THEODOR

Finally finishing this sample from ages ago that has been tucked away! Today I’m noticing a tiny bit of malt with chocolate and caramel flavors that are a little stronger. This is reminding me of a couple other French caramel/chocolate teas like Palais’s Toffee and MF’s Wedding Imperial, but with softer notes and no bitterness. I added a touch of sugar and it seems to have made it a bit bland! How is that possible?! I’m still not able to pick up the hazelnut notes, but I could have sworn I tasted a touch of mint in the after taste. I steeped it a little hotter than suggested because I was guessing on the C to F conversions. I really need to learn the metric system! US public schools… you have failed me again!

This is a tea that I’d gladly cross paths with again someday!

I’m having this chilled today with a little sugar and a bit of cream! I was surprised at the low steeping temp, but it seems to work! The chocolate comes through for sure, but the hazelnut is a little more hidden for me. Nutella is my go to hazelnut/chocolate association and this isn’t nearly as bold as that. It is still really good and I look forward to trying more of it.

Thanks for the sample Barbara!

From the queue

This came out of the EU TTB round 2. Cream, vanilla and roasted hazelnuts. What, I ask you, could possibly go wrong? I lurve vanilla, I’ve quite fallen for nutty blends recently, and I can imagine what the cream must add to this. I can’t actually in anyway at all imagine this not being awesome. Therefore I looked shifty and filched it. I can’t remember if I’ve had any of this before. I haven’t really been buying very much of the European blends, tending to look more towards the East and the UK.

This smells awesome! All roasty nutty! Also a lot of sweet sweet vanilla that makes the whole thing remind me of hot white chocolate. (I’ve got some powder for that from Whittards of Chelsea. It’s luxuriously awesome made up with warm milk) I can’t really detect any notes of actual tea, though, which is the only thing about the aroma which I can find fault with. I can’t smell any cream either, but I expect that more in the flavour than the aroma in general. It always surprise me when I can actually smell cream in cream-flavoured teas. In this particular one I’m also expecting it to be more a question of texture than of taste really, so I’m not too bothered about not being able to find it here.

Oh my giddy aunt, this stuff is fab! First a lot of hazelnuts, then the sweetness of the vanilla and a smidge of cream onthe swallow. I think the base tea must have some cocoa notes in it, because while it is definitely primarily a nut-flavoured tea, it all reminds me largely of chocolate. I think I’ll sum it up in one word.

Nutella.

As it cools a bit the flavours meld more, enhancing the nutella-y impression, and if you drink it with a sleepy cat in your lap there really isn’t much left to improve here.

I greatly enjoyed this one.

Dry leaves have a nice, nonspecific floral scent. I get a bit of jasmine, I think, in the steep. I’m not sure I know what lotus tastes or smells like. What I have the impression of overall, though, is roses. And to me, the taste is best described as the scent of roses that have been shut in a hot car all day long. Nice at first, but then cloying and overripe. I am glad to have tried this, Ysaurella, and I think the tea base is decent, from what I can tell, but I don’t think it is one I’d go out of my way to purchase.

I opened my cupboard to find this tea because spelling is not my friend. I was amused to discover that Detox from DavidsTea is my most-drank tea, and since I tend to only drink it after a night of too much booze, that just says a whole lot about my life, doesn’t it XD.

Anyway, I coldbrewed this overnight in an effort to both use this up and have something different. The leaves were a bit of a disappointment as I strained them out. Usually oolongs unfurl beautifully, but these were just brown wilted leaves. Sadness.

I’m not a straight tea drinker, so I couldn’t tell you about any of the nuances of the tea, but I will say it is light and refreshing in a way a black tea could never be, but for me it is nothing special.

I wish I knew what the trick is to rooibos. What makes a good and a not-so-good flavoured rooibos so completely different? When I first had delicate, French-style rooibos I could barely believe it was the same thing as the cardboardy German stuff. Do they water the bushes with gold? Sing to them? It can’t all be in the flavouring. No flavour profile, no matter how adeptly put together, could ever mask that much cardboard.

