The Black Cat

Time to take a short break from Another Traveling Tea Box. I want to make a little progress on sipdowns this week and hope to finish this one off soon. I bought this from someone during a sell off sale, I think it was momo but I can’t remember at the moment. Thank you to whoever you were… I need to keep better track.

The color of this is a little off-putting, it steeps up a murky green, but has a nice fruity scent to it and it does fit in perfectly with the season. I just can’t get past the color of this tea, I decided to pour it into a darker mug so I can’t tell what color it is. Maybe I’m just weird. I do know that I’ll have to sip this down soon, or risk it sitting around forever,.

I can’t decide if I like this tea or not. It really just tastes like some hodgepodge of fruits which is just weird and I shouldn’t like it but I keep finding myself drinking it and liking it. I think after a few cups I can get over trying to taste different fruits and just taste… black cat? but that will be hard. I’ll have to revisit this rating later but for me, right now, this tea isn’t so for me.

This smells like sweet tarts for some reason. Well, candy and fruit anyway. The flavor kinda reminds me of these mango flavoured candies I used to like. Not sure but I was expecting, but it’s certainly different.

I have loved everything from Della terra tea, and this is no exception! I made it as an iced tea and its a dark murky green. It’s delicious. Very tropical and sweet. Can’t wait to make more.

This is different. Lol. To many flavors to really pick any out. But its still enjoyable. It had me and my son laughing as we tried to describe it to each other. It may not have been on the top of my list for a Della Terra Tea, but it was fun and I would order it again to drink with the boys.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by this tea. I received it in a tasting pack from Della Terra Teas. I find that most tropical fruit flavored teas are overwhelmed by the fruit flavors, leaving room for nothing but tea (and making me feel like I am drinking some sort of chemical concotion that was developed in a mad scientists laboratory). But this tea had a nice light scent, and the flavors of the pineapple and mango just came through to brighten the cup without overwhelming it. I was pleasantly surprised.

I received some of this from Chuckieroy in a trade that was far more generous on his end, so thank you to you sir! I would not have chosen this tea had I seen it for sale and I would have missed out on something good. I find candy sprinkles in my tea amusing yet foreign and distrustful, something that I am slowly overcoming. It’s really quite stuffy of me! The dry tea smells exactly like what I remember Mighty Leaf’s African Nectar smelling like; a tropical fruity rooibos. It also tastes like what I remember that tea tasting like and I loved that tea… until I tried it again recently and found it fell short of the nostalgic pedestal I had placed it on. This tea is what I wanted when I bought a box of that other tea recently and I’m guessing by the name that I’ll have to wait until next Halloween to get my hands on more. Just another reason for me to love Halloween I guess!

Have to admit I was a little disappointed with this one. It tasted like a whole lot of fruit and didn’t really have any distinctive flavour for me. That being said, I did happily sip down the whole cup and I will drink it again. I did love the colour of the tea… a lovely ghoulish green that looked great in my glass mug!

From the EU TTB – Round 3

This was my second pick from the box. I’ve heard a lot about this one, and I’ve often hoped that some day I’d have the opportunity to try it. It sounds like such an intriguing mixture of flavours! The cat sprinkles are beyond cute, too. I used 1 tsp of leaf, and gave it 4 minutes in boiling water. No additions.

The first thing I noticed about this one is the liquor colour. As with Bats in the Belfry, the black sprinkles give this one a grey-ish hue, so that it looks rather unappealingly like swampwater. It’s supposed to be a Halloween tea, though, so I guess it’s more than appropriate from that perspective! There’s a light oily scrim on the surface which I assume is from the sprinkles, but it doesn’t affect the flavour/texture at all.

To taste, this one is really wonderful. I’d say it was more of a generic tropical flavour than one or two fruits in particular, but I can detect the influence of pineapple (sweetness) and mango (pepperiness) in the overall flavour. It’s sweet, fruity, a little creamy. Drinking this one actually reminds me more than anything of sherbet!

This is another one I’m pleased to have had the chance to try. It’s a lovely, fresh and fruity tasting tea, and the black cats and unique liquor colour make it perfect as a Halloween tribute. A little incongruous, maybe, but a great tasting cup! No overwhelming rooibos flavour makes it doubly a winner in my book.

Sipdown! 148/397. Now for a new target – I think I’m gonna try to get my cupboard below 300 teas by my 5 years on Steepster anniversary, at the beginning of February 2019. Google tells me I’ve got 41 days, so it works out to like 1.2 a day. Which is totally doable, if I don’t deviate from my sipdown box. I am totally committed to getting my cupboard down enough that I can justify buying more tea in 2020. Maybe even next year, if I’m super committed!

I chose this one today as a sort of low-key good luck charm for my football team. I’m a huge Sunderland fan, raised on them since I was 6 years old (18 years ago) and I’m going to their Boxing Day match against Bradford today. They’re expecting a record crowd of 44,000 and I can’t wait; the atmosphere is going to be amazing. Their nickname is The Black Cats, hence me choosing this tea.

The tea itself is disappointing. I paid attention to adding more leaf and less water than usual to try and intensify the flavour, and zippo. It is an old tea at this point, and I’m not going to judge it for that, but I know I’ve had better cups. Ah well. Hopefully the football will be better!