Savoy Tea Co

This green tea blend with a mate’ kick is very refreshing on a hot summer morning, and as mentioned previously, you don’t notice the ginseng flavor much. Would try some cold, but I keep drinking it up before any makes it to the fridge. Larger purchase predicted. Oh, shoot—that means a trip back to the tea shop. What a tragedy :)

Curiosity prompted the purchase of this sample rather than taste preferences; ginseng is traditionally too “rooty” to be very pleasant.

It’s a pleasure to be mistaken in this case—this is a nifty little combo with enough green tea to counteract the ginseng bark-i-ness. Just tastes fresh. The mate’ is doing something in the bass line as well, though I’m at a loss for an accurate flavor adjective.

At any rate, nicely done and a good eyes-open tea for those of you who really don’t like the dark, deep, builders’ blends.

I always approach floral teas cautiously; I’m not a perfume-y person and so many of them taste like cheap cologne (sorry, flower lovers). But this, a tastelet from a work friend who ran to our favorite little shop in NW Arkansas, is nothing to be afraid of.

The flavors run as advertised. Black tea—mild; lavender—plenty; jasmine—mild to minor, but that’s OK by me; natural flavors—I’m catching some vanilla behind it all.

One for milk and sugar and china cups and big hats and feather boas and stuffed animals.

If you haven’t, today you might say a prayer for the little girls in Moore, Oklahoma, who are without a “lovey” to hug. When I think where we were—physically and emotionally—24 hours post-storm, my heart hurts for those families.

I have a kind of fascination with the idea of matching rooibos up with different flavors. It’s as if I’m watching a favorite bachelor dating various women and laying bets as to which one he’ll marry. This combination looked interesting so I decided to give it a try.

It smelled good during it’s five minute steep, though my big sis’s observation that rooibos tends to crumble into tiny fragments and find it’s way out of the tea strainer and into the cup was sadly evident. I really ought to pour this stuff through a coffee filter but I’m too lazy. Oh well, ce la vie…

This blend is rather nice, actually. The lavender goes well with the rooibos and the additional coconut flavor rounds it out and gives it a little something. There’s a hint of caramelized flavor as well, as if the coconut were toasted. I’m pretty sure this one would be lovely with cream or coconut milk and sugar, but it stands alone quite nicely. I’ll look forward to more of this in the future.

But next time I brew this, I’ll be using a darn coffee filter.

Posted an hour ago on FB, sharing here for your amusement:

Career tip: I strongly advise against taking up cat juggling, particularly after the age of 40. You’ll likely end up sitting woefully balancing a bag of frozen chicken noodles on your sprained foot and picking sawdust out of your backside.

I’ll leave the highly unglamorous details to your imagination. A tango it wasn’t.

Pride is bruised as much as the tootsie. I needed something sweet to make it all better. Cocoa with orange, bag in.

Informal inventory of my decaf stuff reveals I’m way overstocked on rooibos/chocolate and rooibos/vanilla blends. Not a problem; drinking up the inequity will hurt no feelings here.

This particular blend smells luscious. (Yankee Candle, are you listening?) Thick, rich chocolate orange. Double up on the teaspoons, drop in a few extra cocoa nibs, walk away for 10 minutes…dessert!

This isn’t currently on the Savoy Tea website; it can’t have been that long since we were there…picked this up…uh, in September-ish?

It’s a nice blend of chocolate-orange; more orange than chocolate after a (recommended) monster steep time of 9 minutes. Rich and thick.

Savoy Pomegranate Grape Green

One thing I’ll say for this tea, it does smell grape-y. Like green grapes, very distinctively. Yeah, I know, the first ingredient in the name is Pomegranate, but that’s not really the flavor I get from it. To me, it
tastes a little like green tea and a lot like grapes.

A better tea snob than I might be able to distinguish the various dried fruits and elements. I’m nowhere near that discerning, but can say it’s a pleasant tea to start my day, mild and amiable. With pomegranates, red currents and raspberries on the ingredient list, I would expect this to be a bit tart. Instead, they blend together to give the whole thing an underlying sweetness.

