Moderna Tea

sample of this one from Roswell via VariaTEA. I was hoping i’d love this one but for me it was kinda fruity rooibos tea. Not a bad cup, but if you asked me to name the flavour i’d have to say….sweet rooibos? :) Appreciate the share though as i love trying new teas!

Sipdown (264)

I’m sorry Roswell Strange but I don’t like it. I tried different steeping parameters and it brought out an alcohol quality and its bad. I wanted honey. I wanted pear. I got rooibos and I got bitter alcohol.

I know Roswell Strange paid a lot for this and had a bit of a time trying to purchase it so I really wanted to like it. However, the base is just too strong for me. It’s nutty and almost the slightest touch leather-y. Pear is hiding just under it. It peeks through at times but it can’t seem to fight it’s way through. The honey is even further buried. I want to like it but it’s not delivering for me. Perhaps different steeping parameters would help coax things out because 4 minutes in 190F didn’t do the trick. I’m still grateful for the chance to try it though and will change up steeping next time. Thank you for sharing, Roswell Strange!

I’m blanking on the name of it, but almost a decade ago I used to semi-regularly buy this really sweet but delicious pear flavoured liquor and as I was sipping on this tea I was hit with such an intense wave of nostalgia as I remembered that deliciously golden pear flavour. Very tasty cuppa!

Cold Brew!

Loving having this one to sip on tonight. It’s pretty rooibos forward, but also has a pleasantly fresh yet indulgent note of golden pears. A little bit of honey, but more of the creamier poached pear notes. Yummy!

I’ve been drinking a lot of rooibos in the evening lately, as you can maybe tell from this recent batch of tasting notes. This is another that I haven’t had in ages that I dug out and treated myself to, and it was amazing! Juicy honey and floral pear in the most mouth watering kind of way!

(Side note – it’s kind of weird seeing the company name now. Moderna has a very different connotation now in this post Covid-19 landscape…)

Cold brew!

I’m a little bit sad that neither Sil nor VariaTEA found this tasted much like pear to them; but not too sad because that just means I get to keep hoarding this stupidly expensive scam company tea all for myself, haha. I made this brew a while back after reading Sil’s review, and I enjoyed it a lot. I definitely think it tastes like pear to me, but it’s a very distinct sort of sweet golden pear that simultaneously has fresh, juicy notes but also that more “poached pear” bake-y quality too. The honey leans into the fresh fruit, while the rooibos works with the poached elements I’m getting.

Yum.

I think this image says it all…

https://i.imgur.com/yt4hXhJ.png

I went grocery shopping with one of my roommates last week, which was kind of nice – the getting out and socializing with one of them part, that is. The grocery shopping itself was kind of meh…

When we got back, I offered to make us each a mug of tea while we unpacked our hauls. At her request I selected something caffeine free and since this is such a favourite of mine at the moment/complete obsession I selected this one for the both of us. It was a raving success, and the sweet juicy pear was the highlight of my entire day.

I’m starting to wonder if, on a scaled of Smiles/Dollar, this tea might actually have been worth its exorbitant price point!?

I just had to revisit this tea sooner rather than later to find out if that pear note was really as truly delicious as it had been the first time I had it and, well, it is. Seriously; this is such a brilliantly perfect and juicy pear note, with honey and floral undertones. I’m half convinced now that the weird/creepy sales people from this shop laced it with meth or something to get people really hooked on their tea.

(Not really – it’s just sort of unbelievably delicious)

So, I think this is the most expensive flavored tea that I’ve ever purchased – and honestly the experience of purchasing it was a wild ride. I also, for the record, completely don’t believe that it’s worth the price tag – but it was my crazy, stupid “Las Vegas” souvenir so I didn’t really mind dropping the money on it. Better than losing it to slot machines…

For the whole story check out this tasting note:

https://steepster.com/roswellstrange/posts/381724#likes

So, here’s the crazy part – I made a hot mug of it last night and I swear to fuck that it’s maybe the best pear tea that I’ve ever had!? Like, I was so hesitant to open up this stupid tin of tea because I just knew in my heart it was going to be TERRIBLE but it’s actually, just, not. I plan to brew it up again pretty soon just to see if the amazingness of that pear note can be recreated – but it was simultaneously SO juicy, fresh and sweet (like the Juicy Pear flavoured Jelly Bellies) while also having a subtle, soft floral undertone and the sweet honeyed rooibos flavour just slightly in the undertones. It actually felt well crafted and nuanced. I was floored!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m pretty ecstatic that I actually like this tea that I spent stupid amounts of money to get, I’m also just shocked.

