Secret Garden's Secret

thank you Anlina for sharing this one with me. I grabbed this one to try yesterday and hadn’t looked at what it was supposed to be. What resulted was a really nice, vanilla berry tea – leaning towards strawberry with just a sense or cream. It was delicious and a great first introduction to this company!

Backlog:

I love the dry leaf aroma: notes of berry and vanilla. Once brewed, there are more black tea notes, and the vanilla fragrance becomes softer and the berry notes seem to disappear.

It’s tasty! Even though I can’t smell the strawberry in the brewed tea, I can definitely taste it. Hint of chocolate. Vanilla. Sweet strawberry with a tart note in the aftertaste. The chocolate was very subtle. As I say in my full-length review of this tea – http://sororiteasisters.com/2014/10/27/secret-gardens-secret-black-tea-from-the-secret-garden-tea-company/ – the chocolate is very unassuming, it’s a note that sort of hides itself but every once in a while the palate notices it and the taste buds jump up and say, ‘whoa, what was that? chocolate???’

The black tea is lovely with notes of malt.

A really enjoyable tea.

Hmm, secret flavours.

My first impression from the dry leaf was subtle notes of chocolate and strawberry.

I steeped 1tsp in 8oz of 96C water for three minutes. I typically steep blacks for at least four, but Secret Garden’s Plum & Cottage Pear seemed a bit oversteeped at four minutes. I think three minutes was the right choice for this, and I’ll be starting with three minutes for my other Secret Garden blacks, too.

Steeped, the cup smells very creamy on top of the strawberry chocolate notes.

The taste… it’s good, but I can’t really put my finger on what I’m tasting. Creamy, chocolate, strawberries, malt?? A hint of berry tart that’s there on the finish but not the rest of the sip? Maybe even just a touch of citrus and hops? There’s definitely more to this than just strawberry, chocolate and vanilla.

I’ll have to try this again on a different day and maybe my palate will be able to better pick out the different flavours, as I’m having a hard time accurately describing this. It’s desserty and different from other chocolate berry teas I’ve had. I like it, and I think it would probably be tasty with milk and sugar, too.

Thank you to Tiffany at Secret Garden for the sample!