Sipdown! (75/393) – Yes, it’s gone up again. Don’t judge me, I needed a couple more caffeine-free options. I swear, I’m tempted to just buy 7 more teas and make it an even 400 to sip down in total… Tea addict logic.
January’s Butiki drink-a-thon went well, so I’m trying to stick with manageable monthly resolutions which contribute to my overall tea resolutions for the year. February’s is to get my cupboard to under 400 teas before the end of the month, which – with my two new teas included – will mean sipping down a minimum of 20 teas in the next month. In theory, it should be more doable than the January Butikifest, so I’m feeling optimistic. I’m sure a lot of you got sick of me posting so many Butiki-related tasting notes last month, so apologies for that! This one should be less noticeable, since I’ll be going back to posting many varied tasting notes, only hopefully with a lot of sipdowns amongst them.
Anyway, on to the tea! This is the first of many planned sipdowns this month, and one which sort of snuck up on me. I’d only drank it once since I bought it, and had recently moved it into my focus box where apparently I gravitated towards it fairly often, since it was only there a week or so before being sipped down. Granted it was a 0.5oz sample size, but there was almost the whole thing left and I have around 20-30 teas in my focus box to choose from so it still went down surprisingly quickly. It was nice! All of the flavours are there – pumpkin, apple, and banana bread – and all are things I love, so it’s not such a big surprise that I liked this tea a lot. The pumpkin in this blend reminds me a lot of Adagio’s; more reminiscent of actual pumpkin than pumpkin spice (big bonus points from me) and with a sweet, baked sort of quality to it rather than raw or savoury pumpkin. The apple is not really as noticeable as the other flavours until sugar is added. Then it really pops, turning more into a baked apple tart sort of flavour. I was wary of the word ‘banana’ in the name of the tea since bananas and I are mortal enemies (unless the bananas are fairly under-ripe, in which case we get along pretty well), but luckily the word ‘bread’ which follows makes all the difference. Whilst I’m not a fan of actual bananas, nor banana flavoured things, I bizarrely love banana bread. This tea definitely tastes more like banana bread than bananas, which makes me very happy. In fact, it really does taste like someone just cooked a banana bread with pumpkin and apple added to it. Not that I’ve had that before, but how I imagine it would taste. I can’t fault it! Astringency is very mild, and even though I added milk I don’t feel like it was necessary, and have drank it black in the past which I think I enjoyed more. This may be one of my favourite of Frank’s 52teas blends. I wonder if Anne has considered a reblend…
