Dammann Frères

Catching up on my tealog!
My cousin took me to brunch at Firestone’s last week on Sunday, and I decided to try the earl grey of this brand, which I’ve never heard of before. It was quite delicious, but I can’t accurately rate it since it’s been a while. One of the better ones I’ve tried, I think, as I recall having about 3-4 cups of it.

Thank you to Doulton for the opportunity to taste this tea!

I can taste a strong almond note from the marzipan, and thanks to the biscuit flavor it tastes like almond cookies! YUM!

A very pleasant sweetness and depth of flavor. This may just be my favorite “almond cookie” tea I’ve tasted yet!

I haven’t had a great deal of success finding something I love in the flavored oolong category. The GM Sugar Caramel Oolong was a winner, but the others I’ve tried have ranged from meh to ok.

This one creates a worthy first impression. It’s visually enchanting, with the colorful flower petals among the curly or balled up oolong leaves. It smells wonderful. I get the coconut, the chocolate and some pineapple fragrance. And something that smells a little like tomato. The cereal is even there, though exactly what it is is lost on me.

The tea is a light yellow color and clear, very much what I’d expect from a green oolong. It has that flowery, buttery, green oolong smell, too. The flavoring agents don’t present themselves much in the aroma of the steeped tea, which could be either a good thing or a bad thing.

I think it is turning out to be a good thing. And I think I may be turning into a bit of an oolong purist, as I am finding myself to be with green tea with a few exceptions. This may be one of them. I can taste chocolate and coconut in the oolong, which is actually going pretty well with the butter. I get a hint of pineapple, but it’s only a hint, which I think is a good thing.

Compared to my Toasted Nut Brulee experience of last night, this is a nice performance by a flavored oolong. The flavors work with the tea, rather than against it. They don’t fight with it, trying to cover it up.

I’m thinking the Sugar Caramel is still in the front position, but this is up there.

I’m not following the Dammann Freres steeping instructions, by the way. I’m doing my usual oolong in a cup steeping method. First steep 2 minutes, add a minute per additional steep.

Second steep: 3 minutes. Not surprisingly, given what I’ve come to experience with Dammann Freres teas, the blend does what it’s supposed to do (at least what I think it’s supposed to do). The flavor doesn’t all wash away with the first steep. The second has a nice chocolate/coconut note and I do still get a suggestion of pineapple in the aftertaste. And through this, there is also a buttery, sweet, floral tea flavor.

Third steep. 4 minutes. Still doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s as though the tea has been impregnated with the flavor; it’s actually part of the tea, rather than something added to it on the surface that washes away with multiple steeps.

Fourth steep. 5 minutes. The non-tea flavorings finally faded here, and the oolong itself is starting to as well, but a very good run! And the leaves have gone from something reminiscent of ball bearings to a rather amazing length. I’m eyeballing it rather than measuring it, but I’d say one of them is close to 3 inches long.

Another success story from the Dammann Freres sample-fest organized by Doulton.

I really feel sophisticated while drinking this tea. This would be a beautiful tea to serve at an elegant tea party. I love the floral, nutty flavor. I wasn’t sure how much nut I’d get out of this tea, but it is a sweet pastry nuttiness, with a hint of flowery good ness. Glad I took this back out of the cupboard. Thanks to Doulton for organizing the great tea purchase from Damman Frere’s months ago. Deliciouso

Thank you to Doulton for making this tasting note possible… thank you very much!

A fantastic aroma – although I’m not at all surprised… I’ve come to expect a sumptuous fragrance with Dammann Freres teas! Always enticing is the scent – beckoning me to take a sip.

I am going to agree with Morgana on this one – it definitely has a depth to it that would make this a much better tea for chilly weather. Not heavy, exactly… but, deep and rich in flavor… very French.

Even though the weather isn’t chilly, I’m still quite enjoying this cup for what it is. Lovely, aromatic, rich and delicious. Pleasantly fruity. Lovely and floral. Very nice.

Sipdown no. 17 of 2021 (no. 637 total).

What to do with you, Melange Mysterieux? The more I drank you, the more it became clear that you weren’t a favorite. And yet, I recognize that you are exceptionally well blended so I feel bad bumping your rating down even further.

Your fruit flavors today are distinguishable in the aroma and yet all of a piece. How do they DO that? But there’s also a sort of peppery note that I don’t remember from before and don’t love.

I suppose I will bump you down a little but not too much. I’ll put you in the good category, though it’s unlikely I’d buy you again given there are others I prefer.

I’m inching up on sipping down the 84-rated black teas in my stash, which I guess is some sort of progress.

