Fleurilège

Last DF sample! Thanks again to the lovely and generous tea friend who sent these to me. This one is a mix of smallish black tea leaves and cream-colored dried flower petals. Dry scent is sweet and creamy and vanilla-ish, which makes sense considering it’s supposed to be a hazelnut/vanilla tea.

The steeped tea smells delicious – creamy, sweet, nutty with vanilla notes. Hmm… I’m actually slightly disappointed with this one. The vanilla flavor here is similar to bourbon vanilla or vanilla bean, which I think seems wrong for this blend. I feel they should have gone with a more creamy, confectionery vanilla flavor. It’s not a bad tea, just not what I expected from the aroma. Still yummy though.

I loved this one the first time I made it, and then the second time I just liked it. I think I need to figure out just how to prepare it, but it definitely has a lot of potential.

A note – it’s a vanilla and hazelnut black tea. The other day, I mixed my Notting Hill (Tea Palace’s vanilla black with some decorative flower petals) with Adagio’s black Hazelnut tea and it was very very yummy and very very vanilla and hazelnutty. This tea is nothing like that – it tasted much more subtle, but still sweet and lovely. And whereas I drank my mixed tea with milk and sugar, I drank Fleurilege plain and I get the feeling that’s the way it works best.

Must try it again before adding a rating.

I found myself scoping cadeau-deco-vendome ( A Dammann reseller) so I figured that this is as good a time as any to dig into the samples that Sil sent me.

This tea smells like butter, roasted hazelnuts and vanilla and has a light maple wood coloured broth after steeping at 1tsp/225ml/4min/95°C.

There is a lovely roasted hazelnut note with a touch of a wood in the flavouring, as well as a touch of butter caramel and a warm vanilla tone. The flavouring blends well with the base tea which is slightly fruity with a cocoa note and is relatively innocuous except for providing a light astringency and a medium body. The flavouring is light and subtle as is the tea itself.

Thanks for the treat Sil

Sipdown (162/168)!

So much tasty hazelnut!

I think this tea triumphed as the best one I’ve had today (although, I really didn’t do a ton of tea drinking today) so it’s a perfect one to end the day on. I paired it with a couple coconut macaroons which I bought today on my “outing” to Postal Jail and now I’m just winding down for the night while I paint my nails and watching Whose Line outtakes. It’s a simple nirvana.

I added milk to this cup and I think that just revved up the hazelnut and took it to a whole ‘nother creamy, dreamy vanilla playing field. And, I just have to note how happy I was that there _wasn’t_ any chocolate notes in this cup: I like the “Nutella” pairing a fair bit – but hazelnuts can more than stand on their own too.

Goodbye; thanks to whoever passed this along to me and to Sil for passing it on to them! I’ll remember it fondly!

Whoops, I kind of fell off the radar there for a bit. To be fair, I also wasn’t drinking nearly enough tea, and was mostly drinking PG Tips when I was down in Oxford (where I stayed for an extra day, whoops) and then I started my new job, so yeah. Busy bumbly bee.

Remind me to bring a small pantry of teas next time I’m down at Gentleman’s for the weekend. I can’t take it anymore. Plus, I practically half live there already, so it’s only right I have my teas with me!

As for this one, a gift from the lovely sil in our exchange. Oh hellooooooooo, baby. It’s actually been a few days since I had it and hadn’t had time to write up a note, but its beauty has stuck with me. What a cozy, delicious wonder. There’s a very true vanilla and lovely hazelnut that sit in perfect balance over the base, and it’s creamy and comforting. And then there’s this sort of lovely, perfumed almost fruit flavour that’s hiding under there, that’s really difficult to describe at this distance from it, but MAN, it was like a hug from the inside, like a really gentle party in my mouth. You know, the kind of party where it’s just three or four of your best friends just chilling out on the patio of an evening with soft music and conversation that stretches on far into the night. That kind of party. That’s this tea. Yeah, it’s a good ’un.

From the queue, written March 29th 2014

Husband is out today at a whiskey fair, so I’m home alone all day. I’m going to take this opportunity to have a lot of flavoured stuff as, with the exception of the occasional EG, he’s been quite disinterested in flavoured things recently.

I’ve dug through my box of untried things and picked out a number of little baggies. Steepsterites, I have an itinirary! Well, actually I strongly suspect it’ll be impossible to get posts done about all of them today, but having this smaller pile to choose from makes it a little more manageble to choose something.

This is also where I’ve realised that I’ve got the EU TTB samples from the first and the second round mixed up because I’ve forgotten to number them. All is not lost, I can go back to the discussion thread and work out which is from which round, but it’s a little annoying to have to do it. I haven’t the faintest idea why I never numbered the first round samples in the first place. That was stupid.

