16396 Tasting Notes
Cold Brew.
This one tastes like grape juice – the natural stuff not, like, grape soda. Grape juice, and crisp red apples. I fucking love it. Like, love it. It’s so perfect, and refreshing, and well balanced. More doesn’t need to be said – this was a wonderful tea drinking experience.
So, this review is actually for the English Toffee infused fondue kit that DT sold over Valentine’s Day/February in general…
Ok, for starters; this was actually very easy to make. They give you the option of making in in a traditional fondue set up or just microwaving it – which is what I ended up having to do since I don’t own any normal fondue stuff. However, it does come out very thin/runny. I mean, it definitely doesn’t taste thin or watered down but just know that as far as thickness goes… it’s soupy.
The taste is mostly that of milk chocolate, but there’s a bit of a toffee kind of element to it that does make me think of the tea. It’s a weak connection though and I don’t believe you’d dip some fruit in the chocolate and instantly just know that it was tea infused/specifically infused with English Toffee tea, but I mean, it tasted good. I used apple slices and pineapples with it, and it was a tasty good time.
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.
Oversteeped mug of this.
Surprisingly didn’t go bitter on me, maybe a touch astringent? Mostly what happened was that the intensity of the apple notes increased tenfold to the point where I felt like I was biting into a bright, shiny cartoon level of green apple. The fennel provided sweetness, but in a non-distinctly fennel way.
It was actually still very good.
Cuppa that I drank on the way home last night.
It definitely had some bitterness to it and that lawn clippings/overly grassy kind of taste; I think that’s probably because the base green tea is a lot lower quality than I’ve been drinking as of late. The jasmine was nice though; pretty strong but not rough. It definitely did the grapey thing though where I’d slip back and forth between tasting florals and plump red grapes. So weird.
Not terrible overall as a tea though.
I generally avoid this tea at work; it just smells so intensely ginger heavy, often to the point where I kind of feel like I need to sneeze – and ginger just isn’t my thing. I’m sort of on one of those “revisit all the teas you feel meh about” kicks though where I’m trying things I haven’t had in a very long time/aren’t usually to my tastes. This falls under that category.
I will say, as far as taste goes it actually had a lot less of a ginger punch than I’d built up in my head. In fact, it was actually pretty sweet; bright acidic/juicy notes of orange, and that weird but pleasant enough sweetness that eleuthero has that’s really hard to describe. Then the ginger; in the undertones of the sip and in the finish. Still much more of it than I would want on a regular basis, but not so much to completely turn me off. I’ve been focusing so much on the ginger aspect when showing this to people, so these revisits are really good for sharpening product knowledge too because now I feel like I can give a better description of how the orange comes into play too.
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.
So I’ve been to a couple different DAVIDsTEA locations now since starting to work there, and one thing I always try to do is ask the employees about which teas are their best sellers that are unique to their store – and what I mean by that is that every store kind of all have the best selling teas; Just Peachy, Forever Nuts, Cream of Earl Grey, ME to WE, Buddha’s Blend, etc. I mean, generally speaking, anything that comes in the Rainbow Tins/boxes of Sachets is a company wide best seller – those are the ones that sell well, so those are the ones that can justifiably be prepackged.
However, each store also has a handful of teas that don’t come in those prepackaged options that they just sell a ton of, that other stores don’t – and my theory is that the general reason for that is because those teas are staff favourites, and so because the staff as a whole really likes them they sell a lot more of that tea because they recommend it more. Some of these ‘staff favourites’ at my store would be Chocolate Macaroon, Midsummer Night’s Dream and, as of late, this tea! I mean, in the last few weeks our sales of this tea have nearly doubled because collectively our whole staff kind of just went “Man, this is a DELICIOUS tea!” And I’m not really an exception to that; I’ve found it’s the perfect thing to pull down when I want something light, refreshing and fruity tasting without it being in my face kinds of fruity, or reliant on things like hibiscus for flavour impact. It works hot, it works cold, and the apple/raspberry combo is really satisfying.
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.
I must have wound up with the one scoop in the tin loaded with cayenne pepper, ‘cause I’ve had this tea a good handful of times now and this was the first time I really, really felt the spice. Still a pleasant taste, but not nearly the intense candied lemon peel and slight tickle in the back of your throat that I had become accustomed to.
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.
I had kind of forgotten I had this tea. Oops.
So… I hate raisin cookies, but I love sweet potato, and I have a particular fascination with sweet potato flavoured teas so that’s what drew me into trying this one, against my better judgement.
All things said, done, and steeped it actually tastes neither like raisin cookies or sweet potato, though. I’ve now had this ingredient in enough of AQ2T’s blends to be really familiar with it, but what it tastes like it that super, super robust Ceylon Cinnamon that Lauren’s really favoured as of late. In fact, it basically only tastes like cinnamon. In terms of accuracy to the intended flavour, it’s definitely a miss for me. However, I happen to REALLY like the taste of that cinnamon. It’s SO rich/intense, and leaves a pleasant tingly feeling on my tongue.
So, even though I don’t think the tea is a good recreation of what it’s named after I definitely still like the taste a lot. I’d love to see this cinnamon continued to be used in blends, just hopefully with some ingredients that can stand up to its intensity. A cinnamon poached pear, for example, could be a really lovely thing!
Revisiting this one already because I just haven’t been able to get it out of my head since trying it during the collection launch…
I swear it tastes even more of fennel this second time having it; with the same crisp, clean lettuce notes to it. I’m actually really, really liking it – so much so that I even bought a little 20g bag for at home. Last year I really craved florals around the Spring time; maybe this year my thing will be very clean tasting greens? That’d be a little out of character, but seems to be the direction I’m headed.
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.
Mid afternoon cuppa.
This one came with my last box from Sipsby – I was excited to get something from Yunnan Sourcing as I’ve not explored many of their offerings, though less excited when I saw it was a raw pu’erh rather than a ripe.
I made this one Western, but will eventually try it Gong Fu. I just didn’t want to commit to a whole Gong Fu session with a raw I hadn’t tried yet – I have no clue if this is gonna be up my ally or not. Flavour wise it’s very interesting; there’s a touch of astringency but mostly it’s quite smooth with some interesting flavour notes to it. Sort of a caramelized sugar and sweet smoke note mixture – with just a bit of fruityness to the top notes; almost like a starfruit kind of fruit flavour with aspects of under ripe peach? It’s such a weird mash up; exotic and stone fruits, smoke, and caramelized sugar…
I can’t decide if I’m into it or not – but hey, at least I don’t hate it!
