Mariage Frères

Breaking open a new entry into project lapsang sipdown. This will give me a nice variety of three to choose from in the coming months. I expect this project to last through the end of the year, given that I don’t drink black tea except on weekends and holidays and I mostly have a single large cup threshold per day when it comes to lapsang.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing how Mariage Freres does lapsang. And indeed, it’s an interesting contrast to some of the others I’ve tasted recently.

The tea in the tin smells more spicy than smoky. Peppery, really. Which is fascinating.

After steeping, the smell is still not smoky. It’s got a sweetness to it, like a sugary spice bread. I want to say gingerbread, but it isn’t really that. Maybe a spicy banana bread? Weird, I know. The tea is a coppery amber color, a little darker than medium for a black tea. There’s a bit of a haze to the liquor, but it’s translucent.

The flavor is where the smoke is the most noticeable, but as I would have expected from a French tea, it’s not overpowering. It’s a sort of a light smokiness that integrates into the tea in a way that isn’t pasted on. This one doesn’t have the sweetness of some others, not even in the finish or aftertaste. Nor does it scream woodiness, though there is a bit of wood flavor.

My recent lapsangs have all been pleasing to me for their lack of ash, meat, or resin flavors, and this fits that description as well.

I keep harking back to the Kusmi lapsang which has a sweetness I liked in the flavor, and I decided to bump that one up a bit in ratings.

This one is different from the Kusmi in its flavor, but I can taste the quality if you know what I mean. So I’m rating it the same.

fantastic aromatic tea. drinking at as i write this review. i get some berry aroma but for me the first aroma that hits your nostrils is the smell of chocolate as you open the tin. the berry flavours and aroma develops in the cup. drink with warm water only. no milk or sugar please.

quite a strong flavoured and dark tea. it got a little bit dirt/dust smelling as it was kept for nearly 2 years on my office desk. still great for waking me up whenever i need a strong jolt.

Sipdown 106/395

Another from the EU TTB. I was super excited about this one when I first picked it out, because I’d heard so many good things about it. I remember being really disappointed when I tried it and couldn’t taste any vanilla or rum, so I held onto the last cup of my sample as it never really grabbed me, expecting it to be as lacklustre as the first time. This made it a good candidate to drink while my tastebuds were on strike, though, so I brewed it up and was surprised when I took my first sip and BOOM flavour. I drank the whole cup plain, no additives, and got it all – rum, vanilla, and some dark rich frutiness which was hard to place. I owe you an apology, Mariage Freres; I never should have underestimated you.

My daughter just brought this loose leaf tea from Paris. Delicate flavor but smokiness a bit much for me.

There will never be a lychee flavoured tea as good as this one! This one is truly Haute Couture like Mariage Frères. One of their best teas.

When I wrote about the green version of this a while back, I was surprised to find I hadn’t written a note on the black version. I know I’ve had this before, but somehow never wrote about it.

I intend to try this at different temperatures and steeping times given the variety others have used. Starting with boiling for 3:30.

In the tin, I smell cocoa and berries. In the steeped tea, I smell berries and vanilla bean.
The berries I smell are red, rather than black or blue, but as between strawberry and raspberry, I get a bit of a mash up. There’s a sweetness that is very strawberry like, but it’s almost like it’s at a distance, which is very raspberry like.

The tea is a clear, medium-dark amber. I wouldn’t describe it as smooth in the sip, but it doesn’t have a bite, either. The aftertaste is quite smooth, though, with a somewhat silky mouthfeel. It’s got a magical French thing going on with the flavors, which are very like the aroma with the added bonus that they integrate and balance seamlessly with the tea base, which has a depth that gives the tea a lot of character.

It’s got to be one of the best I’ve had from Mariage Freres, so it’s no surprise it’s their signature tea. It’s not the best tea I’ve ever had, but it’s awesome and something I’ll want to keep around.

Sipdown no. 62 of 2018 (no. 418 total).

This was the lowest rated black tea in my cupboard with enough to cold brew, so I left it in the fridge for just short of 24 hours.

It makes a tasty if not entirely remarkable black tea. It has a weird saltiness to it that makes it interesting — a little like the saltiness of salted caramel but with a different flavor profile.

I got this tea through the Cultured Cup, where I placed an order for a number of Mariage Freres teas. I didn’t know who Stephen Pyles was until I found this tea and read about him, but for those who don’t know, he’s an award-winning chef based in Dallas who is known for the “southwest” style.

My guess is that the Cultured Cup commissions custom blends from Mariage Freres, as well as selling some of their standards, because I’ve seen several teas available at the Cultured Cup that bear the Mariage Freres name, but that I haven’t seen on the Mariage Freres site or elsewhere.

In any case, this one smells heavily of bergamot in the packet. After steeping, there’s a dusky vanilla mixed in with the bergamot, along with a baked bread quality in the aroma. The tea is a clear, dark chestnut.

As with most Mariage Freres and indeed most French blends, there’s no clear demarcation between where the flavor ends and the tea begins. The flavors don’t just sit on top of the tea, they meld with it in a very pleasant way.

The bergamot isn’t overpowering in the sip, but it does linger in the aftertaste, moreso than the vanilla.

The only thing that’s missing, and that would make this truly wonderful is more depth to the tea base. With a malty Yunnan base, this would be spectacular.

This is not a sipdown, but I missed apricot day yesterday, unfortunately. I hadn’t read about it on the discussion board until yesterday, when I was done drinking caffeine for the day. Better late than never?

It’s a nice note to end my flavored black teas on for the day and I’m glad it won’t be a sipdown candidate for a while. I want to savor it.

