Monk's Blend

Teabox Tuesday! I grabbed this sample from the Discovery Teabox, so thank you to Skysamurai for organizing and all participants for sharing! I had to run a ton of errands this morning bright and early before work, so by the time I made it to work, this tea was already not as warm as I’d prefer. Still drinkable, though.

This is pretty much a black breakfast sort of tea; I got a lot of malty/toast notes, a bit of a dry autumn leaf flavor, and a bit of a peppery/subtle smoke flavor toward the end of the sip. This is actually a quite nice blend; I often get the autumn leaf taste from darjeelings and I can definitely taste the Keemun in the blend rather distinctly. I just wish I could’ve enjoyed this while it was still properly warm and not sort of luke warm in my thermos. Ah well. Things have just been crazy lately, hense the lack of much tea-goings-on for me of recent.

Discovery Tea box – Tea #22
The last serving of tea I’m removing from the box before passing it on. As usual, a fun experience, though this might be the smallest tea box I’ve ever participated in. I think a tea box should be a nice balance of not-too-big to ship and overwhelming, while also being a large amount of teas you want to try before passing the teabox along. I think I might have tried most of the teas in the tea box that I didn’t try before. And I must say there was A LOT of large pouches with a teaspoon or two of tea in them. But I appreciate tea boxes no matter what!
This was yet another tea I had to add to Steepster (there were many of those) so maybe this tea box actually WAS the ‘discovery tea box’. This tea is a blend of organic darjeeling, keemun, assam, nilgiri black tea leaves. If it was a blind taste test, I would have a difficult time telling any of these teas were here. I think I can taste a bit of keemun and that’s about it. It tastes like a smoky keemun so I’d probably guess there was some lapsang souchong here. But there isn’t. A solid black tea.