This is the last of the teas I took notes on while I was in the throes of academia. It is another one of the teas Carolyn sent me, and though I was afraid I might jinx myself by prematurely drinking a celebration tea before the semester was actually over, it was too pretty to put off trying it any longer.
This cup is pleasant. It’s smooth, and it’s not too strong, which I was a little afraid it might be when I looked at the ingredient list. I was half expecting a fireworks of exploding flavors [much like the tea is a fireworks of exploding colors], that would perhaps result in a great clashing and clanging with much dissonance on my tongue, but I was surprised to discover that this wasn’t the case. It all melded together. I’m still trying to decide whether or not I was disappointed by that, even more than a week later.
I wasn’t really able to pick anything out of the cornucopia of components, except for a black tea flavor with the slightest hint of maltiness to it, and a tangy fruity flavor. The maltiness makes sense because the description says this contains assam. The fruit flavor slightly reminded of the dreaded hibiscus, if I’m being honest, but only slightly. Probably I wasn’t paying full attention, what with trying to watch a physics video and jot down thoughts on the tea at the same time. [In fact, I have a formula written on the page here that I think is for the escape velocity from Earth. Wow. Guess I retained something after all.] It also had a kind of spiciness to it. Nothing overwhelming, but enough to give it a nice kick.
Luckily, Carolyn was very generous with the quantity of tea sent to me [again, I must thank you, Carolyn] so I definitely have enough to be able to sit down and really soak this one in. Maybe play around with temperature and steep time a little bit. I might have had this a little cooler than it should have been. The rating on this tea is very likely to change, but then again, I’m constantly shuffling all my ratings around anyway, so this point is likely unnecessary.