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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.

Part of my tea-exchange sampler for the season – this one’s a perfectly serviceable vanilla tea, but not one I need to keep in my cabinet. I’ll finish the sample, and move on.

It’s a basic spice tea. Nothing particularly jumped out about it for me, and I don’t feel the need to keep it in the house. I got it as part of a sample pack of other spiced/nut teas, and there’s nothing wrong with it at all, but it doesn’t spark joy.

I’ll finish the sample pack, but I don’t feel any need to get more. Very much a “shrug, OK” tea for me.

I am currently out of my chestnut tea, which is one of my favorite Adagio teas, so I was pleased to get this one as part of my annual tea-gifting that my friends and I do amongst each other. Hazelnuts are more common than chestnuts in some types of things, but they’re less common in tea, and this one was quite good and scratched the same itch as the chestnut.

It’s a lovely nutty flavor, along with the proper “yes there is black tea in here” and it brewed twice without notable degradation in flavor.

Since this one is so similar in terms of what I would be drinking it for, I’m unlikely to seek it out when I have Chestnut in the house – but if Chestnut is unavailable for some reason, I will swap it in without compunction and be just as happy.

Definitely a success.

It’s annual-tea-gifting time amongst my friends and I, and I have been given two four-pack samplers from Adagio. Today’s was Almond. That’s it, just almond.

Given that I really like almonds, I was dubious about this tea – most of the ‘almond’ or ‘almond-marzipan’ teas I’ve had have had a fairly modest almond-ness to them. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to be grabbed by the lapels of this tea as it shouted “ALMOND!!!” in my face.

“Yes, yes you are, aren’t you,” I replied, and the tea subsided a bit, appeased.

This is a very almond-y tea. I like it quite a bit for just that reason! It’s probably capable of assuaging my desire to eat an entire box of marzipan all at once (but I don’t keep marzipan in the house anymore – it’s too dangerous for just this reason – so I can’t test this hypothesis) and certainly it fulfills its name.

I shall be very happy to keep this sampler around. We’re a bit tight on tea-cabinet space right now, so I’m not sure I’ll keep a large amount of this one around long-term, but for the moment, I’m quite enjoying it.

Definitely one I plan to drink again.

LEMON. Wow, that’s a lot of lemon. Possibly I’m not used to it anymore?

Spouse bought this one, and quite likes it, but wanted to know if I would drink it with him. (He’s not sure he can go through it regularly.) So he asked me to try it.

It brewed up relatively weak-looking by my standards (4 tsp. leaves in my 3 cup pot) and when I took a sip, the lemon punched me in the nose. It’s drowning out most (not all) of the other flavors – about the only thing I could taste in addition was the rose. Not the tea, and not the ginger.

This one is definitely not for me. Oh well!