1908 Tasting Notes
This tea has been on my Shopping List for a long time and luckily TeaEqualsBliss sent me a couple sachets in our most recent tea trade.
It has a very nice smell – nicely tea-like with a hint of flowery-pungent lavender. It wasn’t so pungent as to be overpowering, nor was it that sweetly-fake smell you sometimes get in lavender-scented products – it was nicely balanced in between these two extremes.
The base is decent enough for a bagged tea – not tasting too harsh nor too dusty and tasteless. The bergamot was reasonaby mild-tasting and it made an interesting mix with the flavour of the lavender. They’re both plants that have a pungency to them so they make a good flavour pairing in my opinion.
The resteep (@ 5:30) unfortunately was pretty nasty – it tasted like watery tea crossed with that taste you get from undercooked pasta – ew! It went down the sink.
Preparation
I’m noticing an oddly dry sort of characteristic to this tea’s flavour – it’s not dry as in astringent, more like a sort of dusty dry. I made that sound horrible and gross, didn’t I? It wasn’t meant that way; it doesn’t spoil the tea for me, it’s more of an “oh, that’s interesting” sort of thing.
It give a very flavourful resteep (@ 5:15) which I can still taste the cherry in. A lot of flavoured teas will lose their flavour after their first steeping I’ve noticed, but not this one.
This would be an interesting tea to try sweetened but unfortunately I’m all out of the little sample I got from TeaEqualsBliss.
Preparation
I switched up the steeping parameters a little bit, but I don’t much like the results. It seems to make for a weaker, more watery-tasting oolong with a bit of a sweet aftertaste. The resteep is a bit more well-rounded but I think this oolong needs a slightly hotter steeping temperature to coax it into properly releasing its flavour.
Preparation
Milk and wildflower honey seem to really bring out the cream in this tea in particular, and they give the whole thing rather dessert-like taste that makes me think a little bit of gourmet hot chocolate.
Preparation
The end of another tea sample. This tea was nice enough and I liked it for the novelty but I don’t think it’s really for me. The roasted flavour is perhaps a bit too strong and the tea too rough, so I probably wouldn’t go out and buy this tea.
Preparation
The more I drink this tea the more I’m picking up the similarity to a Darjeeling. I find it interesting that two teas grown in different regions under different climate conditions could be so similar.
Preparation
Steepsterites, I think I have been struck with a fit of madness. The taste of this sencha is eerily reminiscent of orange creamcicles – almost anyway, it’s not quite creamy enough. I keep being tempted to commit the ultimate heresy of adding milk to this green(!) tea to see if I could get that creamy-orange flavour to come out to play.
…Yeah, I know, it would likely just make the tea taste aweful.
Preparation
Can’t remember if you do rooibos or not, but if you do, Franklin Tea Company had an orange rooibos that was a great creamsicle clone, minus the dairy.
Eh… maybe not… some people add milk to green chais. You might want to bump up the leaf if you try it to say 4.5tsp per 6oz of water at about 160 degrees or a min and a half.
