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Where, oh where, has my o-o-orange gone, where, oh where, can it be? ♬

Saveur de Paris, in its dry form, has such a fantastic fragrance (if you’re the black tea + citrus-loving kind): black tea, lemony bits, orangey bits… So fresh, so refreshing, one’s eyes open a fraction wider and a smile plays upon one’s lips after just one whiff. But then, then it just sort of went away. Sad panda. The tea smells like black tea. The citrus is there, but it’s not as there as, say, Golden Moon’s Tippy Earl Grey1. It’s not that every blend of the Earl Grey ilk must be so…saturated, but that is what I expected from this blend, given its fragrance.

There is the threat of bitterness in the tea’s flavour, a threat that doesn’t really materialise, but that maybe could if I let it cool.

I’m interrupting myself to say that I think I’ve got this all wrong. I think I might’ve steeped this one too long and tried to drink it too quickly. As it cools, the flavour and fragrance are both becoming more layered, more like what I expected from the beginning. There is bitterness along with the wonderful floral notes (hullo, safflower, how do you do?).

Given this discovery, I’ll scrap my rating and try again with another cup. I have a feeling that if I can actually prepare this properly, I’m going to love it.

1 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/126970

Today, I chai’d this up. Did you know you could chai this up? I didn’t, but that’s never stopped me before. =)

Honestly, I’m not sure Ocean of Wisdom can do any wrong. It is such a forgiving blend, and apparently you can do whatever you want with it and it’ll remain delicious. I did my usual: boiled water, sugar and tea (since it’s rooibos, I like to maximise steep time and don’t bother waiting ‘til the water’s boiling), then added (vanilla soy) milk and let it bubble, bubble, bubble for a while.

Nummy.

On my second try to play nicely with 52t’s Gingerbread Chai, I used the stovetop method: I brought water to a boil and then added (vanilla soy) milk, sugar, and a little more than a tsp of tea. I let it do its thing for about three minutes, instead of five.

The resulting brew was not bitter, which is great, but it wasn’t gingerbread, either, which isn’t so great. It’s a decent enough ginger tea, but the baked, cakey sweetness I was expecting didn’t appear in the fragrance or the flavour, only in…the aftertaste. I tried it just off the stove, and I tried it after it cooled some, but I still only got ginger chai. If only I could get the taste to match the perfect aftertaste, I’d be happy. :D

I don’t _dis_like the tea and I’m happy that I have enough left to experiment with a few more cups. If you’re ever wondering about The LiberTEAS Sampler box, I have no complaints about the size of the samples! They’re really the perfect amount of tea to really play and get a feel for whether you can make a tea work for you, whether you want to pass it along to someone else or stock it permanently in your cupboard, etc. Thanks, LiberTEAS!

Tea amount: 1.25ish tsp/~6g
Water amount: About 8oz/~237mL
Additives: Vanilla soy milk and about 2 tsp Demerara sugar
Dry mouth factor: 7/10 (Even with milk, such a strange sensation!)

This is another “Oh noes, I haz eated mah tea!” Della Terra Teas blend, by which I mean that you open the packet and you want to eat the tea. It smells like lemon cookies, maybe even lemon sandwich cookies, with the vanilla notes ‘n’ all. I don’t even know how I didn’t eat this one. Cookie Monster’s sitting in a corner, sulking.

[Edit] I forgot to mention that this tea is really pretty! I didn’t remember the photo, which showcases its beauty quite well, so I was surprised when I opened the packet and got a good look. Black tea with these blue highlights and flecks of gold. I rarely notice how a tea looks, so it basically has to bat its eyelashes at me and be all, hey, look at me, I’m pretty! Such a little tart, this one.

I wasn’t able to coax the flavour I wanted out of the blend, sadly. It was so frustrating, like dropping your keys in the car, between the center console and the bucket seat, and then being able to almost-but-not-quite reach them. The flavour I got out was that of a nice black tea, good but not great. The bergamot was present but really not bold enough, especially given the heady fragrance. I steeped three minutes because I recently got schooled on the dangers of over-steeping black tea, but I think maybe the DT black tea base is more forgiving than the 52T one…? Next time, I’m going to try my usual five minutes for this one and see how it works out, because I really, I really want to taste the taste that the fragrance promises.

[Edit again] Sorry, I also forgot to mention that, like 52t’s Gingerbread Chai (which I also had today), the aftertaste is perfect. Perfect lemon cookie! I would love to get the formula right for getting the taste to be just as perfect. I mean, who wants to sit there, aggressively exhaling, just to get the perfect aftertaste, ya? Even living alone I feel silly doing it.

