42 Tasting Notes
This is nice enough. The blueberry flavor is nice and fruity. This isn’t something I ponder the flavor of, but it’s one of my go-tos when I want a thermal mug of tea to take walking. My contigo holds the temperature of hot liquids so well that if I make black tea, near boiling, it would be hours before I could drink it without injury. Green tea, on the other hand, brewed a bit cooler, is just about right. And the nice bright blueberry of this tea is about right for walking and drinking.
I got some of this as an experiment of sorts. I’ve been enjoying loose leaf tea so much the past few years I haven’t really bought anything bagged for quite a while, but I needed something I could travel with that wouldn’t make a mess.
This…does not taste like sencha to me. I’m not sure what it is, it’s not the fact that it’s bagged, because I’ve had green tea from Starbucks (that I think is Teavana?) that’s tea bags and it has that umami/grassy green tea flavor. But this tastes, well, I’m not sure what it tastes like. Like hot water with some straw in it? I’m not sure, but I don’t much like it. Well, I don’t hate it exactly, and I’ll finish up the box, but.
It’s funny – I’ve seen two tasting notes in a row from people mentioning World Market. The other person is gmathis, who is in southwest MO. Maybe they live close to you!
Southwest MO—I’d bet they’re within an hour or two drive of here. :D
Yeah, Starbucks did buy Teavana. For bagged tea, Mighty Leaf is tasty. They have 5 different varieties of green.
Mostly I drink tea without anything added—no sugar, no milk, just the tea itself. The exception is a nice, chewy English Breakfast kind of black tea. Which can be difficult to find—though it’s gotten easier, at least around here, to get PG Tips, which is kind of my baseline for “the kind of tea you put milk in.”
I’ve bought any number of teas marked “English Breakfast” in the hope they’d be that (to me comforting and comfortable) milky tea hit, but mostly they’re miserable with milk and much better without.
This tea, though, stands up to the milk. Very nice.
Yes, I know, it’s Irish Breakfast, not English. And I could have bought English Breakfast instead while I was in the shop, but a while ago a friend of mine, when we were talking about the milky tea issue and the inadequacy of American teas called “English Breakfast,” told me that in her experience, Irish Breakfast was more likely to deliver the goods. She was talking specifically about Harney and Sons Irish Breakfast, and she gave me a sample, and I agreed with her assessment. It was the stuff.
So when I was at the London Tea Room the other day, I bought Irish instead of English. It’s the stuff.
Maybe some time I’ll try it without milk, just to say I did, but this is the kind of tea I drink when I want milky tea.
Ooh I like this a lot! Ordered a pot after lunch at the London Tea Room. I’d tried plain cherry blossom tea a while back, and found it…not to my taste. In large part because the cherry blossoms were preserved in salt. However. I really enjoyed the very subtle flavor I recognized as that same cherry blossom flavor, with the umami and sort of grassy taste of the sencha. I made sure to buy a couple ounces to take home with me. Now watch me oversteep it or something.
