Peanut Butter and Raspberry Jelly Black Tea

Homemade Advent Swap Day 9
from AJRimmer
I made a cup of this one last night and sipped on it while doing some holiday shopping. This was my first peanut butter and jelly tea. Raspberry PB&J was always my favorite with grape being a close second. The black tea was strong and reminded me of a breakfast tea without any bitterness or astringency. It works really well with the fresh raspberry jam notes. (so many teas miss the mark with raspberry but not this one!) Unfortunately as hard as I tried I didn’t taste anything reminiscent of PB. It’s a lovely raspberry jam tea though! I noticed that in the description of the tea it says that Anne isn’t a fan of PB & J together. So the peanut butter note is meant to be faint here and I might just be unable to identify it. I need to try my next cup of this one with milk when I finally get ahold of some more.
Question for Anne though do you like other types of nut butter sandwiches with jam or jelly?

I have to say that this tea doesn’t taste like its name. The black tea is pretty strong, and it tastes nice. I also get a strong berry flavor. It tasted good without milk, but I added some anyway and like it this way too. I wish there were something like peanut butter here, but it is a nice berry black tea.

My first sipdown! :D

This is from the most recent advent box, and I keep forgetting that putting milk in it makes it a lot harder to taste the flavors! I did get a sort of sunflower nuttiness, especially as an after taste.

The black base is pretty brisk this time around. Still not tasting any peanut butter, but the raspberry is nice and jammy.

This one is a forever favorite. I bought a fairly large bag of this blend several years back and still have plenty left. It’s the mix with the sunflower seeds, but I don’t notice anything stale about it even though my batch is an older one. This was a delicious cup today, mostly nutty but the raspberry is definitely there.

Have I actually not reviewed this yet? I’ve had it several times hot, although have yet to try it cold.

Tasty black base tea-thick, malty, neither sweet, nor overly tannic. It goes well with the fruity (and slightly sweet) raspberry flavour. The sunflower seeds somehow taste like peanutbutter. I’m not sure how that sorcery works, but it tastes /just/ like peanut butter. Magic?

Sipdown

I got a sample of this from Kittenna and unfortunately I have not stored it all that wonderfully so this is mostly just black tea and a slightly seedy flavor. Still I am grateful to Kittenna for that chance to try this out.

Additional notes: This is really one of those teas I should have enjoyed at the freshest. This tea is certainly not the same, which I mentioned a few months ago. But I did want to try different parameters: I’ve been having luck with other teas having more flavor peeking out with more leaves, so I used two teaspoons with this steep. A brisk tea to try with two teaspoons, but with the flavor mostly gone, I didn’t feel like I was wasting leaves. I also handpicked the sunflower seeds out of the teaspoons so they didn’t impart more stale flavor than they needed to. The flavor ended up stale anyway, and still not much raspberry. Maybe a tiny bit more than if I used one teaspoon (which was no raspberry flavor at all). So what I once called ‘best raspberry tea’ is now hardly raspberry. I would say the sunflower seeds definitely don’t work, especially for us hoarders, but this tea isn’t THAT old yet. I don’t think the sunflower seeds were an accurate substitute for peanut butter anyway. I WOULD love to see a good flavored peanut butter tea, fake ingredients or not. The original rating was for the ‘raspberry’ aspect, rather than the ‘peanut butter’ aspect. The raspberry was so good I was willing to look over the sunflower seeds. Also, this partly assam base just pairs very well with raspberry.
Steep #1 // 2 teaspoons (with sunflower seeds plucked out) // 20 min after boiling // 2 minute steep
Steep #2 // 10 minutes after boiling // 2-3 min

Took this into work and forgot we had no milk. Dur!
It was ok… but nothing special. Definitely nutty, and just a tiny bit jammy. The consistency was pretty consistent with “pb&j” though, which was nice.
More experimentation needed!

Adventaggedon Day 15 – Tea 2/6

Hello nostalgia my old friend! This is like a double whammy of nostalgia because not only is PB&J a super nostalgic flavour but the tea itself is also nostalgic because I remember the original of tea from years back! I see I only rated it a 70 so maybe I’ll have to go back and reread old tasting notes because I remember liking it a lot more.

There’s obviously some changes – I don’t think Anne works with sunflower seeds anymore. Personally, I’m a bit sad about that because I think they add such a lovely flavour, but I also completely understand the move away from them. The result here is a cup that, while nutty, is more focused on the delicious and jammy raspberry note which actually perfectly captures that “Smuckers Raspberry Jam” flavour that seems ripped right out of my elementary school life. The black tea is plucky and tannic, with a bready/grainy note that adds to the illusion as well!

It was an unexpected tea in this year’s advent, but I enjoyed it a lot!

Advent Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CI1bJQzAPNj/