Thé du Hammam Black

Thank you Ysaurella, for another lovely tea!

This was one of my 2 bubble bath teas this evening, & it is quite nice! I enjoy the mellow smokiness of Keemun, & the fruity & floral flavors with it were very nicely balanced.

Thé du Hammam black leaf was in my shopping list for a while.
I bought it yesterday and just made my first cup this morning.

I am a lover of the original green tea and was a little bit concerned by the dates swap to rhubarb in this blend.

I am very surprised and absolutely in love with the black leaf version : the flavours are perfectly balanced and none takes the advantage on the other.

I put too much brown crystal sugar for my first cup and didn’t appreciate the real taste of this tea so I steeped the leaf a second time and it was a revelation : no need of mint to create a fantastic oriental tea (I already known it thanks to the green version but it’s confirmed !)

To be honnest I still miss the dates even if I really love rhubarb.

Black leaf version seems more to be a cousin of the green version rather than his black twin.The green version is more delicate and subtile but I love both and the black version is already now in my top 20 list.

I enjoyed the original version of The du Hammam, which is a green fruit blend with dates, but the green leaf and the super-sweet date in the blend wasn’t my preference. To my good fortune, I was offered a chance to try the black leaf version of this recipe, which features a wonderful smoky, floral, spicy keemun as the base and swaps the dates for rhubarb.
Fantastic! None of the ingredients overpower each other, it’s fruity without being super-sweet or astringent, and the richness of the keemun just keeps me coming back to my mug. Notes range from floral, red-fruit, spice, and I even detected some chocolate in the sip because the keemun is just that good (no chocolate in the ingredient list).
Definitely worth trying if you haven’t yet – it wasn’t listed in their Theophile catalog, but it’s available on their U.S. website, so it might be fairly new. They have a rooibos version as well that I haven’t tried yet. But I will definitely be ordering more of this Black Leaf The du Hammam.

Let’s say first that the original one, the green The du Hammam, is very good, but a more sensitive one. You will allways been tempted to push temperature or steeping time to extract more of that dates flavour, which are good. But it’s a green tea, so… well, sometimes you get the dates flavour PLUS biterness. It’s not easy to obtain the good balance between biterness (just a little bit) and dates flavour). But when you suceed, the tea is just excellent.
I agree with LatteTeaDah that the spicy and smoky flavours of the keemun is a good thing and it’s certainly a plus, comparing to the green version. But I was enjoying the dates flavour and I have to confess that now I know that I miss them here.
What to say? I mean, ok, rhubarb is never bad, but here I don’t think we can feel it fully, as we can do it in their La Montagne Bleue tea (LatteTeaDah, have you tried it?). So, for me replacing dates by rhubarb was a loss.

The result is quite pleasant anyway, as any keemun-based tea shall be.

It is a nice blend, but good as afternoon tea, I think. Not really strong (for my taste) to have as morning tea, and probably better to drink without milk, or let it steep for longer time, to be able to do so.

Another one that came in my Try the World Paris box. This was really nice. Full bodied and a hint of sweetness from the rhubarb. The whole time I was drinking it I just kept thinking how amazing it would be iced.

Full disclosure: I don’t like the taste of rooibos. And even though this tea contains no rooibos, to me it tasted as though rooibos was the base. Therefore, I did not care for it at all. I’m not saying it’s a bad tea, just giving a warning to the other rooibos-haters out there.