Red Rose

I don’t like tea that much . But this was pretty good I would definitely recommend it. Especially if your sick.

2/6/14 Evening cup. 2 teabags/12oz/180F/3min. Some days, all you want to do is throw a bag on a string into a cup of water and microwave it. This is a peach flavored tea for those days. I get the peach, but not the cobbler. It probably has hibiscus in it. At this moment on this day, it’s a good cup of tea.

caveats: other people on other days in other moments may not show this tea well.

This is my every day tea, and has been since I was young. I love it!

My go-to grocery store tea bag tea. Need a huge jug of iced tea for a picnic of non-tea-people? Red Rose to the rescue! Need half a cup of “strong black tea” for a recipe? Red Rose to the rescue! Need cold wet teabags to put on my eyes when hungover? Red Rose to the rescue! Need an acceptable basic black teabag for any purpose? Red Rose is probably the answer.

Plus, the big box comes with a cute little collectible figurine in it! Find a rare one, and an avid collecter will take it off your hands in a heartbeat, making each box a fun little “will this pay for itself” lottery.

Although I enjoy tea in both loose and bagged forms, I never thought I would buy Red Rose. I tried the regular Red Rose before, and it was pretty bad. Colored hot water seems to be as descriptive as I can get. Well, when I saw the Canadian Breakfast version at the supermarket, the name kinda grabbed my interest and I thought I should try it. When I opened the package, I was actually surprised with the amount of tea in each bag, and I liked that because I like my bagged teas to be strong. After it finished steeping, the colour of the liquor was a dark red, and it seemed only promising. After I added milk and sugar as I always do with bagged teas, I took a sip and was met with nothing but disappointment. The flavour is seriously lacking in strength, and whatever you can still taste is pretty one-dimensional. It was a sad letdown. It ain’t a Canadian Breakfast, but more like a watered-down English Breakfast.

Despite the packaging, which will put you under the assumption almost instantly that this will be a very bad and low quality tea, it’s quite the opposite for me. The very vibrant orange flavor coupled with the delicious cardamon and cinnamon really will make you wish you were watching the sun setting on a warm summer day. Perfect for setting the mood for that time of day I’d imagine. Really liked this tea overall, it smells really good too xP

You know that tea you get because it’s familiar and you don’t have to think about how long to steep it or how hot the water has to be and all that good jazz? Well, Red Rose Original is that tea for me. I can’t mess it up no matter how hard I try and it makes me feel good.

I grew up with my grandma drinking Red Rose, she collected the figurines and would always make a pot when I was growing up, I never drank it but she loved it, when my grandma passed a few years ago, I picked up a box of Red Rose for nostaliga’s sake. Lo and behold, my love affair begin.

Red Rose original is really nothing special, it’s your basic bagged black tea that you get at the grocery store. It’s comparable to a Lipton and that kind of thing.

HOWEVER, it is my favorite tea, I always buy new teas but find myself going back to my reliable Red Rose, I boil my water throw a tea bag and a slice of lemon into the mug, pour hot water over it and let it steep for who knows how long, mostly 5 minutes, and you’re good to go.

In conclusion: It’s a pretty average black tea that for me is the best. It’s familiar, it’s delicious and it’s a big hug in a cup.

I think I have been trying to drink down some of my teas and I have been hitting my teabags really hard recently.

It is important, even with teabags, to maintain a proper water temperature to steep times to any additives you put in or else your tea just won’t taste the way you remember it tasting. I apparently have not been heating my water to boiling and the quality of even this tea suffered. Bad me for being impatient.

I don’t think I’ll be picking up this tea again, but it was pretty tasty for a lemon tea. Definitely worth a try if you think that you are stuck in a rut with your teas.

Yeah. I really don’t like this one as much as the caramel one. I think the next time I have it I’m going to double bag it and then try it sweetened over ice and see how it is. If I don’t wait until late at night then it won’t be too cold and I might have a new drink to take to work.

So, I was drinking this the other day and I gave the cup to my mom to try and I almost lost my tea. Dad thought that was hysterical of course since she already had a cup of tea next to her.

She thought it would taste better with some milk in it, so I tried it with milk. It tastes exactly like a lemon cream puff. Not as good as the caramel tea, but still a pretty good tea. I’ll probably finish the box without too much thought to it because I’ll be sharing it with my mom.

Since I liked the Creme Caramel so much and my tea basket is slowly dwindling, I decided to pick up a box of the Lemon Chiffon tea to try. Now, I normally don’t like lemon in tea very much, so I am not expecting much out of this.