It’s an unusual tea, not one I would choose to have every day. It isn’t that I OBJECT to it’s grape-y goodness. The flavor is amiable enough, but grapes don’t readily come to mind when I’m thinking of tea. There are times when this flavor is just not something I’m craving at teatime.

But by golly, if I’m in the mood for something grape-y, this is definitely my go to. It’s good hot or cold and stands alone just fine without any sweeter, an unusual quality in a fruity tea like this one.

I chatted with one of the owners at the Savoy Tea Co store about cold brewing and this came highly recommended. “It gets better the longer it brews,” he said. Since I like my teas cold brewed and am apt to leave the jar steeping in the fridge till I get around to drinking it, (which can sometimes be as long as a few days) this sounded like my kind of tea. I put a generous measure in a quart jar of water and tried it after a few hours. It smelled great, very tropical and fruity. Since I’m allergic to pineapple, it’s nice to have a tropical blend without this ingredient for a change.

This tea is very mango-ey. Enough to stand alone as a good, solid, fruity tea. I’m sure it would be great with coconut milk and sweetener (I doubt a splash of rum would hurt it any either), but it’s a tea that doesn’t need “help” to be good, which is the sort I’m most inclined to drink. All by itself this is pleasantly fruity and just the thing if you like mangoes (If you hate mangoes, maybe not so much.) Since the weather here is a bit wintry, I’ve taken a few cups of this cold brew out of the fridge and heated it in the microwave, and can say it’s quite good warm too.

There’s supposed to be rooibos in this one, but I’m not tasting it. I’m not sure I mind, though. The fact that a blend contains rooibos and I can taste ANYTHING ELSE seems a tentative step in the right direction… :)

Good stuff, especially for those of us in the middle of the country experiencing winter and beginning to tire of cold weather. It’s making me dream of tropical vacations.

I think Jamaica in the moonlight. . .

I decided to try this on Christmas day. It tastes. . .well. . . it tastes like. . . Rooibos. . .sigh. And maybe it should but I’m growing bored with rooibos blends. Regardless of how they are made, they all seem to be tasting more or less the same to me lately. I think the roibos tends to overpower every ingredient added.

This has vanilla, almond, and walnut added, but all I seem to notice is rooibos. So I tried it with coconut milk and sweetener and it’s a lovely dessert tea . . . Just like all the other rooibos combinations.

I want to say this tastes like cookies but it doesn’t. It tastes like rooibos and vanilla. I’m not catching any of the almond or walnut at all. It’s nice as a dessert tea and amiable enough if you like rooibos and don’t mind pouring it through a coffee filter to get all the tiny bits out of it. As far as cookies, though, I think they missed the mark.

This is a quirky, odd duck of a black/rooibos blend. But oddly, the apple fits with the rooibos which fits with the chocolate; it just leaves you a little pleasantly puzzled. Like those days when you discover a plaid jacket that doesn’t exactly not go with some pinstriped pants and you decide to take a fashion risk and then wonder all day if they really match or not. (Or maybe that’s just me :)

Rooibos fans will like this, I think.

More than really needed for one cup, but not enough for two…aw, heck, let’s just throw it all in and see what happens.

Figured an attitude like that would get me a bitter cup of citrus flavored mud, but with a 4 minute steep, we’ve got a nice dark toasty oolong with pleasant “show me your citrus peels” flavor. Sheldon would approve, even if it isn’t tangerine.

Work buddy surprised me with half a sample packet of this. She says it takes a little sugar well, but I had it straight.

The orange flavor trumps the oolong personality, but it’s pleasant stuff. Nice pithy-rindy-peely orange flavor, not tart or fakey.

Drinking this today, cold brewed from the fridge with nothing added. It is just awesome this way. I liked it well enough warm, but cold…well, it looks like I’ve found a new favorite. No temptation to add anything. It is pleasant, refreshing, just wonderful.

Unless you hate cardamom. Not a problem for me. I love cardamom, oranges, spices, everything in it. MMMMMM.

I used to do a lot of whole grain baking. The flour I used featured a recipe on the label for orange cardamom cookies. It’s one of those recipes I always intended to try and never got around to but it sounded good. I always imagined it would taste like . . . Well . . . Like this tea.

This is good. Nice mild orange flavor with no nasty acidity, pleasant cardamom, and a hint of vanilla. My only complaint is I am strongly tempted to add cream and sweetener, cause I know they’d be awesome.

