Granville Island Tea Co

This is one of several teas I picked up last time I was at Granville Island Market. This one smelled amazing so I got it for autumn mornings. I was not disappointed!

This is your classic herbal chai but with pieces of pumpkin, apple, and carrot. Despite this, it is not savoury at all. The cinnamon and cardamom (it is heavy on the cardamom) give it a natural sweetness. When steeped it has a lovely light pink hue due to the beet pieces (you cannot taste the beet, luckily).

I like to brew it strong (5-8 minutes in boiling water) and then add a dash of vanilla soy milk to create a warming latte. There is a nice hint of nutmeg and caramel in the aftertaste. The vanilla in the soy milk really makes this desserty. I wouldn’t have liked some pecan or nutty notes being stronger in the blend, but it’s still very tasty.

87/100 plain
92/100 with 15 mL vanilla soy milk

A cuppa from this morning! I definitely remembered this as a little more sweet and juicy tasting, but regardless I found the grape flavour incredibly smooth and pleasant with a bold, brisk black tea base. It was one of those cups that you start drinking and by the end you’ve sort of just fully relaxed and melted into. In fact, I almost feel like if it had been juicier it might have felt a little out of place for the morning that I ended up having. This was just better.

Cold Brew!

Didn’t have a super awesome experience with this one, and I’m trying to decide if I think it’s because of the tea itself or if it’s more on the user side – specifically with potential over leafing. The reason I’m thinking it may be the latter is because the biggest issue I had drink this was just the intensity of the flavours. There’s was an almost soapy floral note that felt sort of out of place for an Ice Wine blend but also just an immensely cloying finish. I did expect sweetness because, well, this is an ice wine inspo we’re talking about. However it was just jarring and a bit undrinkable…

So next time I make this I’m going to try really hard to remember to scale back the leaf quite a bit so I can reassess.

This is a Black OP tea, rose petals. I’m a huge fan. I just can’t find the caffeine content anywhere

As a chai blend this was enjoyable. It had a nice ratio of spices with a pleasantly lingering sweetness from what I imagine was either fennel or anise. Good sweetness, a little bit of a peppery undertone. Not anything with “wow factor” or that read as distinct, but solid. However, as a Rose Chai it leaves a lot to be desired. I really didn’t taste any floral notes at all, and that’s a shame because I quite like the idea of a Rose Chai on a rooibos base. I’ve tasted more than a handful of Rose Chai blends though, and this was for sure the bottom of that list.

My taste preferences definitely get a little darker and more cozy with an indulgent/roasty lean to them as it gets colder outside, but if we’re being honest I never really ever stop drinking fruitier flavours teas – I just love them, I think more than any other broad flavour category for teas…

But even those fruity options change a little bit. Like, the pear cravings are starting folks. They never really go away. I fucking love pear teas. But I drink more of them in the fall than any other time of year, and this was DELICIOUS. I know it’s just a catalog blend under the Granville Island branding, but this Tuscan Pear that floats from company to company has one of the best juicy, ripe green pear flavours I’ve ever tried from a tea company. I love the hint of cream and the slightly nutty, honey-like flavour of the rooibos. But that pear. Oh that pear.

A few nights ago I had such a strong craving for this ta so I went sample diving to find it. It’s such an insanely rich tasting blend with a prominent banana candy flavour coupled with other sweet notes like frosting, caramel, and coconut. For half the mug it was perfect for satisfying that craving, and the other half I just had hit my threshold and only really found it cloying…

Had this one two nights ago. It’s also another Vancouver/Victoria vacation haul blend…

I also didn’t picked this up because it wasn’t in Gravnille Island’s printed out menu, but my mom had eyes like a hawk and saw it on the far back counter with a few other unlisted teas. Maybe seasonal inclusions? I’m not sure. She was curious about it, so we picked some up.

In contrast to the Strawberry Banana Smoothie rooibos blend I had just yesterday from another BC based company, this one is almost too much flavour. It’s very, very sweet to the point where it’s kind of cloying. However, I’d much rather an excess of flavour than not enough of it. The banana is sort of that Penicillin banana flavour that a lot of adults my age loved as children (ie. “banana medicine”), but with added notes of chocolate and, weirdly, honey? I don’t know why I tasted honey in this, but it was there for me…

I think with less leaf or the addition of milk to help mute the notes of the tea, I’d probably enjoy this one a lot. I love this style of banana. It just isn’t something I’d recommend leaving a teabag steeping for – it gets mad strong!

Cold Brew!

One of the teas I picked up while on vacation. I’m always intrigued by an organic fruit infusion because, candidly, they’re so challenging to develop. Many reasons for that; not gonna get into all of them – but suffice to say this one was a mix of professional and personal curiosity.

The dry leaf visual is a little generic to me with it’s majority apple base – to me that says there’s probably going to be a decent amount of natural but generically fruity tasting sweetness and I think that assumption was pretty spot on. Does lean citrus in taste too though and because the balance of citrus notes is so nicely in the middle of sweet and more zesty/tart it conveys pink grapefruit pretty well. Certainly not the nicest pink grapefruit blend I’ve ever had, but knowing the restrictions they were probably working with I think it’s very solid! It’s mostly just that it’s not defined enough that I think most people could confidently identify it as grapefruit without the name filling in some of those gaps to better flesh out the taste in your head…

Refreshing, though! It will be an easy thing to sip through this summer.

Tea Lemonade!

We spent most of our second day in Vancouver at the Granville Island Market where we enjoyed several baked goods, some beer, a really cool ceramics studio (where I bought some teaware) and, of course, the Granville Island Tea Company! I did pick up tea, but I also grabbed one of the tea infused lemonades they were selling since it was a suuupppeeerrrr hot afternoon.

I thought the white tea lemonade, made with their Pai Mu Tan, sounded the most interesting so that’s what I got. Sadly the white tea was so delicate that the bright, zesty notes of sweet and pucker inducing freshly juiced lemons just totally eclipsed the taste of the tea. A bit disappointing, but I guess it was at least technically a caffeinated lemonade?? Small condolences.

Cold Brew!

Very, very rooibos forward blend with a lot of that woody mineral taste, but alongside it almost equal parts of just a distinct, clear orange note. To call it blood orange feels like perhaps somewhat of a stretch, but it’s dark and dense enough in nature without a lot of tartness/acidity so I do feel like I see what they were going for.

Found this one really easy going and sippable, especially as someone who likes the taste of rooibos.

Sipdown (234)

Q is for…Queen Mary

Thank you Sil and OMGsrsly for this tea!!

I used the whole sample in one of my small pots of tea. This is not my sort of black tea though. This is more like a breakfast blend in that it has a briskness to it. I like my black teas to be more like dessert. Still, always fun to try something new!

Considering the Burning Season™ BC often gets, I’m kinda weirded out by the name of this tea.

Also, it smells bacony. Which is something I wouldn’t expect due to the rose, jasmine, and bergamot.

It’s not terrible, definitely drinkable with a touch of maple and some sort of milk or cream. This one does better with a shorter steep time for sure.

But it’s not the smokey tea of my heart. That one is Murchie’s Russian Caravan. Which I’m out of.

Oh yeah. Last time I had my computer open I was trying to write a note for this tea.

Well, it’s a tea. It’s a little more astringent than I typically like, but I will drink it. Hopefully Sil doesn’t hate it.

Definitely drank this with milk.

Yay tea.