Except that I’m finding that either my tastes have changed or something. Like my tastes have changed?

So, for example, while this one definitely has that French thing that I love so much, I don’t like it better than some of the other teas I’ve tasted recently in the 83-84 range. So I’m bumping it down a little.

I am also considering up-rating Champagne Rose by Lupicia, and Scottish Breakfast by Upton. Yeah, I’m gonna do that. They both have something very appealing — in the Scottish Breakfast, it’s undoubtedly the Yunnan, and in the Champagne Rose it is likely the fact that it really suggests the flavor (and effervescence, somehow) of champagne.

I’m astonished to realize that after all this time I still haven’t written notes on all the fab and gear Dammann Freres teas from the virtual shopping spree Doulton organized weeks… no wait, it must be months ago now. I am going to remedy that post haste! And yes, I did do the weight work out. [self-congratulatory one handed applause] Now I’m just “resting” before the aerobic part. I wonder if it’s possible to read War and Peace while on a stationary bike?

Golly, I love how their teas smell. I really do think the French teas, for the most part, win the best fragrance award all around. This one has a fruity scent that is sweet and fresh smelling, and so well blended that I fully understand why they named it as they did. Once you read the ingredients, you can pretty much isolate all the individual scents. The orange and the cherry stood out most to me, though I could get the sweetness of strawberry underneath. What I understand to be peach actually smells somewhat fig-like to me, rather like the figgy aromas of some of the other Dammann Freres teas that actually do have fig as an ingredient. The leaves are pretty, too, with the purple mallow and yellow sunflower petals. I have been all along, but I’m now starting to appreciate more fully exactly what I sucker I am for flower petals in tea.

Now for something really mysterious. The aroma has shifted with steeping so that I’m now getting a much more obvious peach fragrance, followed by cherry, with just a tad of orange. Tres interessant.

In the flavor, yet another shift. The orange is back to the front, then there’s a mellow, water-color like flow from one flavor into the next, rather like riding a very gentle wave. Orange to peach (figgy still) to cherry, with a cherry/strawberry tail.

This is a happy way to end my caffeine for the day. Dammann fine tea! (Apologies, A&D!)

I’ve been under the weather, but well enough to still crave cookies! I wasn’t up to baking, so I purchased some of those little schoolboy biscuits.

http://www.lubiscuitsna.com/

Mmmm! I thought this tea would be perfect for them, because it’s so delicious with chocolate. Berries and caramel and good tea, perfectly blended. I feel like I had the most wonderful, transporting treat. I could be sitting in a little tea house in Europe in a dress and pearls, and not sick on my sofa in my pajamas!

I think it would be a good idea to stick a few of these packages of biscuits in my cupboard for surprise guests. They would feel welcome and treated well at a minute’s notice!

Oh! Before I forget – my latest flickr set

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackiemania/sets/72157624294962481/

has a bunch of things I’ve been talking about lately like my trip to get shortbread and PG tips, my tea themed cloth napkins, the tea cup cloth that my swap partner on Ravelry made for me, the print of Thomas Sampson that Doulton so kindly sent me (and Doulton – there is a picture of my cat Marty in there!!) etc etc etc if you would like to take a look :)

Another deliciously well blended and subtly perfect Frenchie! Berries and caramel, a little vanilla. Also, indescribable! Have you noticed how the French flavored teas taste like 10 different things you can barely put your finger on?

Decadent with a little sugar and half and half. REALLY decadent paired with chocolate! I rate this one 90, but with a little ounce of good chocolate beside it, it rocketed to 100 for me! I am going to save this one for this purpose :) Fantastic.

Can anyone tell me a bit about naranquilla?

Anyways… this tasting note is made possible because Doulton was so wonderful and sent a sampling of this tea to me.

The black tea is very smooth tasting and does not interfere with the flavors. The vanilla is sweet and creamy, and the chocolate is so yummy in this blend, and although it isn’t strong, I think that for this particular blend, it’s just the right amount (because, ordinarily, more chocolate is better) I can taste a hint of the marachino, and there is also a fruitiness to this tea that I guess I must attribute to the naranquilla because I don’t know what that is!

A very nice tea – would be a delightful dessert tea (or even a substitution for dessert!)

YUM! I think I want to move to France and live next door to the family Dammann. (And in this fantasy of mine, they invite me to tea every day)

I seriously have not yet encountered a tea from them that I do not like.

I need to thank Doulton for this experience – thank you! This tea is incroyable!

