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Sipdown no. 29 of 2023 (no. 687 total). And I’m down to 13 pages of cupboard. Huzzah!

I needed a lower ranking cupboard occupant (which is relative since everything in my cupboard now is over 80, I think) to sip down as a cold brew. When I picked this, I didn’t realize how little of it was left. I really only had half as much as I needed to do a cold brew so I topped it off with Harney English Breakfast, which I thought might be interesting. It occurred to me afterwards that what I might end up with was something very weak and pear-like and something very weak and black tea like mixed together which might or might not have had working synergies.

Yeah, it didn’t really work. I’m writing this note to record that it is now gone, but it deserved a better send off.

Sipdown no. 28 of 2023 (no. 686 total).

Drank the rest of this as cold brew and find myself tempted to repeat my note on the Peach Fruit Tea. Instead of repeating it, I’ll link to that entry here. https://steepster.com/teas/harney-and-sons/9591-peach-fruit-tea#tasting-notes

Sipdown no. 27 of 2023 (no. 685 total).

Hard to believe this is one of the lowest rated items still in my cupboard until just now.

All of the Harney fruit blends shine as cold brews, perhaps even more in my opinion than when served hot. Because the base has a lot of hibiscus (which I am now a fan of after a fair amount of time shunning it), the fruit blends have a lot in common and the fruit that is the distinguishing feature is harder to identify, but once you realize that and focus in on the non-hibiscus backdrop, you can definitely get the peach. It’s not as strong as some others (mango for instance) but it’s there.

I could see maybe getting one of these gain. I’d probably do the strawberry kiwi or goji berry, but who knows, I might get a hankering for this one.

Sipdown no. 26 of 2023 (no. 684 total).

I’m going to miss this one. I see that when I wrote the original note on this I was skeptical about why I would have ordered it. Since then I’ve developed into a pretty big fan of ginger in tea.

This one has a lovely balance. The ginger isn’t too strong, and leaves a nice, fresh aftertaste. The floral notes are atmospheric rather than definable, but they don’t cloud (or crowd) the tea’s flavor.

Lovely even when old, and I might have to get more of this some day when my cupboard is cleared out.

Sipdown no. 25 of 2023 (no. 683 total).

I had a humongous bag of this and whenever I have a humongous bag of anything that is a sipdown candidate, it ends up getting mostly used for cold brew.

This was a nice cold brew. Close enough to the standard “tea” flavor you find in good restaurant iced teas to be reminiscent of that, but with other things going on. I didn’t get a lot of berry in the sipdown, probably because of the tea’s age, but I did get something that tasted rounder and deeper and even, I think, somehow greener than a standard.

I think it is the honey note that gives it that depth. It’s not citrus.

Sipdown no. 24 of 2023 (no. 682 total).

I sipped this down a couple of weeks ago. Things have been so discombobulating lately I didn’t get around to recording the sipdown. I have been traveling a lot, mostly taking no. 2 for college tours. I am enjoying it but he’s nervous even though his grades couldn’t be better — it is so very hard to get into college these days, especially the University of California, and his frontrunner is UCSD with its 34% acceptance rate.

In any case, this was a lovely take it to work tea. When I don’t have green tea for a while, I forget how much I like it. What I noticed the most with this one at this late date in its shelf-life (when anyone but me, the completionist, would probably just have tossed it) was the lavender, which was mostly what I got from this very old tea, along with a generic, mild fruitiness. Soothing.

Sipdown no. 23 of 2023 (no. 681 total).

Had the rest of this last week as a take it to work tea, and the melon flavor was still as I remembered it and predominated. Fortunately, the flavor kept the tea from that planty weirdness I don’t like in a lot of white teas.

I still don’t really get white tea. As much as I would like to get it, I don’t. I’ll keep trying, though.

Sipdown no.22 of 2023 (no. 680 total).

This was my latest take it to work tea, and while it lost some of its luster due to age, it was a pleasant flavored green. Perhaps be cause of age, the floral and fruit notes didn’t seem separable to me — the flavors were all of a piece, more fruit than floral and not further separable into distinct fruit flavors as it apparently was when I first tried it. But that didn’t bother me.

I just love the way the French blend teas and it takes a lot to ruin a French tea for me.

Sipdown no. 21 of 2023 (no. 679 total).

I recall that I enjoyed this one a lot when I first tasted it, and my earlier note confirms the reason — the jasmine is not a flavor so much as a floral essence that tastes natural rather than artificial.

I had saved this one for a long time because I didn’t want it to go away, and I am sad to see it go.

But on a positive note, I see that Tavalon is still around. I had figured it would go the way of Teavana, but nope — it’s still on the internet. And they have a jasmine green. It’s pearls, not what this one was, but it is still comforting that a blender that does a good jasmine is still around and has one available.

Sipdown no. 20 of 2023 (no. 678 total).

I was truly sorry to see this one go. I’m making a point of not revisiting ratings as I sip down unless something is wildly off, and this isn’t as wildly off as it needs to be to change the rating. But there was something brown sugary and rich in this one that makes it among the top, if not the top, of the thousands of teas that congregated around the 85 rating mark.

I’ll miss this one more than the other 85s ;-).