Pisces

Light flavored tea, possibly not enough tea in the pot. Good taste though. A nice blend of tea and herbal.

Cold Brew!

Made this one last night and drank it this morning on the way in to work. It’s not bad, but tastes strongly of rooibos and lemongrass with only the slightest taste of grapefruit. It was hydrating on a hot morning, but I do feel like I actually liked it less this time/prepared this way then when I first tried it.

This is a very old sampler I got from… I think the first Adagio order I ever made, sometime in the summer of 2017? And I don’t order from them anymore, so… it at least feels like a long time ago, now. It was my free zodiac birthday sampler based on my birthdate. I had every intention of getting around to it last month and somehow never did…

I think part of why I haven’t gotten to this sooner was the mix of tea in what appears to be mostly herbal ingredients, when I’m always in the need for more herbals to drink at night, but it looks pretty scant in the black tea leaves listed in the ingredients (and I didn’t even notice the white it boasts in the ingredients…) so I figure the caffeine must be pretty light in this. It’s a Friday night and I’m off tomorrow, so a lightly caffeinated herbal should be alright tonight, so I figured I’d finally drink this one off, in the mammoth-pot. (Probably a bit over-leafed, but maybe that will make up for the age of the leaf and the fact those Adagio sampler tins, while “looking cute” have pretty much no air seal on them at all, so I’m expecting some bad flavor deprivation…)

The tea is dark red, and the aroma smells heavily of rooibos and chamomile. I’m not a big chamomile fan, but the rooibos is very rich in this blend and helps balance out that flavor a lot for me, so it isn’t quite so overwhelming and overbearing for me. Mostly I get a strong, forward rooibos flavor that is a bit woody, grassy, sweet, and floral in flavor; likely these flavors are amplified by the heavy taste of chamomile that comes out midsip to finish and lingers on the tongue. This tea apparently has orange and grapefruit flavoring, but I’m not tasting any flavoring at all, so either it is the age of the sampler, or because I’m very sensitive to the taste of chamomile, it is just drowning out any other flavors for me. I feel like there is a very subtle hint of citrus left on my tongue in the aftertaste, but I can only pick that up after the thick chamomile taste finally subsides, and during the sip I can’t notice any citrus notes at all. So this pretty much just tastes like a rooibos/chamomile blend. I honestly can’t taste any black/white tea notes and don’t know why they would be included in this blend; it seems silly to add caffeine to this when they aren’t really adding anything to this blend in regards to flavor.

This is pretty meh. Since I don’t really like chamomile and this isn’t providing much else, this Pisces tea just isn’t for this particular Pisces, I guess. To be fair, the rooibos is making this much more palatable for me than many chamomile teas I’ve tasted, so I will finish this pot rather than dump it, so it does have that going for it.

Drinking this one room temperature with a little honey. It is the perfect drink to have while helping students. It is relaxing, but still interesting. I find the black tea is nearly non-existent for me. I drink this as if it is caffeine-free and find I have no ill effects (sleeplessness, etc). This was one of my favorites, but after drinking two tins worth over a year, I’m kind of getting a little tired of it. I think I need a break. Perhaps I’ll switch to plain chamomile or chamomile with lavender and vanilla instead.

Leaves

The leaves themselves are interesting. I don’t find them particularly visually pleasing (which is odd, considering purple and green are my favorite colors). Felt a bit contrived. But, as you can see here, there’s a lot going on. We’ve got rooibos and white tea with a little black tea mixed in, plus lemongrass, chamomile, and purple cornflowers. There’s one little orange peel in the middle there, and the yellow splotch in the top left hand corner is a bit of grapefruit.

The smell is interesting, but not really in a good way (in my opinion). The smell is very abstract, perhaps a bit medicinal. I saw other reviews that said it was fruity (unbearably so, even), but I barely got a sense of fruit. Perhaps it was the mix of fruit plus chamomile plus lemongrass creating something more than just the sum of its parts.

Tea

It’s quite a bit darker than I expected it to be. There might be more white tea by volume, but I forgot that rooibos is a fairly dense tea, and it definitely took over here.

The smell was again fairly abstract. A little medicinal, a hair fruity. The taste was pretty much what you’d expect from a tea that smelled that way, though the chamomile stuck out here. It was naturally fairly sweet. I wouldn’t want to add cream or sugar too it. Overall, I was fairly underwhelmed. I should have loved it – I like white tea, I like rooibos, and orange peel almost always works well in tea. But this one just combined in a weird way for me.

A copy of this review plus pictures can be found on my blog: http://lizkuba.com/tea-review-pisces-by-adagio/

Drank this yesterday and tried to turn it into iced tea by putting ice in it. Not the best way but semi-tasty.

I think I should have let this steep longer, but the tinier tea leaves were leaking through the little infuser spoon I used so I got a little impatient. This would be pretty decent if stronger.

I’m finishing up my stash of this now. I oversteeped the amount of loose leaf only because I don’t think I had enough for a 2nd helping. Either way – it wasn’t bad. Still find it pleasant.