A Winters Treat

It snowed today where I live, which is extremely uncommon. Especially more than a cm which melts within 12 hours. It’s at at least 8 cm out there, and it continues to fall. I felt it was only right to warm myself up with a desserty advent calendar tea.

The oolong base is toasty and roasty, notes of raisin and barley. The spices are lovely, as are the dried fruit pieces. I can’t taste apple, so I’m not quite sure what it is (EDIT: I see it is banana from the description, which is what I was tasting. I wasn’t expecting banana in a winter tea, I guess. It’s a very welcome surprise, though) The cinnamon and creamy flavours are great. Some nutty notes. I’m not getting any rum, however I did add milk and that may have interfered.

I tried to look at my old tasting notes to see what I thought about this tea and turns out I wrote a very useless note. Basically I was unsure about how I felt regarding this tea because I love banana but I don’t love oolong. However, I enjoyed Banana TieGuanYin which is just banana and oolong so clearly that’s not my issue here. And, marshmallow most likely won’t be what’s holding me back from loving this so that leaves the cinnamon. The cinnamon is what makes this a “winter” tea by giving it spice and warmth but the cinnamon also takes the forefront which is what I don’t like about this tea. The base is creamy and the marshmallow makes this sweet and fluffy but this lacks banana flavoring and instead highlights cinnamon and as someone who enjoys some cinnamon now and then but loves banana, that becomes an issue for me. This is not bad perse but it is also not the balance of flavors that suits my taste.

Another timely tea to drink. Still enjoy this one, although I think the spicing might be a tad heavier than I’d prefer, and more banana would be nice. But the base is really lovely, a nice and creamy oolong, and really works well with the blend.

Oolong blends are hit or miss for me; this one was a miss. It smelled delicious. The smell of dry leaf reminded me of the Snickerdoodle Re-Imagined blend from earlier in the 12 Day of Christmas sampler. I like the idea of a tea that combines bananas, cinnamon and buttered rum essence – a liquid version of bananas foster if you will – but the base of this tea just didn’t jive on my tastebuds. Meh.

On the 12th Day of Christmas – MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone! Or if Christmas isn’t your thing – Happy Holidays and I hope that it’s been a wonderful season for you and yours!

This tea is a little bit of a twist to the Bananas Foster tea although I must tell you that it wasn’t intended that way – when I came up with this tea idea, I wasn’t thinking “Bananas Foster” as much as I was thinking, “hey, I’ve got some amazing Charcoal Baked TieGuanYin in stock right now and I’m wondering how amazing that would taste with banana and marshmallow.” Actually, I think I may have come up with this idea when I was blending the Banana Marshmallow Treat Genmaicha – because I really loved the combination of banana and marshmallow. So that may have been the nucleus – the seed – that grew into this amazing tea.

To the combination of banana and marshmallow, I added some cinnamon because it’s a Winter’s Treat, after all and cinnamon seems to go with all things winter-ish. And then I added a splash of Buttered Rum essence because – well, do we really ever need a reason to add buttered rum?

This is really good. Really, really good!