”
Yay, October is here! Sadly it’s still in the 80’s here in Austin, and probably will be all month long. Wishing for sweater weather…
Anyway, the tea! This is another one from Gabby, so naturally it’s a desserty tea ha ha. It’s a puerh base, which isn’t my favorite. I don’t dislike puerh, but I tend to like it better in flavored blends when it’s mixed with black tea, otherwise it just tends to be a bit too earthy for me. It’s a nice smooth and easy-drinking puerh though, with no fishiness or anything like that. The toffee is buttery and rich, with a salted caramel sort of vibe to it. I could see this being a yummy latte!
Flavors: Butter, Caramel, Caramelized Sugar, Earthy, Musty, Smooth, Sweet, Toffee, Woody
Preparation
If you didn’t already know, Brutaliteas originally started back in 2016 when owner Courtney decided to pursue and build a business centered around loose-leaf teas. When brainstorming ideas knew that she wanted to create something for a specific niche of people, and that’s when one of her friends suggested creating metal-themed teas since they were fans of the genre; and in a local Denny’s, Brutaliteas was born. Courtney launched the Brutaliteas website with the original 25 flavors later. Now six years later, Brutaliteas has over 100 flavors and themed blends incorporating music, horror, and puns into the beverage we all love.
Lycheep Trick is one of the Brutaliteas music-themed teas based on the band Cheap Trick; this blend is sweet and floral lychee rose green tea. As I already mentioned, Lycheep Trick is a green tea blend composed of green tea, apple pieces, rose petals, lychee, and rose flavors. When I first steeped this blend, I was a bit skeptical, don’t get me wrong, I love lychee, and I love rose; however, sometimes I’m not a fan of floral green tea blends.
Right off the bat, this blend smelled incredible. It reminded me of my favorite lychee jelly with a touch of summer rose. When steeped up, this blend was just beautiful, the smooth green tea base wasn’t bitter at all, and the sweet lychee carried the floral rose note so perfectly that this blend has become another favorite of mine from Brutaliteas.
Flavors: Honey, Lychee
Preparation
Sipdown! (39 | 255)
Another swap sample from Gabby, who I saw is here on Steepster now. Hi Gabby! o/
This is a tasty tea! I like that it’s an oxidized oolong base instead of black tea, it gives it a bit more smoothness while still having enough body to carry the flavors. There’s apparently some roasted maté here as well, I’m not sure I taste it though.
It’s very sweet, with a strong maple character – makes sense, given its namesake. I’m not picking up on a lot of cream, which is a shame as that would make it taste more like French toast. There’s also (IMO) a bit too much cinnamon for French toast, it’s almost as strong as the maple here. It tastes good, but it veers more into coffee or crumb cake territory for me because of the strong cinnamon presence.
Super tasty, but I think I still prefer my Apple Cinnamon French Toast from S&V because of the addition of the apple! The oolong is a nice idea though.
Also, the name… 10/10
Flavors: Butter, Cake, Cinnamon, Dry Leaves, Maple, Nuts, Smooth, Sweet, Woody
Preparation
I enjoyed this tea a lot more than I expected. I couldn’t really taste the white tea (there was a lot less of it than in the picture on the website). It mostly tasted like a light apple juice. I think the chamomile was a great choice and perfect pairing. I only tasted a hint of the cinnamon. It’s not special enough to order, but it’s definitely refreshing. I preferred this one hot – it was comforting and well-balanced. Once it cooled, I tasted more white tea, which I don’t personally prefer. I made a cold resteep of the leaves, which ended up with almost a caramel apple flavor.
I love apple and chamomile together. (Although, based on the Brutaliteas reviews I’ve read, that sounds like a very mild-mannered flavor and name choice — unless there’s a pop culture reference I’ve missed!)
I just noticed that Harney has a Disney line now, and the one I am most interested in is a white apple….Snow White Tea, of course!
Apple and chamomile sounds like a delicious combination. I always have straight chamomile but this inspires me to blend it with one of my apple flavored teas.
This is definitely one of the better fruity black teas I’ve tried, which is a category I don’t normally love. I can barely taste the black tea, but I get just the right amount of tartness. The flavoring reminds me of one of the Adagio fruit teas…I don’t remember which. The fruit is perfectly tart and refreshing – if I had an uncaffeinated version of this, I would drink it frequently. I can totally picture this flavor being passion fruit.
