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Steepology Advent of Tea calendar: Berry Delight

This tea brews up almost the color of a dark red wine, and the nose is very strongly elderberry and black currant (at least to me) which always makes me think (fondly, to be clear) of the cough drops and cough syrups I used to be given by friends from the U.K.

Unfortunately, the moment it’s in my mouth, all I can taste is the hibiscus. I wish companies would stop sticking it into teas like this one – they’re advertised as berry teas, and they don’t actually need the hibiscus in them at all. And for those of us who taste hibiscus very strongly, it completely overpowers everything else. I’m sure that if I added honey, I could mellow it out – but I prefer to drink my herbals unsweetened, because if I’m drinking them, it’s usually late in the day when I don’t want sugar at all.

Hard pass on this one. I poured out the remainder of my cup. :sigh: Oh well, on to the next herbal.

I got this for myself because I knew my advent calendar of teas was liable to have a fair number of herbals in it, and in the morning, herbal absolutely doesn’t cut it.

It’s a perfectly nice tea. It doesn’t jump up and grab me the way, say, a Golden Yunnan or other single-source really nice tea does, but it also doesn’t make me sad the way many other blends do. I’m happy to drink the rest of my sample of it over the next month or two, and I’ll buy more if my preferred breakfast Assams are out of stock. It will do very handily.

But it also isn’t Harding Spring. :-)

Steepologie Advent of Tea: Day 7 – Cafe Latte Tea. Well, that does indeed taste like the additions to a cafe au lait. The hazelnut and cocoa are quite strong in the nose, as well. I am particularly tasting the cocoa nibs near the back of my tongue, and only when swallowing, which makes me think that the hazelnut nose is overwhelming the cocoa except when some can get in the back door, so to speak.

It’s a pity that this tea is hitting my mouth with an unfortunate aftertaste that I suspect is something to do with the hazelnut pieces. I find that the aftertaste is strong enough that it’s also mixing with the individual sips of tea, so I’m losing the taste of the tea to the aftertaste. :-/ This is not what I want my tea to taste like. And it’s definitely not what I want my mouth to taste like.

I am probably going to pour half this tea out, and not resteep, and go find something strong and unflavored-by-things-not-tea to clear my mouth out. It’s a pity, because I really like hazelnut, and I really like cocoa, but whatever they did to the ingredients before they went into this tea is really not doing it for me.

Another Steepologie Advent of Tea – this one was tucked in on Day 4 with the Peppermint Bark, which is good because today’s tea is a Rooibus, and yesterday’s was an herbal, and I am in dire need of caffeine right now.

I like jasmine tea – jasmine oolongs are one of my favorites for when I have Chinese food. (I learned to love them while eating out, when you couldn’t get milk for your tea, and I continue to drink them without milk.)

This one, being a black tea with added jasmine, I adulterated with a bit of milk, and it came out just lovely. The jasmine flavor is quite strong, but there’s an odd aftertaste that I can’t place – possibly the milk? I’ll have to try resteeping the leaves and drinking it straight.

I won’t be seeking this one out since I have to mail-order my tea from Steepologie, but I would quite happily drink it again. Definitely on the list of “yup, this one is worth it.” And if I’m ever in the store and am looking to just get a cuppa, I’d be happy to have this one.

Day 4 of the Steepologie Avent of Tea Calendar. (I actually got two samplers on Day 4, and didn’t drink either of them on the day of, because my refill box from Adagio arrived and I was absolutely going to drink some of my Chestnut, having had only an empty tin of that for almost a month.) Yes, this smells very, very much like peppermint bark. The aftertaste is also like peppermint bark – peppermint and chocolate.

During the drinking…there’s less flavor. I’m not sure if I didn’t steep it long enough or hot enough, or just didn’t have enough in the sampler (I brewed 24 ounces of water with it, so it might be a trifle anemic) but the flavor of the tea while it’s in my mouth is quite mild. The peppermint aroma almost overwhelms the taste of it.

If I wanted to drink a candy cane, this is the tea I would go for. I don’t, so I won’t be buying this one. But I’ll finish my mug, so that’s fine. If I were going to buy this tea, I would want to put more black tea in, to perhaps dilute the peppermint a bit and give it a bit more body – but I am the sort of person who likes her tea to be thick enough that people mistake it for coffee some days.

Got this as part of a sampler in my annual tea swap. This is the wrong season for me to be drinking this tea. It’s a nice light green with a strong smell of raspberry.

I will be coming back to this and the other greens when the weather warms up and I can do them iced. It was a pretty average “green tea” taste with some raspberry overtones, but it didn’t do anything specail for me. I want to see what it tastes like when I can make it stronger and over ice.

As a winter hot tea, it’s not doing anything particular for me.

Ah, I knew there were probably going to be some herbal tisanes in this Advent Calendar from Steepologie,. This one is a pretty standard floral/mint herbal, with bonus eucalyptus leaves. And it does absolutely nothing for me.

Herbals are often hit or miss for me, because I want my hot leaf juice to have the taste of proper tea, but I do like herbal tisanes from time to time. However, they’re usually the spiced/cocoa-shell varieties, and this one has no spice to it at all. It’s a bit like drinking what lotion smells like.

For someone who enjoys mint or floral herbals, this tisane is probably quite good. I am not one of those people. So it goes.

This tea scratches the same itch that Tea & Absinthe’s “Elixer of Wisdom” does – namely, a black(ish) tea with floral notes. I don’t think I like it quite as much as I like Wisdom, but that’s a bit like saying I don’t like vegetarian masala burgers from Trader Joe’s as much as I like a gourmet hamburger from a specialty restaurant.

This is a fine floral tea. The aftertaste has a pleasantly minty feel to it, for all that it’s not mint at all. (I think that’s probably the green tea that my tastebuds strongly associate with mint.) The aroma is good, also. I can slightly make out the flavor of apple, but I’m not sure I’d know what an osmanthus flower tastes like, so I can’t tell if I can taste it. (I can definitely taste the linden. I’ve had linden honey. It’s yummy.)

My spouse wanted to know if I would drink this – he’s the one who bought it, as he’s more of an Avatar: The Last Airbender fan than I am. I will drink it! But I’m not going to be seeking it out, so it’s getting the top rating for something I’m not actively looking to put in my cabinet on the regular.

Good tea, definitely glad I drank it.

Steepologie Advent of Tea, day two!

I am not really a mint tea-seeking person. That’s just a general thing. But my grandfather was very fond of gunpowder green tea in the morning, so I was already predisposed to like this one a bit more than I otherwise might.

So. Very minty. Not unpleasantly so, but it’s a very single note. (Unsurprising, it’s just spearmint and green tea.) I have no objections to it, but it’s also not something I’m going to seek out.

I can definitely see why Steepologie has a recipe for making a mojito with this tea. However, since I’m a morning-tea person, that’s not really going to be something I want to do. I’m going to go brew myself a cup of assam so I can have my proper caffeine-and-tannin fix for the day.

(I would like to observe that we do not appear to have MINT!!! as an option for “what flavors and scents do you notice,” so the flavors and scents don’t really adequately cover the level of “yes, this is mint tea” that I want. ;-)

A friend gave me the Steepologie Advent Calendar this year. (Thank you C!)

First day: Majesty’s Chai. Still one of my all time favorite chais. This calendar is off to a great start. Yum.