Dessert by Deb

Sipdown (261)

I want to like it but I hate it. The icing is just cloying and then apple and maple and cinnamon and sweet on sweet on sweet. Deb makes some good dessert blends but this is not one of them.

I asked both Sil and Roswell Strange if I should make this or Coconut Maple Custard as an iced latte and both said Maple Coconut Custard. So this got made as a plain tea. I want to like this but something in the smell is throwing me a bit. Plus, this has a strong sweet note but it falls flat. I get a whole lot of maple and then apple and cinnamon bun icing with a dash of cinnamon. It has all the components but I just need the flavor to be more rounded out. It’s sweet on sweet on sweet and while I want to like it, I don’t.

Cold Brew Sipdown (289)

A lot of the time when I don’t love a tea or I am not overly excited about drinking it, I toss it into my swap box. I find I have a lot of tea and focusing on things I don’t care about just to finish them, while my good teas lose flavor with age and are left untouched makes me sad. That is why I just pass them along and hope they go to a home where they will be more appreciated.

However, sometimes some teas just end up hanging out anyways and in those cases, those sipdowns are the best feeling ones. That is the case with this tea. It never did much for me but I held onto it for whatever reason. Today I get to say good bye. This cup, like the rest, is sort of a mediocre sweet orange flavor. It is not all lemongrass which is nice and if I squint, I maybe get vanilla but mostly this is like the outer layer of a creamsicle…without the best part in the center.

Yesterday I decided to take a break from school and drink tea and relax. Recently I have also been alright about setting up cold brews so last night, after I finished cold brewing Orangesicle, I guess I had creamsicle on the brain. So I grabbed this tea out since it is best cold brewed, though has never been a favorite. I am nearing the end of the package and thought it would be good to try and finish it off sooner rather than later while I am in the cold brewing mood.

Today it mostly tastes like lemongrass with some orange. Not much vanilla or coconut. Just lemongrass. Sort of bland and boring and making me think sooner should be sooner – I have one serving left after this so I may just make it to have tonight/tomorrow as a cold brew.

It’s almost 1 am. I am listening to a lecture, enjoying a cheese plate and drinking this cold brew from earlier. The first cheese was quite nutty and seemed to latch on to the honey/wood notes of the rooibos base. The second cheese was a creamier cranberry goat gouda so it pulled out the orange notes, which were creamy and sweet instead of bright and sharp. The third cheese was also nutty like the first but much more creamy and it also clung to the orange. The fourth cheese was also creamy – this time its like a super high end baby bel or string cheese and again, it pulled orange. The fifth cheese is a spicy cheddar (that is actually spicy) and it pulls out the honey notes of the base. I have now run out of tea but have more cheeses so I guess I should try this experiment tomorrow with more tea. It was fun to see how different flavors brought out different components of the tea. With that said, there was nothing I would call mousse in this tea.

I pulled this out and had no idea I made this before…which isn’t a good sign. Then I tried it and thought it was mostly rooibos with some orange so I was surprised not only that I tried it but also that it was rated at 78. I’m dropping that since hot this is a rooibos tea with some orange. Guess this will be a cold tea going forward.

Deb recommends having this one cold so I cold brewed it for about 5 hours today. It’s got a nice creamsicle flavor with a touch of green rooibos base peeking through. It’s quite lovely actually, though I wish it was even More creamsicle and less base. Plus, there isn’t much of a mousse element here and I think I would have enjoyed that.

Sipdown (289)

This was my sister’s random number selection pick tonight. I also didn’t realize it would be a sipdown but when I opened the package, I realized there was basically enough for a 16 oz serving so I just finished it.

Now that I am drinking the last of this, I am wondering how sugar or something would have helped this. It’s a nice warming coconut flavor and I could even see coconut pie but the lemon isn’t strongly present. It’s a good dessert flavor but seems to be missing just one thing. This will sound weird but the flavors you do get are almost bottom heavy so it seems like you need a pop of something on top. I think it is a bright lemon or even a sweet lemon note (like the lemon flavor in Butiki’s Lemon French Macaron) that would make this really rounded out.

