Earl Grey

I found a recipe for Earl Grey lemonade and it made me curious. It has been very hot here recently and I have been drinking a fair amount of half-tea, half-lemonade that my fiance’s mother has started to buy. The recipe was basically the half-tea and half-lemonade with the tea part being Earl Grey.

I made a strong cup (1 bag steeped for 10 minutes) and poured in some lemonade I made yesterday for Memorial Day. It was about 3/4 Earl Grey and 1/4 lemonade. At first it was a yummy mix with a splash of bergamot mixing with the lemons. Then it kept getting tarter and tarter.

So I drank it down and put in enough lemonade to bring the mix to 1/2 Earl Grey and 1/2 lemonade. Then I put in a spoonful of sugar and mixed it well. The color now looks closer to the half-and-half store-bought mix. Now it is yummy with a splash of that bergamot at the end. The sugar made it sweeter, but I think it toned down the tartness too much. But I think that you would want an equal 1/2 and 1/2 mix for this Earl Grey Lemonade.

I might have to make a bigger bottle of this the next time we make lemonade. I really like it, but I don’t think my family will enjoy it as much. So I will have to make two bottles of lemonade. I think this is a very nice way to enjoy Earl Grey on a hot summer day.

I wonder if it would work well with different tea blends? It is a good thing that I might have to experiment because it is supposed to be very hot this summer. I just have to make sure that we have a fresh supply of lemons to keep the house stocked with lemonade because I don’t like using the lemon juice in the bottle. That makes the lemonade taste chemically and fake.

Edit: I think I was jumping to conclusions about the sugar. It has been sitting for a while and now the bergamot is jumping up and down again playing with that sugar. Balance has never tasted so yummy!

I have one more bag of this. I used to drink this often and loved it. Now I am finding it kind of meh. I hate it when the classics don’t quite live up to the memory.

This is another tea I bought, mainly because I like Earl Grey. It is really one of my favorite [fruit flavored] teas. Surprisingly, I haven’t had all that many different brands of it, nor do I have it as often as I would like. ://

One of the reasons I like it so much is because I find the aroma almost INTOXICATING! Nice aroma greeted me right away filling the air around me. :)) How I have missed this tea! Sometimes I think not having a tea too often [even a favorite tea], is a good thing. It makes me realize & appreciate how special the tea is! Sometimes I’m an odd egg.

The cup is a nice light brown color with a fantastic bergamot aroma. The tea base is probably Ceylon, which I like, but I think the tea base could be a little stronger. The bergamot seems to cover up the tea flavor more than I would like. :// Less bergamot flavoring would help accomplish this, giving more balance to the tea flavor itself. A longer steep & hotter temperature might also bring out the tea flavor. I’m not sure if the bergamot is all natual, which does make for a better cup of Earl Grey.

More tinkering and a review update may be necessary. Overall, this is a nice cup of Earl Grey, and worth the price-although not my favorite brand. A fine hot cup of tea, and I can’t wait to cold brew this soon. :))

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY EVERYONE!! :))

This song is by Brian Setzer. He’s an underrated guitarist and he’s a good singer. It is a bit different, but I like it!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVpz9k5myno

Cupped & Reviewed: Wednesday, July 4, 2012.

I am kind of confused by the myriad of Earl Greys that Twining’s seems to offer. I am now in Heathrow Airport (London) on my way to Madagascar and I had a bagged EG that wasn’t the typical yellow-pouch one but instead a black with “The Earl Grey” on it. But when I go to Twinings’ site it seems that perhaps it’s just a packaging redesign? I dunno, but I’m sticking it under here anyway.

So yeah, I haven’t had tea in it seem s like forever. I have been running around like crazy trying to get my apartment packed up and get ready to go into the field. Also, the weather decided to give me a big F-you and be exceedingly hot and humid for the last couple of days, so not hot-tea weather even if I did get a little break. But now finally I have time to relax in my layover in London and I finally got a pot of tea. Twining’s isn’t my favorite, but I actually enjoyed my pot of tea way more than I did last time. Maybe they did a slight reblend, or maybe I just appreciate the base tea more this time around, but it was nice and well rounded, and not bitter or astringent at all. Very pleasant and welcome after the plane ride.

Weeee i bought the water boiler for work yesterday and i just made my very first cup od tea at work :D New working era begins lol
http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l188/malomorgen/Teas/20100514_001.jpg

Another tea I get to decupboard! I do enjoy this one, and will revisit it.

Oh, and has anyone else heard the Twinings radio advert? I heard it on the drive last night…was amazed that a tea company was advertising on the radio! And it made me realize that I wasn’t pronouncing the name right. Woops!

