Random Steepings

It’s been a good tea day so far! I mailed out my tea swap packages to Cavocorax, Roswell Strange, and Carol Who this morning!

I had two great teas, which I will log later (White Rhino by Butiki, and Caramel Almond Amaretti by Teavana)

AND I am going out with a friend tonight for Japanese and the restaurant serves Matcha-based cocktails!!! I am excited!!!

It is raining. That is all.

Ha ha.

OK, I did come here to actually type something distantly related to tea. So I went to a local frozen yogurt place because I got a coupon in the mail for 10% off. They also advertised bubble tea, so I thought I would give it a try.

I ordered a lychee bubble tea. It was ok. Not the greatest. In hindsight, lychee may not have been the best flavour to order at a chain yogurt shop who is trying to get customers through coupons. It was quite perfumey and artificial. The pearls are quite low quality and the texture is weird. But it is still drinkable.

I never quite understood bubble tea. It is not really tea at all. So I did some research, by research I mean I typed it into google then clicked on the Wikipedia page. It appears that bubble tea did originally have tea in it. But it seems through commercialization that it is now some sort of milk product with flavouring added. There are also several kinds of bubble tea. I shouldn’t complain, I did get this at a yogurt shop.

Of other interesting note, there is a little comic on my bubble tea that points out the bubbles are actually the foam on the top of the “milk product liquid” and the tapioca/gelatin balls are the pearls. But on the wiki page it says the pearls are the bubbles, so who knows.

I also got yogurt and I would say my experience with that was very poor, but that is for a different review site.

GCTTB3

There are just so many teas to try in the travelling box that I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. However, I decided to make an iced tea mix recommended by jewelledthumb when she added her teas to the box. So I mixed the following 3 teas together in my iced tea pitcher:

- Wild Strawberry by Adagio
- Citron Green by Adagio
- Lemongrass by Adagio

I let them steep and cool down with 1L of hot water, and am adding ice as necessary when I pour it out.

The liquid is a beautiful shade of pink, and I have to admit that the dried Wild Strawberry mix smelled so scrumptious that I had to seriously restrain myself from taking it all and thus preventing the rest of the people in the round try some. But I prevailed against my id!

This tea is a tad bitter (I probably steeped too long), but I can definitely taste the lemon and the green tea, and the general fruitiness imparted by the strawberry. My husband said he liked it, so that’s definitely a win in my book.

I’ve been sick since Thursday. A gross, stuffy, foggy head cold. The “blow your nose 3 times per hour” sort of cold.

My tastes just started coming back on Sunday evening. And now they’re mostly back.

But since I couldn’t taste or smell anything for 4 days, I wasn’t wasting good tea. I have Davidstea’s Cold 911 or whatever it’s called, which i LOATHE, but always drink when I’m sick. So I had a few mugs of that.

Also, I thought that since I still craved hot, comforting tea even though I couldn’t taste it, I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to drink up the ones I don’t love but had lots of.

So I alternated between 3 teas, mostly. (Besides the Cold 911 one)

- The Tea Spot’s Bolder Breakfast which has a chocolate flavour I’m not super keen on

- A&D Damn Fine Tea Mount Grey, which I find to be an overly strong (overwhelmingly so) EG

- H&S Queen Catherine which everyone else seems to love but I find a bit too smokey. It’s actually really good when you can hardly taste it. HAH.

So, I am almost done the QC and the BB, I brought the remnants to work to polish off. I think I will go make some now.

The Mount Grey, however… I suspect that one going to be around to haunt me forever

It has been a long time since I have written a tasting note, but that is mostly because I was on vacation in Scotland! What a beautiful place it is, the rugged highlands, epic oceans, sandy beaches, cliffs, hills, munroes..everything was great! And the weather was gorgeous to boot! I can’t wait to go back someday, it was a good 10 days there but I will definitely return to see the eastern parts (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, we saved the whole eastern coast with its castles for another trip) and I would love to go back to the Isle of Skye and the Outer Hebrides again, they were stunning! Great time, wish I was still there!

Anyways, so while on holiday I did drink a fair amount of tea, every morning in fact, although it was mostly basic bagged black teas by Twinings or Tetley, but I took those with milk and sugar so they were quite good with the delicious Scottish breakfasts. A few places had peppermint, and I had that one or two mornings to help with digesting the heavy food near the end of the trip. I also had loose tea once, in Glasgow, at a little cafe near the University I got an EG to go and it looked like it was loose tossed in a tea bag, it was also pretty good. So overall a lot of tea drinking, also, every B&B and hotel we stayed at provided a kettle, tea, sugar and milk in the room! I wish they did that here in Canada!!

