Stan Pines

Confession time – on my first journey through the world of tea, Adagio somehow flew completely past my radar. By the time I even heard of them, I was a bit of a tea snob, in fact, and so I’d never ordered anything from them. This time, though, the journey was kicked off by another member of the Gravity Falls fandom, who made a number of unofficial custom blends around characters from the show, all of which I decided I ought to sample all eleven of them. There was only one I flat-out disliked and I considered most of them above average, but only three drew me in enough for full-tin purchases. This is one of those teas.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Stan is the tritagonist of Gravity Falls. He’s the great-uncle of the two central characters, has become their caretaker during their summer vacation in either 2012 or 2013, and is a former jack-of-all-criminal-trades (Sovo Night, who blended this tea, described Stan as “a man who’s held many names and heard his own the least”) turned operator of a tourist attraction, along with hosting the county fair and occasionally dances for the youth of the town – all, of course, in the interests of getting yet more money. He’s a massive personality who I cannot properly describe here – I’m working on a monograph on the subject, actually – and whose tragic backstory is about one-fourth of the reason the show even has a plot, which therefore makes him also quite a lot of the reason why it has such a large adult fanbase despite being, er, originally made for Disney XD.

It’s clear enough how the elements of the tea are meant to reference Stan’s personality. Ginger – he comes across as quite prickly and has an extremely hot temper, so much so that he nearly ends the world by accident due to it. I couldn’t find any references to Wuyi black teas when I was adding the ingredients to this description, but they and Yunnan make up a blend Adagio calls “Mambo” – fitting enough for a guy who spent a decent chunk of his life in South America and also can break out the dance moves every once in a while. Lapsang Souchong could refer to one of two things – either the recurring theme of fire as a destructive force which surrounds Stan in general, or the fact that he apparently liked smoking cigars a lot, before having a couple of twelve-year-olds dumped on him for three months made him feel obliged to give up smoking, drinking, and the freedom to “swear for real” all at the same time – teaching them to be card sharks and run scams, that’s fine, but he wouldn’t want to encourage substance abuse or bad language in children. And as for caramel…‘burnt sugar’ isn’t the worst analogy in the world for the man. Sweet kid, but life put him through it, which both resulted in sweetness sometimes manifesting in a different way than it originally did and also made him a lot clingier.

All that, though, is character analysis, not tea analysis. The flavors seem to work pretty well together as a description of Stan, but do they actually taste good together?

Yes.

I have the vague idea that I have mixed caramel or vanilla with lapsang souchong myself, back in the day, and that it was good, but it wasn’t quite like this. One can just taste the smoke and just taste the caramel, but they come together in such a way, presumably along with the base notes and the ginger, to taste…well, the first thought that comes to mind is that it tastes fun. Fun is not, of course, a proper tasting note, so I’ve tried to analyze it properly and come up with things close to various sweets (I started off on ‘candy corn’ and moved to ‘maple syrup’ before settling on ‘butterscotch’) but the overall impression is just of…fun! Which is good, because now I have five ounces of it.