Sugar Plum Shou Mei

I am getting a lot of lavender from this one. There is a sweet fruitiness and the white base is prominent as well but mostly it is lavender. I can’t decided if I like it or not. Luckily I have one more cup worth to sort out my feelings. Thank you Scheherazade for sharing.

I never did get to try this one from the Christmas hamper at the right time, unfortunately I became ill and couldn’t taste much so I saved it for future steeping. Right now I need to use up as much tea as possible before I move house, so small samples like this one are first on my list to be used. Besides, sugar plum sounds delicious at any time of the year.

Once steeped the tea is golden in colour and has a sweet fruity scent, like plum but also berry. Also a little floral and dry.

Flavour wise it’s sweet, a little tart and with some harshness but it softens as it cools. Again I can taste more berry than plum but it’s a pleasant fruit taste regardless, and it matches the Shou Mei rather well. It just feels like it’s missing something for me, it’s nice and all but I think it could be better, I just can’t think of what’s stopping it from being so. Either way it’s just not to my taste at the moment, I’m thankful I got to try it but this one is not a blend I am likely to re-visit.

The 12th day of 52 teas 12 Days of Christmas.

I think this was a good choice for the last tea. It was also neat that is was not a repeat from the rest of the year but a brand new tea.

I don’t get much from the smell of the dry tea. There is some fruity sweetness.

The brewed tea tastes strongly of white tea, maybe it was my steeping. There is a fruity (glucose) type sweetness to the tea. I get a pastry/bread type flavour. I am also getting some cinnamon, maybe some nutmeg. Like Christmas-y spices. I don’t get any sugar plum per se, but just a generic fruity taste. I do get a slight hint of prunes as the tea starts to cool.

I think for my next cup I will add some sugar/sweetener.

Overall, I really enjoyed the 52 teas 12 days of teas. I loved the novelty of scratching to reveal the tea on each package. I would most likely do this again next year. It was a great way to try some favorites, bestsellers, and new teas I would never have tried otherwise.

Edit: brewed again. This time I overleafed and added some white sugar. The sugar plums are starting to peak out a little bit. I wouldn’t say they are dancing through my head, but they are subtly there in the background.

Yes! This is definitely a CrowKettle tea. I’ve never had the actual sugarplum dessert but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying it! This is a sweet and sugary white tea, with a wisp of syrupy stone fruit and a touch of mint. I’m such a sucker for this kind of thing, even if it is kind of crude in a way.

Thank you, Frank, for the fun advent box! Merry Christmas, steepsterites!

I am finally having this tea, I was not able to brew up tea on Christmas day properly, so I didn’t even bother. I just used my mom’s keurig to make chai lattes.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the 12 days of tea, the anticipation of scratching the bag every day.
This tea was ok, light white tea taste. I am not sure what a sugar plum tastes like, but I am getting a plum-like fruitiness that is pretty subtle. I think this tea needs sweetener though.

I purchased the 52Teas 12 Days of Christmas sampler for two reasons: First, I can’t afford to buy large quantities of all their teas I’d like to try, and this was a more affordable option. Second, I am trying desperately to finish up the Pageant of Winter Teas for my blog project, and I wanted to be able to get my hands on whatever holiday-themed teas may have been included.

Well, it turned out that this was the one and only holiday tea. When I didn’t receive an email response, I guess I should have read the description a little more closely, because I was a little shocked to find the Halloween tea in there!

It’s been interesting, and the maker’s refusal to post any kind of steeping suggestions has been a consistent and rather aggravating headache. It’s like a homework assignment any time you want to make a new cup of their tea.

I imagine when you buy larger quantities of their teas, you have more tea to waste trying to dial in the best cup. With the small size of the samples, however, it’s more of a roll of the dice. I’ve got hints from other Steepsterites about how they generally approach the 52Teas guessing game, and I try to pick up hints from the notes of other people’s reviews on here, but sometimes it’s just not enough.

