Culinary Teas

I finished this up yesterday! This is a great assam tea. It is one of my favorites.

I love this tea with ginger! I cut up fresh ginger and let it boil in hot water for a few minutes then added this tea. Delicious! I also added some sugar since this tea became too bitter to drink alone. My husband liked the tea, which is great! He loves ginger tea.

I opened this package today! It smelled so good dry! Malt and cocoa are two things I love in life. The leaves were twisted and dark brown. Since I haven’t been brewing teas for long periods of time, the liquor was a bit scent-less to me. When I drank it, it tasted like good Assam. I detected maltiness, slight fruity notes, and some cocoa notes as well. It was still strong, so I added sugar and skim milk to it. Delicious and easier to drink with the additives, which I usually like to use when I’m drinking assam teas. I imagine that this would be a good base for blending teas or making chai.

This tea is pretty incredible… First off, it smells amazing! More like dried apricot and dark sugar than plum, but still mouth-wateringly good. Some teas skimp on dried fruit, but I got a piece in every spoonful!

When brewed, this tasted like sugarplum, with the slightest bit of cinnamon… The tea base wasn’t too strong, and went well with the tartness of the plum. A definite re-order!

Dry the leaves smell wonderful, so fresh and floral and fragrant. Pretty too, with different colored dried bits. Brews up a dark brown. Freshly brewed it smells of vanilla and flowers, really lovely. Rather sweet right off the bat. It tastes relatively gentle, especially as it cools, but that fits the feminine vibe of it. Feels like the equivalent of strolling around a French-y girly garden full of flowers.

Has a musty (but not bad) aroma dry, and brewing it’s very much like wet grass and soil. Brews up a dark but relatively bright red, pretty. The vegetal scent recedes after brewing, which I admit I found a relief. As it cools it mellows and becomes quite smooth. I like it a lot once it settles. It does retain a grassy herbal flavor but it’s light and enjoyable, floating gently over the black tea flavor. It’s funny, I thought based on initial smell there’d be no way I’d like this as much as Hooghly Holler but I was wrong. Very refreshing. I’d drink it again!

Dry this smells like a refreshingly tart underripe melon. Interesting just how different it is from Butiki’s Cantaloupe and Cream while still resembling melon.

Brewed, this seemed odd at first, not resembling melon in smell or taste anymore. There’s some tannin and that bit of bitterness most Culinary Tea blends have if you aren’t very mindful of steeping briefly (I may start brewing them all at a slightly lower temperature and see what happens). But as it cooled down a little the melon came back, and the whole thing turned a little more luscious and silky. Not bad. I don’t think I’d brew this hot very often given the deluxe silkiness and creaminess of Butiki’s but I’m definitely going to save this to ice (which is recommended right on the website). It really does have an authentic melon flavor coupled very tidily with the taste of black tea, making it an ideal midday iced tea choice. Bet it’d go great with summer meals.

If it wasn’t for the “this screams iced tea” possibilities, I’d rate this significantly lower, but really, it’s for sure one of the better CT blends I’ve tried all around. It’s an interesting combination of sweetly refreshing real-fruity with pick-me-up brisk generic black tea flavor, and unusual in that there’s more flavor in the swallow than the settled nose (how often can you say a flavored tea tastes better than it smells?!).

Really digging how floral and sweet perfume-y, not just grape-y, the dry leaves smell, indeed like a lovely chilled wine. Brewing and in the cup the sweet floral quality turns a bit musky in a good way, continuing the perfume element. Impressed and pleased this isn’t more astringent.

Funny enough, I seem to have a conditioned mental block to drinking more than a cup of this in one sitting—I guess I inevitably connect it to drinking a lot of wine really fast, and how my body doesn’t like the idea of that.

It’s a shame this isn’t less caffeinated, because it’d be a lovely way to have a nightcap sort of relaxation beverage without, you know, the icky dehydration and mouthfeel when you wake up the next morning. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with any herbal/tisane wine “teas”—New Mexico Tea Company’s, Joy’s Teaspoon’s, and Red Leaf Tea’s all have tea leaf bases as well. I do reckon it would be refreshing iced in hot weather and possibly blended with other flavors, sort of like a wine tea summer spritzer “cocktail” thing, which might be good for a party on the patio in that it’d pick you up (instead of make you sleepy, which wine does to me) and be less dehydrating.