Noël à Vienne translates into Christmas is coming. I can taste a bit of christmas in this cup – there is a certain “baked” flavor to the tea that reminds me of the apricot cookies my grandma would make at christmas time. And of course, there is the chocolate. It is a bit more delicate than I would like (but then, I’m a chocoholic, so more chocolate is always better). There is also a light touch of citrus and a pleasantly creamy character to it. This is SO GOOD!

Thank you again Doulton!

This was another present from Doulton tucked into the box she sent me with my Dammann Freres order. Thanks, again, Doulton, for your generosity!

There is really one major fragrance to the dry leaves: smoke. There may be a tiny bit of citrus underneath but you really have to search for it. I’m wondering how this will work, given the overpowering nature of lapsang smoke. It seems ambitious to try to combine it with any other flavor.

The main ingredient in the tea’s aroma is also smoke. And in the taste, too. It’s got a lighter smoke than a full blown lapsang, more along the lines of a Russian smoky tea, but I am constrained to find any Earl Grey flavor under the smoke.

Trying a second time at 205 instead to see if that brings the bergamot out. It doesn’t so much in the aroma, but it helps in the flavor. There’s a definite citrus note combining with the smoke, and a mild tea flavor as well. It’s still balanced a little more toward the smoke than the citrus than I would choose, but it is flavorful and has depth. It’s the kind of thing I probably wouldn’t have on a daily basis but would be happy to enjoy every so often.

Thank you Doulton – I am so grateful to be able to taste this Dammann Frères tea!

This tea smells amazing. This is THE ULTIMATE fig tea! The best fig tea that I’ve tasted thus far (I haven’t tried a lot … but this one is awesome!)

The black tea base is smooth and unassuming. There is a baked character to the tea that works well with the fig flavor, which is rich and sweet and delicious.

YUM! I love this tea!

Another delightful Dammann Frères tea – courtesy of Doulton – thank you!

Yum! I love cherry sencha. This one isn’t as good as Den’s but then, it’s different. Den’s has a stronger vegetative quality to it, and the sencha tea is of slightly better quality. This tea still has a very good quality sencha though. The cherry flavor is rich and sweet – and very abundant! YUM!

Sipdown no. 3 of July 2019 (no. 85 of 2019 total, no. 573 grand total).

I liked this one quite a bit, but in its dotage it tasted more fruity than almondy. The original note tells a different story, so likely this one did change in its old age.

In retrospect I am bumping the rating, as I could see buying this again.

Another of my Dammann Freres purchases from the Doulton led adventure. I still have a few left to taste. Did I go overboard, do you think? (The angel on my should says “of course.” The devil on the other shoulder says “nah..”)

There are huge pink petals and tiny blue ones in among the dry leaves, which smell sweet and flowery and not at all like marzipan. Love those little blue cornflowers in anything. They make me all goofy. ;-)

The tea steeps dark reddish amber, and has a very gentle aroma that is most definitely marzipan. I can smell the sweet almond, down to that somewhat alcoholic scent and taste marzipan sometimes has. Mmmmm.

Taste wise, I get the marzipan as well. It’s not overly sweet or pastry like, which is one of the things I like about it. It truly is marzipan flavored tea, not a cake superimposed on the tea. There’s also a gentle floral taste and feel to it, particularly at the beginning of the sip and there’s also a slight saltiness that is extremely interesting.

It isn’t a heavy taste as marzipan can sometimes be, and was perfectly yummy on a day like today that is bright, sunny and warm. At some point I’ll have to assess all my Dammann Freres experiences and think about which ones are worth repeating through additional purchases, but for now I’m just enjoying drinking my way through them. This one could end up being a rebuy. Time will tell.

This is a very perfumed tea and its aroma evokes being at a busy, bustling perfume counter where a bunch of youthful girl scouts are spraying the air with all kinds of different and not necessarily complementary scents. Trying to deconstruct the riot of flavours and aromas is not easy.

Perhaps this tea is too much of a good thing: it’s as if a master builder had only one opportunity to create a building and tried to do a Bauhaus structure with Gothic gargoyles, rococo flying buttresses, and Frank Lloyd Wright glass.

Perhaps it’s not wise to gather up so many sages for one single tea. But it’s not cacophonous—-just a bit busy. I think that the citrus looms larger than the rest.

Or maybe a decent Earl Grey got loose in the kitchen one night and added all of the loose ingredients it could find to itself.

Sipdown no. 24 of 2017 (no. 305 total).

My sons have become fashion plates. They like certain “designers” and that’s all they will wear. Gone are the days when I could find a T-shirt with a cute saying on it or something geeky and get to adore them in it. Now they only wear surfer stuff and they won’t even wear the free swag I bring them from work (which believe me when I say, most kids would find these items quite cool).

