Out of the four teas I bought from Tea Desire, this is the one I was most interested in! It’s a flavoured green tea AND a Chai, both of which are tea types that are very hit or miss for me. However,smelling the dry leaf has me really excited to try it.
It’s hard because I have no idea how to explain how it smells, and yet I know EXACTLY what it smells like. In my senior year of high school in commercial cooking class we vegetarian “Sweet and Sour Meatballs”. The meatballs themselves were made with crushed nuts, yogurt, cottage cheese, and different sorts of shredded cheese. What the dry leaf really reminds me of is the “sauce” that the meatballs were cooked in. Sadly, I don’t remember all of the ingredients that went into the sauce, but the ones I do remember are ketchup and apricot jam (both in quite generous amounts), and then I know there was some sort of spice added to the sauce as well. The dry leaf smells exactly like this! And, that sauce was really weird – but SO good.
Following Tea Desire’s steeping instructions I’m steeping a generous teaspoon of this for about two and a half minutes. Honestly, I have no idea what to expect – but if this tea tastes anything close to how it smells I’m sure I’ll like it.
Steeping, the most prominent scents are cinnamon, cloves, and apricot. Maybe it’s because I’ve already made an association to those Vegetarian Sweet and Sour Meatballs, but I also smell a very sweet sort of tomato scent. The liquor actually reminds me of the colour of dried apricots or apricot jam.
First few sips… Mmmmm! It does taste more spicy than it smells, but in a good way. This is definitely a very sweet and spicy tea. Most prominently, I taste the cinnamon, pink pepper kernels, apricot, and cloves. I’m happy I’m not getting a distinct sense of ginger – it’s by far NOT one of my favourite flavours and I tend to avoid food and drink in general with prominent ginger flavour.
I love this tea, and I don’t have anything like it in the rest of my hoard so I feel like, once the 50g I have is gone, I can restock this pretty much guilt free! A success on the Chai and Green Tea front!
