Sparkle Pony Oolong Tea

TTB #23

Such a fun blend! It brews up to a warm golden color with a subtle sparkle from the glitter. The flavor is a nice balance of sweet plum and spicy ginger with a smooth finish. A pleasant warming tea for a cold January day!

This was a bonus tea from my (last?) 52Teas order. I think, anyway. It’s definitely been a while. It’s also the last untried 52Teas blend I have in my cupboard, other than (quite a lot of) SBTs. I’ll be working on those again this summer, though.

I kept this one until last for a few reasons. I love the name, and it’s SPARKLY, and obviously that makes it the kind of tea I want to keep around for a bit. More significantly, though, it contains ginger. And ginger isn’t really (usually) my jam. I’m hoping the pluot is more apparant in the taste than the ginger…

I used 1.5 tsp of leaf for my cup, and gave it 3 minutes in water cooled to around 180 degrees. It was kind of hard to measure – these oolong leaves are big! Or at least, long and twisty. Despite my aversion to ginger, I do actually love the scent of this tea. It’s mostly sweet and stonefruity, but there’s a touch of ginger lurking underneath that actually strikes me as appealing…Who’d have thought?!

To taste, it’s pretty delicious! It’s sweet straight-off, mostly plum in my estimation but I get apricot, too. I’ve never tried a pluot before, so this is a learning experience as well as a tea. There is ginger, but it’s reasonably subtle. It adds a spicy warmth to the background, and works better than I expected with the fruit flavours. On the whole, this one’s a lot fruitier than I thought it would be, and juicy-tasting to boot. It’s perfect on a day like today, which is spring in essence but also cold; sunny fruit flavours, warming ginger kick. I couldn’t have chosen a tea more suited :)

The base oolong adds a mild nuttiness, but otherwise is pretty hard to taste underneath the flavouring. It didn’t make much of an impression on the blend, but I suppose in that respect it’s doing its job well – supporting the flavours without overpowering them. It might have some stone fruit notes of its own, but it’s almost impossible to say.

The sparkle in this one is very subtle, but there’s a touch of gold glitter swirling around. It’s not in-your-face in the way that Glitter and Gold is, but it’s cute just the same. More of a Bluebird Christmas Cake level of sparkle, if you’ve tried that.

The more I sip this one, the more I like it. Sad face for it being a limited edition, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to miss it when my sample pouch is gone. My conclusion is that pluots should be used more often in tea!

So when you first discover tea and then find out about black friday sales you tend to go a bit overboard and then you have way too much tea that you felt you needed because it was such a good price and how else would you try all the teas. Well apparently I am rediscovering tea because somehow I just can’t stop myself from placing orders. Seriously. It’s bad. And I can’t even say it’s because of sales since only one order is from the BF sales. In the past two weeks I have placed a 52 Teas order (which is being shipped with the 12 Teas of Christmas order I placed a while ago), a Necessiteas order, A Quarter to Tea order, and a Liquid Prost order. Not to mention Teavivre teas just arrived yesterday and I have a monthly subscription with TeaTaxi. Plus a swap with Arby incoming. I am already over 200 teas so this is both exciting and terrifying.

As for this particular tea, it’s been quite soothing while I considered all the money I have spent on tea thus far. And how much more I may potentially spend this weekend. The ginger is adding a warmth while the apricot/stone fruit flavor is taking over. It is lovely and calming and just an easy drink to sip on this evening.

Sipdown. I had the last of this during lunch today. The flavors of ginger and plum (apricot) were still strong enough to cut through my lunch and overpower my cold.

Do I like oolongs? I wasn’t sure when I ordered this. I just threw it in my cart for the name. And the idea of a tea that sparkled.

So let’s get this out of the way first: it doesn’t sparkle much, which 52teas had actually mentioned in one of her reviews. Apparently the glitter is a pain in the you-know and doesn’t have a lot of payoff. So I wasn’t expecting much sparkle. The sparkle is (or should be) secondary anyway.

Other than the sparkle, the appearance is really striking. It’s got SUPER LONG leaves. There’s a certain DRAMA to the look of this tea. The leaf length makes it kind of hard to figure out how to portion it, since it doesn’t fit neatly into my Perfect Tea Spoon thing. I just eyeballed it. (Do other people have a solution to this?)

Anyway, this tastes great. I don’t know if I like oolongs or not (gotta keep trying around), but I definitely like THIS. It’s got a rich, throaty sweetness. I would have described it as “plum-like.”

