Ocean Blue

Homemade Advent Calendar from Arby: Day 5

Huh! This one is kinda wild. The ingredient list had me unsure what to expect. The dry leaf smelled… strange. Kind of like slightly stinky feet, but not aggressively so? Maybe feet that are on their way to requiring a good scrubbin’ but aren’t there yet. Brewed, the tea has a whisper of juicy, fruity bubblegum with a slight note of cream to buoy it. There’s also something sliiightly earthy or mossy. And it doesn’t smell like feet at all!

I don’t know how to rate this one. I’ll have to try it again before I can commit. But it sure was fun to try!

After we took the ferry into Victoria our first stop was a perogie bar for lunch. As we were leaving the bar, we looked across the street and not four feet from where we’d parked was Special Teas – we’d completely missed it initially in our rush to fill our bellies!

Special Teas was a store I’d actually ruled out of my shopping list because I hadn’t heard of them before and I needed to balance my desire for tea shopping with my mom’s desire to do other shit. However, the fates must have been smiling down on me so we took advantage of the convenience of already being at the store to check this one off the list as well!

I picked up a decent haul of teas, but my mom actually grabbed a few things too – all green tea blends, which was surprising. Like I did with her Murchie’s haul, I made sure to steep a cup of each of them during the remainder of our trip. Aside from our one overlap tea we had both purchased, this was the one I enjoyed more from her two others. I didn’t expect to like it, the ingredients list is sort of wild and all over the place. However, when my initial sips were surprisingly just as creamy as they were fruity I sort of softened to the blend…

It tastes a little like vanilla custard, but if you crossed it with just a little bit of bubblegum and a handful of different tropical fruits – possibly the strongest of which was the sweet ripe pineapple note that poked through. I didn’t taste either the moringa or spirulina, for which I am thankful. Definitely a weirdly “smoothie bowl” type of vibe. I doubt I’d revisit this one, but seeing as it was essentially a free cup of tea I also can’t really complain about it. Weird as it was, it was pretty solid!

Teabox Tuesday! This is the last green tea in my teabox stash; it came from the Discovery Teabox, so thank you to Skysamurai for organizing and to those that participated for sharing! I decided to cold brew my sample since the leaf smelled a bit fruity and I’ve been drinking a lot of fruity iced greens lately.

Because of the hectic weekend I experienced I was unable to strain this when I planned, and I’m uncertain if in coldbrewing a tea can get “oversteeped” but that may or may not have made a difference (I usually always strain within 12-24 hours). The aroma smells, perhaps oddly to me, a bit like bubblegum… very sweet, jackfruit, and pineapple are coming to me in the aroma. The flavor is very sweet and fruity, but there is something vegetal about it, too… it has like, this freshness that makes me think of aloe, and it’s a little “watery” tasting too… not oceanic, as it’s lacking that saltiness of seawater, but it makes me think of wild freshwater somehow? I wonder if that’s the moringa? I’ve never tasted moringa before. I’d say that the sweet, vegetal note is the strongest flavor and overpowering the rest of the drink… I can taste some pineapple, and there is a sweetness left in my mouth as an aftertaste, but that strong “green” taste is very palpable. Reading up on moringa a bit, I have a strong feeling that is what I’m tasting. Interesting. I wouldn’t say I dislike it, but I do wish it didn’t feel quite so strong in this particular blend.

Thanks for sharing! I appreciate getting to try new ingredients I haven’t been exposed to before!

Discovery Tea box – Tea #19
Here is a unique one I like to find in the tea box. I don’t think I’ve tried this tea shop before. Unfortunately, any info about it already seems to be gone, so I had to add the info that was kindly added to the pouch of tea in the teabag. I like the name, because upon smelling the fragrance of the dry blend, it does remind you a little of the ocean somehow? It’s weird. There were interesting little fruit pieces. I was definitely tasting white tea with hints of fruit, but somehow the fragrance of the dry leaves was a lot stronger than the flavor of the tea.