English Tea Shop

This is one of my most favorite teas. Perfect blend of peach and ginger.Smooth! I buy it every week and always have a spare in my cupboard.

I forgot I received a tin containing 9 different The London Tea Company flavours. I came across the tin whilst I was sorting my tea cupboard out in preparation for Black Friday. I have no space left :( But I have a few days to clear some space and a further week or so for international post to arrive so I suppose that should be enough time.

Once steeped this tea is golden in colour and has a sweet citrus scent with an after-sniff kick of ginger. Rather fiery actually, cleared my sinus that’s for sure.

In the first few sips the lemongrass is nice and sweet with a gentle sourness which is followed by fiery and warm ginger before being lightened with more citrus in the after taste. The aftertaste citrus is different, it’s not lemongrass..waxier than that…perhaps lime? or orange?

It’s a pleasant enough blend and is definitely the sort of tea that I enjoy drinking in cold weather. I have a warm glow in my stomach now :)

This is one of my new favorites…a delicate flavor hinting at the chocolate and vanilla. Heavenly fragrance. I love that this can be a bedtime tea with no concern of caffeine keeping me awake. I save it as a “treat” tea.

Light flavored tea, I barely tasted the caramel and english toffee flavors but it’s a good tea to cleanse your palate after meals.

My last tea of the day, I don’t need anymore caffeine, so I figured I’d give this one a try. I had a feeling it would be weak, so I used all 3 teabags that Sil sent me, & let them steep for awhile.

There isn’t really a lot of flavor here. It’s mildly sweet, & does kind of remind me of those very plain butter cookies.

This ends my tea drinking day. I’m at 237, which means Sil & I are currently tied in our crazy sipdown challenge. :)

Out of the package, I can really smell the berry blend, and it smells delicious. Aroma is kind of important to me. In taste, I can clearly taste the blueberries and just a hint of the raspberry. But I suppose raspberry can be a difficult flavor to grasp in tea.

I’ve made this “king” of teas my morning cup today. I love this tea. My very good friend from Iran gave me some advice on brewing. She said to make a concentrate, keep it hot over a pot of boiling water, then pour it into the cup adding hot water with it as you make each cup. I’m off to give it a try.

Blustery clouds scudding across the sky. Mid 50’s. Yum. (Same forecast in April and I will be grousing about it.)

At any rate, the need for an extra cuppa at lunch caused me to paw through my random and motley work tea tin and pull out this one, like a cracker jack prize. Apple and vanilla with a sminch (I made that up, do you like it?) of cinnamon spice in the background. Perfect with a slice of pumpkin pie. (It’s October. I couldn’t wait any longer.)

Anybody besides me wondering if we’ll still be in long johns come July? Blustery and chill this morning, giving way to some scraps of cold sun later on—-grabbed this at work because it was handy, and I was freezing. It’s a good steeper when all you have is sloppily microwaved work water. More fruit-vanilla than spice, which is OK by me. I’m going to have to count remaining bags and use them parsimoniously.

I like this better each time I try it. Apple and vanilla—not exactly pie-like because of the other stuff, but still quite nice, not too picky on water temp or steep time, which is handy at work.

Which I did get to today, wicked sleet notwithstanding, but which is looking a little iffy for tomorrow. Driveway is a mess; we almost weren’t able to pull in to park and the snow shovels are currently frozen in the shed. (We, uh, forgot to get them out before the storm started last night. Go ahead. Laugh.)

But for the moment, chicks are all in the nest and we are warm.

…of course, the upside to being the “_____ will drink anything; she likes tea” person are the nice little surprise packets that turn out surprisingly good.

Like this one. Apple-orange-vanilla. Nice. Made my morning. (Wouldn’t take much; seasonal gloom has hit me like a road train.)

Another suprisingly tasty gift-boxed blend. Nice strong vanilla keeps the spice from overpowering. You can taste both the apple and the orange. Not often you get one with this many ingredients that represents them all fairly well.

A nice little gift-box quality (bagged) amalgamation of ingredients. Mostly getting mint, muted a little by the rose petals. Cinnamon/ginger…not so much. Some of that can probably be attributed to sloppy and unattended microwaved water.

But a nice little sippin’ steep to perk you up a bit.

Combine hospital water, a weird cafeteria microwave with controls I didn’t understand, a poorly rinsed-out Tervis Tumbler, and you get … a cup of warm something that tastes mildly of chocolate, maybe. But is warm and comforting in unfamiliar surroundings.

Always, always, always keep emergency teabags in your purse!

Had some leftover coconut milk from the Thai incident the other night. (Who KNEW that you had to soak the noodles first?) So I stirred a cautious teaspoon into this ice-creamy flavored rooibos, and it wasn’t bad. I consider that advance confirmation that with a larger proportion of c-milk, chilled, it would make a nice frappucino-alike.

Still don’t know too much about the company itself and what it offers. This box was another TJ Maxx find.

A schmoe evening…I have a bunch of toys out on the floor (large plastic iguana and a bunch of Pokemon tops) trying to figure out what my Sunday kids and I will be doing with them in a couple of days. (Yes, I know you’re supposed to study the material and then figure out the teaching gimmick, not the other way around.) …the schmoe part is that I’m really just piddling and not getting anything done.

But thinking about my batch of 10-year-olds is making me think about a batch of cookies, and since it’s really too late to start baking and I sort of snarfed the last of the E.L. Fudge Double Stuffs in a sugar and carb-craving haze, this is a fair alternative. Enough sweet to stave off the munchies.

Added a little half-and-half to the cup, and it accentuated the rooibos flavor, not the chocolate or vanilla. Go figure. It’s still nice and smooth and tasty.

The nice thing about the Easter Elephant is that he doesn’t forget how hard it is to ooze back into work after a lovely Easter weekend, so he occasionally leaves a small little post-Easter treat by the kettle after an icky Monday. You really need to get to know him.

In this case, it was a lovely little box of rooibos goodness from a seller I can’t find much about online at all—just one little “coming soon” site with a really cute logo.

I’ve mentioned before that rooibos was just made for ice cream flavors—so in this case the double whammy of chocolate/vanilla is really nice. Lots of chocolate scent in the dry teabag; heavier on the vanilla when you steep it. And decaf enough that it doesn’t muss up bedtime.

This sounds like something I would like. I love ginger, and I love honey (that I love tea goes without saying).
But this just tastes flat. I don’t get any complex flavors or layered notes of ginger or honey in this. I do get a hint of the ginger, but not any of the honey. Unfortunately this tastes a bit like….. hot water.