Ovation Teas

I bought this a couple years ago now and when I first bought it, it tasted sharp and unbalanced. Now that it has had time to mature, I’m liking it much more! The orange has mellowed out and is even with the chocolate. It makes for a much smoother cup!

Tried to give this tea some time to mellow out in my cupboard, but the orange is pretty strong still and has a little bite. The chocolate comes out well and I do love the combo of orange and chocolate. With a little cream and sugar this is a pretty good cup. It isn’t as decadent and delicious as some other orange/choco teas, but it is very enjoyable which is good because I still have a ton of it. Never. Buying. Tea. By. The. Pound. Again.

I haven’t quite gotten the hang of this tea yet. I have tried it hot and cold brewed now and either way it still has this uneven edge to the taste that turns me off just a little. I love chocolate and orange, and I get that in every sip, but it just doesn’t balance out as well as other chocorange teas I have had. I bought a pound of it during Ovation’s closing sale, so I’ll have plenty of it around for a while to try brewing different ways in the hopes of a better cup.

Thirteenth tea sampled from TTB-C

I forgot that I tried this one already until I saw my tasting note here already.
This time around, I noticed the orange more than the chocolate. strange how that is. But one thing is the same: It’s still very very bitter.

I don’t like chocolate teas too much, but since I don’t completely hate them, I figure I should give them each a chance when they show up in my cupboard, as has this one from Shadowfall.

Not a big surprise, but I don’t like this tea. The chocolate is very bitter and I don’t detect much orange.

I had a cup of this from the Traveling Tea Box the other day and forgot to log it, oops! Overall, I liked this tea. It had a fun fruitiness to it, with a little hint of floral in the background. Maybe not one that I would chose every day, but it was certainly nice for a summer cup first thing in the morning.

-Dry blend has large black tea leaves and twigs with large pieces of dried fruit, yellow petals, pink rose petals, and small lavender petals.
-Dry leaves smell lightly musty and of dried fruit. Tea liquor aroma is malty and of sweet fruit.
-Tea liquor is a clear dark brown color.
-Tangy fruit flavor and finish with a small amount of bitterness. Strong floral aftertaste.
-Best with milk and sweetener.
-Good tea. A very fruity cup with floral hints of lavender and rose.

This is a sample sipdown, and I am ashamed to say that I have probably had this for about two years, maybe longer. I really want to place some orders, but I have SO. MUCH. TEA. My bestie busted out laughing a few days ago when I made tea for us to share. I asked what was so funny and she said it was because there are all these tea tins on display in the kitchen, and then I bend over and open a chest and it is full, too! Oy.

Even though this was old, it was quite good. The base was smooth, not very strong, though it may have been stronger long ago. The bergamot is moderate here and I can smell and taste another citrus here, maybe orange? But I can not find blueberry in this cup at all. Other reviewers mentioned it being in the forefront and being quite strong. It is probably because my sample is old, or the food was competing with it. We had brownies with a dark chocolate drizzle, sugared strawberries, and homemade vanilla ice cream with white and semi-sweet chocolate chips in it, also drizzled with homemade dark chocolate “Magic Shell.”

I have enough for one more cup, so I think I will try it again sans food and see if I can detect those blueberries. (My other blueberry teas taste like violets to me.)

Beautiful tea blend! This was a sample that I stumbled upon! Delicious. I love the orange bits.
The chocolate was great and well blended. The orange was not very overpowering which is a plus. It got bitter towards the end.

Thank you yssah for this one!

This is an interesting tea. I am not really familiar with the flavor of figs (I’m also terrified of them since they can essentially eat bees, no not the part about there just being insects it’s the part where the fig can just digest it, NATURE!) I know the flavor of fig but I’m definitely really just getting brown sugar.

I have an ounce of it so I will give it another shot soon, I did not get any of the fig pieces in my infuser but I’m not sure that really matters. In my mind it does.

Today is my dad’s birthday, and as tradition dictates I baked a cake! I love baking but I usually try to keep my cakes simple. Well, not this year! My dad said he wanted “something fruity” so as tempted as I was to make a fruitcake just for laughs I went with a blueberry lemon theme.

