13950 Tasting Notes
I had a very, very stressful afternoon today so I turned to a mug of this tea as a source of comfort and grounding. The deep, full bodied and smooth notes of sweet potatoes and semi-sweet chocolate were exactly what I needed to get over some building up anxiety and get in a better mental place. I’ll be on a plane in less than twelve hours, heading to Toronto Tea Festival, and I’m really looking forward to it. Some community is exactly what I need right now!
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
Gongfu!
Started my morning with a grounding session of fresh figs and Yiwu sheng. Definitely subtle sweetness was a huge element of this tea session both from the pu’erh itself and from the fruit. Usually I would opt to pair figs with something like a white tea, but the initially soft liquor that slowly crescendos into something more impactful with each steep worked really, really well!
Tea Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn7xO7PuUkD/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXg1QK7M9Ak
Cold Brew!
Sipping on this one now and it’s actually quite enjoyable! It reminds me considerably of the cherries embedded in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. Not the ice cream itself (and no chocolate notes either), but those delicious candied cherries themselves.
Perfect for a surprisingly warm winter afternoon.
We have a new adaptogen/wellness focused collection that dropped today, and this is one of two new teas included in it!
No adaptogens specifically in this very straight forward blend, but definitely still plenty feel good. Truly though, it is a veerrryyyy simple tea. Just three ingredients! Shou pu’erh, ginger, and lemon. It steeps up with a rich full body from the pu’erh and lots of zesty and earthy ginger with just a hint of lemon. I like it a lot hot, with just a bit of honey. It’s pretty great for when you have an upset stomach, but also has that classic “sick tea” kind of vibe that I gravitate towards when I have a cold.
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
Ordered lunch to the office and my meal came with a kombucha. Unfortunately they were sold out of all my favourite Gutsy flavours, so I ended up grabbing this one as an alternative. It’s been, like, three years since I last had it so it was kind of interesting to revisit and see if my impressions had changed at all. The long and short of it, though, is that they hadn’t. Still a decently delicious kombucha but lacks the “magic” of some of Gutsy’s other flavours.
Just finishing off a mug of this tea.
There’s a lot of ingredients in this blend and it feels a bit like Magic Hour sort of just tossed in every ingredient they could make some type of wellness claim for instead of developing something more concise and targeted. It also means the flavour is pretty scattered and all over the place.
Truthfully, I actually think it tastes really delicious. They call it a dragonfruit tea but that’s definitely not the flavour I’m getting. Though, it is hard to say SPECIFICALLY what it tastes like other than, like, sweet and berry-like. Maybe a berry fruit punch? It’s not cloying though (which I like) and there’s a sort of “plump” roundness to the more blue/purple oriented berry notes. It was very smooth to sip on without any off notes, and I got the impression it would be very, very refreshing as an iced tea or cold brew.
Persimmon tea blends are so uncommon so I got really excited when I saw that Magic Hour carried one, and I immediately knew I wanted to try it. Truthfully, I could have cared less about the butterfly pea flower – but I get that there’s still a lot of people who love the aesthetic/gimmick of it.
Smelling the dry leaf, I got worried – it did not smell good. Definitely like that bag of dried fruit “chips” that you get from the wholefoods store on an afternoon where you’re telling yourself you’re only gonna have healthy snacks – a little stale and musty. Add to that the less than appealing aroma of a lot of butterfly pea and… wasn’t looking good.
But, I drank a mug today and was kind of pleasantly surprised. It does steep up a gorgeous shade of blue, though maybe just a biiitttt more of a teal-ish colour. Definitely not as “deep blue” as I’ve seen a lot of BFP blends, and there were greenish undertones. Pretty though, nonetheless! But as I’ve already said, I didn’t buy this because it was pretty. I bought it because I wanted persimmon!
So, does it taste like persimmon!? Yeah! It’s not the sweetest and most juicy persimmon tea I’ve had, and definitely still has soooommeee of that “dried fruit” taste that’s a bit flat, but the key medley of floral and honey notes that make persimmon so distinct were both there. I think it would have been better without the more musty notes of the BFP. This blend eres on the more delicate side (white tea base def leans into that quality) and there’s a lot of butterfly pea so the flavour isn’t masked at all and, honestly, it probably contributes to that dried out fruit effect.
So, overall… Enjoyed the cup, doubt I’ll have problems finishing off the sample bbbuuutttt it’s not the 10/10 persimmon blend I was hoping it might be.
I agree with Cameron that the green tea base is very much drowned out by all the strong herbs in this tea, though I do think it’s maybe adding a bit of body and astringency that they would have lacked otherwise. In particular, I think that’s helpful given how sweet the combination of mint and fennel reads. For that to not come off as terribly cloying I think it needs some of the texture and coarseness of the green tea. Perhaps that’s incidental though, and not what Chroma actually had in mind with this tea.
I say that because my best guess is that they were going for some type of riff on a Moroccan Mint. To be fair, I have no real reason to assume that – it’s just that the dual combination of mint (spearmint reads more strongly here, IMO) and the suggestion to make it iced/cold brewed gives me strong “upgraded Moroccan Mint” vibes. So, totally just conjecture on my part.
Anyway, it was fine – but definitely not my favourite from Chroma.
Sipdown (2078)!
Didn’t realize how close I was to a sipdown this sample was, so when I saw it while looking for a good afternoon cup of black tea I figured I’d take the easy sipdown win! It was a really nice mug of tea – rich full bodied black tea and fresh mango notes with a gentle creaminess to round out the cup. Was gone before I knew it!
Took a personal day on Wednesday and this was just a random cuppa I steeped up early in the morning as I kind of lounged around my apartment, sort of doing off and on chores and vibing to some new music. It was nice because the flavour is sweet but not cloying, and the gentler notes of caramelized almonds and toffee with the fresher green elements of the mate were neither bland nor very intense – so it worked as a more neutral and gentle cuppa that still had all of those focus oriented mate benefits. I enjoyed it a lot!
