Baresso

First of all, Baresso = more or less danish equivalent of Starbucks.

I’m not really sure what came over me when I ordered this. I actually went in with something else in mind, and then decided I’d rather want something a little more.. refreshing maybe? Generally though, the sign just sort of caught my eye.

Also, I figured it would be faster and I wanted to catch my train.

I’m not actually a very big fan of iced tea. I prefer tea to be warm.

Erm, right. Let’s start with the tea involved here. Outhu Pekoe, which I had seen on their signs for a long time now and wondered if it was some sort of weird way of saying orange pekoe and maybe they thought it sounded more clever or something. As I haven’t previously been particularly interested in their tea selection, I haven’t bothered to check it out before. Turns out Outhu is actually an estate in the Nilgiri region of India. Interesting.

Now, the actual drink I got. They have three different variations of this, all of them based on the Outhu Pekoe and two of them just with added flavour, the third being just plain. Anyway, the added flavour is done with some sort of syrup-y concoction and a slice of lemon.

I probably should have stirred the cup because the syrup-y stuff sank to the bottom and the first third of the cup was more or less just…. lime syrup. Which wasn’t very nice. It completely overpowered everything else and felt like drinking undiluted cordial or something like that.

After that was out of the way the actual tea bit was a pretty tame experience. It didn’t actually have much in the way of flavour. It possibly would in a warm state, but definitely didn’t on ice.

But yeah, it was refreshing. Primarily because it was like drinking ice water with a bit of lemon in it, which is generally a nice alternative to sugar-y drinks.

Points not given based on whether or not it tasted good or bad, but rather based on whether or not I felt like it had anything at all to do with tea. Which I didn’t.

HAH! It really IS an almond pandemic. :D Everybody’s drinking almond tea.

Backlogged ever so slightly. Got another one of these to go this afternoon when going home from work. I know I’m supposed to be in stingy-mode and I am really being careful about saving money, but I was allowed this partly to celebrate that I have all of next week off (yay holiday!) and because I had collected nine stamps so it was free anyway. :)

I made sure this time to get it without anything sprinkled, sprayed, dumped or whatever on top in the hopes that it wouldn’t be drowning in cinnamon. Turns out the extremely cinnamon-y flavour the last time wasn’t really because of all the cinnamon they put on top. It just IS very cinnamon-y. I could still pick up vanilla and sugar too, and I’m still uncertain about anise, cloves and cardamom. Now that I’m home I’ve been in the kitchen sniffing and tasting a few of my spices. Now I’m also thinking allspice, but again, not sure. The only thing I could tell for certain was that there was something sweet in it that wasn’t cinnamon-sweet, vanilla-sweet or sugar-sweet. I just can’t figure out what sort of sweetness it might have been.

Also, I briefly had an association to do with oranges. Like… I really thought I ought to be able to find orange, but couldn’t. Odd.

Still not really sold on this here chai-concept. But you can’t say I’m not giving it a chance.

This one comes with a bit of a story. Prepare yourself for a lengthy post. Fingers on scroll-buttons.

I was a scout when I was a child. At one point when I was around 9-11 or so, we had these two pretty alternative individuals as leaders. Two younger men, who seemed to be brought up on the belief that sweets=evil and if it came from the Far East it was Good by definition. This is why, whenever we had any sort of celebration of sorts, like before holiday breaks or the last time before christmas or what have you, we had chai.

I had never heard about it before, and I didn’t have the slightest clue that it was something to do with tea. And back then I wouldn’t have cared either. All I remember about it was this strangely coloured spicy fluid that was just about drinkable, all the while wondering what the heck was suddenly so wrong with hot cocoa! So I was biased against chai at a fairly early age.

Many many years later I started getting interested in tea and one day I purchased a chai (Tengla chai, from Chaplon) to see if it was really so horrible as I had remembered it and also out of curiosity about the fact that there are as many recipies for chai as there are people in the world, just about. Oh, I remember it well. There were instructions for how to make it with milk and what not. I didn’t like it one bit. Couldn’t get it down. There was something or other in it that made it impossible for me to swallow without making a face and got rid of the rest of it in the first and the best swap that came along. Having shown people the list of ingredients it had in it, I have been told that the thing I didn’t like was likely ginger.

Fast forward to this past saturday. There’s a really great ice cream shop near where I live. They make a load of different flavours, some fairly unusual (it’s the only place, for example, that I’ve ever seen a plum sorbet. Which by the way is delicious) and you never quite now what they have to choose from on any given day. This past saturday they had one called chai latte. I don’t much care for chai, but I like tea a lot, so I’m enough of a dork that I had to try that one. There was just NO WAY I’d be able to walk away from it ever.

Turns out chai turned to ice cream was rather nice. Surprisingly nice. Nice enough that I could totally buy it again if I saw it there another time. It made me think that possibly it was time to give chai another chance.

So today, when going home from work, I went into Baresso and got a small chai-cino. I’ve seen people log chai latte or some such from Starbucks and I assume this is pretty much the same deal. They make it like a cafe latte (or in this case, like a cappucino) only instead of the espresso shot, they use this chai mix. I just got a small one, in case of extreme dislike. I’ve tried looking it up on their website and it would appear that the contents of said chai mix is a closely guarded secret. Can’t say I’m really surprised there.

They asked me, “do you want cinnamon on top?”
I dithered a bit on this and finally answered, “yes please, but not too much.”
This, apparently, was not a problem. Except, I saw his colleague make it and her definition of ‘not too much cinnamon’ was about three times my definition of same. I would have stopped her, but I hadn’t realised yet at the time that it was my order.

It was very very very VERY sweet. Sweet and fat. I’m glad I only got the small one, because I don’t think I’d be able to finish the large one. And I’m honestly not usually all that fat-frightened. You’d be amazed at the amount of cake with whipped cream I’m capable of consuming with utmost pleasure.

The contents of the chai mix being a state secret, I tried to decipher the flavour myself. There was cinnamon, definitely. The lot she had shaken on top was pretty overwhelming, but I’m certain there was cinnamon in the chai mix itself too. Also vanilla. And definitely sugar. These were most obvious flavours. I also picked up a note of something that I suspect might have been anise and something that was possibly cloves. Rather surprisingly I couldn’t find anything in the flavour that reminded me all that much of cardamom, but I expect it was probably hiding underneath all that cinnamon.

I liked it. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it was drinkable. Definitely more so than my previous encounters, and I’m not completely turned off the idea of experimenting a bit the concept, depending on the list of ingredients in any given chai. The chai-cino from Baresso is also available on ice, blended with ice cubes. Considering how sweet and fat the taste was, I think that might actually be the way it would work the best.