Flowering Black Tea Cones

These handy little flowers have become my go-to tea to carry in my purse. I can bring them with me to a restaurant, drop a few in my cup, let them steep & fish them out with a fork when my tea is strong enough. I don’t need a strainer, because they are tidy, with the leaves all tied together in the classic flower formation. The resulting cup is malty, smooth, & sweet. And they resteep nicely too. :)

another great cup of tea this morning while i clean up the kitchen, do a little work and get it ready for my other half to then wake up and cook me breakfast! lol this is pretty much par for course when we have a day off together on the weekend as i’m a morning person and he’s a night owl. So i get up, prepare the kitchen, make coffee and bring it to him in bed…then he gets up and makes my delicious breakfast to go with said coffee :) it’s perfect. Today we’ll be doing that and then i suspect it’ll be an extended bike ride down to high park to check out the cherry blossoms for fun :)

Love this tea!

The flavor is a nice malty brew with caramel and pecan notes with a silky texture. What I enjoy most about the Flowering Cones is it can take a beating: when I was on my cruise I’d just toss a few in my travel mug and let it infuse away without worry of oversteeping.

I personally prefer a longer steep with this tea, but the short 1 through 5 minute steeps were pretty good and I got quite a bit of tea from two little cones.

Full review on my blog, The Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/flowering-cones-black-tea-mandala-tea-oolong-owl-tea-review/ Black Tea Week with Sunset Owl (shhh, he’s missing feet!) I took some cool pictures of this blooming tea, so check it out!

This one came from Terri HarpLady!

This one has been on my shopping list, now newly named wishlist (?), for a long time. I love flowering teas. They are definitely beautiful to watch bloom, it is almost like I have no idea how that even works. Definitely an art. But I don’t really care for the taste of flowering teas. So when I came across this one, I was super curious, it was a flowering tea but made of black tea. Right up my alley.

I only used 2 cones for a cup because I wasn’t sure how strong it would be. In hindsight, I should have used 3 or 4 cones but I have enough to try again. Definitely beautiful to watch the cones “flower”.

This one brewed up a sweet, malty black tea. I am getting honey notes, but very specifically barley honey notes. It is quite mild on the boldness scale but I think that is more to do with not using enough tea. This one is similar to some of the black pearl teas I have tried but with more sweetness.

Edit: I did a resteep with the same two cones, but for 4 minutes. Definitely a lot stronger with the 4 minute steep time. less honey flavour, it is strong but not bold. Pretty smooth taste. I think, though, I would prefer more tea with less steep time.

Tried to brew these using the method on the package—try 1, 2, then 5 min steeps with 2-3 cones for 8 oz water.

Second steep: A bit better than the first, but only just.

I’m going to try the 5 min steep, but overall I think these cones require much more time.

Such joy to watch these small cones expand. A meditation in itself. Sweet black tea that is likely very to sip.

I took these camping this weekend (with some other teas, but forgot the tea bags/strainer), and OMG. SO GOOD.

I could let them steep for ages, and in a 12 oz cup 2 of them gave me 3 good cups of tea. Plus, it was really fun pulling them out of my ceramic mug and holding them up (like kraken! or sea urchins!) when people asked me what I was drinking. :D

This is something that I’ve been wanting to try for awhile. I’m so happy that I finally received some . They have an amazing aroma. These little golden cones carry a deep sweet malt and currant aroma. I placed two inside my glass tea pot. The liquor is lighter than most Yunnan reds. The scent is the same. This brew carries the amazing sweet bread, malt, and caramel aroma. The taste was fantastic. I can taste light fluffy baked bread, sea salt caramel, malt, and a sweet currant. The best thing about this tea is that it cant be over steeped. I left this in the teapot for longer than five minutes. The brew was still sweet and soothing. These little cones would be perfect for traveling tea. They have easy brewing parameters, and are so convenient.

https://instagram.com/p/5169_czGdH/?taken-by=haveteawilltravel

Backlog from yesterday – GCTTB4

I put a cone of this into a 12 oz cup and let it sit for quite a while. It was a solid black tea, but I don’t remember a whole lot about it since I was cooking dinner at the time, and I probably let it sit for too long. But I don’t remember disliking it a lot – it did the job.

I still need to do some notes for the gongfu sessions I had with Equusfell yesterday, but for now I will continue with the cupboard sip-through because I am almost done!! This tea (#–4) represents the Mandala order for smart soak that also included some tea. I had read good things about it, so I threw a small pouch of these cones in the order.

I think I will need to play around with steep parameters for this one. This time, I used 4 cones for 12 oz of water, steeped for 3 min at 205°F, which is close to the given parameters. Actually I steeped it for three minutes, sipped it, and then decided it was too weak so I put the cones back in for a bit. It came out decent, but not as good as I was hoping. I think my downfall was putting it back in. Or maybe I need fewer cones for longer. I dunno, but the main flavors were general earthiness and maybe some dark chocolate, but not very predominantly. It reminds me a good amount of Black Dragon Pearls. I think it needs to be a little lighter for my tastes, and hopefully some sweetness will come out. Fortunately I have enough cones to play around with them a bit.