Shibui Leaf Tea

So, I’ve spent this past week in Winnipeg (though I’m home now) – it was a bit of a “workcation” since I spent about half the trip visiting with my mom and youngest sibling, who planned their summer vacation around when I’d be in the city and drove in from Saskatchewan in order to spend some time with me, and working in the five DAVIDsTEA locations within the city to get a feel of how the average day in a Winnipeg DT is different from the average day in a Montreal DT…

This tea was actually consumed in Montreal though – at the airport, while I waited to fly out! I’ve only been on a plane a few times and only once by myself (when I moved to Montreal) so I was very anxious about flying on my own and I arrived at the airport VERY early in order to ensure that everything went smoothly. Well, it went quite smoothly and I found myself with three and a half hours to kill after clearing security. Oops!

So I had some tea at basically every place in the airport that served it – the first one being this Moroccan Mint. It was actually served to me at a pizza place, but they had the tea on display on their front counter and I could see that this was the brand they were stocking. I’ve never actually heard of this brand before, so I was curious. Moroccan Mint was a safe choice; it’s pretty hard to mess up green tea and mint. It was a nice cup for a bagged tea, and the mint was soothing and did a lot to help calm my preflight nerves. It was that sort of muddy, herbaceous mint (kind of a European mint) over the really crisp menthol heavy USA mint – but that’s not bad, just different from a lot of what you see from North American companies. Green tea was a little astringent, but minimally so.

For airport tea, I was a pretty happy customer.

www.TastetheTea.co.uk

I’ve had bad experiences with blueberry blends. Like really, really bad. Shudder-inducing bad. Yet, this one went down easy! The steeped aroma is like a very sweet, sugary blueberry, but the flavour is underwhelming (not bad, just not special). The combination of flavours (carmael and fruit) seemed jarring against one another. It just wasn’t my thing… Until I iced it. The sweet caramel hints combined with the fruitiness in a smoother way, whilst the rose became more apparent.
Enjoyed: Iced, after work when the apartment felt hot and stuffy.

For more on tea: www.TastetheTea.co.uk

Whilst the smell on this one isn’t overly appealing, the taste is well crafted to replicate the flavour of milk chocolate orange perfectly, making it an enjoyable cup with combined citric and creamy notes.