Anyway – what I wanted to get to was that this reminded me a whole lot of a horrible Teavana tea experience I had with a blend called Rooibos Tropica. It smelled tasty from a distance, but then as you came closer, the citrus turned all chemical and brewed up it was seriously the horror of horrors. Cold-brewed it was seriously window cleaner in a cup. I haven’t been able to drink citrus-flavoured rooibos since, so I figured I’d better give this a try, seeing as it seemed a suitable back-up-on-that-citrus-rooibos-horse contender.

This is the sample that had leaked ever so slightly, so smelling puts me back in the state of excitement one unavoidably enters when receiving one’s swap box. (Oooh!) This one you can smell forever without it turning chemical, too – the citrus/rooibos balance is perfect and there’s a sweet note rounding everything off. This is more or less what you get in the cup as well, but the aftertaste has a warm, slightly creamy, vanilla-esque note to it that is very nice.

This is just good, delicately flavoured, high-quality rooibos.

I don’t need a citrus rooibos in my permanent cupboard, but if I did, this one would be a very fair contender. In terms of a rooibos-off between French tea merchants, Mariage Frères would still be in the lead, however.

Thank you for sharing, cteresa!

[Sample from the second round of the EU Travelling Box, spring 2014.]

As you can tell, I’m box-sampling way outside of my comfort zone this time around. Next up, lemongrass! There were two lemongrasses (uh) in the box, so I figured I’d compare, even if one is a yerba maté (this one) and the other a straight-up herbal.

I was surprised that I liked the scent of this one so much in the bag – I keep avoiding citrus, but it seems it’s just one of those Brian Roberts/Sally Bowles (Cabaret) situations, where those three girls were obviously just the wrong three girls.

Flavour wise, I get a slightly medicinal citrus – the tea reminds me so much of a type of citrus candy (I honestly think they were cough drops) my grandmother used to keep in her handbag. Aw, gramps. I remember how you always used to say, ‘If someone pokes you, KICK them in return!’ Always equally hilarious coming from a small Miss Marple-like old lady with a huge purse.

Strangely, though, I enjoy it. It’s sort of herbally and citrusy with no clearly distinguishable notes of any specific type of citrus, although I think it’s much closer to grapefruit than lemongrass. I could absolutely drink a few cups of this, and I have a feeling this is one of those I might experience a small, weird craving for in the future.

Thanks for sharing this, cteresa!

[Sample from the second round of the EU Travelling Box, spring 2014.]

So I continue to venture outside my tea comfort zone with this one. On the sample bag, as you EU-swappers will note, it says, ‘not a black tea’, but as cteresa points out in the forum thread, it is actually black, but should be treated as a green. Now, I’m someone who tends to slap her greens and call them names (deep down they like it), that is, brew them at 100C with a 1.5-minute steep – because I mostly drink Lupicia greens, and, before someone jumps down my throat concerning this very touchy subject – this is what Lupicia themselves recommend.

Either way, I went for some form of compromise – 90C at 2 minutes. The O Dor themselves recommend 85C for 3:45-4:30 (very specific, I like your OCD, Théodor mon chéri) but I didn’t feel like anything too strong.

In the bag, this had a somewhat minty tang to it, which was surprising. I assume this is just how the freshness of this leaf comes off to me scent wise, seeing as there’s not the slightest hint of anything minty in the brewed cup.

This is one of those blacks that work for me, especially lightly brewed as in this case. I definitely wouldn’t turn down a cup, but it’s not a tea I will crave or think about in the future.

Thanks to cteresa for adding this one to the box!

[Sample from the second round of the EU Travelling Box, spring 2014.]

Okay, so you remember that Thé d’amandine (Comptoir des thés et des épices) review that prompted Ysaurella, our resident fairy godmother of The O Dor tea samples to offer some up in the first place? Well, I do.