Now I’m wondering if it’d make a good partner with certain foods. Hm…

Had this for breakfast. Pretty decent. Not great. I added some milk and honey to my first steep. Was heading out the door and added half of an actual salted butter caramel from Trader Joe’s to my second steep. That was was really good. Like most of the Culinary Teas, I enjoy it, will drink my whole sample, but probably won’t re-order.

Once again, a tea I was kinda meh about hot is made short work of iced. Love how refreshing earl grey iced tea is!

Gonna be quiet around here for a week or two as I go out of town—I don’t bring tea with me when I travel (usually travel = chance to drink fancypants cocktails because Memphis’ craft bar scene is pretty crap so I gotta make the most of my chances) and I don’t have internet access/a smartphone anyway. Hope y’all have a lovely, tealicious week.

Strongly citrus aroma. I think I’m beginning to get a general sense of CT’s stuff now—the flavors are nice, but what I’m finding disappointing is the black tea base they tend to use in everything. It’s not terrible but it’s not flavorful or smooth enough in its own right, and the authentic but light flavors they build over it are usually not quite enough compensation to push any given tea of theirs into the “would definitely buy again” zone.

I do appreciate the way the floral notes come in later in the swallow, after the citrus, and linger.

I’ve tried a bunch of teas over the past few days but it’s been pretty crazy over here so I haven’t logged them. I’ll try and get back on track! This tea smells awesome. The flavors are good and all present (Chocolate, caramel, nut), but I wish the black tea base was a little stronger. It gets tastier as it cools. I’ll definitely enjoy the rest of my sample, but I doubt I’ll reorder.

I dig the way this has a sort of floral, perfume-y thing going on, not just straight up sweet strawberry. And there’s definitely a rich creamy-pastry thing going on in the aroma too; it’s less evident in the swallow, but the overall effect really is of good homemade shortcake with freshly whipped cream and sunpicked fresh berries, the small flowery-smelling sort, not the bland supermarket behemoths. Nice. I’m sure the slice of strawberry cake I happened to have on hand and enjoyed with this didn’t hurt either!

This tea while it’s brewing really does smell like good pecan pie—you know, a pie that’s more about roasted nuts and buttery flaky pastry than a ton of corn syrup goo—and almost a little chocolate-y, sort of like Dorie Greenspan’s very adult/sophisticated recipe for chocolate pecan pie with the secret ingredient of a little espresso powder. So that’s a plus.

As for the actual flavor while drinking…like Irish Cream, not a lot to write home about bad or good at first. But once it cools slightly and a tiny pinch of raw sugar is added, the pecan pie flavor comes through. I’m beginning to suspect most of the Culinary Teas dessert-y flavored teas I got are going to need this treatment; I don’t think they enhance their sweetness with sugar or licorice root or whatnot in the bag, which hey, I’m not complaining (you can always add sweeteners, but you can’t get rid of them if put there as part of the blend!). It doesn’t take much sugar to let the nutty caramel flavor shine through. The nutty taste is still slightly thin on the first/front part of the swallow, but then it deepens and lingers nicely in the aftertaste.

I still don’t think so far CT’s rich dessert-y flavored black offerings are on par with, say, American Tea Room’s, but they’re a step up from supermarket brands and they definitely don’t taste adulterated with cheap artificial ingredients.

at first i was pretty disappointed because as another reviewer said, there’s not much going on here, good or bad. just tastes like plain nothing-fancy black tea. but there’s a creaminess to the finish, a thick silky mouthfeel, that accumulates as you drink the cup as it cools down. it’s still not quite what i was hoping for, but it’s not bad either. fairly faint and nondescript.

there was also the slightest twinge of bitterness initially, but i blame my steeping approach and haven’t made that mistake since with CT’s stuff (it needs to be slightly less than boiling and definitely not a full 3 minutes).

next time i’ll try adding a bit of raw sugar and see if it helps.

I am sad this is gone! I finished it up a few days ago! _ This is a great blend.