B&T Tea Honey

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This continues to be gross, and this last cup of it even had a super unpleasant metallic/coppery taste. I couldn’t finish it.

Good riddance.

So, I don’t know which genius decided that adding licorice to this instant tea/honey would be a good idea, but they deserve a slap. This could have been a really nice bergamot/Earl Grey infused honey but the licorice is so strong and unpleasant that it completely ruins the whole thing…

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Well, kind of? I had about a teaspoon or two worth of this left so I scraped it into a mug to steep up as a hot “instant tea” to polish it off. While the kettle was heating, I stepped out of the room to grab something to shove into my suitcase. When I came back my mom had rinsed out the mug, which I had left next to the kettle, and popped it into the dishwasher…

So, there goes the last of that honey.

Just something fast to make so I’d have something to sip on while watching some Netflix…

I think this tasted marginally better than what I remember it tasting like when I first had it; it was still a little swampy/grassy in a strange way and had this sort of ‘snap pea’ vegetal quality that was certainly strange paired with all that honey and the hints of fruit in the blend, but it wasn’t terrible either. Mostly I was able to just mindlessly sip without focusing on the weird flavour, so that was good.

I’ve almost made my way through these tea honeys/instant teas now.

This is one I expected to like a lot, but it wasn’t good at all. It’s just very rich and sweet with such a distinct honey taste – and that would be all well and good but the matcha that accompanies it is sort of funky and has a weird, ‘off’ green tea/grassy quality that has a harsh juxtaposition with the honey notes. Nothing about it says smooth, fluid taste to me. It’s made even worse by the fact I actually already own a different company’s version of a matcha infused honey as well – and that one is MUCH better.

Boo.

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I feel like I’ve had to get very creative in the different ways I’ve consumed this tea/honey. It’s not good on its own or prepared in straight, hot water. However it CAN add something nice to other dishes, and tonight I’ve finishing it off as part of a “sauce” that I made to pour over vanilla ice cream.

Easy enough to make; I took a LARGE handful of blackberries and a pinch of brown sugar and popped those into a microwave safe bowl along with the last of this honey. Microwaved that for a solid three or four minutes until the fruit had really broken down and cooked in its own juices and the sugar/honey to create a sweet, hot fruit sauce of tender, “melt in your mouth” blackberries. That was poured over a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and of course it did melt the ice cream a fair bit. So I have this bowl of beautiful almost “blackberries and cream” ice cream that tasted super sweet, but heavenly. The rooibos is DEFINITELY not the star ingredient, but it’s not lost either. I feel because it is such a woody taste that leans more towards an earthy profile that it tempers the sweetness of my blackberry sauce a little bit; stops it from being cloying despite its obvious sweetness.

Happy to be done with this tea/honey, though.

Finally found a way that I enjoy this tea/honey – and not surprisingly it’s as a honey and not as an instant tea! Should have just tried that from the start, to be honest…

I spread it on my morning bagel today, and then lightly dusted it with some cinnamon as well. The sweet, woody taste of the rooibos paired with the honey and cinnamon actually makes for a really nice bagel with sweet, savory, and warming spice notes. Also, just a hint of fruit because of the small amount of fruit mixed into this company’s “tea honey” blends. Definitely, definitely how I’m going to finish this one off since it was a lousy flavour as an instant tea…

Wanted something fast and no fuss for my last tea before bed yesterday, and this jumped out to me from the shelf it sits on in the kitchen. Like, literally – I was digging around the shelf for things to drink and I knocked it off.

It was disappointing; it tasted very strongly of wood and honey with some very light berry undertones from the finely cut up berries also in this blend. Each flavour individually would have been fine but they just weren’t cooperating with each other and it tasted pretty nasty. Reminded me exactly why I wasn’t enamored with this one the first time I had it…

If anyone was ever curious about whether rooibos infused honey was a good thing/a thing that would work well as an ‘instant tea’ mix…

The short and sweet answer is that it isn’t.

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I said I was gonna finish off these “tea honeys” and I meant it! This was consumed late last night as an alternative to a “bedtime tea”. It was actually pretty good; sweet and smooth with a reasonable amount of spice – dominant one being cinnamon. This might be the only tea honey that I could realistically see myself buying again as I did like it on its own, but I can also see it having the most alternative uses in things like cooking or baking.

Don’t know if it was me or the tea/honey, but this was the very first thing that I drank this morning and I just found that it left me feeling quite nauseated. I wanted to enjoy it, but I just went back and forth between finding it soothing and just feeling gross and sick, and gagging. I did finish it, not sure if I that smart or not. I felt completely fine in about an hour though. Maybe I just shouldn’t have been drinking it on an empty stomach fresh after waking up?

Next up in this line of ‘instant tea’/tea infused honey is… Chai In The Sky!

