Tea Forte

Dude. I keep forgetting I have this tea.
I normally look at the teas that are organized in the little bucket stuff on my bookshelf, I keep forgetting that I actually have tins of teas just over to the right! Dang.
Ahh well. herbals for the night. It’s 11:30 and I’ve got stuff to do and I’ll need to be able to go to sleep tonight :)

A decent tea. Rooibos and peppermint blend. Can totally taste the citrus.
There’s a thing in this tea though that’s not necessarily working for me though. Like it’s great but… there’s an ingredient in there that just throws it off.

More concentration tea!
Took a study break because my friend texted me and FREAKIN COLIN MORGAN THOUGH. THOSE PHOTOS.
Okay.
Yeah.
Relaxation tea.
Colin Morgan’s beautiful face right there on my screen. Like how can one man possess so much unf.
Seriously. My entire blog right now is just his face because hAVE YOU SEEN IT.

Hahha okay bUT TEA. TEA IS GOOD. I got the trio set thing from Tea Forté from my sister and this one is pretty good! Very similar to Foxtrot by Adagio, minus the chamomile, add the citrus. It’s nice :)

Subtle and clean. The lemon does not overpower the lavendar. Well balanced with lavender notes on the initial taste and lemon essence on the finish. However, not as bold as I had hoped for. Would prefer more of a punch from the lavendar.

1/21/14 PM Decaf. This is a mixed brew – the Tea Forte bag for the flavour, and a bag of Bigelow decaf green tea to add body and let me brew a large mug. The predominant aroma is of cinnamon with dried apple undertones. The cinnamon and apple carry well into the tea, and the rooibos works well them. As I suspected, the Harvest Apple tea is more then a match for the green tea, making the mixed brew a great way to extend this tea. I sweetened this with honey.

Caveats: the Tea Forte tea bag is so utterly kawaii that I doubt my judgment of this tea can be trusted. I am crushed by the cute.

1 “single steep” sachet for 300mL water @100C, steeped four minutes, drunk bare.

This is re-packaged as “Reflect Vanilla Black Tea” in a collection of single steep packets sold in Chapters/Indigo stores in Canada. I bought such a box this evening. So far, the Lemongrass Ginger is great; the “Revitalize Cherry Black Tea” is the equivalent of drinking melted cough drops; now it’s Reflect’s turn.

I can really smell the coconut, like in DavidsTea Buttered Rum. My study smells lovely, in fact; vanilla and coconut go well together. In a candle, say, or soap. They’re not going well with what tastes like low grade astringent Ceylon. The entire tea is soapy: taste and mouthfeel, probably from the coconut. Like the Revitalize Cherry before it, this is, for me, undrinkable.

This is a nice earl grey, nothing special. It’s slightly malty, slightly citrusy, and a nice medium base, with no complexity that I could detect.

Travelling Tea Box C

Heavy on the cinnamon! Sweet, slightly artificial tasting. I could discern some peach and rhubarb, but not as distinctively as I wanted. Some hibiscus, but not as much as I was worried about. An ok fruity blend, but nothing spectacular.

I like this tea a lot! And not just because the company is located in the town I was born in. It’s very citrusy and smooth. Some teas are very unforgiving when you over steep them. I HATE bitterness. So the first cup I did my usual 4 min. It was good but almost too….pretty tasting. Don’t know how else to explain it. The cornflowers maybe? Perhaps someone could leave a comment that would shed some light on things. Anyway, the next cup I left for 5 min…..Really good! I may even try for a bit longer next cup. There’s doesn’t seem to be any need to worry about bitterness with this tea. Just full, rich earl grey goodness :)

This has been in my box from Sil for awhile, & I brewed it tonight to get another sipdown in for the day, & also because, silly me, I didn’t read the label & was thinking this was some non-caffeine cup. As it turns out, there is green tea in there, but oh well, the night is young!

Flavorwise, it’s not bad. And now it’s gone! That’s ends my day at 358 teas!

Wow, delicate full tea leaves produce a crystal clear green brew the likes of which I’ve never seen before. I’m impressed! There was a natural sweetness, and delicacy to the tea. I want more!

Well, it really tasted like cherries. Too bad about the taste of hot cherries though…

When my friend and I went to Venice for the final, flickering moments of the Biennale, I picked up some sample tea bags from Tea Forte that were on sale while she was shopping for gifts. That’s how it always goes – I accompany someone as they shop. They buy gifts for others. I buy gifts for ME.

Anyway, I’d been curious to try out TF, and I’d only seen them in hideously overprized huge tins before, so I snagged what looked interesting. One of the bags was this one. I’ve been a little too excited to catch up with my untried teas lately, and the amounts of black tea I’ve had late at night has resulted in the following type of sleeping pattern:

O_O

0_0

zzz

0_0

O_O

So I figured white was the way to go today. This bag, helpfully, even has ‘Very little caffeine!’ printed on it. As for the tea itself, well.

Sniffing the bag didn’t get my hopes up – it smelled very strongly of artificial ginger. The description clearly says PEAR, with a note of ginger – ginger as the dominant feature in a tea isn’t really for me, unless it’s very well-balanced, like Kusmi’s lemon/ginger which I quite enjoy.