I tell this story because one of the things that drives me nuts is their desire to “save” certain clothes, particularly shoes, for certain occasions. They get me to buy them Jordans and they spend hours keeping them clean, but when I ask why they aren’t wearing them often the answer is “because I want to keep them nice.” When I point out that in two months they’ll have grown another size so there’s no point in not wearing them, they look at me like I’m from another planet.

And yet, that’s exactly what I do with teas I like. I save them for just the right time to drink them. Then they grow old and I wonder why I didn’t just drink them in their prime.

That’s what I did with a lot of the black teas I like a lot, including this one. But I keep telling myself I have to become ruthless and just drink them and enjoy them.

So there may be a number of other flavored black tea sipdowns coming up soon. I picked this one to start with because I’d given it the lowest rating of all of the Dammann Freres in my cupboard.

But now I’m wondering why. It’s delicious. I shall miss it, but I must set an example for my kids (at least that’s what I tell myself). Bumping the rating.

This is another tea from the Dammann Freres group tea ordering project Doulton put together. I started laughing when I read the ingredients. This is indeed the fourth tea from Dammann Freres I’ve tried with fig as an ingredient. Fig. 4!

Amazingly, the dry leaves smell like peach even though there is no peach flavored anything identified as an ingredient. I can get fig as well. I had to look up what pitanga is, and if it smells like cherry, I can find that as well. Ironically, what I’m not getting is a whole lot of citrus, which, one would think, would be the main event since there is lemon, bergamot and orange in this. It’s definitely in there, but it isn’t in-your-face.

The aroma of the tea also reminds me, inexplicably, of peach. Through some weird synergy of the ingredients, that’s what I smell. I can pick out the individual fragrances as well, even the rose.

The word that came to me when I was thinking of how to describe the taste is “French” which I realize isn’t very helpful. It’s a complex flavor; like its name, a well-blended perfume that doesn’t have one particular note sing out, but if you’re willing to spend the time putting your mind to each flavor you can find it there and, more interestingly, find how it interacts with the others. That’s what I think of when I think of French perfume.

It’s a tea I think would taste particularly fine on a fall day when the air is just starting to get a crispness in it. It’s not heavy, but it has a depth to it that may feel too heavy for spring and summer consumption.

Thank you to Doulton for allowing me to sample this tea!

This tea is very good – a robust tea that starts off with a spiced floral-woodsy taste, and then becomes a bit fruity in the finish. It has a very pleasant astringency.

I really like this tea, but, there are other Keemun teas that I’ve enjoyed more. After tasting several of Dammann Freres amazing flavored teas, I think my expectations were a bit higher and the tea did not deliver. That isn’t to say that it is a bad tea, just not as great as I had hoped it would be.

Thank you Doulton – you are the best!

The aroma of the dry leaf is magnificent! It smells like peaches and cream! There isn’t much fragrance from the rose petals, maybe just a hint of floral essence. Once brewed, some of the earthy qualities of the black tea emerge in the scent.

The flavor is also quite magnificent! Smooth and rich. The peach and cream flavor is there, however, the black tea is much more pronounced. This is black tea with peach and vanilla flavor, not the other way around. It has a very bright flavor. Astringent with a slight tannic quality – but not an overt bitter note. Just a little something that sort of rests upon the palate to let you know that it’s black tea that you’re drinking.

Oh. My. Lordy.

I want to marry this tea company. I want to marry someone who works at this tea company. I would seriously consider dropping everything and moving to France in order to have easier access to this tea. This is the best floral green tea that I’ve ever had!!!!!

How can a tea be so complex, delicate, and beyond yummy? Dammann Freres? They really must be fairies masquerading as tea blenders creating rare, precious, and joyful nectar.

Violets? I never really gave much thought to this flower. Violets in this tea are a revelation! Bergamot? I didn’t even realize that there was bergamot in this until I looked at this tea’s description (on my 3rd yummy steep). This is the most delicate and lovely unassuming bergamot!

Okay, I’ll stop rambling. But this is an awesome floral green tea! Thank you so very very very very very very very very much JacquelineM for the sample of this tea!!!!!

ETA: Ummm…TG

Sipdown no. 47 of 2017 (no. 328 total).

I picked this to sip down because I had rated it second lowest of the Dammann Freres teas in my cupboard. I ended up bumping the rating of the 7 Parfums up, and I’m going to bump this one down.

I don’t know if it’s that my tastes have changed over time or what, but this ended up being way too perfumy for me, to the point where the tea became hard to discern.