I’ve been so curious about this one – I mean, a comment such as, “Tribute by Theodor is cleary THE galette des rois tea” makes it impossible to resist, after all. And yes, this is one of those cases where – if I’d had this one first – I would have been head over heels, placing an order within the week. But now I have two very positive experiences with other almondy teas, one of them a staple in my cupboard (Pleine Lune) and the other one (Thé d’amandine) a tea I’ve vowed to re-review more generously, seeing as I was so fed up with French greens when I tried it.

This is a black tea, though, and as such more closely comparable to Pleine Lune. Quite unfairly, seeing as the MF tea is one that makes me want to put a leash on and kneel before my master. Tribute strikes me as less complex in taste, with a mouthfeel that comes off as a little watery to me, compared to the creamy smoothness of PL.

In the case of Thé d’amandine, it had the added bonus of being a green tea, and as such lighter and more accessible. It also brought some element of surprise to the table, through the addition of that distant, near-spectral cherry presence.

Tribute, however, doesn’t leave much of an impression on me.

I’m very torn here – on the one hand I feel like it’s close to sacrilege to rate this less than the seemingly obligatory 80+, but on the other, I’m really grateful for knowing exactly what I’m looking for. That knowledge, however, would be impossible if not for all this tea sampling – thank you so much, Ysaurella! I’ve had such a good time with these samples, and you really are the sweetest for helping me explore my feelings for the ravishing Monsieur Théodor.

[Sample from Ysaurella, spring 2014.]

Oh, okay, wow. So I’m having quite the The O Dor sample party today, courtesy of Ysaurella, cteresa and the EU swap box. Before yesterday, I was a The O Dor virgin, but things are getting pretty depraved pretty fast over here.

All these preconceived notions of what I’m going to like are so often completely turned on their heads when I try out a brand new company. I thought Lupicia’s blacks would be insufferable (but it turns out they’re just as amazing as their greens and oolongs) and I thought Butiki’s flavoured teas would be right up my alley (turns out I prefer the plain ones) and I thought I’d like Damman Frères far more than Comptoir des Thés et des Epices (a million times no).

And here I was, convinced this tea would be just average, and that Celebration would have to be the most desirable in the entire The O Dor kingdom.

As it turns out, I realized chocolate teas don’t really do it for me, even if there’s hazelnut and vanilla involved… and that this tea is gorgeous. Seriously, the last time I had a tea experience like this was with Lupicia’s Cookie. (And you all know how I feel about Cookie.)

I did a double take smelling the sample, because it was so rich and lovely. I always talk about the wild card, that inexplicable something, and there it was, in the dry tea already. And this teal is solid and reliable, because that something stays there all the way, both scent wise and flavour wise. There’s a perfect, creamy intermingling of coconut and pistachio, with an aftertaste that is all smooth vanilla with this slight floral hint that literally makes me smile.

My mnemonic analogy (there always seems to be one hard-wired into some part of my brain, after all) emanates from memories of love, suitably. When you’ve been in love, and you’ve loved, and you think you’ve got it all figured out, and then you meet that goddamn person who just turns everything upside down and shows you what all those stupid songs and books and movies were really about.

Je T’aime – the evolution of love, in a tea cup.

(You will be my special coconut and pistachio tea forever.)

[Sample from the second round of the EU Travelling Box, spring 2014.]

This has been a bit of a revelation, to be honest – I have come to a realization. I’m just going to come right out and say it. I don’t need chocolate teas in my life.

Honestly, that’s pretty huge on a tea preferences scale, seeing as I love everything else chocolate. Seriously – chocolate is where it’s at.

But in a tea? No. I think this reflects my shift in tea preferences lately – I find myself craving lighter, greener, fruitier, less desserty teas. It might very well be a spring thing, but it’s definitely here to stay for now.

That much said, this is a deliciously elegant tea. I wouldn’t say the chocolate tea to end all other chocolate teas, because there are several flavour layers here, and a definite complexity beyond just the chocolate, but it’s definitely one of the better chocolates I’ve tried, if not the best. (Chocolate-orange will always have a special place in my heart, though.)

