Tamborine Tea

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this tea! My absolute favourite black. Smoky, but not overpowering and with a richness underneath that makes it a pleasure to drink any time of day (although earlier is better) & especially in winter.
I have been trying to identify what the underlying flavours are, because they’re very subtle – there’s red wine, berries, mushrooms and something umami. Altogether heavenly!
In case of a nuclear holocaust, this & my peppermint tea would be the first into the fallout shelter…

What a great combination! Raspberries need to be a bit tangy to taste good in my opinion, so the lime does a good job. I think that more tea companies should be putting this flavour combination in their tea.
It’s on a black tea base, which you can taste well, so it’s fairly well balanced.
Out of all the flavours, I find that the lime flavour comes through the strongest, and is on the edge of being too strong. I don’t mind that but I’d be interested to try it with more raspberry and less lime to see what it’s like.
I find that this tastes good any time I’ve made it, but it is possible to over-brew it.
I need to experiment to find the best brewing time and technique, so if and when I do that, I’ll add another tasting note.

Very subtle vanilla flavor, as you expect when it is all natural. You can really feel that this tea is based on quality. Not that artificial flavored vanilla teas you often get. Plus Plus Plus for this tea, it is better for each cup.

Backlogging.

I’ve been wearing perfumes featuring quite prominent vanilla notes lately. (Reviewing perfumes is not unlike reviewing teas, weirdly enough, though I still find it easier to write multiple paragraphs about tea. ;-) The best of these makes me want to drink something with that same quality of lovely, smooth vanilla, which led me to finally trying out this tea.

sigh What a let-down. I’ve never yet found a vanilla-flavoured tea that remotely touches the places that I want it to go – a place that the perfumes seem to find with ease – and this one is probably the most disappointing of all. I really expected this to at least smell something like vanilla even if the taste wasn’t there. Nup. The vanilla was barely present in either the taste or the aroma.

The tea used for the base was a very uninspiring, second-rate green: one of those teas that you wish was overpowered by the flavouring so that you don’t have to endure the taste of the tea itself.

I’m beginning to think that the sort of vanilla tea I want just doesn’t exist. I really hope I’m wrong, because I still have a bunch of vanilla-based perfume samples to get through and they keep making my mouth water!

There’s nothing really wrong with this tea. It’s a perfectly adequate peppermint green tea. The effect of the rose petals on the taste is negligible.

Apart from that, there’s not really a lot to say about this tea, which is its main problem: it’s not very memorable and really pretty dull. I have more than one other peppermint blend in my tea cupboard that easily out-does this one.

The leaves look more likely to be a Chinese green rather than a Japanese, I’d guess, but I could be wrong. The flavour of the tea isn’t a major issue, though, since the orange dominates pretty much everything I’m tasting here. I would have liked this to be just a teensy bit sweeter, but it’s certainly not as sharp as the lemon and lime flavoured green teas I’ve tried before. That’s definitely orange I’m tasting in this, rather than a more generic citrus flavour.

This really isn’t bad at all; it’s just mainly not the tea I was really in the mood for this afternoon so it’s pleasing me less than it probably would on some other day. I think it would be worth trying with a little honey added next time. I’ll keep experimenting with it.

resurfaces

I haven’t posted any tea reviews for a couple of weeks because… I haven’t been drinking much tea. hangs head in shame

Anyway, I’m back home now, and drinking tea again, so… here we go!

This is one of the teas I got when I was in Queensland. It tastes like… green tea with dill. g

Actually, it’s pretty good. It has that aniseed/licorice sort of edge to it that you’d expect if you’re familiar with the flavour of dill, plus something lurking around the edge that’s almost minty. The dill flavour doesn’t overpower the flavour of the tea because they’ve used the seeds instead of the plant – definitely a good move, since the flavour of the seeds is softer and more subtle.

All in all, this tea balances out the competing flavours nicely. I’ll definitely be drinking more of this.

I’m staying with my parents for the next couple of weeks. Since I’m nearly 1000km away from my usual haunts and I don’t know this area very well, just about every place I go is a new discovery. Today I went to a large weekend market that my father wanted to check out. Most of the stalls didn’t interest me much, until I spotted: tea! My parents watched, bemused, as I sorted through the teas on offer and ended up with nine little tins.

“No one buys that many teas at once!” said my mother.

“Oh, I know a few people who would,” I assured her, thinking of steepster. g

In the end, they offered to take me to the town of Tamborine, where Tamborine Teas is based, later in the week, so I may end up with a few more of their teas by the time I go home again. (As it is, I’ll be going home with more teas in my bag than when I arrived, which surprises me – though probably it shouldn’t. g)

This is a mix of oolong and green tea, with a little added spearmint and safflowers. It’s really not bad at all. The spearmint is there, but it doesn’t dominate the flavour as much as I expected. It provides more a refreshing edge to the tea and let the flavours of the tea come through. It reminds me a bit of Moroccan Mint, though more oolong-y (is that a word?) than green.

I liked this tea quite a lot, and now I’m really looking forward to trying the other teas I got from Tamborine Teas.