Tea amount: 1 level tsp/~4.75g
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: About ¾ tsp Demerara sugar

This is my first 52Teas blend! Thumper taught me not to say anything if I can’t say anything nice, so I’m having a bit of a tough time getting the words to flow, here. It’s especially tough given how beloved 52T are to the Steepster family. I’m going to go ahead and leave off the rating, for now, and take the blame for this poor first impression.

My little sample bag says to steep in boiling water for 3-5 minutes. 3-5 or 2-5, I forget which. But I always pick the longest steep time, because I always want the strongest, most robust flavour possible. This time, doing so resulted in an undrinkable brew.

The dry leaf’s fragrance is sweet in kind of a generic way. If you’d blindfolded me and waved the bag under my nose, I would’ve said “sweet,” and I probably would’ve said “black tea.” I wouldn’t have said “gingerbread” or “chai.” The brew smelled more like I expected: now I could definitely smell chai, and as the tea cooled I could smell gingerbread more and more.

My first sip of unsweetened tea caught me a little off-guard. It tasted like black tea with cardamom. Not chai, and not gingerbread. It was a little bitter, too. So I added honey, and that made it palatable, but it still tasted like black tea with cardamom. I’m sad to say that now that the tea’s cooled a bit, it’s become unbearably bitter, and I’m going to have to pour it down the drain. Really sad. (On the other hand, the Universe is probably doing me a favour: I’ve already drunk some black tea today and shouldn’t be having any more.)

I shan’t rate this until I’ve tried the stovetop method. Crossing my fingers that I can get the same great taste out of this as most of the others who’ve reviewed it!

No rating for this yet, because this isn’t an “out of the box” tasting note. My father, who’s visiting from Florida and underestimated how cold it’d be here and is now miserable, wanted something hot to drink. I wanted to limit his caffeine intake, but I’m reluctant to give him something I haven’t tried yet myself, so it was with a bit of trepidation that I made this tea. Meh, I thought, how bad can it be, right?

So here’s what I did: brought the tea, some sugar, and some water to a boil, then added some vanilla soy milk and grated some fresh ginger into the mix. Kept that going for “a while,” basically until I thought the colour looked good. Poured the whole thing through a strainer (which I didn’t used to own, by the way—thank you, Steepster Select! (RIP)) and divvied it up for us.

If I were to rate this concoction, I’d probably rate it somewhere in the 90s. Maybe even that elusive 100. I couldn’t taste any coconut, but the vanilla soy milk and the ginger+chili and orange and the cinnamon (and I don’t even like cinnamon)…[incoherent babbling]

Sorry, I’m back now. What I was trying to say was that the orange hit my tastebuds and made my mouth happy; the cinnamon hit my nose and gave it a pleasant little tickle and a lovely fragrance; and the ginger+chili hit the back of my throat and made me feel warm all over. So, so, so good.

Next time, I suppose I’ll try the blend on its own to see what it’s like.

G’morning! My blind tea grab today got me this sample, courtesy of The LiberTEAS Sample Box that I purchased a little while ago.

The dry leaf’s aroma is sort of a generic “sweet,” maybe a hint of caramel. I didn’t get any nuttiness or chocolate. Brewed, the chocolate made its appearance in the fragrance, but I still didn’t really get any nuttiness.

Chocolate is the strongest flavour I got from my unsweetened cup, followed by a bit of caramel complaining about how I couldn’t expect it to play its role well if I wouldn’t give it any sugar (it had a point). The nuts apparently called in sick, or quit or something. After sweetening my tea, I finally got the caramel I really wanted, but honestly, I think that’s more because I used dulce de leche as my sweetener than that the tea did its job.

In the end, I just had to work too hard for this, and even then it was only mediocre. After being blown away recently by some Della Terra Teas blends, I’m just not willing to put in so much effort to get a cup with lackluster flavour.

Tea amount: 1 level tsp/~4.75g
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: 1 tsp dulce de leche (http://amzn.com/B000WMPGDW) (a lot cheaper in my supermarket than on Amazon)

I closed my eyes and pointed and ended up with another Della Terra Teas blend. I gotta say, I’m getting really spoiled here. I also kind of feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken record with my unbridled glee. Every time I feel like a blend couldn’t be better, couldn’t be more accurate, I get one that is. This is such a blend.

For the third time in two days, I wanted to eat the tea. It just smells so much like those chocolate oranges that it’s hard to resist the temptation. I haven’t had one of those chocolate oranges in years, either, which makes it even harder! But I resisted and patiently brewed my tea. The balance was way off in the blend’s fragrance, and this worried me: where the dry tea smelled just like a chocolate orange, the brew smelled mostly (maybe entirely, now that I think about it) like chocolate. I was worried that the orange would be absent from the flavour, as well.

