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With Valentines coming up kinda soon, I’ve been thinking about those little cinnamon heart candies – one of my favourite V-Day treat (definitely over chocolate), and since I don’t actually have any of those I made the next best thing – which is a tea that tastes just like them! This one.

This is definitely sweet cinnamon candy – and is pretty close to being the perfect amount of spice for me personally. I’ve noticed recently that, actually, while I dislike Chai in general for how spicy it is and while I typically dislike green teas, green chai seems to be a good compromise. Maybe it’s the lightness/vegetal quality of the green balancing out the boldness of the Chai and keeping it from being too much? And then, the Chai aspects kinda also hiding the parts of green tea I dislike?

Or, something like that? I don’t know…

But this was good, and it satisfied my craving well.

I made tea tonight for both Tre and I, and this is what he ended up having. He asked for something with “No cinnamon, licorice or lemon” and I was already making this for him when I remembered that a third of this is DT’s Earl of Lemon (a flavour he didn’t want) and a third is McQuarrie’s “Ontario Ice Wine” (a flavour he absolutely hated and flat out refused to be served). Oops.

I stole a few sips from his mug before I doused it in sugar and passed it off. It tasted pretty good, maybe a little bergamot heavy though.

It worked out – he liked it for the most part (said he could taste the Goji). He didn’t mention noticing the lemon or the ice wine in it – so yay for that!

And, this finishes off the sample from VariaTEA – though I still have 50g I purchased which remains untouched. I’m actually quite loving that I’ve received this as a sample from so many people because that delays my digging into my own rations of this – and since it’s sorta expensive, I’m certainly not going to complain about that.

I cold brewed this one – today, actually. I was going to strain it before bed and then drink it tomorrow, but when I went to grab something from the fridge and saw it was quite dark in colour already I took a little sip and found that it was already quite flavourful and could be strained right away. So, that’s what I did.

In total – this was a four hour cold brew.

As far as the taste goes, it’s mostly like drinking liquid gummy strawberry candy (think the red Gummy bears or red gummy worms), but with just a little tartness that gives a little more of a natural taste to the tea. This is fantastic as a cold brew!

And the long stretch of plum flavoured things continues!

Again, guzzled while watching Bones but I think I was slightly more aware of the flavour of this one as I was drinking it. I noticed it was maybe a little more tart, and still tasted like candied fruit with the soft cinnamon edge. Like a rounded edge – when you’re baby proofing shit.

It was good.

Guzzled down while it was hot this time – no chance for it to get cold. I watching a really emotional episode of Bones while drinking this one, and I was very caught up in the episode and wasn’t paying attention to the taste of the tea I was very quickly sipping at for comfort.

I’m sure it probably was as delicious as usual.

This one didn’t want to come up in the search bar – so I had to did through my cupboard. I mean, if I had a reasonable number of tea that wouldn’t really be a big deal…

I’m trying to do some resteeps this evening since I’ve had several teas today/yesterday that I know are good resteeped. I typically don’t resteep at all (only if I’m too lazy to clean things out) since I don’t generally want several cups of the same tea – I want variety. But there are some teas I’ll make a special effort for – and hell yes this is one of them.

The second cup was every bit as good as the first, despite some over steeping. A touch more floral, but still very genuine and juicy.

Mmm, this one is growing on me slowly but surely. Tonight I thought it’d provide a nice sweet treat to counter balance the fruity teas I’ve had (and will continue to have) tonight. i debated adding a splash of milk, but ultimately sided on drinking this straight.

Although, I will not that tonight’s cup is closer to 50/50 rooibos and maple, and I still likely wont restock since I have tons of Birthday Cake to blow through (slowly but surely making my way through it, though). Once I’m out of both, I’ll reevaluate and see which I want more of in my life. As is, they’re relatively similar and this is also similar to Tea Desire’s Sweet Toffee – I certainly don’t need all three.

Had this To Go today, while I was at the mall.

Because I know you’re all just dying to find out (realistically, probably could care less) – yes the attractive one was there, though he wasn’t working. He just happened to also be there at the same time. Lucky me.

Also, I happened to stumble into there at the same time that all the employees were doing a tasting. ‘What were they tasting?’ you ask with great enthusiasm? Chocolate. Yes – I inadvertently got a little sneak peak of the chocolate bars that DT will apparently be testing in stores soon. Or, I’m assuming it’s DT testing them since the manager said “These are the new chocolate bars. They’ll be for sale soon, and not even staff will get a discount because they want accurate sales results before deciding if they’re going to be permanently sold”. I saw about four different kinds there, but the one I heard them talking about/currently trying was a bar of Matcha White Chocolate. It looked really good, actually – despite being straight matcha.

Based on that one, I’m going to assume that DT isn’t just selling random chocolate and that these will all be tea related/flavoured chocolates. Maybe black tea & dark chocolate? Or Mate/Guayusa chocolate? Regardless, they sure sounded interesting.

Anyway, I got this one iced to sort of get a feel whether I want to use the rest of my sample as a cold brew or continued to have it hot. I’m wondering if maybe the water was too hot while it was steeping because there actually was some bitterness in this cup that certainly wasn’t present last night. That said, this was still pretty good for a green: lots of kiwi flavour, and in this cup more lemongrass/lemon zest flavour. It was a little more tart.

Despite the bitterness, I liked this almost as much as last nights cup – but I think I prefer it hot just a touch, so I’m going to try and finish off my sample that way instead of cold brewing. I wasn’t disappointed with my choice of tea, though. Yay for that.

Grr… Chrome crashed so I lost my really nice tasting note on this one, and now I don’t have time to completely right it out before I leave for the bus/my interview so I’m just going to be able to summarize.

But basically this was an expectedly pleasant follow up after starting my morning with a not so pleasant cold brew. I knew it would be great (it is a personal favourite, after all) so I made some up to enjoy while watching the most recent episode of How I Met Your Mother. I was a beautiful, gentle start to the day (much more than chemical oranges) and one of those rare moments of “tea nirvana” where things just sort of slow down and get really pleasantly peaceful/perfect.

And now off to an interview! Fingers crossed – and this time I’ll try not to go into DAVIDsTEA to look at the hot employee buy more tea.

Sipdown (203/206)!

I thought this could be interesting as a cold brew, and that it might balance out the flavours a little bit, so I used the rest of my sample from Keychange for cold brewing. However, in hindsight I regret doing so.

At a hot drink, this may have been alarmingly strong in regard to the flavour of the orange but at least it didn’t taste chemical. As a cold brew, this is still alarmingly orange flavoured but also has a strong and harsh artificial component which is really unpleasant. I should have stuck with finishing it off as a hot drink – I definitely enjoyed it better that way.

So a disappointing sipdown.