The base cake was a fluffy white cake, much less sweet than your usual cake, studded with blueberries. In the middle was a blueberry mousse, the frosting was lemon cream cheese and it was topped with more mousse and candied lemon peels. All from scratch!

And because 4 components weren’t enough apparently I also made a sorbet on the side. Using… this tea! Water, sugar, vanilla, lemon juice and this tea simmered for 15 minutes, then chilled and poured into an ice cream machine.

So this note isn’t really that centered on the tea (because CAKE) but the sorbet came out SO GOOD. The blueberry was strong, you’d swear there were fresh blueberries in there somehow, and of course EG is great in any cold form. All in all, a huge success! Worth the 5+ hours of work the total ensemble took.

Probably should have used more pearls for my first brewing, but was worried of using too many. Oh well. Nice flavor and perfume. Will definitely be trying this again with more pearls. Lovely tea.

I picked this one up from the Ovation liquidation sale for its potential as a cold brew in the summertime. Most of my favorite iced teas (for example Cantaloupe & Cream or Green Chestnut) are way too pricey to make in bulk, and while I have a few that I like to make pitchers of I enjoy variety. And with 8 ounces of this one I think it will last quite a while!

This is nice iced, the pineapple is in the forefront and the blueberry a nice burst at the end of the sip. I think I’m going to leave off a rating until it’s hot and really iced tea season, I can see this being so refreshing during the warmer months… especially with a splash of coconut sake.

For some reason I am putting off making a tasting note for this. I’m not sure why, I enjoyed it! I guess I’m having trouble coming up with a not boring description for it. You’d think this tea would be all over the place because of the ingredient list, but it’s actually quite simple and mellow. It’s a bit fruity (I tasted mostly peach, perhaps a hint of mango but they blend together really well) and only a tad floral—rose mainly, I didn’t get any lavender. I was worried this blend would be overwhelming but it’s a bit underwhelming I think. I braced for strange flavors, but it was just… average. In flavor profile I mean, the tea itself is of nice quality. The black base stood up really well to all the flavors thrown in there, and was definitely not overtaken by any of them. I think I’m going to have to revisit this tea when I am in a different mood and can appreciate it better, since it seems like something I’d really love. I kind of want to add coconut though, somehow I feel like it would go very well!

I got this awhile back from TeaEqualsBliss. Thank you very much. There is good sized pieces and chunks of fruit. This smells like strawberry and green tea. Tastes like strawberry with abit of mango slight pineapple and green tea tea. I added some sugar. This is pretty good. I have only have,had one cup so far. May try iced next time.

I’m in a bit of a tea funk today. I just can’t decide what I want to drink, nothing seems to be hitting me. However, I was determined to find something—if I get out of the habit of drinking tea every day I find it kind of hard to get back on the horse. So I decided to just go for it and put on water without deciding on a tea. My teapot doesn’t whistle when the water is ready so I have to time it, not the best idea looking back because I ended up with only a few seconds left, frantically digging through my sample bin in search of something. I have well over 100 different teas in there to try but I seriously couldn’t pick out any one that screamed “try me” so I went with a flavor combo I knew I’d love—caramel, chocolate, and hazelnut. This is from my box from LiberTEAS and I’ve actually been meaning to try it for about a week so it seemed like the perfect fit.

This smells a lot like Florence, with a hint of caramel. The dominant flavor for me seems to be chocolate, with the caramel and hazelnut about even. There’s a bit of bitterness as others have noted, but it’s not overpowering and I can definitely handle it. Definitely an enjoyable cup, but I do wish there was less chocolate—Caramel Praline in my mind is just caramel and nuts, and as it is this blend is just a bit too similar to Florence for me. Still glad I had a chance to try it out and it got me back in a “tea mood!”