So, while we were in Vegas we walked almost all of the strip and checked out quite a few of the different hotels. Most were pretty cool, but my favourite was probably Caeser’s Palace – which also has a HUGE shopping area inside of it…

Quite by chance, we stumbled upon a tea store called “Moderna Tea”. They were displaying a lot of different Gong Fu tea sets in their front showcase so I was obviously very curious and insisted we go check it out. They had a tea brewer set up in front of their shop with little sample cups so that you could sample their “featured tea of the day” so we of course 100% did that. It was a little weird though; there was literally no one in the shop or outside sampling and nothing labelled on the brewed to indicate what the tea was. So we did try it, but I have zero clue what the tea was since no one was there to tell us. It tasted like a sweeter than average Monk’s Blend sort of deal though – those grenadine cherry/pomegranate flavours and a darker base. So that would be my guess!?

We looked inside the store too; gorgeous teaware all over and a huge “sniffing wall” with glass jars filled with their teas and little cork stoppers you could remove to smell them. Only about 1/2 of the jars were actually labelled though, so even though there were three that I thought smelled good I only knew what one of them was – a rooibos blend called Honey Pear Nectar. After maybe about ten minutes of looking around a very heavily blinged out woman walked in who was just CAKED in make up, and more highlighter than I’ve ever seen on any one person.

She actually seemed surprised to see people in the store, and almost immediately she tried to pull both of us to the back of the store where there was one of the make up counter type set ups you might see in Sephora; bar stool, mirrors, and such. She had a super thick European accent, and just kept saying “skin care routine?” over and over. We really flatly/bluntly told her we were NOT interested in whatever skincare/creams she was peddling and only wanted to look at the tea. Eventually she just left us alone.

We got to talking (the person I was with and I) and also did a quick google search of the store – and it became pretty clear, pretty quickly that the store was basically a front for a really scammy beauty cream peddling type of place.

However…

I really wanted to bring some sort of loose tea home with me from Vegas because I literally bring tea home for myself with EVERY vacation – it’s tradition at this point. And this was the last day that we were there before the day we were flying back, and I hadn’t found any other places selling tea. So even though we were convinced at this point that this place was almost certainly just using the guise of “tea stuff” to lure people in to look at their shady AF skin creams and sell them on stupidly overpriced skincare stuff, we decided to buy the one tea that I had liked (that was labelled) on the sniffing wall to take home, despite how RIDICULOUS the price was. I mean, it was $50 for 4 oz of this rooibos blend – definitely overprice. But it’s Vegas, you’re supposed to make stupid decisions, right!? And I don’t gamble at all so this might as well have been my equivalent…

You should have seen how shocked this woman looked when we said we wanted to buy the tea. I mean, she fucking scrambled. She spent live five minutes rapidly checking all of their shelves looking for a box of it, and eventually she just left the store without saying anything to either of us. We just kind of stood there confused for a few minutes, and right before we were about to walk about because we thought she wasn’t coming back, she shuffled back in with another woman; this one in a pantsuit where the most rings on her hands I’ve ever seen any woman wear. They started looking together; I mean, these ladies seemed INCREDIBLY uneducated about ANY of the tea they were selling. Finally, they found a box of the tea and shuffled us up to the till.

Again, as we were trying to pay, they tried talking us into picking up skin creams – each time offering a bigger discount when we said no. Finally, they just gave up and sold us our tea. We quickly got the fuck out of there.

I’m sure I payed WAY MORE for my tea that it’s possibly worth, and the quality is likely shaky – but I got my vegas souvenir, and at least I didn’t waste the money on slot machines or something like that…