Nose wise, it jumps from lush in the bag to a little bland in the cup, but the flavour lands on the lush side of things.

Hazelnut, vanilla and chocolate are the three main taste notes for me, but in no particular order – this is a very playful brew, as each sip stacks the flavour chips a little differently. I’m sure this would kill with a dash of milk or cream, and as usual, I’m happy I never keep those in my fridge, because this would have gotten pretty decadent pretty fast.

It’s hard to rate this one, so keep in mind that this really is an excellent tea of its kind, and that my grade reflects preference rather than quality.

Many thanks to Ysaurella for not only letting me try some The O Dor, but helping me address complex existe(a)ntial quandaries in the process.

[Sample from Ysaurella, spring 2014.]

mmm perfect mid morning tea to go along with getting tons of work done at home today. I really needed this day to just relax and focus on catching up with work. Hopefully by the time the weekend rolls around i’ll be ready for daylight savings, and being back in to the full swing of things with work :)

WOW! another tea from Ysaurella this is marzipan in liquid form! Funnily enough i’m not a HUGE fan of it in solid form but this is a really tasting almond paste tea :) I am really enjoying the black base that comes through and blends really nicely with the almond taste. This is sweet without being cloyingly so. Probably not something i would have picked up on my own, but now that i’ve had it, i would consider it from time to time. :) merci madam!

The remainder of this sample was just enough for a pitcher of iced tea. As expected, this worked quite well cold. It lost a surprising amount of the apple/date character of the hot tea, but it gained some floral notes, and, most surprisingly of all, a peppery aftertaste which was very nice.

[Sample from Ysaurella, spring 2014.]
[Sample polished off in Rome, February 2014.]

So a while back I received some samples from the ever-lovely Ysaurella, but I have neither been in possession of the time nor the faculties for note writing until now, so the samples have had to wait patiently. In very pretty air-tight containers, though, so they haven’t exactly been languishing.

My benefactress had recommended 75C for 3-4 minutes, so I went with 80C (my kettle only does increments of ten) a brief cooling off period, and then a three-minute steep.

In the bag already, it is quite clear this is an exquisite green – I had to force myself to brew it fearlessly, as the scent of the sample was so delicate and complex the risk to lose some small delicious note along the way seemed overwhelming.

But, in the end, I managed to keep my hands steady and my timing timely.

In the cup, the complexity of the dry tea prevails. For me, the notes most present taste wise are apple and date. The apple in particular is interesting – it can’t really make up its mind. Is it a red apple? Is it a green apple? Is it a special fairytale multiplex apple? Possibly, possibly, and possibly.

All in all this is a very pleasant tea, with a light, rosey aftertaste. I have synesthetic tendencies, and this tastes the colour of green marzipan. I see the cake from my 25th birthday (and many other birthdays, I admit I do love my princess cake) as I sip.

Thank you so much, Ysaurella!

[Sample from Ysaurella, spring 2014.]

Wow. Definitely one of the most unusual teas I’ve tried, and one I’ve wanted to try for a while. Can it really smell, taste, like fresh tomatoes? Yes, yes it does. It brings me back to living at the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga as a karma yogi a few years back, where everything we ate or made for the guests came out of the garden. Tomatoes and beans were the huge crops that year, with more than a handful of varietals of each. I learned how to save and process the seeds there, and sent a bunch to my son’s Grandmother for her to try out in her own garden. This smell, flavor, feeling… reminds me of processing those seeds. Mushing up the tomatoes not fit for eating in a huge tub of water, letting them ‘process’ for a day or two so that the seeds rose to the top of the water, skimming the seeds off and dumping the rest of the bucket in the compost pile, and then carefully arranging the seeds on screens to dry in the greenhouse.

Yes, this tea reminds me of all of that.

There’s also something else in the mix. Lemon, perhaps? It’s faint, and adds a bit of whimsy to it, which may be the first time I’ve ever described a tea as whimsical. Super fun!

