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Drinking this tea with milk seems to bring out the flavours a little bit and gives it a sweeter taste and a smoother texture in the mouth. Still not enough orange though, IMO. le sigh

This tea keeps reminding me of something and after two cups of it tonight I think I know what it is. It has that bran-like flavour that you get from brown rice or maybe whole wheat bread, combined with a bit of “green”-ness and a touch of charred/roasted corn.

The wet leaves in the bottom of the strainer actually look like little bits of charred wood instead of resembling anything remotely leaf-like. It resteeps very well though, the second cup being almost identical in taste and strength to the first.

This cuppa is a little stronger than normal because what I had in the sample bag amounted to about a teaspoon and a third – so not enough to get two uses out of it. I ended up just shrugging and dumping the whole thing in my mug.

This time I added some skim milk to the tea as an experiment, as many teas have been improved by adding milk or milk substitutes to them. In this case the results were a bit disapointing. The milk make the tea taste very…ordinary. I’m not picking up those berry-like notes anymore and the honeyed/burnt-sugar flavour is somewhat dulled. It’s not bad – it’s still a smooth, nice-tasting Ceylon – but it’s lost much of its uniqueness.

The black tea in this blend definitely seems to dominate the flavour, unfortunately it has a sour-bitter sort of aftertaste and I don’t know if it’s the Ceylon, the added lemon, or the jasmine green. Which ever it is I can’t seem to get rid of it by changing the steeping time, so next time I drink this tea I’ll try it with milk and see if that changes anything.

I accidently forgot my mug on the counter so by the time I remember it had gone stone cold. Not daunted, I took a sip and found that it actually isn’t that bad in that state – cool, green (if that can be used as a decription of taste), and refreshing are words I’d use to describe it.

I’m still picking up the faintest trace of cinnamon in the aftertaste, however. I’m curious now to see if Adagio actually uses cinnamon oil or something similar in this blend. Maybe I’ll email and see.

My breakfast tea – I got to sleep in today so I don’t need anything powerful to kick-start my body and brain.

So I added milk to this tea and wow, does it ever bring out the flavour! Like I said before it’s not a powerful vanilla, but it’s very smooth almost to the point of being creamy and it actually has almost a caramel-like note to it.

I think this is the first decaffinated tea I’ve had that actually goes well with milk; most of the others being too thin and weak for it. This is one I really want to keep around.

I’m bumping up the rating a few notches.

I thought I was over my nasty stomach flu but my tummy has started feeling a bit queezy again. 0_o

Drinking this tea seems to help – it must be the ginger in it.

This tea smelled wonderful like fresh, fragrant peaches when I opened the little package. There was only one serving in one of those pyramid-shaped sachets – a big thank you to TeaEqualsBliss for sending it to me, BTW. :D

The taste is distinctly that of a dark oolong – bakey with a slightly woodsey note to it. Unfortunately I found that it tasted more than a little on the harsh side in the way you’d expect a lower-quality oolong to taste. The peach flavouring was nice – it wasn’t too artificial and meshed pretty well with the oolong like it belonged there, and I think made it less unpleasent.

Most of the harshness seemed to be gone when I resteeped it (@ 4 min) and enough of the peach flavour still lingered to make it interesting. So this tea is definitely good for more than one go.

All in all this strikes me as a pretty average tea – if the oolong base were better I probably would have rated it higher.