Just Outstanding Orange Spice

First, thank you to the kind folks at Just Organic Tea for the amazingly generous set of samples they sent. I’m looking forward to trying them all!

Just Outstanding Orange Spice was the sample I originally requested, so it is the one I chose to try first. The dry leaf smells amazing. It made my entire kitchen smell like Christmas, all cinnamon and clove.

I steeped the tea according to the directions on the label (195 degrees for 3- 5 minutes). The liquid was pale amber, and the smell was still full of spice, but it wasn’t as strong as the dry leaf. The taste, not surprisingly, was also spice. The dominate spice was cinnamon, but there was a fair amount of clove as well. I could not pick up any orange flavor which was kind of disappointing. I will say that the base tea is really, really good and has a presence even with the strong spices. It is smooth with no bitterness or astringency. There is also a forest floor note that I really liked.

If I were in the mood for an orange tea I’d have to look elsewhere, but if I were in the mood for a cinnamon or spice tea I would happily take a cup of this.

This was one of the teas that I really wanted to try from Just Organic Tea. I love orange – orange everything. The color, the fruit, the flavor. Looking around my desk I have an orange iPad cover, orange headphones, stuffed orange poofy flower thingie, you name it. It’s a signature for me.

Sadly, I did not get much orange from this tea. I liked it, and if you like clove and cinnamon you will like it too. There are bits of orange peel in the mix, but they couldn’t rise above the spice part of the mixture. When I was brewing it I caught myself thinking that it would work great as a holiday potpourri, it smelled that strong.

So a nice tea, for sure – but not an orange tea.

This came in the post today, which was totally when I was excepting it. Yay! It smells like many an orange spice tea I’ve had before. There is a nice scent of orange (made stronger ’cause I just had an orange), cinnamon, and a little cloves. Mmm… spice. The flavour is a bit like an orange chai. I like this one a lot. Thanks Just Organic Teas.