I remain a staunch fan of French flavored black teas. Having just sipped down a German one, I have in my head a very clear picture of the difference between the French ones and all others (including those from the US). I am sure I’ve said this before, but the difference (to me, anyway) is that there is really no delineation between the base and the flavor in French blends. The flavor and the base are blended and inseparable.

Non-French blends, more often than not, have a discernible separation to my palate. The base is the base, the flavor is on top of the base.

It’s, as with everything, a personal preference, but I much prefer not being able to tell where the base ends and the flavor starts.

Surprised that I seem to be the only one who has written about this? I searched under the French spelling too, and nothing came up.

In the packet there’s a juicy apricot smell that’s got a dark, sultry quality to it. The steeped version is less juicy but still apricotty, and also smells like baked bread with a touch of chocolate. The tea is a rather unique russet and clear.

The flavor is much better than the aroma — deeper and with more of the sultry quality of the dry mix. And yes I know that taste is mostly smell, which is why this is surprising to me.

The apricot is a bit sneaky. Though it is obvious from the beginning of the sip, it really blossoms in the mouth from mid-sip to aftertaste, becoming sweeter and juicier as it goes.

With the demise of ATR, I’ve been looking for a good black apricot tea, and this will certainly do.

I love this tea, like I do with most of the tea from Mariage Freres. It steeps really well and has a beautiful, simple, bold taste with plenty of undertones of caramel, chocolate and vanilla.

I’m not normally a fan of chocolate in tea but in this case, the tea is so smooth that it doesn’t get bitterness that sometimes comes with chocolate in tea.

I think the Highland Toffee Tea from David’s Tea would act as a really good dupe for this tea, and since Highland Toffee Tea is one of my favourites, it’s easy to see why I love this one.

A favourite tea that I do my best to refrain from drinking till December. It’s lovely and orange-y, quite floral but then the body of it is sweet and spicy with a warmth at the end. The orange flavour is quite intense upfront but fades away in a satisfying way. Just lovely!

This tea is powerful and spicy, like a chai or a glögg tea.

It has flavours of mulled wine, cinnamon, cardamom, almond and other Christmassy things. I love drinking it in the winter time and although it wasn’t my favourite tea from this company to begin with, it’s totally become a fast favourite.

Whenever I open my tea cupboard, I can smell it right away. It’s spicy and sweet and definitely packs a punch. <3

This tea has lots of lovely layers, as most Mariage Freres tea does. It starts off really fruity with hints of raspberry and strawberry, with a touch of sourness, and then it has this really nice caramel finish.

I would be careful how you brew this tea — I don’t like particularly strong tea and find it easy to over brew, but it’s easy enough to rescue with more water and honey.

I really enjoy this tea and would totally recommend it.

I thought this might be another in the same vein as Brioche and Almond Biscotti, but after smelling the dry leaves I think it’s a different type of almond. It’s less pastry and more Amaretto.

I find it interesting that The Cultured Cup sells this under the Mariage Freres brand, but it’s not available at the Mariage Freres web site.

But I digress. The steeped tea also smells and tastes like Amaretto, but without the alcohol. The underlying tea blends pretty seamlessly into the almond, to the point where it’s not really discernible as a separate flavor. Admittedly, I have a cold so my taster may be a little off, but I don’t think I’m missing anything here.

It’s an interesting change from the usually pastry flavored almond teas. It’s the sort of thing I might consider having around even if I also had Brioche because they’re so different.

I am puzzled by the fact that it doesn’t appear on the Mariage Freres web site, though.

Anyone have any thoughts on that? Does Mariage Freres have different flavors that they sell to other outlets?

Steeped according to package directions.

I wanted something fruity this morning and it was between this one and another that was more of a red fruit blend. I went with the citrus/tropical ingredients instead.

I bought this before the moratorium on green/black blends, which I believe I’ve since broken in any case. But it seemed to steep just fine with the time and temp listed — no bitterness to the green and enough flavor to the black.

Despite the lack of vanilla in the ingredients, there’s a creamy, vanilla-like smell to both the dry leaves and the steeped tea. The next strongest smell is the fruit, and it’s less a citrus than a stone fruit smell. The peach and apricot seem to predominate, but there’s definitely citrus in there somewhere. More of an orange than anything else I can identify, and in addition to making the rest of the mix smell more interesting, it gives a freshness and tang to the finish and aftertaste.

I’m not sure I can pick out the mango, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there somewhere. No one single flavor jumps out of this mix, which is pretty much characteristic of most French tea blends I’ve enjoyed. It’s truly a blend, where all the ingredients work together to create something that isn’t just a sum of its parts.

This may be why they’re so great with perfumes, too.

I can’t remember anymore who sent me this, but I’ve put it in my focus box because I have about 5 cups worth and otherwise I will take forever to drink it.

My initial tasting was after I had left it a bit too long (~5 minutes in warm but not hot water). I then diluted it a bit and found the fruity notes shining through. I get a lot of strawberry, jam, dried fruits, fig, and something that is either peach or pomegranate (or both). Lots of interesting fruits, and the black base is quite tasty even now that my cup has cooled. I reccomend this as a latte too. I’ll be trying this coldbrewed soon.

A lot of flower character that is well balanced with the base rooibos notes, plus a bit of caramel and strong fruity characteristics.
The taste is very rich, slightly sweetish, complex. Good alternative to my everyday theine teas.

I’ve had this for so long now and it still delivers a good cup! It has a nice smooth fruit with vanilla flavor on top of green tea. It is reliable, but I don’t find myself reaching for it often and I still have half a tin. I like it enough to keep it, but it’s slow sipping down. Maybe I’ll try using it more as an iced tea once the weather warms up.