Plum Pryanik

Made a warm cuppa of this yesterday night using 4g of leaf to a 350ml cup but the flavor wasn’t as strong as I was hoping for, so tonight I used 6g for a 500ml teapot with a long “leave the bag in” steep. The deep cinnamon and citrus aroma is very pleasant. The steeped tea is a very pretty red color on the pour, but the flavor still doesn’t feel as strong as I’d like… I think the problem is that the color and aroma remind me of hibiscus spice Christmas blends (which I really love and drank a lot of over a two week course of sinus infection) but this is a honeybush base which is just a more thin mouthfeel. The flavor is a bit similar, with a strong sweet cinnamon taste (with woody undertones, not like candy), but the citrus note is much stronger. The lemongrass really pops, very citrusy with a slight hay-like note. The woody and peppery notes of the honeybush blend very well with the cinnamon and lemongrass, so that pepper flavor doesn’t feel quite so out of place here as I get with other honeybush blends. I don’t taste plum, but that’s one of those tea flavors like cranberry that I never seem able to taste. I also have never even heard of a pryanik prior to seeing this tea’s name. (Idaho is not exactly a place of very diverse food offerings… We do have fry sauce, though!)

I don’t taste any plum, but I notice mild spices on a nice rooibos base. This tastes pleasant, but not special. The second time I had this, I had it with no milk so that I could taste the flavors a little better. I guess I can see maybe a hint of plum? Not really though. It’s similar to other flavored rooibos blends I’ve had before, maybe the caramel monkey bread from forever ago?

For some reason I never tried this during the actual advent season.

This is a nice nighttime option. It’s spicy and a bit citrusy. Warm and comforting.

(52teas (Anne) 2022: 31)

This tea has a most interesting flavour, with the lemongrass and spicing that I can’t quite place. It does remind me of some European spiced cookies I’ve had in the past – I wouldn’t have thought lemongrass would be involved, but I’m not great at breaking down complex uh… compound? flavours. I do not taste plum at all, or at least, not in the plum flavouring way that I expect. An interesting blend.

The rare mood to have an uncaffeinated tea struck me last night. This blend is all spiced wine, including that slight catch at the back of the throat.

This cup has a nice citrus rind presence, but, for me, the plum is absent. What I am getting is the slightest bit of rose.

Twelve Days of Tea 2021 – Day Nine (Last one!)

My first cup was a nightstand tea that ended up serving as excellent breakfast tea – spiced red fruit almost in the vein of glühwein, but with a subtle jammy quality. The second was hot and still pretty good. My sipdown was more muted but still enjoyable.

I am familiar with the cookie filling flavour this tea is inspired by (sort of), although I wasn’t certain why this flavour profile tasted so familiar to me. Then someone dropped off Croatian baked goods on Christmas, which were followed by German cookies – many with different variations of spiced jam filling; somewhere in that cookie-eating daze there was a filling that tasted identical to this blend. I wish I’d eaten that cookie alongside this tea.

And this marks the last of my advent teas. Until next year, delicious teas!

Backlogged Advent Note
52 Teas 12 Days Of Tea Advent: Day 9
The dry leaf smell made me a bit nervous but I was surprised by this one. I also had no idea what a plum pryanik was when I smelled the dry leaf. I looked it up afterward and they look like really tasty cookies. Really enjoyed this one as it’s such a unique herbal tea. The honey taste in this one was really good. The lemongrass was such a lovely contrast to the spices. The second steep was somewhat weak but reminded me of cola probably from the spices in this tea.
More to be added later after the holidays.

52Teas 12 Teas of Christmas: Day 9!

My tea-making abilities have been slightly hampered by my parents’ lack of a real kettle… we have to use the hot water heating element of their coffeemaker. (They don’t even drink coffee!) It’s a far cry from our variable temperature kettle! I feel like I’m not doing these teas justice.

I’ve never had the cookies that inspired this tea, so I can’t compare the flavors. I got a deep plumminess layered under an almost floral spiciness—a very cozy, holiday-appropriate flavor profile.

The 9th Tea of Christmas – I was interested in reading what others thought of this – I personally LOVE it & it tastes a lot like the bit of Pryanik I had last year. It didn’t really taste cake-y or even entirely like a gingery gingerbread. It tasted a bit like … imagine a fig newton, but the cake part was made with spices & sweetened with honey rather than sugar & instead of fig, you had a thin, plum-y jam-ish sort of filling.

The honeybush I use has often been described as “peppery” & I think it works well with the spices in this blend. It’s sweet & mildly spiced with notes of plum & hints of honey. Tasty!

Adventaggedon Day 21: Tea 7/8

I genuinely love when I have to look up ingredients or names of tea because they’re introducing me to something I’m not familiar with – it’s a merger of a general love of experiencing and trying new food/flavour sensations and a natural curiosity and excitement about learning all things tea.

So when I saw “Pryanik” in the name this morning and didn’t recognize it as either an ingredient, food, tea garden or anything of that nature I was excited. After looking it up I now know that Pryaniki are Russian spice cookies! They look pretty yummy and I can definitely see how plum would compliment that type of profile. It’s a really, really fun and creative holiday type of profile that kind of escapes the cliche of all wintery plum teas being “sugar plum” flavoured. I dig it!

It’s hard to say if the taste is anything like the actual cookies because I’ve never had one. I don’t really get anything cookie like here aside from maybe a very loose gingerbread comparison? The medley of the several different spices with the more cooked and syrupy plum-type notes is pleasant though! I say “plum-type” because it’s tricky to get plum flavouring right and I don’t know that I’d name this as plum blindly – but it’s definitely in that lovely sweet stonefruit type of realm, for sure. The most out of place flavour element here for me was the lemongrass. I didn’t feel like it made sense to me for the profile, though it didn’t taste particularly unpleasant.

I can see why Nik likened this to potpourri because it is a really busy profile overall and there’s a sort of hint of floral flavour in the undertones alongside that spice medley. However, I found it soothing overall and really appreciated the creativity. The fruity honeybush/spice combo works well for me. They’re different tasting in many ways, but I found myself thinking of 52Teas’ Blueberry Cobbler Honeybush which I suppose is similar(ish) because it’s also got this sweet cooked/jammy fruit flavour with spices on the honeybush base.