June Wedding! Something old… Goodness, I’m not even sure when I got this tea, since I picked it up from the loose bulk spice bins at my local Fred Meyer, along with some lavender buds. If I had to guess, I’d say likely last fall or winter? I remember I had been looking online for a long time for a black lavender tea, but I could only find lavender earl greys, and I just wanted black tea with lavender without the bergamot added. When I was doing my grocery shopping one night and passed by the loose spices and saw the lavender, I got the bright of idea of just adding lavender to a black tea. Then I saw they also had some teas in the bins. The only options were an Assam, a Ceylon, or a Darjeeling, and since I’m not a huge fan of Assams or Ceylons (I usually find they tend to get a bit strong, bitter, or astringent for my particular tastes), I decided to try the Darjeeling. I’d never tried a Darjeeling before, and wasn’t expecting anything amazing for something out of a bin in Fred Meyer that I’d be blending with lavender anyway, and was really just hoping I’d get the less astringent of the three options.
Plain, the tea has a slightly honeyed aroma, and brews up into a light black tea that is slightly malty with a very subtle apricot note, and a slight autumn leaf flavor in the aftertaste. It’s a bit on the mild side and probably not the sort of black most folks would prefer for breakfast, but it is definitely lacking any of the bitterness I get from darker black teas, and its astringency is very mellow, so for my purposes, this tea was a good choice.
It took me a while to work out my preferred black tea latte with this… mostly because lavender is finicky. Too much and it gets very bitter and sour (and I’ve had this problem even with commercial tea blends using lavender!). But too little and you don’t get a good lavender flavor, so it takes quite a bit of experimenting and several bad cups of tea until finding the golden ratio. For me, I like to use 1.5 tsp of the darjeeling, a level 0.5 tsp of the lavender buds, infuse that in a cup and a half of 200 F water for 3 minutes, and add it to half a cup of warmed vanilla almond milk. It’s such a tasty breakfast tea; lightly malty with no bitterness, very sweet and creamy, with a strong lavender flavored finish that doesn’t step over that edge into sour floral. For two relatively cheap bulk ingredients (the darjeeling and the lavender buds) that I can grab at a grocery just down the street, it’s a really satisfying tea latte.
Flavors: Apricot, Autumn Leaf Pile, Honey, Malt, Smooth