I thought this was a new-to-me sample from Michelle. Evidently, so says my tealog, I tried this 11 years ago. Good grief. I can’t even remember everything I’ve done since breakfast.

However, since breakfast, I do know I have enjoyed another tumbler of this authentically chocolate tea and I’m loving it. Real cacao shells, and while I’m not exactly picking up vanilla separately, it makes the blend sweet and creamy enough to cover that whang-y mate flavor that I’m not enamored with.

The fact that this blend has stayed in the Savoy lineup is further evidence of its tastiness. On my short list next time we visit the storefront!

Sipdown, easy steep, pleasantly chocolatey—-reminds me of a very “lite” chocolate Zinger. Mate’, do your stuff—-the to-do list has already beaten me today and my eyes aren’t even open.

The chocolate-vanilla-mate balance is even; it’s pleasantly drinkable without additional milk or sugar, but if you’re hoping for the sugar buzz of a buttercream truffle or a glop of Pillsbury fudge frosting … not quite.

Eat an almond, then go try something flavored with almond extract. They’re both nice, but they aren’t the same. The scent of this tea is kind of a parallel to this phenomenon. I like pistachio nuts and I like this extract but it’s a different animal, more like someone’s fantasy of what pistachio ought to taste like than the real deal.

This tea has a lovely scent, but no real flavor. It would make a lovely bubble bath or extract for cookies (where all that sugar would no doubt “bring out” the flavor), but I take my tea without cream or sugar most of the time and expect it to stand on it’s own. It does not. As a stand alone tea, it lacks something and doesn’t really meet my standards. I love the fragrance that comes out of the bag when I open it, but this tea always disappoints me.

Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

Now if you like a dessert tea with cream and sugar, you’re in luck. These “bring out” the flavor. Indeed, I’ll likely be finishing this batch that way, and will no doubt enjoy every drop. However, I probably won’t be buying it again because I cannot afford the calories necessary to make this tea worth my time.

Your mileage may vary. J

Cheating is such an ugly word, so let’s just say we caught Savoy in an act of creative relabeling. You know how when you shuffle the basket of half-packets just so, sometimes one bubbles up to the top you haven’t seen for a while? And when it bubbles right next to the one labeled “Misty Morning” and you notice the ingredient lists are identical, well…

Not that it’s an issue with something this tasty. Orange, almond, peppercorns, a little sweet vanilla flavoring. It’s all good, no matter what’s on the package.

After a lovely week of downtime, I’m wrestling with a case of post-holiday, here-comes-January-and-taxes, darn-I’ve-gotta-take-down-the-tree, my-favorite-jeans-don’t-fit blues. Seasonal depression breathing down my neck like cold orc shadows.

In an attempt to keep from drowning my glums in the last of the Christmas candy in one gnarf, I made myself the tastiest tea I currently have to hand. I haven’t had marzipan in years, but this is what I think it tasted like. The orange-almond-vanilla combo in this is so sweet and confectionary, it’s a good dessert substitute.

A sample-sized packet was not enough of this!

Manomanomanoman, oh, man…I wish I had Smell-O-Net so you could get a whiff of this, dry. The smooth, marzipanny almond is so rich it’ll make your eyes roll back in your head. I want a candle that smells like this. I want pillows that smell like this.

The first fresh cup was fabulous—tasted every bit as good at it smelled. Orange and almond predominate, with the rest of the godies serving as backup singers (doo-wop!)

Second steep is still smooth; more almond, less orange, and oh, wow—there’s some pretty decent green tea under there!

Unfortunately, this isn’t on the Savoy website—must have been an in-store holiday-only treat. Locals, grab it while you can ;)

I’ve reviewed this multiple times and, averaged out, they’re all pretty much the same: it’s a good, fancy-pants tea with a little mild cocoa and honey flavor, but not nearly strong enough for my morning wake-up needs. One expects something with a name like Black Dragon to roar and smoke and whap you with its tail. This one just whimpers and crawls back into its cave.

The problem with pearl teas is that you never come out with the right number at the end of the packet. So I popped in a Mandala Black Pearl and sailed the door with a cup of co-smoke-coa.