Thank you to Ysurella for sharing this with me!

1.5 tsp in 12 oz.

Now THIS is a roasty oolong that i would seriously consider getting more of. I like that there’s a hint of that charcol note, but it’s not overly coming through and what IS coming through in the taste is smoother and less…charcol like than others i’ve had? This is a really smooth tasting cup of delicious. I pretty much made it, sat down to start thinking about it and writing something, and it’s already all gone. Thank you ever so much for sending this one to me Ysaurella I think i really DO need to place that theodor order soon!!

as a non fan of oolongs, I’m happy ysaurella sent me a sample since she and I have similar feelings regarding oolongs most of the time. :) Since she enjoys this one, i figured i would likely enjoy it as well. And i was right! this has a really nice milk oolong taste without that oily weird thing that sometimes happens with milk oolongs. The flavour was smooth and creamy without being too vegetal or too fake tasting. i think this one and Mandala’s are probably my favourite as far as milk oolongs go.

Merci encore une fois madam!

Advent day…. what are we on? 9? This tea smells like red fruit. Strange that we can have a sense of what color fruit might be based on smell when we can’t pinpoint exactly which fruit it is. The steeping instructions suggested a lighter temp, which I went with, but I wonder if I’d get more flavor from a higher temp. I can taste the strawberries and a little bit of raspberries now that I’ve read which fruits are in there. I thought that adding a creamer would heighten the vanilla, but it kind of dulled the flavors in the cup instead. I’ll have to try a resteep at a higher temp.

I can pick out a little fruity strawberry flavor in this. Cream and sugar is working well for this tea. It is pretty smooth and comforting on this overcast day, but it’s not calling to me to get more either.

I got some of this in a long ago swap with Barbara. I was having so much fun trying the The O Dor brand while traveling last March, but when I got home I was distracted by all the teas I had purchased in San Francisco and the swap teas got tucked away.

When brewed and in my clear glass cup, this tea looks like a giant piece of amber with the light filtering through it. The smell is red and fruity, but I don’t know that I’d be able to peg the scent as strawberry if I hadn’t read the description. On my first few sips I was met by a quick sweetness followed by a touch of bitter. Perhaps I steeped it too long or the water was too hot. The black base is nice and tastes familiar, but I’m not yet able to identify them. The base also masks the flavor of the fruit a bit at the moment, so I’m adding some sugar. Sometimes adding sugar makes certain flavors stand out more or taste more natural and sometimes everything still tastes the same, only sweeter. This time it tastes the same. I’m getting a slight smokey aftertaste mingling with some strawberry. It is pleasant, but unless I’m able to get better results with different brewing parameters, this tea won’t make it on my must purchase list.

sipdown! (139) I have not been doing well with drinking up my teas to be good when my orders start coming in. I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance over the next couple of weekend. Should be doable since i’ve got release testing to do this weekend and next.

This one could grow on me..i still like une autre idee more but this was tastier tonight so that’s good to note. Thanks again cteresa!

another tea from the lovely cteresa though i must admit i’m glad there aren’t’t many more since between her and ysaurella/dinosara i’m looking at moving to europe so i can drink the teas i want, when i want!

I actually thought that i would like this more than i did. I am not a rooibos hater – i have both enjoyed it and not, depending no how it’s blended. In this particular instance the rooibos is wonderfully blended with the almond and red berry flavours….and that’s slightly the problem. I’m pretty certain that the RED BERRY flavour is just not something i generally like in french teas. I like ONE specific berry flavour and when there are multiple, i don’t enjoy it nearly as much. Now, having said that, i still drank my cup insanely fast and loved every moment of it…but it’s not as deliciously amazing to me as i’d hoped it would be for want of more non black blends in my cupboard haha

Thank you again cteresa

Another one i’m finishing off today. Made myself an extra big mug of this and sat and just drank it. Glad i picked up a bunch of this while i was in Paris but the break from it will be nice until we can go back for more haha