My mouth was watering before the water even heated up because of how this teabag smelled. It was like I had just taken a sheet of lemon bars out of the oven. Sadly, once you get the tea brewed the smell goes away. Very sad. Tea companies really need to figure out how to get the dry leaf to smell like the prepared tea when they smell that good.

Plain the tea was underwhelming. It had a nice smooth base and it just tasted like you squeezed a lemon into it. While some people may appreciate that, it is just not my cup of tea. (puns, love them)

So I put in two teaspoons of sugar and tried again. Ah! This is what I was hoping for. You can still taste the tea, but the flavor has been transformed from a fresh squeezed lemon to a cake-like lemon bar. The kind where they have sugar on the bottom of the bar and the filling is so gooey it is almost like lemon pudding instead of cake? It is that sort of bar and it was one of my favorite treats in college.

I prefer the caramel creme over the lemon, but this is pretty good as long as I remember the sugar.

Best of all, this one is decaf so I’ll get to share it with my mom. I am sure she will love it.

(Also, this is my 500th tea note!)

Good morning—-absolutely nothing to say other than sounding a barbaric YAWP! This is banana season at work under normal circumstances; even more so trying to open the school year sensibly and safely. So I need no-frills tea I can neglect, abuse, guzzle, ice down, mismanage, steep with my eyes closed, and forget in the fridge for three days. This is it. Looking forward to the good stuff later!

Warm enough for cold tea! I sun-steeped this yesterday with about 4 leaves from our new potted applemint plant (all I could spare without denuding it). Makes a smooth and non-acidic chilled tea. You have to squint and wrinkle up your nose and think really hard to catch any of the applemint, but hopefully, that’ll resolve itself as I have more leaves to spare.

There are days—-most of you have been having them lately, too—-when refinement and subtlety and tenderly monitored steep times just don’t matter. And you get so tired and chilled that the first warm liquid hitting your dry throat and empty stomach is liquid ambrosia, brand notwithstanding.

One little bag of Red Rose did that on a beastly cold afternoon with office doors swinging open while they moved equipment in and out. I wouldn’t have preferred any other tea in the world at that moment.

The need for easy tea continues as I run back to the farm to help Dad deal with Mom’s things. So glad y’all introduced me to this one. Strong enough to wake you, smooth and a little nondescript so as not to trouble you.
Looking forward to a quality tea morning soon.

Found some locally, relatively inexpensive. With life and all as it is, I justified it as “needing some comfort tea that I can just tuck in my purse and go with.”

Nice smooth “just tea.” Sometimes we all need that. Just a cuppa.

It may be flavor inflation because it’s my put-your-feet-up tea after an extremely long travel day, but this is delicious. I need to get me a box for general pantry purposes. I need more tea. Yeah.

This is so ubiquitously available in other parts of the world, I have felt a need to try it just so I can say I did. Thanks to Spencer, I have now been initiated.

And pleasantly so. Gave it a good long Monday morning I-don’t-wanna-deal-with-the-world steep. Side by side with a bag of Lipton, I’d say it’s a bit smoother, a scootch less acidic. Tried this cup straight up, but a little milk would be a nice accompaniment.

Though it isn’t easy to find in this part of the Midwest, it gets a vote here for “good pantry tea.” Hope yours is stocked well.

I finished this one up yesterday with my breakfast. Sadly, I did not make any more iced tea out of this, but it was delicious while it lasted.

And now we have caught up to real time. I normally drink this with milk and sugar, but I now only have it with sugar. The caramel and creme still come out nicely. Because I am using less sugar now (one to two level spoonfuls as opposed to heaping spoonfuls), I get the creamy mouthfeel and a nice caramel finish.

I only have it with milk when I want it to taste more heavy cream and desert-y.

Backlog #2: Creme Caramel has to be my favorite tea at the moment. Not too sweet and not too boring. I tried this one iced because I really wanted to drink this tea, but I didn’t want a hot tea because it was so hot and humid the other day. I put three spoonfuls of sugar with a double strength cup of tea.

It was so refreshing! I have three more teabags left and I am so tempted to make a gallon of iced tea out of it, but I’m afraid my family would drink it up before me. I must have sharing issues.

Note to self: Don’t drink tea while listening to the Young Turks.

I had to pick up some black tea that wasn’t an Earl Grey. Don’t get me wrong, I love Earl Grey. I just got tired of it. I am cutting down on my milk and sugar on it though. One spoonful of sugar and just a little splash of milk. Still lovely and creamy with just a touch of sweet that helps the caramel comes out.

And there goes the last of the box. Very satisfying! I’m sad that it is gone though, but maybe now I can explore my tea basket and see what I still have in there.