These are individually packaged tea bags (environmentally bad but soooo convenient!), and when I rip one open I get a very strong sent of cloves…a hit of cinnamon…maybe a bit of ginger. I give another sniff looking for the orange peel smell but I can’t say I really find it. There might be a slight citrus tang sort of rounding out the spicy smells, either from the orange or the dried lime. Overall, a very yummy smelling tea!
No instructions on the box, but thanks to the informative people on this site I now know that white teas should be brewed with cooler water. Unfortunately I don’t have a thermometer, so I guess with the water temperature based on the noise my kettle is making (that lull between the louder sighing noise and the full-on boil).
Steep for ~9 minutes (oops, got distracted making breakfast), and I expected it to be very bitter. Nope, no bitterness, just a delicate spicy-tea taste. I figure the delicacy of the taste is because this is white tea, not the stronger-tasting black I’m used to.
The liquid tea smells like cinnamon and cloves, though I like to think I can catch a note of orange in there, a slightly different zing to the scent. First sip is…hmm a little bland? I try the slurp, that brings out the spice taste a bit more, and there’s a tingle on the front of my tongue. No spicy burn in my throat though. And not much tea flavour (maybe because of the white again?). I sip a bit more, but my taste buds aren’t really getting the flavour much. I know you’re typically not supposed to add things to white tea because it drowns out the flavour but…in goes a little squirt of honey and a tiny dab of cream. I like the result, but it may be because it now tastes like a faintly spicy creamy-sweet hot drink of indeterminate composition. Oops.
Thankfully I have a whole box of this to experiment with. I think next time I’ll try either hotter water or an even longer steep, just to see if that brings out more taste. And be a purist and resist the urge to sweeten-cream everything I drink…
