After Dark

I just got so much tea!!!!!!!!!!!! YAY!!! Happy Dance!!! My boyfriend decided to give me some of my christmas presents early and I got not one but TWO tea of the month clubs!!! How awesome is he???

I decided to try this one first because it looked so bizarre! I am also drinking it in my new get relaxed mug that came with one of my tea of the month clubs!

This is my first ever tavalon tea. Their packaging looks very fancy :) This tea seriously looks like trail mix. HUGE dried cranberries!!! Dry it smells very fruity!

It tastes kind of like broth. Now that might sound like a bad thing but its really not. I am digging the savory feel with a hint of tartness in the background. As it is cooling it is morphing into a less savory and more tart fruity tea. Either way I really like it. It is very relaxing and I can see this as being a great tea to have at night after being out in the snow all day. I am surprised no one has logged this before!!

The more I drink this tea, the more I like it. I’ve always liked chamomile tea for medicinal purposes, but I never liked it enough to just drink it. This chamomile based tea, also has cranberry and sour cherry, which give it just enough interest that I could drink it anytime. And because it is caffeine free, I really can drink it anytime.

Tasting note 800 and the 500th tea I’ve written a note about. If only it was a milestone sipdown as well!

Once upon a time, I belonged to the Tavalon tea of the month club. I am fairly certain this was sent to me as a part of that club.

I really love the way this looks. It’s a bit like a Teavana blend in that there are large chunks of fruit in and among the flowers that make up the rest of the blend. There’s a great dark, dried fruity smell that smells like currants and dates to me more than anything that’s actually in this blend.

It looks like cranberry juice in the cup, maybe even a bit more magenta if that’s possible. I smell mostly hibiscus and chamomile coming in the aroma. I steeled myself for the hibiscus pucker, but fortunately, this has enough sweet stuff in it to counteract that, and the hibiscus is actually serving a purpose here. It keeps the mixture from being too sweet to drink.

Cranberry and cherry are the main flavors I taste along with the hibiscus, though there’s a citrus note that floats in and out which must be the blood orange. My guess is the apple is contributing sweetness more than flavor.

With blends like this, I’m never sure whether the difference from cup to cup is going to be significant enough to change my mind, because a lot of the flavor seems to depend on how much of which ingredient gets into what you steep.

Despite the wildly divergent ingredients in each of these blends, it’s in the same general category as Tazo Passion, Teavana Caribbean Breeze, and The O Dor Je M’appelle Dorothee, but it has one thing none of those have. A balance of tart and sweet rather than just tart, tart, tart.

Found it to be more sweet than sour. Great mix of flavors. We think we might try it iced for a summery drink.