Overall, a tasty week of teas and a great holiday. Now I am back to my stash, and will hopefully log some notes as the weather here is turning cooler so I should be drinking more chai, puerh and spicy pumpkin and apple things haha.

Rant:Ugh, I can not wait for this freaken week and semester to end. I spent the night in the art build finishing my final 2d art project. Started around 10 pm and finally went to sleep around 4:40 on a bench in the building; my class starts at 8:30. At least it seems like people liked it.

That being said, I have com to the conclusion that when you are running on 2.5 hours of sleep food tastes 30% than normal; though McDonald’s would still suck. I am not even going to go into the laborious details on how crappy my time at [REDACTED] has been here, but I am so glad I am never coming back and will be able to get a better education at my old school; it is now offering my degree.

Tea

I have been getting a lot of my lunches at this pita place on campus. They let you get a combo with small side salads and a choice of drink; obliviously went for the tea. I don’t know what temp their hot water contain maintains at, but I have never gotten a bad cup of tea for any of the bags I have tried; and I tried a lot of brands. Today I mixed Twinings Darjeeling and a bag of Twinings pomegranate-raspberry I think is what it was called. The clean floral taste of the Darjeeling blends well with the fruity flavors, the latter of which is the dominate flavor.

mmhhhh, food.

If you have a chance to try that combo, go for it.

I went to the coolest place for dinner today. Chefs from awesome restaurants in the area all contribute a sandwich recipe, and they are all offered at this cafe. Anyway, seeing as it is a weeknight, I decided to order the mint peach iced tea over an alcoholic beverage. It was a bit too minty for my taste, but it was a nice sweet tea. Plus, it was refreshing on this very warm evening. Just thought I’d share :)

Wicked Tea subscription box.
Wicked Tea is based in Canada, but also ships to the US. When I went to the site I immediately got a pop up for $5 off a purchase. Bonus! They also have a free monthly trial available and you just pay $4.95 shipping. Knowing Canadian shipping, that’s less than it costs them.

After the trial the subscription is $21.95 a month (includes shipping). You can pre-pay for four months for $79 ($19.75/month.) In addition, orders of teas outside of the subscription are 25% off for members.

Pictures and the rest of the story:
https://tealover.net/2015/08/wicked-tea-subscription-box/

No idea where to categorize this tea or feel there’s a need to start a new tea entry on Steepster for it.

Anyways, drinking a pomelo herbal tea I found in Honolulu, just off a small shop in the mall. No labels on the tea, ti even came out “bulk bin” style. Expensiiiive! Looks like little cubes of melon, pineapple and other citrus. No apple (interestingly, herbals do like loading on apple for filler). I used 4t for a tumbler of iced tea, steeped for 8 minutes. The flavor is interesting. A little zesty and melony. Kinda grapefruity, but not like a pomelo really. It’s good, could be better.
Darn this tea was expensive, and heavy.

Well, I had my first intro to tea party. I had a bunch of retired teachers over and introduced them to loose leaf tea. I thought there were going to be about 13 people and then at the last minute a bunch of people RSVP-ed and suddenly there were 23! Just getting the logistics of where to put people in the living room was a challenge. :D

I wasn’t trying to be an expert and try to go with the unflavored teas as this was just a general intro. I basically made teas that I enjoy in each of the basic groups: black, green, white, herbal, honeybush, rooibos and mate. I made 7 teas… Earl Grey Creme from Teavana, Citrus Green from Adagio, Youthberry from Teavana, Chocolatea from Sereneteaz, Tropical Fruit Rooibos from Spice of Leaf, Vanilla Honeybush from Infusion Bouteaque, Chocolate Rocket from David’s.

Juggling the making of tea was less tricky than I thought. The Breville did a great job!

We had a lot of fun and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. Most of the people had never had “good” tea before and were very excited.

I served raspberry scones, butter cookies and cucumber sandwiches using my grandmother and great-aunt’s best china. Everything looked so nice with the good silver, china and fancy cloth napkins.

After they left I was so exhausted!!! I had really gotten my self stressed trying to figure out the logistics of the whole day. But it was fun!!