Ovation teas really has an insane amount of flavor combinations, and it makes it so hard to choose, especially since you can’t order samples. It’s probably because they apparently blend each tea to order, so they don’t make small amounts, but it would be nice if they had some of their standard teas available for samples. But plenty of other companies don’t offer samples either. I had a groupon-style deal for this company and had an impossible time trying to decide what teas to get from their blends, and whether I should go for the custom blend, but ultimately I decided to try a custom blend another time. Blending to order probably means I should wait for the flavors to meld a bit more before trying them, but it’s been about a week since they’ve been blended so I’m going to give them a first try now.

The smell of the dry leaf on this one is great. I get a lot of chocolate, caramel, and nuttiness. Definite yum. It brewed up fairly light in color, and I’m afraid I might have made it a bit weak… I don’t make tea in my small teapot at home all that frequently, and I think I might have overfilled it. Anyway, the aroma of the steeped tea has much less chocolate but more caramel nuttiness, along with a bit of roastiness that almost reminds me of a dark oolong.

The flavor is a little weak, certainly my fault, but what’s there is nice. It’s nutty, chocolatey, and caramelly, with a pretty pleasant black tea backing it up. The nuts are actually hazelnuts (and there are big halves of them in the blend), so it ends up tasting kind of like a caramelly Florence. A good combo! It does seem like there is a hint of bitterness, which is probably coming from the Assam in the base (I’m pretty sure all their black bases are an Assam/Ceylon blend), which isn’t my favorite, but I have been able to make it work in their teas before. I am interested to try this one in another couple of weeks under more normal circumstances and after the flavors have “matured” some more.

Found one teaspoon of a very old sample – five years old! Made it anyway. With the kitchen renovation, youngest and I are trying to sip down a ton of samples and older tea so it will be less cluttered when we reorganize once the cabinets are up again.

I made two steeps and in spite of the age this was still pretty tasty. Fig is awesome. Some fruits add a bright flavor, or a tart flavor, but fig is deep and rich.

Whee! I got new tea in the mail from SimplyJenW today! I couldn’t wait to try this one, so we served it at tea party just an hour after it arrived.

The dry leaves smelled AWESOME! I love that scent. The tea smells sweet and the fig adds a wonderful note that is both a high fruity note but is warm at the same time. I really, really like this! No additions, and I really must finish the pot so I can stop sitting here sniffing it and move on to other things! No additions…this is too good just as it is.

Thank you, Jen!

Hmm. This one is puzzling. I am on my second pot of this, and I really don’t know what to think of it. When I think of figs, I think of something sweet like raisins. Brown sugar, well, I think it should be light in a mapley-type flavor but not quite there. The tea itself smells pretty good, and I do imagine there is some difference between this and the tea base on its own, but I really am not getting much in the way of flavor. Maybe I am just looking for the wrong flavors? I think the other problem is that the way the flavors play with the tea base reminds me of the Metro tea base I don’t like. It is smooth with no bitterness, and really might appeal to someone else. All of this is just my personal take on the tea, but I know I will not be reordering or remaking this one.

Now that I made it sound so good, does anyone want a sample? ;)

Tastes unlike Earl Grey and also unlike blueberries but isn’t bad – a little bitterish.

This is a little bit too lemon for me, but the raspberry is very nice! I kinda wish I’d cold-brewed it for Kelly, because this is basically his jam. Gonna resteep it later and see how that goes.

Sample from Sil, thanks Sil!

This one got away from me for a minute and it is strong. I’m not getting too much chocolate flavour in the first steep, only in the aftertaste and in the aroma of the liquor. The aftertaste is really quite nice, chocolate and orange.

Really strong base. If it weren’t for the aftertaste I’d think I’m drinking a strong cup or Orange Pekoe. I know that sounds like maybe I have amazing taste memory. I don’t. It’s just that I used to drink a lot of Orange Pekoe. Ok, I used to drink only Orange Pekoe. I never bothered to try other teas, to me tea was tea so just pick up the giant box of Tetley Orange Pekoe and I was set. Ignorant fool, huh?

2nd steep is much nicer. Still no chocolate but easier to drink, lot less strong.

Parameters: 1 perfect measure, 8 oz water just off boiling. 3 minutes. Same temp. and time for 2nd steep.