Oh well. This one is a tea that Anna shared with me, and I’ve been a little scared of it because the name sounds so flowery. I don’t like floral scented teas much. At least not if ‘floral’ is the only thing it’s been flavoured with. (Halfway through the word ‘flavoured’ my brain apparently decided it liked ‘scented’ better. I ended up with ‘flented’…) Therefore I decided to start with it and then it would be over with.

In order work out whether to use boiling or just under boiling water (I prefer flavoured teas just under boiling. I feel the flavouring behaves better that way) I looked it up in the database and was highly pleased to discover that it was actually vanilla and hazelnuts. Hooray! I love vanilla and I’m rather interested in nut-flavoured teas as well, so this sounds just like something for me. It also rather explains the flowery name, since we must remember that vanilla is an orchid.

For people who can understand French, this may all have been painfully obvious from the name. I don’t know any French, save a small handful of random words, so I had nothing to go by. This brings me back to the whole pondering of whether or not to translate non-English names. I WISH all these French blends that are very fashionable around Steepster at the moment had names that I could actually read. How else am I supposed to know what they are? I’m not really super keen on having to take French lessons in order to read about other people drinking tea…

Now, small pet peeve aside, this smells lovely. More vanilla-y than nutty, but the nuts are definitely there as well. I can’t pick up any notes of the base tea, though, but I can sort of feel that it’s there.

The flavour is quite creamy. I could actually convince myself that it’s cream-flavoured. I think it’s the vanilla that does this, but in this cup I’m experiencing the vanilla as cream more than as vanilla, which I find a little disappointing. I mean, I like this as well, but… I want vanilla-y vanilla.

The hazelnuts, however, are very pleasant indeed. Sweet and nutty, and I can pick up the base as well. Again, I can’t say anything about the base, other than ’it’s tea’. It’s just sort of a default tea-flavoured black tea, but I’m fine with that. I don’t need a whole lot going on in a flavoured base. I just like to be able to tell that it’s there.

In spite of earlier fears, I’m enjoying this.

Thank you Sil for sharing some of this with me. As I drink it, I can’t help but feel like I have had this before despite never having this tea in my life. The black base is prominent and complimented by the nuttiness while the vanilla comes through in smell as opposed to the taste. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel like I had this time and time again and for that reason it is not something I need to keep stocked. I am still grateful to have gotten to try it though.

Thank you, Anna, for the sample of this!

It brew into clear and ruby concoction that vaguely smells of vanilla as well as some non-describable fruit.

The base is supposed to be Ceylon and Chinese black tea(s) and I can mostly detect ceylon, although definitely toned down by the Chinese part. I really like the base this way.

When it comes to flavoring, I hardly detect any. I sure can taste vanilla, but it is very shy and hiding in the corner. I have to look for it. Hazelnut? Hmmm… perhaps. It could be even shyer than vanilla, probably to the point of paranoid kind of shy. But it’s there.

The flavors seem to come out of their corners a bit more once the brew cools down. And I greet them with an open palate.

Errr…

There’s something else I detect, too. Some fruitiness. Perhaps it is just maltiness. It’s like some sort of carmelized citrus with most of its citrusy notes seeped out and only sweetnes left. If that makes any sense?

This tea is very delicious, but it is definitely not for the impatient ones because the flavors are very subtle. In fact, if someone just served it to me and said it’s just a non-flavored morning blend, I would totally believ it. And I would still find it delicious.

There is also a possibility that I did not detect the flavors because I was just out for a smoke. I am a very occasional smoker, so it is unfortunate I decided to taste such a tea after just smoking a cigarrette. Oh well – that’s a lesson.

Wow. This is wow. It’s like a creamy Nutella, but vanilla instead of chocolate. Hazelnuts and vanilla, creamy and smooth, full yet light. Really, really delicious. I do love it, it is a sipdown, and while I doubt it’ll be on my must-have list, I will definitely grab more should the opportunity arise.

A huge thank you to Dinosara for sharing this and many other Mariage Frères teas with me! I think the easiest way for me to get more of this is to just go to France…

Another sample to clear from my cupboard that was received in the first round of EU travelling tea box.

Wow this tea tastes strongly like vanilla and nuts, sort of like almond. The black tea is not overpowering but has a nice thickness which the vanilla and nut combination lightens and adds some sweetness.

I wasn’t expecting much from this one but it’s very nice, I could easily drink more of this blend. Not sure it would be a must buy but I would order it from a cafe. Lovely, happy I got to try this one.