In the cup, the ginger definitely mellows, and the flavour is predominantly pear. However, it’s a really artificial pear experience, much reminiscent of my fave Swedish ice pop, Piggelin.

Just… warm. And with ginger. Urrrhh.

Then there’s this other note, both in the scent and taste of the steeped tea, that I absolutely cannot place. It’s just weird, like drinking something that came out of a 3D printer. It’s so very clearly the scent/taste of an object not made for drinking and it’s really confusing.

I will finish the cup, but I never need to drink this again.

(ETA: I’m liking this a little better as it cools, so I’ll kick the rating up a little, but just a very little.)

[Sample bag picked up in Venice, winter 2013.]

sipdown! this was from a sampler a while back and i finally got round to trying this last one. Sadly i was hoping for more from these little packages. I think i’m better off sticking to tea that isn’t “designed for cold brewing”. Oh well, it was a great intro to some of tea fortes teas. This one is white and ginger…but not really pear. Instead there’s a weird taste to it that i’m not a fan of.

Whoops: perhaps I really am comparing bergamot with oranges, because it turns out that the Tea Forte Earl Grey filter bag contains orange zest, which the Tazo Earl Grey filter bag lacks!

But does it help? Does the orange improve the flavor? Honestly, the Tea Forte version smells much more like tea (ceylon, I’d guess) than either bergamot or orange! The brew is less strong (in part no doubt due to the smaller amount of tea in the filter bag), less red, and generally less appealing. It does taste pretty good for a grocery store bag tea (faint praise…), but I prefer the Tazo.

I drank both of these brews with light cream, and the Tazo is much creamier and smoother than the Tea Forte. This Earl Grey seems to be geared more for people who dislike bergamot, given that the dried filter bag does not smell like perfume but like tea. My question: do people who dislike bergamot buy Earl Grey tea???

I stand by my earlier evaluation. The Tea Forte Earl Grey is potable, but I will not be purchasing it again.

I have the filter bags of Tea Forte Earl Grey, and I imagine that it varies from the loose leaf version which some have raved about. The only ingredients listed on the box are:

organic black tea, natural bergamot flavor and natural orange flavor

So definitely no cornflowers.

This is an acceptable filter bag Earl Grey. It’s not delicious, but it’s certainly drinkable. I find it less perfumed than the Tazo Earl Grey filterbags (the purple paper ones, not the white ones, which I have not tried, nor the loose Tazo, which is naturally better).

The liquor brews up reddish orange and tastes a bit too tannic to me. On the box, the tea is described as deriving from the Assam region and “rich in tannins,” so perhaps there are people who look for that quality in their Earl Grey, in which case this filter bag may fill the need. Even with cream, it’s not as smooth as I prefer my Earl Grey to be. I’ll drink this box but will not purchase again.

I have nearly reached the end of my supply of these rip-off single-serve loose leaf portions of Tea Forté Chamomile Citron, and I have to say that this blend has grown on me over several sessions.

Tonight I used a wider-gauge sieve, which made the particles of chamomile slip through, so maybe that’s why it seemed stronger than usual. Anyway, I would definitely consider buying this blend again, perhaps in the loose-leaf rather than in these individual packets. I don’t have a problem with teaspoons. No, not at all!

I drank a cup of Tea Forte Chamomile Citron last night while watching episode 1 of BBC Hustle season 2. I could not make it through to the end.

ERGO…

Once again, I have confirmed that this tea is conducive to sleep. I was literally unable to keep my eyes open through episode 4 of MI5 season 4! Or was it that Tessa, Tom, Zoe, and Danny have all disappeared from the series???

This Tea Forte organic chamomile blend tasted quite good tonight. It also has worked its soporific wonders, as I can barely keep my eyes open!

Bonne Nuit!

Tonight my small pot of Tea Forte Chamomile Citron was not very good—somehow both bitter and sour at the same time—but I severely oversteeped it, so now I know not to do that again!

This chamomile blend is my favorite so far from the Tea Forte collection. Of course, it’s also the first loose tea I’ve tried from them… I have the single “dosed” packet format of loose leaf Chamomile Citron, which I brewed in my two-cup cast-iron pot. I used a finer sieve to filter the brew since there were lots of random broken particles floating about.

I don’t like the basket inserts in these cast-iron pots, by the way. Somehow I always feel that the water in the periphery of the pot is not getting any of the tea flavor. I also believe that the leaves need to be granted maximum liberty for expansion and the ability to float about the entire available volume of water. No, I’m not neurotic. ;-)

The chamomile is dominant despite the notable presence of lemon grass and hibiscus. The combination of everything works together harmonically. I enjoyed this more than the Tazo mesh sachet bags of Calm Chamomile, probably because this blend better showcases the chamomile.

This herbal infusion is basically indistinguishable from my memory of Celestial Seasonings Raspberry Zinger. It may be that in a side-by-side testing, I’d find salient differences, but not having any Raspberry Zinger on hand, I can only work from memory.

Tea Forte Wild Berry Hibiscus is red, it’s juicy, it’s somewhat tangy (wild!) and it’s berry flavored-hibiscus. Several other ingredients have been thrown into the mix, but the hibiscus and berry loom large.

Truth in naming!