First tasting note on this one!
This week I was lucky enough to get two days off – and while I spent the first day lounging around and being lazy, today I had a whole bunch of errands and domestic things to do (finally done now though, so time to slink back and watch some TV). I started by checking the mail and saw that my 52Teas order was in! I left all of it at home except the Very Big Hill Dew Honeybush, which I took with me to the mall.
At the mall, I cashed my paycheck (yay – all my rent for next month is set aside!), stopped at Tea Desire to bring some of the Very Big Hill Dew Honeybush to my favourite cashier/sales lady since she had expressed an interest in it (when we opened up the new package all we could smell was the genuine honest to goodness scent of Mountain Dew), and then I mailed out all the packages for the 12 Days of Christmas swap!
After that I went to work to resolve a technology issues (but thankfully was only there for 20 min. or so), then to McQuarries Tea & Coffee Merchants where I picked up two new blends to try out as cold brews (sadly, there’s zero info on either of them on their website or here on Steepster, and the blends aren’t sold with brewing instructions or ingredients lists at all). And lastly I went grocery shopping before coming home!
And now I’m trying this awesome tea :)
Tre and I both agreed that this smelled absolutely amazing: like super sweet banana pudding or banana medicine. Candy banana, basically. Since this is the first tasting note I had no reference guide for steeping, so I went with 1 heaping tsp. in 8 oz. of water, just below boiling for three minutes.
When it was really hot, I could only taste the black tea which had some unpleasant astringency to it. I figured I had over steeped, so I let it sit a while and when I came back to it the tea had cooled down pretty significantly. However, as a cooler tea the taste was so much different. There’s a strong banana pudding type of taste (which now carries into the smell of the tea, when hot I was just getting a strong smell of black tea), with some creamy vanilla notes in there. I’m thinking the butterscotch is acting as a sweetener here, which gives it the sweet banana pudding type of taste I’m getting. In the aftertaste, I get butterscotch without any banana taste. This is really delicious, but it really does need to be at a cooler temperature to get all the flavours.
This would be great for someone wanting a sweeter black tea or who likes banana candy, but if you want a more natural banana type taste then maybe this isn’t for you – because the butterscotch really does sweeten it up.
I wanted to try this but because I was not sure how much I would like it, I did not feel justified in buying 2 oz. I am glad to hear you enjoyed it though.
nice review :)