Like tonight. I dragged myself through all the homework, but the cup came out too weak and I just have to try to make the most of it. Joy.

Teaware: 16oz glass mug with ForLife infuser
Measured dry: 2 teaspoons
Temperature: 175º F
Steeping Time: 2-1/2min
Additives: 4tsp raw sugar

The dry blend did smell intriguing. Smooth and fruity with a delightful sparkle of lavender. It’s starting to perk up a little as the tea cools, and the lavender is getting stronger, but at first I couldn’t taste much at all.

Unfortunately, it’s not doing anything for the headache caused by the 52Teas guessing game, and I’m having a difficult time finding my way around it to actually try to gain some enjoyment from this tea.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, 52 Teas gave to me…Sugar Plum Shou Mei!

I’ve enjoyed the 12 Teas of Christmas sampler again this year — it introduces me to some teas I missed during the year, reminds me of a few favourites, and provides a new and unique treat for Christmas day. As soon as I scratched the label here, I was excited to try it. I actually only got around to this one early last night. It wouldn’t be Christmas without family troubles, and it’s been pretty grim so far. I’m glad I’ve had this box to keep me going, in a way. It’s cheered me up when nothing else has. Anyway. I’m going to promise myself that next year will be different, and say no more about it.

So. The tea. I’ve never tried a sugar plum before…is there even such a thing? I imagine it’s a crystallised dried plum…a prune, then? I let the water cool and gave this about 2.5 minutes, maybe a shade over. There’s very little plum/prune flavour, other than a generic sugary sweetness. There’s a hint of it lurking in there somewhere, but it’s by no means obvious. My first thought would be to try a little sugar, although I’m pretty sure it’s sweet enough already. Hmm. The white base is nice, though. Very smooth, slightly floral. Mostly, though, I can only taste sugary water, which is a bit of a disappointment. It smells so nice dry, too! One to experiment with a little more, perhaps.

I was really pleased to see that this was included in the twelve teas of Christmas sampler. I love everything related to sugar plums, so a tea is just perfect! The scent of the dry leaf doesn’t offer all that much – white tea, a hint of something fruity. After it’s steeped, it loses almost all of its fruity character and smells strongly of the white tea base.

Sipping…I taste a bit of fruit first .. not sure if I would call this plum? Next come some spices which I actually couldn’t identify at first. For some reason, I was thinking that this would be only sugared fruit, but there are some mysterious spices here. My tongue can’t tell what they are (cinnamon?), but they add a nice dimension to the fruit. I taste the buttery white tea last which brings a rather nice finish to the cup. Everything is wrapped in a lingering sweetness which contributes to the sugar part of the sugar plum. Overall, this is a creative cup of tea. The issue I have is that there is some unpleasant flavor that I taste with each sip. It’s a bit like a film that lingers in your mouth after chewing stale cinnamon gum for hours. I think I would like this tea more without that note because it really does spoil the cup, unfortunately.

Drinking a bit of this tonight. If you call 3 cups worth a bit. Which I do since it’s one pot of my Breville (about 800ml).

It’s very sweet, with my normal amount of sugar added, sweeter than most would be. The plum aspects are very faint and it mostly just tastes like white tea to me, which is also subtle. I do pick up something other than just the white tea, but I don’t know what else is in here or what ‘natural flavourings’ means in this case. I don’t hate it but I don’t love it either.

I found the kitten’s new hiding place. It’s on the back corner of the broken futon bed in the room I was keeping him separated from the other cats. It still has his litterbox and dried food (wet food is up on the kitchen counter to keep the obese cat from it) so he’s comfortable. I wonder if I should put a cat bed there.

I used the rest of my sample that I had squirreled away with a longer steeping time. I found that it improved the flavour a little bit but it’s still a rather bland tea with the white tea base being the primary flavour component. It gets a bit sweeter and fruitier when it cools off but it’s not a huge difference from my initial assessment of this tea.