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How has no one reviewed this yet?

Mad a big western mug using 1/2 ta square – it was pretty good, I should have taken some better notes though. I remember it had a nice, thick mouthfeel and sweet hay and cream notes. The undertone was a little apricot-y. Very tasty!

I think the 1/2 square was the perfect amount for a Western sized cup too; lots of flavour but didn’t feel excessive either. I look forward to Gong Fu brewing this one, as well.

Late night cuppa tea!

Very nice smooth honey and floral note combo; medium bodied but delicate with a lingering sweetness. So beautiful! I don’t think I’m Gong Fu-ed this one yet, but I should definitely get around to doing that ‘cause I bet it’d be so good.

Midday tea!

This was really good – I’m happy I nabbed some from MissB! It’s creamy with lots of rich, bold coconut notes and a bit of earthiness from the pu’erh. Very fresh tasting, and natural with that good kind of confectionery coconut taste and sort of this medium-ish sweetness. Like coconut nectar, or even the coconut agave from work that I like a lot.

Noms.

Sipdown (238)!

Finished this one off hot last night with a squeeze of fresh lime juice! We were playing a really nice family game and I needed something to sip on throughout. With the little bit of added lime, it really made all of the fruit flavours pop and created this super juicy trio of great fruit flavours. In particular, the raspberry and lime were superstars.

Little did I know, my thieving sister would catch a whiff of the fruity deliciousness, and hijack the last third of my mug. She really enjoyed it – take that as a major compliment, because I’ve really struggled to find ANY black based tea she’s been into. Still, I wanted to drink the whole cup…

First tea from yesterday.

I actually didn’t pick this one out myself when I placed this recent Octavia Tea order, though if I had seen it on the site I probably would have. Instead, this was one of a couple free samples that the company added into my order. It’s very much something that appeals to me though: a “Breakfast Tea” with vanilla and caramel.

Steeped up, man does this smell heavenly! It’s almost all vanilla rather than caramel but I have to say it’s a really silky, sweet and rich tasting vanilla that does not mess around! It is there and it wants you to know that! I’m absolutely enjoying the creaminess and richness of it. Even with zero additives this has the flavour and mouthfeel of something with milk in it. I can’t even imagine how creamy it would taste WITH milk. As for the other things, the caramel and the rose, I think more than anything else the caramel is acting as a ‘booster’ to the vanilla and making it sweeter and more richer. The rose is light, but present in the finish as this gentle floral detail that adds the perfect touch of layered flavour/depth.

This is the first tea so far from this order that I’ve actually been like “You know what, I should actually order more of that!” and honestly, I think it gives 52Tea’s awesome Amethyst’s Gold blend a real run for its money…

EDIT: Well what do you know, this was tasting note 4700!

Story Time!

So, the mall which houses the DAVIDsTEA I work at has a lot of vacancies right now – but we recently filled one of those vacancies with a Saje! I don’t necessarily agree with all of the wellness claims/health benefits that Saje typically tends to market their products with, likely because I don’t believe in alternative medicine at all, but I still find a lot of their products really cool and I like the “aromatherapy” aspect of their brand.

So, Friday was their “Grand Opening” and I stopped in early in the morning on behalf of DAVIDsTEA to see if they would want a brewer worth of tea to sample out/give away to the people browsing the store since DT is allowed to sample out teas at special events and things like that. They very politely declined though since they sell their own tea and it would soft of be like competing against themselves. Totally makes sense – no hard feelings at all! It just wouldn’t make sense business wise.

I was, of course, curious about their tea though since I’d never seen it here on Steepster before or really heard mention of it. So on my break I went and checked everything out. My friend/coworker Kandyce’s fiance Seth is actually working at Saje so he showed me a few of the different teas, and I picked this one out – not because I believe in Detox teas at all or really any of the “wellness effects” of this blend but because I thought that of all the teas that they were selling this was the one that sounded most unique and appealing taste wise.

So, when I went up to buy it that guy at the counter was one of the people who had been in earlier in the day when I had stopped by to see if they would want a brewer of tea. Remember, they had VERY politely decline – and as he was ringing me in he said echoed again that he felt really bad they had to turn down such a nice gift, and that it was so well meaning of us. Like I said, no hard feelings; we hadn’t realized they sold their own tea and so it totally made sense from a non-compete standpoint. He told me he wanted to give me a discount though, as an apology and while I said that certainly wasn’t necessary it was definitely appreciated. Next thing I know he’s handing me my bag and telling me to have a lovely day!

“Oh, I need to pay you though!”

“Nope, no need! This one’s on us!”

And that’s the story of how I got $17.00 worth of tea for free.

ACTUAL TEA REVIEW STARTS HERE:

So, this is a pretty simple herbal blend overall: the only ingredients are lemon myrtle, peppermint, and chili powder. I guess when it comes to their tea, Saje’s whole thing is “simple is better” so all of their teas are five ingredients or less, fair trade, and organic. The latter two things there I ALWAYS support and I can definitely get behind the first if the flavour is good/solid. I don’t really like blends bogged down with unnecessary ingredients either.

