Rocky Road

The base is a pretty high quality black. Malty, honey, cocoa, delicious tannins typical in blacks. No bitterness at all, even in a longer steep (6 min, boiling water).

A hint of vanilla, lots of rich cocoa/dark chocolate. I was hoping for more vanilla, but this is still tasty. The sunflower seeds are nutty, but I find their flavour a bit musty (although allergen free). It wasn’t the marshmallow treat I hoped, but I did enjoy my cup this morning.

I don’t want to be too hard on this because I have yet to find a chocolate tea that comes close to being actually chocolatey. This one is no exception, but it only fails in the way they all fail. The richness of chocolate just does not translate into tea, in my opinion. The strongest note in here is actually the sunflower seeds. It’s not bad, it’s just not as robust as some of 52Teas’ other black teas.

This smells AH-MAZING. Familiar. Though I have been racking my brain to pinpoint what it is I am smelling, what I do know is it. is. good.

Flavorwise, I enjoy this. Both chocolatey and nutty. The sunflowers are an interesting contribution that are certainly adding to the nut flavor. It is similar to the Chocolate Eclair, though a little warmer and less creamy.

I think I prefer Chocolate Eclair though both are very good. If it were up to me, I think I would want more marshmallow here. However, I always want more marshmallow so I think I would have said that even if this was 90% marshmallow root.

Last week’s tea of the week!
Now that I’m feeling comfortable with finally getting caught up after numerous delays – I also feel comfortable in sitting back and enjoying a cup of tea and writing about it! The delays over the last two months have been crazy – but as I’ve said – I’ve learned that anything that can happen will most likely happen and really, there’s just not a lot you can do about it – no way of even foreseeing some of those things that happen to delay things – so the key is just learning how to roll with the punches I suppose.
On to this tea! I do love it! Rocky Road ice cream is my favorite and has been my favorite since I was a kid. I occasionally find a ‘new’ favorite that surpasses my craving for Rocky Road – like Cherry Garcia or Praline Pecan – but Rocky Road holds that special place in my heart. So when I saw in the archives some years ago that Frank had actually created a Rocky Road blend once upon a time – I asked him to reblend it. He never did.
So I decided that I would take it upon myself to recreate it and when I did, I did some searching for the tea here on Steepster only to come up empty handed – it was never entered into the database here so it’s as if it never actually existed. So I’m reclaiming the blend for myself.
The base is really nice – it’s Yunnan and Assamica teas blended with Laoshan teas from Verdant. Together, these teas create a pleasantly rich and remarkably smooth flavor that carries the notes of chocolate, nut and marshmallow well.
As I mentioned on my blog post for this blend – http://52teas.com/blog/tea-of-the-week-for-february-6-2017-rocky-road-black-tea/ – the first time I tasted it, I thought something was a bit off. Not because it wasn’t delicious because it was – it took me a while to determine what the problem with it was and I realized that this doesn’t have the texture of Rocky Road ice cream (because it is, as I’ve said before – a tea and therefore shouldn’t have the texture of a ice cream laden with nuts and marshmallows) and while I absolutely love the flavor of Rocky Road Ice Cream, I also love the texture: cool, creamy chocolate ice cream with chunks of crunchy nuts and pillow-y marshmallows. And this tea doesn’t have the crunchy, chunky nuts or the soft, fluffy marshmallows to bite into – but it does have the flavor of those things as well as a smooth, creamy chocolate-y taste.