Monkey Fart

Sipdown!! (195)

Two days ago I hit the 450 tasting note milestone, and now (thanks in large part to an inspiring competition with Roswell Strange) I am writing my 500TH TASTING NOTE. Unfortunately, it just had to be for a ridiculous little tea called Monkey Fart.

Luckily, the taste is not nearly as hard to get behind as the name. I have already said what I needed to say about this tea. It is a nice smooth black that sneakily transitions to sweet banana goodness. However, I decided to drink this up so that I could use the pitcher to cold brew another one of my SBTs.

On another note, I also intend to cold brew another tea but can’t decide which one. I am happy to take some suggestions. What teas (preferably blacks) have you guys cold brewed and enjoyed??

With the successful cold-brewing of the rainbow sherbet, I decided to go ahead and cold-brew the rest of the Southern Boy Teas, starting with this one. This time, though, I decided to keep the tea bag so that I could hot-brew it tonight for tomorrow’s iced tea. We’ll see how that works out!

But for now, I’ll focus on the glass of iced tea in front of me. This is really yummy. I have had the Monkey Fart Honeybush and I loved that – and that was one of the teas that I’d brew in the morning for my daughter before she went to cosmetology school. Definitely one of her faves.

I think I could even serve this to my hubby and he’d enjoy it, but, I don’t think I will, otherwise he’ll drink all my iced tea today and I’ll be left with nothing but hot tea or chilled water, and I want my iced tea!!!

Babbling! Anyway, this is even better than the honeybush, I think, and I don’t know why that is exactly. But I love this. Very refreshing and delicious. YUM YUM YUM!

Well, I got my haircut. Except instead of layers, I got Megan Draper a la Mad Men. Bah. Nice lady and all but seriously I said I wanted layers. I guess she was too busy yelling at me for bleaching part of my hair that was basically all cut off.

Thankfully I don’t mind it and my day was made better by more SBT bags coming in the mail, yay! I was feeling like banana so I decided to have this one.

It’s somewhat subtle, which I like because banana is a pretty difficult flavor. Too much tastes like candy and it seems like it’d be really hard to get a natural tasting flavor. Of course, if banana candy is what you’re after, give it a good bit of sweetener, and you’ve got it. I thought it was pretty good with nothing added because the banana just tasted so good with the black tea. But with a good bit of agave, it’s even more banana tasting with a candy aftertaste.

Love it! Definitely going to give this bag another steep. I should have about 2 quarts of bottles to take with to Florida this weekend then and I can just put this all in them hahaha. I just steeped it up and once it cools I’ll pop the 2 cups in the freezer until Thursday. This had me worried though, when I go up to North Carolina for 5 days WHAT AM I GOING TO DO??? The water there is horrid, I think there’s a hot water dispenser in the lobby but I am still terrified to use it with legitimate tea instead of the cheap tea bags I recall them having. I guess it might be cold steeping in the cooler with water bottles up there!

I should also add this is even better after its spent the night in the fridge. Even more banana flavor without the need of any sort of addition! Now I imagine if you REALLY wanted banana runts, you could add sweetener and it’d taste like them. Awesome!

Just made a pitcher of this at home. It’s another blistering day in Wichita. This is unmistakably banana. I’m thinking the black tea base maybe takes some of that Laffy-Taffy/Runts flavor away and makes it a bit less artificial tasting. To me, it’s just the right hint of sweetness in an awesome black tea without actually BEING sweetened. My wife prefers her iced tea with Splenda and insists this is amazing that way (too sweet for me, but to each their own).

I reallly love the ease of these teabags. I’m getting some samples of different pillow pack bags in to consider for the next round. As cute as these little bags are, they were a bear to get the teabags into.

Thinking about the teabags makes me a little sad. I would love to be able to share our teas with LOTS of people on a much larger scale. The truth is, it is VERY difficult to compete with the big teabag companies. The level of automation they employ and the economies of scale they enjoy are just unbelieveable. At one point I calcluated that to keep my labor costs in line, I needed to be able to produce 80 teabags an hour, weighed, filled and sealed—which was challenging. But if I had $40k, I could buy a weigh-fill-seal machine, fill a hopper with tea and hang up a roll of teabag filter paper and it would make 160 teabags a MINUTE for me. That’s twice my hourly goal in a MINUTE!

Oh well. I spend entirely too much time looking at Youtube videos of industrial equipment. LOL. Maybe someday we could get a bunch of purchase orders from some grocers and take them to the bank and say, “Please, can you help us join the industrial revolution?” Or maybe we’ll crowd source a Form Fill Seal machine though our awesome customers and Kickstarter or one of those sites.

Okay. I’m rambling now. Anyway. The tea is hitting the spot on this very hot day. I hope everyone is having a good Friday and staying cool with some nice iced tea.

I love the cheeky monkey on the package- is it completely wrong that it reminds me of my husband?
The tea and banana flavor are nicely balanced. The smell reminds me of banana runts. My brother could smell it from down the hall and thought I was smashing bananas to make banana bread. I don’t make iced tea by the 2-quart very often, but I plan to repurchase this one.

