Cup of Sea

The TTB has arrived! So big, so many teas… no chance to try them all!
Tea #23

Living in landlocked country means that I have very limited experience to seafood and though it is getting slowly better in bigger cities, living in small town means it’s also hard to get any. I remember having some seaweed flavoured nuts, peanuts possibly and honestly I didn’t liked it at all.

So, when I saw this in the TTB, I have been very hesitant if I should try this. But considering that that most of the black teas there are sweet flavored, decided to go this way. Tea with seaweed. Seaweed taste scale on the bag shows low so possibly a good start.

I used two teaspoons for my 300 ml cup as always and steeped for 4-5 minutes as recommended by the vendor. On a first, hot sip, it was plain black tea with nice robust taste and I liked it. As it was cooling down, the seaweed was more prominent, with its salty taste, but nevertheless, it was just right level of its flavor. Certainly not overpowering the base, but ceratinly noticeable. Actually I liked this twist and right after I checked if there are other blends available to try more.

In fact, I haven’t found any international shipping info and their sampler is sold out, so maybe it’s not a time to order this tea now. Good for my wallet and cupboard.

This was a treat from Michelle, and a fun one at that! Breakfast tea with oarweed, which, not being a marine life expert, is a completely new revelation to me.

Didn’t read any reviews before steeping, so based on the description alone and the hefty chunks of seaweed, I expected something somewhat fishy and very salty. Not so much. There is a hint of salinity, but otherwise it’s a good, thickish English breakfast tea with a little bit of sweetness and cereal at the end of each “ship.”
(First, that was a typo. Then I decided to leave it in, matey.)

Interesting tea concept…

It’s basically just black tea and seaweed. That’s this company’s whole “thing” I believe – seaweed teas. What fascinates me is that they use all different types of seaweed, and when you look at their website the teas sort of rank the “level” of seaweed taste present in the cup. This one is ‘low taste’ or something like that…

I’ve had seaweed in tea before – notably in Kusmi’s Algothe blend which I actually really love. You usually can’t actually taste that in the blend at all though; it’s more focused on the mint. With the only other ingredient in this blend being black tea, I found the flavour a lot more detectable. However, while it was present it wasn’t unpleasant. Kind of just a little bit of an extra savory/salty note in the cup? I didn’t realize just how salty until I drank a sip of something else and returned to my mug and then was hit with more of that “oomph” from the salt – but I do still think it’s a totally reasonable and drinkable cup.

Aside from that slight saltiness, the tea has a bit of a honey/malty note. I think it’s the honey sweetness that I was picking up on which really helped balance out the seaweed. It makes up like 20% of the blend, so that’s not an insignificant amount – all things considered this is well balanced.

My only other note is really that this is best consumed hot – once it had cooled down, around the last quarter of the mug, the taste kind of turned a bit funky and I struggled to finish the rest of it; just a bit brine-y…