My experience is that DT blends don’t re-steep well. At least, the past two black tea blends that I’ve tried to steep for a second time (Oatmeal Raisin Cookie1 and Dubbele Chocolade2) were both really weak, even after steeping for 10 minutes. My experience is also that the recommended 3-minute steep time really doesn’t pack the flavourful punch I expect. Therefore, I’ve decided to steep just once for about 5 minutes and call it a day.

The chocolate-orange balance was restored in the flavour (and actually appeared in the brew’s fragrance, too, after it’d cooled a bit). It’s quite good unsweetened (my sweet tooth prevents me from thinking any tea can be “amazing” unsweetened, but this is really pretty good), but it’s delicious after being sweetened a bit. I’m going to be thinking about it until tomorrow, when I can next have more caffeinated tea.

Tea amount: 1 level tsp/~4.75g
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: ¾ tsp demerara sugar

1 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/137359

2 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/137472

This tea’s name always gets “Creole Lady Marmalaaaaaaaaaaade ♬” stuck in my head. I’m not a connoisseur of chocolate teas. I think I may have had one, once, but I’m not sure. It’s possible that drinking a few other chocolate blends will ground me, but for now I’m blown away, flying high on cocoa clouds. Like yesterday with the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie1 blend, I again almost ate this tea. Dear, dear Della Terra, if you keep on like this, I assure you, some such accident will occur at some point. =)

Dubbele Chocolade smells so, so, so good. You know how no one laughs quite like babies? If someone doesn’t understand what I mean by “squee,” just go look at a baby laugh. They all squee. There is so much joy to express that they simply can’t contain it in their little bodies. They laugh like they will burst at the seams if they don’t. Joy is to baby as chocolate is to Dubbele Chocolade: it’s like the packet will start dancing in your hands if you don’t open it and let the chocolate out.

Here’s a surprise: I sipped my tea, unsweetened, and it was…good! (The good wasn’t the surprise, the good unsweetened was the surprise.) Not good enough for me to finish it that way, but hey, ♬ it’s my teeeeacup and I’ll brew how I waaant to… ♬ I added some sugar and sipped again, and again it was good. In a pinch, I could drink this as-is, which wins it some major points (and earns it a slightly higher rating than Oatmeal Raisin Cookie). But since I didn’t have to, I didn’t…

It’s that time of year again, when the seasonal stuff appears in supermarkets that the mean people don’t let me have year-round. One such thing is Silk’s line of specialty soy milk. Since my tea was still “just” good and not zomg-amazing, I added some mint chocolate soy milk. I really had no idea what sort of concoction would result from this experiment. I’m happy to report that it was incredible. So incredible, in fact, that I’d drunk half the cup before I sat down to write this, so now I have to turn around and go right back to try for a second steep. Thank you, Della Terra Teas! Dubbele Chocolade joins Oatmeal Raisin Cookie as a citizen of my Happy Place.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll try a cup plain or with just sugar at some point. But right now, I am having waaaay too much fun experimenting in my beverage lab. I still have a few finishing touches to put on it, but soon I’ll be able to take some photos and share my pride ‘n’ joy with you all. =)

Tea amount: 1 level tsp/~4.75g
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: A splash of mint chocolate soy milk and ½ tsp demerara sugar

1 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/137359

So, now I know what it’s like to just sort of dissolve into a big puddle of yum. My people, if you like-a the oatmeal raisin cookie, and if you like-a the tea, and if you like-a the yum, you will lub this blend.

The fun began as soon as I opened the packet. I would’ve been able to identify this tea blindfolded. It pretty much screamed, COOOOOOKIEEEEE, causing me to immediately morph into my natural Cookie Monster state. I almost upended the packet right into my mouth, but then remembered that it was tea, and that it probably wouldn’t be as good an idea as Cookie Monster was thinking. There was absolutely no mistaking the oatmeal raisin cookieness in the aroma. Steeped, the tea smelled equally good, only very slightly muted since, well, I no longer had my nose stuck right in the packet.

Sip, sip… [frown] sip, sip… [frown some more] I don’t even know why I bothered trying this unsweetened, except that it’s my habit to at least take a sip or two before I mess with it. But I mean, c’mon, cookie. So I added some milk and sweetener, and it was much better. Cookie Monster smiled. Liquid coooookieeeee! It smells better than it tastes. Not that it tastes bad, it’s just really hard, I think, to capture the in-your-faceness of the fragrance in the flavour. Maybe if I’d steeped longer? I dunno, I’ll try that next time. For now I’d say, “excellent, with some room for improvement.” I award this blend citizenship of my Happy Place.

[Edit] NOMNOMNOMNOM

Tea amount: 1 level tsp
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: A splash of vanilla soy milk and about ½ tsp cane syrup. Cane syrup is new to me. I saw it in the supermarket the other day and thought it would be interesting to try. The jar says it’s great for baking and on pancakes and waffles, so I figured oatmeal raisin cookie tea would be perfect for it. That was a good call. =)