Eastern Shore Tea Company

Slightly sweet clove water, prolly from the pumpkin. I’m amused that the last tea in this advent calendar is pumpkin spice. Anyway, yay! It’s finished! I’m hopped up on caffeine, but I don’t care, I’m going to find my next tea immediately. Something new! Something different! Something without cloves!

Smells a bit like chai, and the black pepper makes this clove water a little nippy, which is nice. Loads of leakage from the tea dust packet, this time; lots of sediment at the bottom of the glass. Cardamom is usually easy for me to detect, but not here. Not getting the cinnamon, either. The only thing I can appreciate is the lingering heat from the black pepper; I think I’d like more of that. (And it’s very clearly from the black pepper, not from the ginger, which was also imperceptible to me.)

The packet of tea dust smells really nice, and although I’m not an apricot connoisseur, it feels accurate. The brew retains that lovely, spiced apricot fragrance, but as the tea cools it fades to—you guessed it!—clove water. I feel like I did taste something other than cloves at the very beginning for a few sips, but I’m not sure.

Other tasting notes about this blend are very positive, which makes me think there must be an absolute galaxy of difference between their loose tea and their tea dust packets. I’ve even started steeping in just 235ml/8ish oz of water, in an effort to really give their teas the benefit of the doubt. But I’m pretty much all doubt at this point.

Nice fragrance, but not much flavour. I like orange teas, but find blood orange to be a bit tart, so it’s probably just as well.

I’m mildly offended by this blend’s name. Chai? Please.
“Very spicy!”, says the tea’s description. My foot.
“Rooibos with Eastern spices”, says the ESTC website. Eastern spices? What?

Okay maybe a little more than offended and into engrumbled territory. Honestly, the rah rah ’Murica tone and ignorance of anything non-US apparent in their descriptions has kinda turned me off this place. There are loads of other arteasans out there that have sensibilities better aligned with my own.

The tea is okay. The apple flavour is nice and the clove—yes, there’s clove—isn’t overpowering. But there’s no mix of spices, here, certainly not what one would expect from “chai”.

I love rose, so this was a safe bet. It’s a nice one, although—as usual, for this company’s blends—too subtle for my palate. And the type of rose is interesting, too. It’s not Rooh Afza rose, it’s not Indian sweets rose, it’s not Turkish delight rose. It’s more … eau de toilette, talcum powdery rose? I wasn’t expecting that at all. Not my favourite, but kinda different, kinda nice.

Eastern Shore Tea Company’s tea bags are tiny, with a small scoop of tea dust in them. Don’t shake them, because the dust escapes. And if you happen to be leaning in for a mighty sniff at the time, much sneezing ensues. Anyway. I think I’m going to start using less water; maybe that’ll make the flavour more pronounced.

Aaaaaaagh it smells so good!

Which is why it’s such a disappointment. It’s a glass of hot water that smells really good. =( It smells like honey and ginger and tastes very vaguely of honey (which I guess is the pear). I had such high hopes. While I prefer intense flavours, I don’t mind subtle ones; but, yeesh, there ought to be something!

I still haven’t looked up how to steep a black- and green-tea blend, so once again I split the difference. This one smells more green than black. I love the deep, rich colour of black tea; maybe it’s the addition of green or something else, I dunno, but the colour here is just straight-up brown: the brownest brown a tea ever did brown.

The flavour is hard to describe. I’ve been nyum-nyumming every sip, trying to get a feel for it, and I can’t. It has a pleasant enough flavour, but it feels two-dimensional. Nothing lingers, there’s no aftertaste—once I swallow, it’s just gone as if it were never there. This is only my second black-green blend; the other was also an Eastern Shore blend (whose name I forget) and I liked that one much better.

I’ve described green teas as nutty, or ricey, or grassy, or just kinda … green? This is the latter. There aren’t any layers here; it’s just a perfectly pleasant cup of green tea.

I. Love. Ginger. Like, looooove. If you do, too, don’t bother with this one. A nice blend, in that the result is smooth and … I want to say, calm? Placid? It’s entirely inoffensive, but it’s underwhelming and just not exciting. I like my spicy teas to be bold and intense, and this is vaguely gingery warm water. It’s not horrible; there’s just too much amazing tea out there for us to waste our time, money, and taste buds on this one.

The first tea in a long while that I had to pour down the drain after a couple of sips. A cacophony, not a symphony. Unlike one of their other blends, in which I could taste both peppermint and spearmint—separately, in this one I tasted something vaguely minty that I could identify as neither. Honestly—and this is gross, sorry—it called to mind mint and cigarette butts. Yuck.

