Tea Gems

Sipdown (2153)!

So, so sweet but also really good. This tastes more like a straight up vanilla and cinnamon blend than a chai to me, but I can kind of see it. Really rich, robust flavours with a lot of silky vanilla creaminess (despite no dairy). It reminded me a lot of instant chai mix from, like, David Rio? I think that’s the brand I’m thinking of…

Not sure I could drink this regularly because it’s so sweet, but it’s always fun to see these gems dissolve and I liked the vanilla flavour in this one a lot in particular. Would love to see the company do, like, a plain vanilla black tea gem. Maybe in a sugar casing that’s ACTUALLY black? Call it Obsidian or something like that.

Geek Steep S2E29 – Weirld Al

Sipdown (2065)!

The Saga Begins is probably my favourite Weird Al song (though Amish Paradise is a VERY close second), and it’s also the song that was my introduction to Weird Al in general. It’s a masterclass in narrative story telling – and it will always blow my mind how Al managed to summarize a whole movie in a song, make it funny, and rhyme fucking midichlorians.

The tea I picked was honestly mostly an excuse for me to geek out about an element of the Star Wars universe that I love so much – light sabers and the kyber crystals that power them. There’s so much lore behind what the colour of your light saber symbolizes, and I eat that shit up. This tea gem may have been called Pink Tourmaline, but realistically it’s purple. A beautiful, deep purple colour that looks very similar to Mace Windu’s iconic saber. Of course, it was that colour PURELY because Samuel L. Jackson just wanted a purple sabey – but I’ve always loved the lore that Jedi who use purple lightsabers embrace both the light and dark sides of the force.

If I was gonna have a light saber, it would be purple.

The tea itself is fine – it’s a very sweet Earl Grey with notes of lavender. Less floral than you would think, but still present. Not really anything special in term of taste, but like all the tea gems it just has a very cool visual.

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU

Sipdown (1869)!

So after our tasting last week I put the remaining tea gems into our office freezer to see if some cold would help them set and get easier to handle – and it worked like a charm! When I unwrapped this one, it looked pretty dang close to all the pretty photos you can see on the company’s Tik Tok or IG accounts!

In terms of taste, this is my new favourite! It’s incredibly peachy and flavourful and even with the obvious extra sweetness from the sugar encasing I’m still not finding it too sweet. Again, the honey is a stretch for me – I just haven’t tasted it in any of the flavours where it was supposed to be. However the peach gummy candy flavour is a delight this afternoon!

Last of the tea gems I tried on the first day!

I thought this was the prettiest looking of the gems despite the fact it was quite melted on the top (the sides were in tact, though!) but it’s probably the flavour I was least looking forward to trying and, of course, it wasn’t exactly a favourite. That’s purely just because I dislike chamomile though, and the honey was pretty absent which probably would have been the only flavour here that could have offset my distaste for chamomile. The quality of the chamomile was fine and I did taste some vanilla – so if you’re a chamomile drinker this this is a pretty fun and pretty way to kind of play around with that profile.

Sipdown (1949)!

Just finishing off a little mini mug of this tea – it’s a bit like neo citron, but with a kick of ginger and much sweeter as well. Not too sweet though, which is impressive. It easily could be given how much sugar casing is on this cutie little gems. I’m liking it a lot and if it wasn’t such a hassle to order these gems I would probably consider getting more of this flavour.

PS. Putting these in the freezer has REALLY done the trick with making them much less messy!

The next gem we tried was this Amber themed one! While still a bit sticky and hard to remove from its packaging, this was the least melted of the four gems I’ve tried so far. It was very pretty though! It took a long time for the casing on this one to melt and the teabag to emerge and I can’t help but wonder if, were the gems not melted, this longer wait time would have been more normal than what we experienced with some of the other gems, like Peridot.

This flavour drew mixed reactions from the crowd of people we’d gathered to taste. I quite liked it and thought the flavour was a nice cross between a classic lemon lollipop with more of the soothing and slightly medicinal lemon of, say, a cough drop. Not much ginger at all to me, in terms of taste. Though it was sort of there in the undertone and I felt I could feel it on my throat. Others said it was too medicinal tasting and compared it to Neo-Citron. Which, like, fair.

I just know that when the samples were all divided out to our panel of people… I drank the rest of the mug. shrug

This was the next one we steeped up after unboxing this order!

The gem itself seemed a little too darkly green for peridot, but once we had poured water over it the colour quickly became the perfect shade of bright but still saturated green to have a spot on peridot colouration. I think in my head I had almost expected the reverse where the gem would be a lighter green but the steeped tea would have a more green/blue colour. That because this gem was pretty much entirely just butterfly pea flower once the sugar exterior had melted. Also, this was the fastest to melt and have the little sachet float on up to the top!

I think this was my least favourite in terms of taste. It was just like a very sweet butterfly pea flower infusion which, I suppose, is actually what it was. The problem was just that butterfly pea flowers don’t exactly taste good, so adding sweetness is a moderate improvement but not really a change of flavour direction.

So earlier this summer this company (Tea Gems) went very viral on Tik Tok and instagram. Basically, this is a one woman operation where she hand makes what are essentially “tea bombs” but themed around different kinds of crystals/gems/stones. They’re more compact than a typical tea bomb and very, very aesthetically pretty.

I was obviously obsessed and needed to order one of each.

Now, I placed my order in the middle of July and I finally received it on Thursday this week. I want to be clear that even though that’s a veeerrryyyy long wait time, I am not upset. When I placed my order it was in the height of when she had blown up on TikTok and I had the understanding/knowledge that this is a handmade product done by a singular person. So, the fact she was able to keep up with so many orders without sacrificing quality is something that deserves patience and empathy.

The other thing worth noting is that when I received my order several of the gems we (Marika and I) tried after unboxing were kind of melted and/or very tacky in texture. That’ll probably be something that comes up across my reviews of this brand. However, it should STRONGLY be noted that the order was packed with ice packs so there were steps made by the owner to mitigate melting and I had placed my order right in the middle of the hottest few months in Canada and these gems had to travel across the US/Canada border in a Fedex truck to make it to me. Like, I knew the risk of melting when I made this order and there is ZERO criticism on my part towards this company for the fact several of the gems ended up effected by the summer heat. That’s just the reality of ordering a sugar based product in the summer and, had she not taken steps to mitigate melting, it would have been much, much worse.

SO! That said…

This was the first gem that we decided to steep/brew. It’s a lovely deep red colour and placing it in our mug and pouring hot water over it we could pretty quickly smell a soft sweet berry aroma wafting up towards us. We were a little unclear if we should just let the gem sit undisturbed or if it would be better to stir it to agitate the sugar/accelerate melting. In the end we ended up stirring it which was a bit messy; the sugar exterior had melted to the side of the cup so it wasn’t easy to stir – we ended up abandoning the idea and just waiting.

Eventually the sachet of tea inside the gem floated to the top though, and from there we divided up the mug of tea to share with all the people who had stopped in the office to look at what were were doing/brewing.

Personally, I think this was the nicest tasting of the gems we’ve tried so far. Really berry forward and not too tart from the hibiscus. I kind of thought it had a cherry Kool-aid vibe but maybe mixed with like, raspberry or strawberry? Not particularly creamy but still really good. It was very sweet but I think that’s to be expected given this is a sugar casing around the sachet. It’s gonna be a constant throughout all the gems, I’m sure. The colour was DEEP red with a subtle shimmer to it from some of the gold mica pigment that had been swirled throughout the sugar. Very pretty.