I’m not big into chai, but maybe I can get on board with this one if it’s sweet and not super ginger heavy. My overall impression from trying these tea honey things has been that, following their instructions, they’re quite weak – so for this one I used the recommended amount of honey, but less water. I think it actually helped because this one had the strongest flavour yet of the three I’ve now tried.

It was pretty good; definitely had strong notes of cinnamon, clove, and ginger but I didn’t think any of the three were more intense than the others and it was certainly sweetened up a fair bit by the honey. So, a good and solid mix of honey taste and general Chai spice notes. It’s weird though ‘cause I swear it had like a black tea note to it also, but there’s not actually any real tea in this one at all – only ground up Chai spice mix. On the flip side, there actually is a mix of berries in this one also, but I didn’t taste those. So, who even fucking knows!?

It’s the best of the three so far, though – and only three more to try, now.

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Finished this off with my breakfast today; I made my own fresh squeezed orange juice with about five valencia oranges – and then added in the last little bit of this honey to it to finish it off, because hibiscus sweetened orange juice actually sounds wonderful.

It looks… Pretty gross, actually? I don’t really mind pulp in my OJ at all so I’ve not strained the pulp out (only picked out a few seeds) and the hibiscus colour with the orange has created this weird, muddy maroon-ish brown coloured juice. There’s a SLIGHT gradient to it that almost reminds me of a Shirley Temple, but it’s not enough to make it look like a pretty cup…

The taste though – OH MY GOD. First off, I get these Valencia Oranges through my weekly Lufa Farms box; and for those not familiar that’s a food delivery box with a focus on local grown produce as well as organic/fair trade foods, gluten free options, and vegetarian/vegan foods. It’s awesome; and these oranges are probably the most amazing oranges that I’ve ever had in my life. So, that already set me up for great fresh squeezed OJ success! But the hibiscus honey adds some extra tangyness, which is actually really good since this was a SWEET orange juice!

But my God, it’s so fresh and juicy. Why haven’t I made my own orange juice sooner!?

Second of these tea infused honeys/‘instant teas’.

This one had a weird texture in the jar; almost gelatinous!? It also radiates tartness, even just in aroma. I decided that I didn’t want to drink a hot hibiscus drink, so I whisked a spoonful of it in a tiny bit of hot water just to dissolve it then I mixed it with chilled water and iced, and a fresh squeeze of lime.

This was better than the Peppermint, comparatively – it has a lot more flavour overall and is tasting more distinctly of hibiscus. It’s quite sour overall though – the added lime probably doesn’t do much of anything to help that, either. I found that after my first half of the iced tea cup it was a little overwhelmingly tart. There’s not enough here to break up the flavour, and I don’t really taste the honey at all either.

So, it’s marginally better.

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Finished off as a cold glass of, I guess, “honey water”. It was… weird. I’m going to try and finish off all these tea honeys before ‘moving day’ – they come in small glass jars, so if I don’t have to worry about packing those then that’ll be a big win for me.

Needed something quick and lazy for late at night, so I went with a hot mug of coconut milk with a lot of this mixed into it. I still don’t know if this technically counts as tea or not, but I did really enjoy having it late at night. It was the best of soothing peppermint tea and hot milk at night; so, you know, basically it had me passed out pretty darn quickly.

Also, biggest complaint with this last time was that it didn’t really have much flavour. This time around it was great and very flavourful; but of course I was SUPER heavy handed with the amount of ‘tea’ I used. So, what I’m learning here is that following the directions is not smart/wont produce a good cup.

So, I don’t know that this is technically ‘tea’ – but I went to a local craft/art show in town and I found this company that has an entire line up of tea infused honey. Of course, given my obsession with flavoured honeys, I had to buy all of them. There was no choice, really.

So normally I would kind of just think of this line up as flavoured honey which I would then use as an addition to my tea – but the company actually markets these as ‘instant tea’ which is why I’m kind of on the fence about whether or not I should class them as ‘tea’ here on Steepster!? I mean, I guess they’re just as much ‘tea’ as those instant tea crystal mixes, so… Sure!?

This one smells like peppermint, for sure. It’s actually really, really interesting smelling and it kind of makes me excited because if the taste is as minty, smooth and sweet tasting as the smell, with those soft berry undertones, I think this could be really nice!

I followed their instructions and mixes a heaping teaspoon into a cup of water. Honestly, it wasn’t that exciting. My biggest problem is that using their measurements it came out very weak tasting; sure there were hints of mint and definitely a honey water kind of taste but it lacked strength and concentration in a way that would have made this actually feel like an ‘instant tea’. In fact, I’m pretty sure that this one would be at its best just as a spread – not even as a flavouring for regular tea. It wuld just have a richer, better flavour that way, I think.