Twinings

Happy World Honey Bee Day! Today the prompt is to drink a tea with honey flavor notes, or add honey to a cup of tea!

This is well-timed on my part because I’ve taken ill with one banger of a cold. Since the symptoms overlap another certain something going around (and I’ve heard it presents very “cold-like” in vaccinated people like myself) I got really paranoid and went in for testing. Now that the results are back negative and I know it’s just an awful head cold brought out by the massively poor air quality around here due to forest fires, I feel I can at least relax a little bit, and actually take some enjoyment in hot tea.

I don’t really need honey in this (I like the tart lemon and warm ginger and it feels great on my throat), but for that added “coating” quality while sick, a spoonful of honey in a cup of this, teabag left swimming indefinitely, has been hitting the spot.

Sampler Sipdown September! My monthly theme this month is to work through my plentitude of smaller samplers to try to clear out some much needed cupboard space! Since I am having a blistering migraine today and my triptan didn’t work, forcing me to leave work early today, I grabbed this single teabag that a former coworker gifted me that I have yet to try. The migraine nausea is pretty bad, and ginger tends to help with that.

This is so much better than the Stash Lemon Ginger I revisited not long ago, which had a really artificial tasting lemon flavor to me, and a really overbearing ginger flavor. If I ever decide I need to have some quick bagged Lemon Ginger tea around, this is certainly the brand I’ll go with from now on. The lemon flavor in this tea is more tangy and citrusy, reminding me more of lemon juice, it’s a bit tart but since I’m fine with tart/tangy notes I find it really nice. But most importantly, the ginger is very reasonable, leaving just a little bit of spice at the finish but no lingering unpleasant heat. It comes off more strongly in the lemon than the ginger, and for my personal tastes, that’s just how I like it.

This is a newer blend from Twinings that I enjoyed so much I intend to buy a box.

The clove and cardamom are fabulous. The chamomile gives a sweet, dry hay taste. The apple is like dried apple chips (not green apple candy or fake apple flavour), and that works nicely with the vanilla bean and cinnamon. The clove is incredible, though. Vanilla and fragrant clove is a stellar combination. It was so good I had to resteep it a few times just because I kept drinking the entire cup. For a bagged herbal, this exceeded my expectations.

(Backlog tea from last week)

I picked up an assortment of teas at the original Twinings shop in London and have been trying to review them all before I forget what they tasted like. This was coldbrewed 5 minutes. It made a great cup of iced tea because I really like ginger/lemon combinations. The ginger was spicewy (just the way I like it!) but the green tea kept things balanced. The green base was not high quality, I think it is just a generic bagged green. With the great spices to help cover the green tea flavour, this was an enjoyable blend to drink.

This is a very tasty blend that tastes quite herbal with the citrus, ginger, and echinacea. The cinnamon isn’t as strong as I expected it to be. The hibiscus was barely noticeable

This tea has a beautiful colour. It has a sweet smell, like a fruit tree’s leaf (a cherry tree, I thought) and also smells like fermentation. The tea itself is very present in that smell. It reminds me of one of my primary school friend’s garden – she had a giant cherry tree in the middle of her garden, where we used to play in the summer. I’m very fond of these memories.
The tea has a very floral taste, almost herbaceous. It tastes like a footpath that leads into a forest going up a mountain. It almost reminds me of sap.
It also opens up in its flavors as it cools down, which means that drinking it slowly is really interesting.
Oh, and the loose leaves are beautiful.

This is your typical chai, but with more ginger to give it a nice kick. I like chais with heavy ginger and clove, so I enjoyed this one. Since there was no metallic licorice, I could enjoy the sweetness of the cinnamon more.

It is a cool summer night at the moment, so it’s a perfect time for a hot tea! I decide to try this one out for the first time. It tastes so good-the peppermint and spearmint go so well together in this blend! One of my new fav teas! I had a chuckle at the hot air balloon on the tag of the pyramid shaped tea bag. Just the other day, I woke up and opened the door to let the dogs out and I see this hot air balloon descending nearby! It was such a cool sight to see and a great start to the day. Riding in a hot air balloon is on my bucket list of things to do.

Bought this one yesterday just because I am a big fan of Twinings and English blends in general. I am sadly disappointed. It’s hard to call it tea. It is just dusty powder, the one that you find in the cheapest teabags sold in markets. Smells and tastes like a typical, cheap Indian Assam CTC tea. What happened to Twinings? I love Gunpowder and Prince of Walles, I used to drink a lot of Lady Grey, but this one is complete disaster and shame to your company.

188/365

This is the blend that used to be called 1706, and which I remember really enjoying as a teenager before I “found” tea properly. It’s nice to revisit, although it’s not quite as impressive as I remember it being. I feel like it used to have more presence, and more to differentiate it; it was somehow “softer” than English Breakfast, less tannic, with a lot of sweet maltiness. Now, I think I’d have trouble telling the two apart.

Today’s cup, I’d say, was a slightly more tannic version of English Breakfast. It’s a good, hearty “builder’s” style tea, for sure, absolutely great with milk, and robust in flavour. I could say the same about their English Breakfast, though, which I find noticeably stronger and maltier than their Everyday blend. The effect you get with English Breakfast and English Strong Breakfast largely depends on how long you leave it to steep – ESB is perhaps a little quicker to achieve strength, but you can get there with EB quite easily.

I feel like these two are basically the same tea, and I don’t think there’s a need for both of them in a range that already has a lot of black breakfast-style blends. 1706 used to be a heritage blend, rather than just an EB clone; I’m kinda sad seeing what it’s become.

A really solid tea for on-the-go mornings. The sachet has no flavour and gives the leaves room to expand. This Darjeeling is fabulous-definitely one of the best I’ve had.

Lightly sweet, malt, never bitter or acrid. Very smooth.