4183 Tasting Notes
The Tea Merchant! You had me at the old timey wax seal on the paper around the tea envelopes! I discovered a couple weeks ago that I love love love creamy earl greys when I thought I wouldn’t like them at all. Now I want to try any and all creme earl grey and I was happy to try some samples from The Tea Merchant. This is GOOD stuff. The french vanilla, bergamot and black tea offers a triple threat of perfection. They work so so well together. The black tea has the perfect amount of flavor to showcase the bergamot and creme. It doesn’t get better than that except for the gorgeousness of the cornflowers. The second cup was just as delicious as the first. The best of the four creme earl greys I’ve had in the last few weeks. (I’m not sure how much alike the creme and the french vanilla are, but this tastes a lot like the Element Creme Earl Grey I have so I’m guessing it is pretty similar.)Creme Earl Grey is my new favorite type of tea and The Tea Merchant is my new favorite tea company! I can not wait to try anything else they make. (I LOVED the Silk Dragon they also sent in my sample package.) I will DEFINITELY be ordering this when I run out of all my creme earl greys!
Thanks Will Work For Tea for the generous package of tea this was included in! I definitely wouldn’t call the steep color of this amber! It is a strong black tea. When I tasted it, I could tell this was a ceylon before I looked at the description here. I’m proud of myself – I just figured out the ceylon flavor a couple weeks ago! haha. To me, the ceylon has a very strong flavor, almost too strong to add any other flavors to. I couldn’t really taste any almond here. There were TWO sips that there was a bit of almond. That’s weird. Even when the tea cooled, I couldn’t taste any other almond. But it works as a black tea anyway!
Thanks to Nicole, I can now try a jasmine oolong! A few months ago I thought a jasmine oolong would be interesting… and this one is! It has a lovely and fragrant jasmine & oolong scent and flavor. And I could taste it even before it was very cooled! Usually, I have to wait a bit to get any good flavor out of a jasmine or oolong tea. Both the jasmine and the oolong have a ton of flavor, so they are both pretty much evenly matched. One doesn’t over-power the other. Delicious! It’s exactly how I imagined a jasmine oolong! On my oolong flavor meter (one is light and floral, five is strongest), this oolong gets a three! It’s floral tasting, but there is something stronger there too.
Thanks, Darby, for trading for some of this! The description says dark chocolate, but my pouch of tea definitely had white chocolate and NO dark chocolate… huh. But there was a big ol cherry in my infuser, so it’s definitely cherry. Sadly, not much of a cherry flavor or a chocolate flavor. (There was oily stuff at the top of my cup though.. I’m guessing the melted chocolate chips.) The black tea flavor is pretty good though, so it’s worth it to drink it just for that. And at LEAST it doesn’t have that terrible fake cherry-cough-syrup flavor!
Thank you Will Work For Tea for sending a ton of this! I sipped some of this last night. I love the unsteeped scent of this! Very spicy! The steeped scent is less appealing… not sure why. A chai hardly ever disappoints me. This one didn’t. However, the coconut there was non-existant. I don’t mind, as sometimes coconut in tea is a bit gross to me. This works as a regular chai for me, anyway. I can never have enough of those!
I was looking for a tin of this tea and James R was selling it as part of his tea sale! thank you! I’m sipping some now and it is even better than I remember it! So sugary and cinnamony! So so good. I can’t even taste the black tea because the other flavors are so strong. I can see orange peels in the teabag but I can’t really taste them. I hope most of the other Harney & Sons teas are this good! I look forward to trying them…
Thanks to Will Work For Tea, I was able to try this heavenly perfect blend! I love the ingredients in this blend. The leaves look great too. I just saw Amy Oh’s review that mentioned it tastes like Strawberry Quik. I forgot about Strawberry Quik! But it does really taste like it! The steep color is a cloudy light green. Cloudy from the matcha. I think this is the first loose leaf matcha I’ve tried. The strawberries are only sweet to me, not sour. The only difference I would make is a stronger vanilla flavor, but that might make the other flavors hidden. I really like this one… realy fresh and delicious. I just wanted to sit here & do nothing but slowly sip this tea for the next three hours!
I’ve been so spoiled with amazing teas lately! The Tea Merchant sent me this free sample that sounded like a very unique & interesting blend. Also, I really love that it was packaged with an old-timey wax seal with the company logo!
First steep: 3 1/3 min.
The scent of the unsteeped leaves is intriguing and delicious! I don’t think I’ve heard of a vanilla flavored oolong before. Vanilla anything is my absolute favorite. The steep color is a light yellow. The flavor is very vanilla! Yum! There isn’t too much of an oolong flavor, however. I also can’t tell that there is lemon myrtle here. It is subtle — but I think it might be making the vanilla taste unusual!
Second steep: 5 min.
The vanilla flavor seems to have disappeared a bit but the oolong flavor has gotten stronger! It’s evolving… most oolongs seem to do that more than any other tea. I wonder why there aren’t more oolong teas with vanilla, since they seem to compliment each other well!
Third steep: 6 mins
The vanilla flavor is still disappearing but the oolong is getting even better. It has that lovely floral taste that the best oolongs have. The steep still has the same yellow color too.
Fourth steep: 9 mins
The oolong flavor seems to have become weaker now and there is a tangy flavor to it. But that may be because I had it steeping for 9 mins with just boiled water. I’d say the best steep for the vanilla flavor was the first and the best steep for the oolong flavor was the third.
On my new oolong flavor scale of one (lightest & floral) to five (stronger), I’d say this is a two. It was fun to see the oolong taste get better as the vanilla disappeared. Very unique! Another tea I’ll have to buy when my tea stash gets lower! Overall, a delicious blend from a great new company! I can’t wait to see what they do next!
Thanks for letting me try this one too, TeaEqualsBliss! I almost had written all Earl Grey off, as the only Earl Grey I had ever tried was probably the worst tea bag ever. Terrible stuff. Then I tried some Creme Earl Grey and it became my second favorite tea ever. (Worst and second favorite? Interesting.) I think I really love the creamy component in tea. I was still worried as I tried this one, just because I didn’t think I would like plain bergamot, because of my experience with “bergamot”. But this is GOOD. This is actually a quality bergamot and not floor cleaner like that other tea! And the bergamot might be responsible for a bit of the flavor I thought was just the cream in the other. There really AREN’T many teas I don’t like!
thanks to Nicole for sending me some of this in her stash reduction! Now this is interesting and GOOD. I’ve never seen “leaves” so tiny! They didn’t seem to go through my mesh infuser, even though rooibos usually does. This has an interesting scent I haven’t smelled in a tea before. I really don’t think any tea could be too strong for me. This looks like a cup of coffee almost. I needed something tough to wake me up… I think I was still asleep from that Drink T toffee rooibos from last night! This has a delicious black tea flavor that really lingers. I really really like this!