I have a special story with this tea.

Few years ago I had the habit to drink Earl grey every morning at work.I liked tea especially because I was not a great coffee drinker.
I was buying any type of Earl Grey in tea bags and often very cheap ones (I was drinking a lot of cups !)

One day I had a cup of one of this cheap Earl Grey and just behind a cup of Twinning’s Earl Grey…it was a revelation ! The difference of taste was so evident.
I understood I had to taste and explore other teas and I began from this date to increase my interest for teas and began to use almost exclusively loose leaf tea.

Even if I know Twinning’s Earl grey is made of “dust in bags”, I should thank twinning for the electroshock. However it is a “regular” tea, classic, made to be appreciated by many publics.

This is a very comfortable tea and it is quite nice.

I continue drinking it some morning at the office when I am stuck with an empty tea tin and by the way need to buy tea at the local supermarket.

Also backlogged. This is what I had this afternoon with the boyfriend. You may regard the following post as a collaboration.

Apparently these bags are getting a wee bit on in age, most likely, and haven’t been stored all that strictly according to what is best for the tea.

I could definitely pick up a citrus-y flavour, although it reminded me a bit more of lemon than of anything else. Something acidic, definitely, thought the boyfriend. We settled on citric acid.

The tea itself was rather bland. After a short while when it had developed a bit, read: steeped a little bit longer, it developed a little more character although not very much.

It did bring on the question of ‘astringency’, though. WTF is that? I’ve searched high and low for a proper easily understandable explanation of what this is supposed to taste like. I know it’s one of them ‘official technical terms’, but it has just never ever been a word that I have associated with any sort of flavour.

On the contrary, I work in a hospital lab, and when we talk about ‘stringency’ it has something to do with the environtment in which a given test is conducted being EXACTLY identical each time. Temperature and reaction times and such things. ‘Astringency’ sounds like the opposite of this and in the lab it wouldn’t really be all that good. It’s just the first thought that pops into my head, and it’s really confusing when talking flavour.

Hence, it’s really difficult for me to wrap my head around it not only being a sort of flavour, but also something good. I know that it has something to do with how tannins affect the mucus membranes of the tongue and such. But still.

Anyway, to make a short story long, we decided that this particular sensation that we found in it must be what people meant when they talked about astringency. I described it as something that could be mistaken for bitterness and the boyfriend, apparently having more imagination than me, said slightly like soap but not. After some consideration the soap was the conclusion we went with.

And then the boyfriend said he would award it 3 out of 5 chainsaws, which I thought on a 1-100 scale would translate to 60. And then he haggled me up to 65 on the grounds that chainsaws are cooler.

(It may take a couple of tries to make the slider hit 65 exactly. Bear with me if I have to edit a few times.)

I edited this tea so that I could backlog it, specifically to warn. I don’t just like Earl Grey tea. Let me acquaint you with my impressions of Earl Grey tea. It was the first blend of tea that I had heard of and had exposure to, early in my life. To fully establish my geekness, lets say that I loved Star Trek the Next Generation. (fellow fans are already seeing where this is going.)

I would watch it non-stop when I was really little, instead of most cartoons. The great diplomat and my then-hero Jean Luc Picard drank this tea in times of severe emotional duress. It soon symbolized a refuge and an ultimate soother to any challenged hero.

I pleaded my parents to buy me some in the most heart-plucking manner. They did so. They bought me…Twinings. I hated it. Didn’t just hate it. Couldn’t stand it. And disillusionment spiraled in my poor head. THIS was what Jean Luc drank? How was the actor able to maintain composure for the camera not to mention to convey the general impression that his character liked such a horrible drink?!

Years later I understood when I tasted Adagio’s Earl Grey Bravo, that Picard wouldn’t wash his cup out with the watery slurry that Twinings tries to pass off as Earl Grey. He would gag at the horrible mildness. He would recoil in horror at the missing bergamot notes. He would shake his hands in fury at the now sullied name of Earl Grey and bitterly cry “KHAN!!”

I’ve geeked this post out beyond good judgment. I need to leave before people try and track this IP to my house.

We went out for brunch yesterday and I was feeling like a hot drink when we got there. The restaurant had bagged tea by Twinnings so I gave this one a try since I liked the Lady Grey a few weeks ago. The bergamont was well balanced with the black tea base for me. Not too in my face, but not too much in the background. I also really enjoyed the black tea base on this
I will be on the hunt for the a loose leaf sample of this and the Lady Grey. I am curious to see how the loose compares with the bagged tea.