I don’t like lapsang, so this was never going to be a winner for me. I had some sweetened with milk, but ultimately ended up giving most of the cup to someone else. I could really only taste the smoke. My sample only came with two marshmallows, which I didn’t include in the cup, but I doubt they could have made any difference. I added some cake batter extract, and when it cooled, I finally tasted a hint of dessertiness, but it was way overpowered by smoke.
The strongest flavor I taste here is chestnut. It seems like the same chestnut flavoring in S&V’s chestnut rooibos, and it’s a flavoring I enjoy a lot. It all combines in a pretty tasty way. It’s nutty and desserty sweetened with soy milk. I taste banana too, it just can’t quite overpower the nuttiness. The resteep tastes like chestnut and celery. I’m glad I got the 2 oz size because I’ve really been enjoying this one warm.
The black tea is a little harsh, and that’s the main thing I notice. I allowed this to cool to room temperature and added sweetener and milk. I feel like that improved the flavor a lot. Now I can taste a mild, but pretty fresh tasting cherry flavor. I still don’t really like the way it mixes with the black tea. I wish the flavoring were stronger and the black tea were a little better. I also didn’t taste any chocolate at all.
Cold Brew!
Sipped on this one in the afternoon. It’s a bit more plain than a lot of BrutaliTea’s other fruit based blends; I know there are supposedly several flavours in play but it just reads like a simple and straight forward semi-sweet orange note to me. Not really acidic or tangy but not too sweet or candy like either. It was really refreshing and, since it was a work packedf afternoon, the straight forward taste was a pro in this in instance.
I just don’t feel like I’d want to repurchase it when I finish the sample – there are more exciting orange teas out there!
Steeped this one iced today and it was a really forgettable and average tasting cuppa. I know it’s supposed to taste like oranges and strawberry, but only the orange came through and it was just so incredibly basic tasting to me. Not that basic is a bad thing, but in the vast pantheon of teas I have available to me it was definitely not what I was hoping for and I just kind of felt like Brutaliteas could, like, do better.
The name and dry leaf aroma suggests lime and salt (margarita) but it steeps up as a nutty cucumber tea that may have looked at a lime one summer back in ‘96. Despite being a tea full of lies, it’s still refreshing and makes for a great cold brew.
Flavors: Citrusy, Cucumber, Nutty, Vegetal
Preparation
Fruity black teas will never be my thing. I just prefer fruit with herbal or green teas. I can’t really tell what fruit it’s supposed to be – maybe blueberry? I liked it more with milk and lots of sweetener. I taste the fruit and a bit of the tea, and it’s pretty pleasant like this, but I wouldn’t order it.
I can definitely taste the coffee beans in this, but that’s almost the only flavor I get. I prefer the way Davidstea does their coffee blends, where they have more flavor elements other than coffee. This one is a little simplistic for me, but okay sweetened with milk. I added some whipped cream to the second half of my mug, and that made the last bit pretty fancy and nice, but overshadowed the tea itself, to be honest.
This tastes very similar to other candy cane black teas I’ve had in the past, especially a Davidstea one…I can’t remember which. It’s basically what you’d expect. I taste a lot of sweet, creamy mintiness, along with the black base. It’s nice with milk, but it doesnt stand out front the crowd. I usually make my second steeps pretty concentrated since I don’t trust flavored teas to have much strength left. However, I accidentally made a full sized resteep of this, and it was fantastic! So minty and fresh, maybe even better than the first steep. I didn’t use milk for that one.
I don’t really like this base tea. It’s just thin and has an almost metallic weirdness that I usually associate with decaf black teas. On top of that, I may taste a little fruitiness, but just a little. I’m sure I’d appreciate this flavoring more on a better base. I just saw that this was supposed to be spicy chocolate flavored?? Wow, I wish I had tasted any of that, but I didn’t for some reason.
Hot, I didn’t get a ton of flavor from this, but cooled down, I totally taste some spicy gingerbread. I really enjoy this flavor combination. I think the rooibos/black base works really nicely here. I wish I had a larger amount of this to play around with because this flavor is really fun. It’s best sweetened with milk at room temperature. It’s sort of like liquid ginger snaps.