I’ve been making iced tea for our housemate lately, and Monkey Fart is currently in the pitcher. Tonight I had some with dinner (beef brisket and a big salad) and I have to say, yum! This tastes like a banana, and reminds me a little bit of hard candy. Pretty tasty, and this is housemate approved (but I didn’t tell him it was called Monkey Fart, it’s a secret).

This one was taken out of the HH teabox a while back since I happen to love 52Teas banana blends. This is actually one big tea bag for a pitcher of iced tea, so I just busted the bag open to have one teaspoon hot. Even though the leaves are tiny, the taste isn’t bitter right after boiling, but that’s because I only steeped for two minutes. The banana flavor is nice as usual, but on its own without the extra ingredients that usually make up a nice 52Teas blend, I can see how this might be considered artificial tasting. But this is a long way from being unbearably artificial, it tastes fine to me! Thanks monkey! I love the bakey bready black tea base… tastes like I’m eating banana bread!

I received this with the SBT sampler from the Zoomdweebies kick starter. I would not have bought this otherwise. So I am stepping into uncharted territory here, I’m ok to try something new but not sure how it is going to go.

Backstory: I don’t like bananas. I will each the greenest banana you can find me, but it is remotely even close to yellow, I don’t want it. I can’t even tell you the last time I had a banana. So it goes without saying, I also do not like banana flavoured things.

Ok back to the real time story: I made this as per usual. Tea bag in about 2 cups boiling water for 3 minutes, added white sugar (maybe 2tsp?), filled the pitcher to the top and let sit in the fridge over night. The dry tea bag smells strongly of banana flavouring. But it also kind of reminded me of the pear SBT. Iced this tea is a dead ringer for banana runts. (I am really going off memory here becuase the last time I had a runt was eons ago, and I couldn’t even tell you when the last time I had a banana runt was because I would pick them out – but anyway, the first thing my brain said to me after drinking this was banana runts).

Its actually not horrible. Tastes strongly of banana, slightly artificial but in a way that banana flavoured things taste. It is sweet but not too sweet. I am glad I did not add any more sweetener to it. I will definitely be able to drink the pitcher of this but I would not repurchase. Not that it is a bad tea, but it is just bananas! (hehe)

Today’s iced tea of choice. I’m sad that I didn’t get chance to try the honeybush version of this tea, but there you go. If this is anything to go by, it would have been amazing. You can probably already tell this this is a winner with me. It tastes exactly like fresh banana, none of this fakey artificial stuff here. There’s even something a little “green” about it, the taste that banana has when it’s not brown and over-ripe, but just approaching perfection. I think it’s pretty amazing how Frank manages to recreate flavours like this in tea form. No other brand I’ve tried has ever really managed to equal these iced teas.

As ever, the black base here is smooth and unobtrusive. It just supports the flavour perfectly, and adds a little bit of depth to the taste. It’s not too strong, it’s not at all astringent. For me at least, it’s just right. It’s a good thing no-one’s asked me what I’m drinking today. I rave about tea a little bit, if I’m given the chance, but I couldn’t tell the humourless people I work with that I’m drinking Monkey Fart. Such is life. Have to say, though – this is ace tea! I love banana almost unreservedly, from those foam banana sweets to banana milkshake, via all manner of desserts, right along with the real thing. Knowing this, it’s probably not surprising that I like this so much! It’s good, though. Really good. As a bit of a banana maniac, you can take that from me.

I was given an Adagio Teas Ingenuitea iced tea maker a while ago and both me and my husband are off work today and felt like brewing up a batch of iced tea. A few months ago I placed an order with 52 tea’s and was excited to try this tea as I had never had banana flavoured tea before (and still haven’t). With my need for iced tea and my husbands love for banana’s it was easy to decide to brew this tea and use my Adagio Teas Ingenuitea gadget for the first time.

As I opened the little packet to expose the large prepared teabag I took in a strong smell of banana’s, it smelt almost milkshake like. The last time I had beer flavoured anything it was for my husbands birthday (5th November) last month when I bought some banana beer as a novelty. Funnily enough I can member saying that smelled like banana milkshake too, which means it also smells like the loose tea for this.

Brewed and left to chill for a few hours while my ice in the freezer becomes solid, it’s been difficult to leave the mixture in the fridge without sneaking a taste. I remain a good girl though and have left it well alone..until now. Serving time. :D

The iced tea is brown in colour, monkey coloured some may say, and it still maintains the amazing banana smell. It’s a sweet yet creamy banana smell, very candy like.

The flavour is more subtle, while I can taste banana I can also taste a rather malty yet cocoa nibbish. The balance is about right for me, it’s not too sweet nor too earthy and the banana lingers in the after taste quite nicely. Such a nice novelty :)

I would buy this again as it’s perfect for the occasional hot spells we get here in the UK (if we’re lucky) but at the same time I’m quite happy with a few others I have in for loose tea at the moment. Great job 52 Teas, yummy work. :)