Lake Missoula Tea Company

Another Reddit TTB tea. This tea tastes as advertised. The black tea is pleasant enough, and the milk essence shows up to add a little intrigue. It’s not interesting enough to drink again though. I guess I felt like it could have been fresher/richer tasting.

I’m not really sure why I don’t drink this one more often. It’s smooth and fruity, not too finicky about temperature/steep time/leaf amount. It’s not as light and fresh and delicate as some of the other greens I like but it definitely isn’t one of those harsh grassy greens. Usually I just get tropical fruity flavors from this tea but tonight I kind of taste coconut too. I’ve been thinking things taste coconutty all day, though, so maybe I just have coconut on the brain. I picked this one tonight because I wanted something that handles being steeped western style and isn’t strongly scented to try out my new DavidsTea tea press travel mug. I don’t usually love tea in metal or plastic and the press is made of both those things but it seems like a great new toy to take places I’m worried about other teaware getting broken. I’m a little worried about the plastic parts absorbing smells so a basic green seemed safer than anything flavored. It took ages to get the chenpi smell out of the rubber seals of my glass gongfu bottle and I have at least one travel mug with a lid that smells strongly of Throat Coat…hopefully I can avoid any permanent smells in the new press.

I forgot to do any sort of special tea for Valentine’s Day this year so I thought I’d make a cup of this now. I drank a ton of this last winter but it’s been a while since I drank it. I suspect it comes from some big tea wholesaler since there are a lot of similar looking heart shaped rose ripe pu-erhs out there but I’ve always gotten it from my local tea shop (which I love and miss hanging out at!). I don’t think it’s the most amazing quality ripe…the leaf is really broken up and there’s no info about growing area or harvest year. I like it for mindless drinking when I’d feel bad about not paying enough attention to the nuances of fancier teas. I usually drink it western or grandpa style. If you make it strong enough, it goes nicely with a splash of cream and a cookie. It doesn’t last many steeps for gongfu but I’m no good at mindless gongfu anyway so no big deal.

First off the aroma is amazing! If you close your pot with the dry leaves for a bit before smelling you get the perfect smell of ginger bread cookies. Yum!

The first pot I steeped a bit short so I didn’t get as much of the ginger flavor that I would have liked (I happen to love ginger, so this may be a good thing for other tea drinkers), but the sweetness and wet leaves of the puerh is nice and mellow with a tiny bit of pleasant astringency.

Second pot: Distracted by work so this one brewed up a bit longer and darker. Love the aroma of ginger and puerh. The ginger is more apparent now, but I don’t detect much of the orange peel though it may well be the influence that makes the tea taste like ginger bread cookies while held in the mouth. The aftertaste leans more towards ginger, but it’s gentle and quite pleasant.

Third pot got a super long steep and was absolutely glorious.

To my amazement, a search for white champagne raspberry brought up fourteen different teas! What? This weird combination has been thought up by fourteen different companies?

No, fifteen, because mine (a gift) came from the Lake Missoula Tea Company in Montana. I was actually thinking that this company might already be listed here at Steepster, given the proximity of Montana to Canada, but maybe no one really lives directly north of Montana?

Anyway, this is an interesting flavored white tea blend. The dried leaves look motley and smell very strongly of raspberry. The brewed liquor, in contrast, does not smell at all like raspberries but of safflower. There is a lot of safflower in this blend, and it looks alot like saffron, but the flavor here appears to be safflower more than champagne (which is said to be present as well).

The liquor is bright yellow with a tinge of red—just like a solution of saffron used to prepare saffron rice. I am pleasantly surprised at the flavor, but I would not recommend this tea as a raspberry blend because the fruit appears to have evaporated completely away.

second infusion: I am now drinking the second infusion over ice, and it is rather nice. I have to admit that I would never have purchased a tea by this name, but I’m glad to have tried something with so much safflower, as it tastes unexpectedly good.

postscript: I looked at some of the other companies’ profiles for White Champagne Raspberry. Some of them have exactly the same ingredients list and picture! This suggests that these various companies are sourcing this tea from a third party wholesaler who does the actual blending. I read about this in the forum, but here we have clear evidence!