So many fancy ingredients to make caffeinated clove water!

I wish the cherry flavour were just a bit more forward, but generally it’s really nice. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that other ingredients, like apple pieces and orange peel, didn’t ruin the cherry flavour.

I think I need to try more cherry teas.

This was 15% apple, 5% cinnamon, and 80% cloves. Cloves aren’t even listed in the tea’s description on their site! Ugh.

Two things I really appreciate about Eastern Shore’s black teas:
- I’ve over-steeped them and they haven’t gotten bitter.
- I can have them without sweetening them—a first for me and black teas.

This Darjeeling is smooth and tastes great, but it’s just a little too subtle for me.

These folks keep surprising me. I don’t like peppermint or hibiscus in my tea: I’m not really a fan of mint tea—although spearmint can be oookaaaay—and hibiscus is just so tart. So a peppermint-hibiscus black-tea blend is just how I wanted to start my day. <puckers face>

But it’s … good? Like, it’s not for me, but it’s so balanced and pleasant that if you like those flavours, I think you’ll really like this blend. I don’t like it, but I can see how others might love it.

Another surprise! I’ve tried my entire life to like raspberries, since I love all the other berries; I keep tasting them and I keep really, really disliking them. So I wasn’t looking forward to trying this one. But I did, and it was surprisingly pleasant. The hibiscus doesn’t feature too heavily, here, which is great, cos honestly berries’ natural tartness is more than enough.

Day 5 of this company’s advent calendar. So far, they’re doing a great job of making their blends’ fragrance and flavour match their ingredients. This is a straightforward blend of black and green teas. I’ve never had a black-green blend before, and didn’t know what to expect. I also had no idea how to steep the thing, since the temp for black tea is so different from the temp for green tea. I should’ve looked it up, but my laziness cannot be overstated. I just split the difference and winged it.

A great blend. I could smell both the black and green teas, and the combination was so complementary! Really smooth and just wonderful.

What? How?

See, this is why I like to try even blends that don’t appeal to me at all. When it comes to tea, I love being proven wrong. I don’t like passionfruit, so I wasn’t looking forward to this one at all. But it smells and tastes delicious! I can’t speak to the authenticity of its flavour, because I don’t remember the last time I had passionfruit. (Hmm, maybe I should give it another chance, too.) Anyway, this one’s really lovely.

Oh, dear. Spearmint, peppermint, and vanilla. Three of the few (more) things I don’t usually like in my tea. I tried so hard to give away this bag, but the blend didn’t sound appealing to anyone else, either. I wasn’t willing to throw it away, and sometimes blends can surprise me, so I gave it a chance.

The one thing I can say about this company is that, so far, their blends have been honest. This one says spearmint, peppermint, and vanilla, and that’s exactly what it smells like, that’s exactly what it tastes like. Unfortunately for me, that means it tastes like a candycane that’s been swirled around in pipe smoke.

Clearly this is a me thing and not the fault of the tea, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to rate it.

I just had their blackberry blend, and I feel like this wasn’t a great choice to put immediately after it in the advent calendar—they’re too similar. I can’t help but compare the two, despite the fact that blackberry and blackcurrant have nothing to do with each other.

I’d think better of this blend if I hadn’t just had the blackberry one. This one is nice, but the flavour is far too subtle for me. If I had more of it, I’d try it sweetened with Ribena!

[Edit] I’d only had a few sips, so instead of just sort of enjoying the rest of the cup, I added some Ribena. It made a huge difference. Quite lovely, now. =)

Got this in an advent calendar. I was mildly engrumbled about having to look up what kind of tea it is so I’d know how to prepare it. Anyway. It’s lovely! It’s a straightforward blend of black tea and blackberry, and it smells and tastes like it should. Doesn’t taste synthetic, and best of all doesn’t have any chemical weirdness like a lot of berry-flavoured things.

Okay, this is very last tea from Devon’s advent calendar. It was funny 25 days with many interesting teas, new companies for me and 25 tea bag wrappers to my collection! Thank you so much Devon!

Okay, my wrapper says actually Key Lima Colada, so I wonder if there is a typo on the wrapper, or it is actually the name and mistake is here? Too busy to find out.

Anyway, it doesn’t smell good, the coconut is having slightly rancid smell; and there was a cheap cosmetics odour as well. Brewed it isn’t a winner either, it is a black tea (which is fine) with coconut taste, quite oily, but somehow smooth. No lime for me. Somehow strange in conclusion, and somehow not a fan… the lime is missing indeed.

Luckily, I have another lime fruit tea in front of me… with basil (and rooibos base); one of the teas from Romania.