American Tea Room

mmmm back log from yesterday. still so very delicious

I’ve been hoarding my sample from tastybrew but now that my order has arrived with my tea mule, i can finally start drinking this one again! I still love this quite a bit (possibly even more than cinnamon swirl…) so that makes me happy since i picked up 2oz of it heh

SIPDOWN! thank you again tastybrew for this one. I’m sad to see this one go but it’s on my list to order again for that occasion when i want a delicious tasty bread delicious tea. It reminds me of one of the S7V teas that i’ve had…i think? There’s something familiar about it in any case. :)

I’ll try to edit and update this more later but i just wanted to track that i DID try this today. Thanks to tastybrew for sending some my way. I got home and i’m apparently sick as i’ve spent the last 4 hours in bed and don’t want to drink any tea. :( but this is good. delicious and i’m glad i have more + the resteeps once i get better. ugh.

Edit: Resteeped this today and it was still delicious. Soooo tempted to pick up a full 2oz of this with the sale.

Starting the day with chocolate tea? Yes, just yes.
This was part of my sample order from American Tea Room, and the first (!!) rooibos I ever drank.

The dry smell was terrific! A strong chocolate smell, with a bit of an earthy hint. Sweet.
Steeped for 5 minutes.
The smell after I finished brewing was even better than the dry smell. Rich but not sweet.
You can definitely taste the chocolate in this, and the rooibos isn’t overpowering, but just sort of adds to the chocolateness.

Good for starters of rooibos (like me, lol)
Likey likey.

when cold steeped with ATR Yunnan Gold, 5/5 (see my bio for more info on my new pared down scale) and probably the best cold tea I’ve ever had

Cold steeped this with a touch of ATR’s Yunnan Gold (I know, how extravagant…I just didn’t care for it hot though, and it was a sample size so I didn’t have much left) for 4 days (! not on purpose, just forgot about it in the back of the fridge…). It is incredible. Super refreshing and light, crisp feeling, yet smooth, rounded, with deep complex floral (true-floral, not perfume-floral) flavor I feel like hot water destroyed (or maybe intensified to the point it became perfume-floral…looking back on my previous note I apparently thought it was so floral as to signal “inedible” to my brain). Using time instead of heat seems to allow the floral element to develop complexity and nuance without becoming sledgehammer-heavy and thus one-note. Maybe that Upton guy who swore by cold steeping black teas for 4 days was onto something, especially with good Chinese tea. A gorgeous bright gold hue, beautiful in my new Duralex Picardie tumblers. So good I might order both again—teas I wasn’t much excited about hot—just for icing on days I really deserve something awesome, ha.

G’ah, the more I drink this the more my certainty grows that this is the best iced tea I’ve ever had, and one of the best teas period. Nuts how much steeping method can change one’s perception!

I wanted to like this more, and it’s definitely not bad (I’ve yet to have anything from ATR that doesn’t feel, smell, and taste high quality and smartly blended/crafted), but it’s too perfume-y in a way that signals “don’t consume this” for me.

Smells wonderful dry, and I like that the citrus is of the rich, dessert-y type, not the bracing astringent fruit sort—more like one of those chocolate oranges you smash open than morning marmalade. Like others, I only smell sweet orange when it’s dry, no smoke, and when brewed the smoke emerges and the orange recedes a bit (still definitely there though!). It is not as sweet as you might imagine, which I also appreciate; if I want it sweeter at times I can do that myself.

This tea smells AMAZING dry, like they didn’t skimp on the saffron at all (which is pretty awesome considering how very expensive decent saffron is!). Whoo boy. Brewed it mellows a lot and tastes almost vegetal more than sweetly spiced, which is tasty in its own right but somehow a little disappointing after that whammy of a first impression dry. Really good, don’t get me wrong, but not as dessert-y as I was expecting. It’s funny, it was sort of the opposite phases of expectations—>dry aroma—>brewed experience from my encounter with ATR’s Toasted Fig. Now that my expectations will be more aligned with final results, I’m sure I’ll enjoy both thoroughly.

Smells like brandy (or actually, a bit like vanilla-y bourbon, with some oak char going on) and toasted hazelnuts to me. Very nutty and “roasty” upon first dry sniff through the entire cup. Disappointed I couldn’t detect any fig at first, but it came up gently upon my second cup (sitting on a warmer) as something jammy but not astringent like other (say, berry or citrus) fruits, more that swollen sticky Christmas pudding sort of thing, dates and whatnot. It takes patience but it’s very nice indeed when it does finally show up, goes lovely with the pervasive roasted nut aroma.

This tea actually tastes much better without any milk or sugar.

For this kind of caffeinated tea, you know the ones, those heavy dessert-y rich ones, it’s better than most I’ve tried so far. I like it more than similar sweet nutty rich offerings from David’s for example. Not one of my all-time favorites or a pantry essential, but I’d happily order and drink it again.