When I looked at the ingredients, there are “pluots” in there. What’s a pluot? It’s a plum-apricot hybrid. I didn’t even know that was possible! This tea isn’t just a tea — it’s an EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE.

So fruit, a little bit of sweetness, some slightly vegetal tea, and a deep booming bass note.

I am super-bummed I only got a sampler of this tea. I should have purchased a vat of it.

During the great Steepster freeze, I hit over 500 followers, so a gracious thank you is in order to any and all who are willing to follow along with my tea journey.  I appreciate all of you here on Steepster!
Additional notes: Sipdown!  Not thrilled about it though, as I love it.  The ginger was surprisingly delicious to a person who isn’t usually happy to have ginger floating around in a mug.  But the pluot flavor held strong, over the age of the blend but also over four huge mugs of the last session.  It paired perfectly with this type of unique oolong, which even brewed up the color of the inside of a plum.  Two teaspoons worked best for me with this one (using a big mug.)  How awesome would it be if Anne would do a summer box like the 12 days of Christmas box?  I know the planning for the holiday box starts around summer though, so I doubt that is doable… I’m looking forward to the poll though (did I miss it?)!  There are always so many summery blends I want to revisit…I could easily think of a box of 12.
2020 Sipdowns: 64 (sample of David’s strawberry rhubarb parfait + Bird & Blend’s Tea & Toast)

Bonus tea from my 52Teas order…

This one smells really nice; strong apricot notes for sure. Technically, these are pluots used in the blend but my initial impression is that they’re definitely more on the apricot side than the plum side.

Brewed up, this is pretty smooth with a really nice, lush and present stonefruit note all throughout the entire sip. Again, I definitely think it’s a much stronger apricot flavour than plum but regardless it’s very delicious and natural tasting. As well, it’s definitely the perfect level of sweetness. Similar to the Grapefruit/Ginger tea from 52Teas I had earlier in the week the ginger isn’t overly apparent, with the strongest point I’m experiencing it being at the end of the sip. I think I may even like this pairing of apricot and ginger better than the grapefruit and ginger due, though.

The base oolong here is nice; it’s a little nutty which is a nice added component to the cup. Other than that one dominant note, it doesn’t offer a whole lot of other added flavour nuances, but it more so just a nice complimentary backdrop to Anne’s other added ingredients.

Aside from flavour; the name of this tea is really fun. It reminds me really strongly of my birthday twin Marzipan who has always had a penchant for sparkly teas. I miss seeing her here and active on Steepster; but hopefully she’s doing well. Sadly, my cup wasn’t really sparkly at all – but it was tasty, and that’s what counts the most.

Holy crap, my first tea blog review in nearly a month!

The label says this tea contains oolong, pluots, ginger chunks, crystallized ginger, and edible sparkles.

A “pluot” is actually a kind of plum/apricot hybrid (hence the name). The dried pluots in this blend look like dried apricots, except for being a bit stickier/gummier. The oolong leaves are a brownish green, but not rolled up. Looking closely at them, I wasn’t really able to determine what variety (eg: tie guan yin, da hong pao) served as the base.

Smelling the leaf didn’t help either, as the most noticeable scent was the ginger — spicy, somewhat sweet and pungent.

I took about 2 teaspoons of leaf and steeped it in 80°C water for 4 minutes, which is slightly longer than what’s recommended on the package, because I’m a really big rebel.

Taste-wise, the most prominent note was the ginger. Beneath that, there’s a gentle powdery sweetness. This tea made me think of a similar tea I reviewed last year: Tea Leaf Co.’s Soul Good oolong tea. The notes here are very similar – the ginger, the powder, the sweetness. Also like Soul Good, I was expecting this Sparkle Pony Oolong to have a stronger fruit note.

After I steeped the tea, I took the dried pluot, now reconstituted due to the hot water, and popped it in my mouth. The taste was tangy, with the tartness of plums mixing with the chewy texture of apricot. Oddly enough, I’d say that the pieces of pluot, just by themselves, are my favourite part of this tea.

Oh, and there weren’t any visible sparkles that I could see. Maybe they’re all glommed together at the bottom of the bag.

Anyways, this was a fun tea to try, and it introduced me to a new fruit I’d like to encounter again in my cup some day.

Full review here: http://booksandtea.ca/2016/08/sparkle-pony-oolong-tea-52teas/

(52teas (Anne) 2022: 299)

Another new package opened. Ginger on an oolong base, but the base isn’t as flavourful as I’d like.