Adventaggedon Day 21: Tea 7/8
I genuinely love when I have to look up ingredients or names of tea because they’re introducing me to something I’m not familiar with – it’s a merger of a general love of experiencing and trying new food/flavour sensations and a natural curiosity and excitement about learning all things tea.
So when I saw “Pryanik” in the name this morning and didn’t recognize it as either an ingredient, food, tea garden or anything of that nature I was excited. After looking it up I now know that Pryaniki are Russian spice cookies! They look pretty yummy and I can definitely see how plum would compliment that type of profile. It’s a really, really fun and creative holiday type of profile that kind of escapes the cliche of all wintery plum teas being “sugar plum” flavoured. I dig it!
It’s hard to say if the taste is anything like the actual cookies because I’ve never had one. I don’t really get anything cookie like here aside from maybe a very loose gingerbread comparison? The medley of the several different spices with the more cooked and syrupy plum-type notes is pleasant though! I say “plum-type” because it’s tricky to get plum flavouring right and I don’t know that I’d name this as plum blindly – but it’s definitely in that lovely sweet stonefruit type of realm, for sure. The most out of place flavour element here for me was the lemongrass. I didn’t feel like it made sense to me for the profile, though it didn’t taste particularly unpleasant.
I can see why Nik likened this to potpourri because it is a really busy profile overall and there’s a sort of hint of floral flavour in the undertones alongside that spice medley. However, I found it soothing overall and really appreciated the creativity. The fruity honeybush/spice combo works well for me. They’re different tasting in many ways, but I found myself thinking of 52Teas’ Blueberry Cobbler Honeybush which I suppose is similar(ish) because it’s also got this sweet cooked/jammy fruit flavour with spices on the honeybush base.