Update: for some reason this gets better after a cup or two (and it’s not a re-steep, just from a large pot kept warm on an electric burner). It’s grown on me. It’s not as amazing smelling as Tangier dry out of the bag, but it tastes better in the cup over time.

Nutty, toasty, brothy and just slightly sweet. It’s nice to be reminded just how good genmaicha can be from time to time.

I’m a huge fan of genmaicha. It was the first tea that brought my fiance over to the dark side, and this just adds one more level to that awesome. It’s so toasty and just a little frothy. I still keep regular genmaicha on hand, but I usually turn to this first. The matcha adds a fantastic layer of flavor depth and makes it an actually green green tea.

Sipdown!

I think I’d like to reorder. But I’m going to hold off reordering this until at least summer, when it’s nice and warm out. It’s good and I always enjoy it when I have it, but I almost need to be in a particular mood to enjoy it.

While I know I don’t necessarily care for this cold steeped (it gets a little overwhelmingly perfumed), I steeped with my usual parameters and let this chill today.

It’s actually incredibly good and a completely different experience to drinking this hot. Still very floral, but balanced and tempered with the white peony, which is almost juicy tasting. It’s almost like there’s pear or light apple in here, that just explodes with juicy freshness in my mouth.

In other news, it’s supposed to get above freezing next week for the first time since Christmas, and that is ridiculously exciting. If Fiance breaks out shorts though, I might disown him.

I never thought 60 degrees and sun would feel so good!

So today’s cold steeping experiment was…weird?

This tea actually crosses the line into too flowery this way! I didn’t think it could be done. It lost the delicate balance between florals and white tea and WHAM right in the perfume. A little sugar coaxed back out the white tea and made the roses seem almost…juicy and fruity. A little weird on the palette, but definitely grew on me! So, sure, I’d do it again, but definitely have some sugar handy!

One of the few non-fruity rose teas I’ve had. It’s like drinking a cup of immersive rose therapy with dusky, vegetal accents from the bai mu dan. I was pleasantly surprised the white tea held its own here! It drinks like a special occasion tea to me though because the floral taste isn’t something I see myself wanting every day (but definitely paired with a box of chocolates!)

Thanks TastyBrew for sending some of this my way!

I have wanted to try a black coconut tea since falling head over heels for Davidstea’s Coconut Oolong, but I’m not sure why.

I brewed this this morning and as soon as I smelled the dry leaves I was a bit put off, because it was doing the same rancid coconut thing that my sample of 52Teas Coconut Cream Pie did. I gave it a shot though, and if I looked past that it did taste very coconutty, but also kind of bitter and soapy too.

I decided not to do a resteep, and made some Coconut Oolong instead MUCH better!!! Going to stop looking now because I’ve already got my winner. I just hope that my Coconut Oolong doesn’t go all putrid on me one day, because I plan to seriously stock up before it is gone for good. I wanted to compare the two and the oolong isn’t bitter or rancid or soapy at all, just smooth and sweet and creamy and amazing. I’m drooling. The Coconut Oolong hijacked my tea note!

Glad to have tried the So Coconut and glad I can stop the search to focus in my next tea goal…. The perfect Caramel (non rooibos) tea!!

Sipdown! Sort of, because I’m giving the rest to my friend. I did order some though and my American relatives are bringing it to Canada for me in July :)

This was my breakfast tea today….yum, but tomorrow I will go with something stronger and less flavoured :)

Drinking up an old sample of this sent to me many moons ago from Tastybrew – belated thanks! – (all of my swap samples are old at this point, haha) because I’m trying to decide if I want to order some from American Tea Room to get it shipped for cheap to my American relatives who are coming to visit this summer.

I’m thinking I will, because it’s a really yummy tea. That’s my official tea reviewer opinion – this tea is “yummy”.

Really does taste like a baked cinnamon raisin treat, though the cinnamon isn’t overwhelming which is great because I don’t particularly care for spicy teas.

I’ve got a bit more to drink before I make my final decision, but I can’t see me not owning a stash of this by mid summer :)

Previous rating of 85 from once upon a time still stands!

Holy crap, yum!! Big thanks to TastyBrew for a sample of this!

Can’t say much now but basically this is what I was hoping Della Terra’s Oatmeal Raisin Cookie would taste like, but didn’t!

I will have to try that one again. Otherwise maybe an order from this company is in my future, depending on how kind their shipping rates are to Canadians!!

Weekend Sample Sipdown, #1! It’s time for me to start using up my samples that I have gotten in so many lovely swaps. I’ve decided that weekends are for samples only.

So, today I drank a pot of this. I can’t remember who sent this to me…my apologies to the generous giver! I didn’t get any scent from the dry leaf, and that worried me. Once brewed and sweetened, I could smell raisins. When I tasted it, I got the raisin, dough, spice flavors. At first when hot, it was delicious. As it cooled, the black tea flavor seemed to thin out a little bit, but it was still good. This is definitely a tea I would drink again. Thank you, mystery sender!