Like I said in my tasting note for Genmaicha, from Calabash, when I order from a brand new to me tea company and don’t have reviews/recommendations to go off when selecting teas, I tend to be drawn to things that are more unique and that I’ve not seen other places…
That’s why I selected this tea; it’s visually very pretty and I will be the first to admit that I am not immune to the allure of a nice looking blend. I also like apricot teas, typically, and this is meant to be an apricot and cinnamon profile.
I shared a photo of this on my instagram account in the stories when I first received it, and holy shitballs are there A LOT of marigold petals in this tea. Like, you can look at the photo on the website and know that it’s got a ton of marigold in it but it hits you much differently in person. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another tea blend with this much marigold in it! As impressively stunning as it is to look at, though, there are some issues that come with that in terms of flavour…
In tea blending, marigold is often used as a visual filler in order to make blends more attractive looking. It’s cheap as an ingredient, and pretty – so it serves that dual purpose quite well. It does, however, have one practical purpose aside from aesthetics – it can soak in and carry flavouring quite well. However, without those flavourings it has a very flat and neutral taste – fine when used in small quantities for aesthetics but when it composes the majority of the blend and the blend has no flavouring added to take advantage of it as a carrier…
Well, you can probably see where I’m going.
This definitely isn’t an awful tasting tea – but there just isn’t enough of the apricot and cinnamon in the blend to overtake the large quantity of marigold. So, the flavour comes across as incredibly thin and bland, even though the apricot and cinnamon used in the blend smell very nice and would probably steep out quite beautifully if they weren’t so stretched out. What makes it so eye catching and stunning is also, sadly, the downfall in delivering a great flavour.
I’m obviously going to play around with this one to see if I can bring out more flavour when I brew it – but even if I can’t that doesn’t mean it’s a total write off. I’m not a strong believer of the wellness benefits of tea, but I know that there are some purported positive health benefits to drinking marigold so if there’s any truth to that at all then I think you’re probably getting a decent hit of whatever that is with the quantity present here…