First things first, validity of ‘detox’ blends aside, I like the flavour of this one A LOT better than I like the flavour of DAVIDsTEA’s Detox. To me, the former tastes a little bit like Pledge. Thankfully, the bulk of people buying it aren’t doing so for the flavour.

The flavour of this one is simple – mostly it’s peppermint. The lemon myrtle is nice too; it’s both a brightness in the top note but also a lemony undertone which pleasantly compliments the mint. It’s cooling, and very refreshing when put together. Again though, just to reiterate, very simple. It’s the sort of thing that I think I’d get very bored with over time but as an occasional tea I think that it’s straight forward enough to provide a bit of relief in between all of the other crazy concoctions I often find myself gravitating towards.

Thank you Saje for the free gift!

EDIT: Because I forgot to actually say it out right, but I didn’t taste the chili powder at all. Maybe I just didn’t get a scoop of leaf that had much/any in it – but this was all lemon myrtle and peppermint to me.

Sipdown (239)!

Just finished this one off; I only had enough leaf left for a teacup worth of it so that’s all I made but it was a hella good teacup. Since I now knew going into this that it’s pretty fruity, I think I enjoyed it a lot more. Muscatel, for sure, but it also has a strong red fruit taste to it. It’s something sort of raspberry like, but also a touch like red currants or even strawberry leaf? I like it though! I still 100% don’t think this is a traditional Breakfast blend but for what it is it actually does taste REALLY good.

EDIT: There’s also a bit of a citrus note coming off the black tea itself.

So, the description for this tea says to enjoy it straight instead of with milk, like one traditionally does with Chai. However, I am a spice baby so I added milk anyway ‘cause that’s typically the only way I like Chai.

I actually thought this was super pleasant! Even with my added milk, I thought the flavours all came through really nicely. The strongest ones were cinnamon, coconut, and lemongrass which made for this lovely, sweetness with a bit of a warming quality internally. I mean, tea is usually ‘internally warming’ but I mean in the sense that I felt like I was getting a hug from the inside. Those three notes were the strongest, but after that there were some nice undertones that provided a really nice support for those main body notes: ginger, clove, a bit of pineapple sweetness (less so the distinct taste of the fruit itself). I want to say I tasted the cardamom too, but I don’t know if I really got a distinct taste of the cardamom more than I just kind of wedged the idea of it in there since I was tasting all those other chai spices.

The peppercorn, as well, I didn’t really taste but I did get that tiny peppercorn tickle in the back of my throat that I normally do with blends that have a lot of peppercorn. Sometimes it bugs me, but in this case I liked it in conjunction with the warming spice notes, creamy mouthfeel, and more tropical tastes. It’s so weird to describe a Chai as tropical as well, but that’s sort of what this one was! I mean, it had lemon, pineapple and coconut – that all works together to sort of give off a tropical vibe.

I probably will try this one straight in the future since I found it enjoyable overall with milk – it’s more promising now that I have some flavour familiarity.

Iced!

So, I saw the other day that the Sears in my mall was selling these little sample packets of For Tea’s Sake’s iced tea line up on clearance for a dollar, and I remember REALLY enjoying this one so I bought the last sample packet. I mean, for a dollar what do you have to lose!?

- Oolong base was stronger this time around than I remember it being
- Quite grassy/‘lawn clipping’ like
- The strawberry & melon notes are every bit as smooth, sweet, and lush
- Really refreshing!
- In a way, it’s a TOUCH candy like: the melon isn’t convincingly natural/realistic
- Still really good though! Very happy I got to revisit!

So DAVIDsTEA just released a line up of tea infused mints for the summer;

Super Ginger
Just Peachy
Maracuja Mango
Peppermint Amour

At this point, I’ve tried all of them but the Super Ginger one and tbh I’m likely not going to try that one because I hate ginger so the idea of a mint using our most gingery tasting tea just doesn’t appeal to me. I wanted to write a blurb on the ones I HAVE tried though, except I don’t want to take the time to do it under each tea’s page with the link to the mints on the DT website and such like I normally do for the tea infused chocolate bars. That’s just time consuming, and I really don’t have much to say for each mint anyway, so I’m just gonna stick the reviews here.

Peppermint Amour
Undoubtedly the best of the three I did try. The flavour pairing is an obvious one; certainly nothing fun/creative – but it’s good. Essentially just a classic peppermint flavoured mint. Though, it is pretty strong!

Maracuja Mango
My second favourite; the mango is nice and I don’t find that this mint tastes too sweet or anything like that. I also like that you can kind of taste the “tea” part of this one. It’s the only one of the four that actually has real tea leaf in it as well, since the others are herbals/rooibos. If you like the taste of the tea itself, you’ll likely enjoy this one too.

Just Peachy
My least favourite. It’s not so much that I thought it tasted bad; the peach note was actually pretty nice. It’s just that despite being peachy I thought it tasted completely unlike the tea it’s actually based upon. Which was weird.

Also, the mints themselves are kind of nice; if you bite into them they do have a bit of a chalky mouthfeel but if you suck on them they dissolve smoothly and at a good pace without that chalkiness.

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 regarding the teas, and not the company’s.