The Tea House - Covent Garden

Cold brew of the day, and delicious. I previously speculated that this would be good iced, and it definitely is. I think the hunks of dried apple in the tea totally make it. Incredibly appley in a fresh way, and with just a hint of natural sweetness. I had a bottled apple black tea a while ago that was way oversweetened, and this tea is what I wished that tea had been. I will definitely be cold brewing this one again!

What’s this? A tea not from Paris? No, this one’s from London. I suppose this one is a little unusual for me recently; I mean, I like apples, but I don’t currently have any apple teas. In fact, a spiced apple tea was the very first tea that I drank and what allowed me to get into tea, but I haven’t drank any in quite a while. I’m not sure what it was about this tea that made me buy a bag of it at this shop (well, I’m guessing it was the aroma, but I’m not sure why an apple tea called to me that day). I think I was intrigued also by a non-spiced apple tea, since so many of them seem to be. The dried leaves are indeed full of hunks of apples and small pieces of strawberry leaves. It smells like warm, sweet, juicy apples, not bright crisp tart ones. It almost seems like there’s a caramelized or brown sugar aroma to it, like a baked apple (but not one baked with spices, just baked!)

The brewed tea has much more of a black tea aroma to it with an underlying appley sweetness. The taste is nicely appley in a juicy way, but it’s not overly flavored. It mostly tastes like a black tea with a bit of apple. There’s a warmth to the tail end of the sip, again kind of like a baked apple flavor, and a bit of what reminds me of apple skins. It’s a well-rounded apple flavor that works nicely with the black tea. And, since it’s summer and I can’t stop thinking about iced tea, I bet it would be really good iced as well.

Mmm, marzipan. Ok, so I can tell this isn’t the highest quality black tea base in the world, being that it’s a little bitter/astringent at less than boiling, but this is still the only straight almond black tea that I’ve come across that really tastes like almondy marzipan to me. The low quality tea base bothers me more than it did before, so I guess my palate is refining itself as I lose myself in high quality oolongs, heh. Still pretty tasty, but I wish I could find one with this level of almond and a better base.

This tea is so tasty hot, so I thought it would be good cold steeped, but I was so wrong. There was some horrible disgusting aftertaste… it’s a shame because I wasted some of this tea on what turned out to be a failed experiment. I guess if I want nutty cold steeped tea I should stick to Trois Noix.

I was most of the way through this tasting note when I reached out for my tea cup and bumped it with my hand instead of grabbing it. I almost knocked it off my (very tall) desk (actually a counter in a lab) onto the tile floor, where it would have assuredly shattered, but I somehow managed to grab it. Not without spilling a third of it on my desk and partially on my keyboard, however. Fortunately, my keyboard is pretty old and thus is pretty much impervious to liquids; unfortunately, I neglected to unplug it before wiping it off, and succeeded in somehow canceling my previous tasting note and thus deleting what I had written. There’s little more frustrating than taking time to write something up on a website and then having it magically erased. When you rewrite it, it’s never as thorough as before.

I threw the little that was left of my Chocolate and Cream black from TeaFrog (~1/2 tsp) into this cup to go ahead and use it up. I forgot to start my time when I poured the water, but I remembered about 30 seconds later, so the tea got a little extra time (because I once again forgot to stop it early). The aroma of the brewed tea was primarily that of a strong black, with a decent dose of almond, but not overwhelming.

The flavor of the main part of the sip is really the black tea with a hint of chocolate and bit of almond, followed by a strong, full marzipan aftertaste that fills your mouth and almost convinces you that you’ve been eating the confection (if it was sweet, I’m sure it would taste exactly like it).

Aaaand now that I said my keyboard was fine, the space bar and apostrophe stopped working, so I had to find another keyboard. Bleh. Anyway, tasty tea. Not so great for keyboards.

Well, I’m back from Europe, though I’m leaving again for Chicago tomorrow for a college reunion. In any case, choosing a tea from the many I brought back was an almost paralyzing decision, and while I initially wanted to start out with one of my fancy French teas, circumstances dictated that I needed something else. I needed a black tea to combat afternoon jetlag, and I needed a tea without too much going on since I’d be doing other things at the same time. This one was a natural choice.

I’ve been casually looking for an almond tea that said almond to me in the way that I love, namely marzipan or almond extract, but I had yet to find one that really was right. When I was in London I stopped at this tea shop, and when I smelled this tea I knew I had to buy it. The dry leaf smells powerfully, amazingly, like the freshest marzipan or perhaps the aroma of a bottle of almond extract. Interestingly this tea company had a different plain almond black tea that smelled much different, but this one was specifically marzipan: what I was looking for.

Brewed, the aroma changed quite a bit and the marzipan aroma wasn’t quite as all-powerful as it was in the dry leaf. The black tea base became a real partner in the aroma, and this was born out in the taste. It’s a nice, strong black tea with a very almondy, marzipanny flavor. There’s also a kind of generally nutty note underlying things as if you were acutally eating a nut, probably from the almond pieces included in the blend. The tea was very slightly bitter, but it wasn’t too much. I don’t usually sweeten my teas, but I have a feeling that a bit of sweetener would probably really turn this into a marzipan bomb.

Overall, I’m very pleased with this tea, and I feel like it’s a nice blend of the marzipan and black tea flavors without being too much of one or the other. A good purchase!