I changed the steeping parameters to see if I could get rid of the metallic twang that threw off the flavor of this one in my last cup. Last time was 200F for 4 mins. This time I did 190F for 3 mins.

The good news? The metallic note is gone.

The bad news? So is a lot of the flavor.

I’m getting coconut but it’s more muted than last time and the lemon has mostly disappeared. It’s mostly just a coconut black tea. Or a black tea with coconut since I’m not sure which flavor is stronger.

After adding the Dessert by Deb teas to my spreadsheet, the random tea algorithm I have set up picked this. I steeped it for the recommended steep time and then I let it cool before drinking it which was potentially a mistake. Or, the recommended 4 minutes was too long a steep time because while the flavor is great, but there is a metallic twang at the end of the sip that’s ruining it for me. So I need to play around with this to get flavor without the twang.

This is the second iced tea in today’s sipdown battle. The other tea is Tie-Dye Butterfly by DAVIDsTEA and the tasting note for that tea can be found here: https://steepster.com/rachel12610/posts/416185

I have never had this iced and I personally haven’t loved it hot so I thought I would give it a try this way. This iced tea suffers from the same issues as the hot tea unfortunately though – no scone, no lemon, some berry and black tea base. It maybe is not as flat as the hot tea tends to be but it’s also just a mediocre berry black tea iced. Preferable to it as the hot tea but still not a tea I care for that much. As such, Tie-Dye Butterfly is taking the win.

Drinking this while watching the masked singer. As far as Deb’s teas go, this is not a favorite. It’s mostly just hibiscus/berry. No lemon really. No scone. And it seems flatter than it should. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Deb’s blends but this one is just meh. It may find itself in my swap box.

This is the tea my sister picked out for me and while it tasted good, it fell a bit flat. It had cooled quite a bit by the time I got to drinking it so perhaps that played a part but between the berry, lemon, maple, scone, etc., there was a lot going on without anything really taking the lead. It was more muddled and I feel needed one thing to sort of pop. Perhaps it’ll be better hot…

Bought instant boba at Costco that is brown sugar boba pearls so I tried to think what could hold up in milk and pair with brown sugar. This stood out because I thought the brown sugar may add to the “cookie” while mint chip is best in milk. Unfortunately the boba is super sweet so while this is good, it’s not quite what I thought it would be. Will need to tweak.

Revisited this one as an iced latte and I am still a fan. I didn’t add the chocolate syrup to this one but I did do a dollop of whipped cream that I whipped in. It really is mint chip ice cream prepped this way.

I’ve been going nuts checking my tracking for this package from a new-to-me company, Dessert by Deb, for over a week now. It’s a Canadian company out of Toronto that specializes in dessert blends. For anyone that knows me, you know that’s my jam so I’ve been excited and it was supposed to arrive Wednesday last week so my family and Roswell Strange and Sil have all gotten basically daily updates about why hasn’t the package arrived yet! Well, it’s here and I’m excited. Also, surprised. Surprised because RS and I talked about how this company seems to be blowing up on Instagram but then I come to Steepster and it’s not even in the database yet. So, Steepster meet Dessert by Deb. Dessert by Deb, meet Steepster.

I made this as an iced latte (I asked RS which tea to start with as an iced latte and she suggested this) and while this doesn’t scream “cookie” to me, as the latte with a slight chocolate drizzle and whipped cream, this screams mint chip ice cream. At times I get a dark cocoa that reminds me of the cookie part of an Oreo so maybe that’s what they were going for. If that’s the case, then it’s some Oreo cookie crumble over mint chip ice cream. It’s just so smooth, creamy and decadently mint chip. Great introduction to a new company. Hopefully it’s not just excitement making things seem better though.