52teas

OK, I thought I’d just top off my caffeination before heading out (while waiting for my beloved to slowly ready himself) and try this new tea at the same time. It’s not for me. I couldn’t finish it. The spices are too strong and hurt my throat and the ginger smell is too strong for me to enjoy the fragrance of the tea.

I’ve put it in my “Give to a Good Home” box.

I had the pleasure of trying this tea first in the Zoomdweebies shop in KS and it is delicious when they make it into a tea latte!

They have the tea latte recipe available so I don’t think I’m giving away anything when I say I went home and tried it on my own with sweetened condensed milk and that is the crux of their tea latte recipe.

With the full tea latte recipe the latte feels lighter than a normal Sbux tea latte and the flavor of the tea seems more developed too. Wow can Frank brew… trust me I had two!

At home making the full amount of latte mix is nice but then you feel the need to drink the whole thing… which ends up being a party type amount…. not I want a bit of tea now amount… so I tried this tea just adding the sweetened condensed milk and boy is that yummy. Actually I’ve discovered that sweetened condensed milk is FANTASTIC with a lot of different dessert type tea and I really suggest playing around with it as a tea modifier. The only flavor I don’t think it works well with so far is chocolate…. but I’ll be experimenting more with that later…

Using normal tea condiments I find that I am using more sugar than I usually do to try to mimick the tea latte flavor. Unfortunately I think I’m walking into this tea biased having had my first taste of it with the tea latte instead of my normal experimenting. I’m finding that three teaspoons of sugar in a two teaspoon of tea pot is the right ratio to about even up the flavor with what I was expecting and then of course some milk.

The tea base is a little astringent tasting if you don’t add enough sugar which is something I have not noticed with the other 52 teas blends so I’m probably again biased because of the tea latte.

Coconut is present and lightly awesome. Not over bearing or a punch in the face and it is accented well with the vanilla creamy flavor. This is a tea that I’m not enjoying with out milk as it seems to lose a depth without it and I also can’t enjoy this one with just milk and no sugar. Again it seems to lose a level without using both. Actually without sugar it almost has a woody black tea quality. Not smokey woody but that potato starchy woody round flavor. Interesting but I’m spoiled with this tea now and only want it light and sweet.

I’m happy this is a permanently available tea. I know that seems to go against the 52teas mantra but this one is that banging good… especially as a tea latte.

We just returned from a five hour trek through a frozen swamp. It was exhilarating crossing logs, creating our own shaky log bridges across treacherously deep swamp waters and then walking (him) or crawling (me) over them.

It was terrifying when we fell through the ice and ended up in deep water and even more frightening when we realized we were lost, soaked, the temperature was dropping down to 12 degrees and we might not get out of there. Our bones might decorate the swamp just as the skull of the small creatures we saw going in decorated it.

Thankfully we’d packed Clif bars as emergency rations and we ate them to get enough calories to encourage our bodies to make heat to dry our jeans and clear our minds. Not that it worked all that well as a heating trick. Our jeans froze hard as boards when subjected to temps in the teens and a brisk wind. But it did clear our minds sufficiently to find a way out again.

Once we arrived home the obvious question for me (that I’d been contemplating since our fourth hour slogging through the swamp) was what tea was suitable to serve as a warming celebration beverage after such an adventure? I picked this one and added a bit of honey. Mmmm. It tastes like victory. Swampy victory.

It really is a yummy coconut tea and the addition of the honey and Silk creamer makes it even yummier!

My plan for today is eating very little so that I can feast tonight. This tea just arrived and I’ve dragooned it into my plot to keep me low calorie during the day while satisfying my hungry inner child. (Thanks for such great timing 52 Teas.)

The tea looks amazing with giant pieces of coconut strewn through the tea. I absolutely adore coconut and would happily live on it if that didn’t mean that I would gain tons of weight. But coconut tea? Just what the diet doctor ordered I think.

The tea’s fragrance wafts upward with a light floral note combined with coconut, vanilla and the classic tea scent. It steeps into a reddish brown liquor that has a sweet dark taste with a coconut aftertaste. It’s reasonably good and definitely what I need today to stay on my meager calorie allotment until tonight’s bacchanal.

The scent of the leaves was intriguing, you smelled some date, along with vanilla and coconut. The leaves were also blended with pieces of coconut, which I thought was a nice touch. The aroma of the brewed tea was nice. It was sweet and complex, you were smelling multiple things and they all smelled good together.

The taste of tea (brewed hot with sugar) displayed the complexity and intrigue of the smells going on. There was a date flavor that was very well blended with vanilla and black tea. However, I could not taste the coconut, it appeared slightly at the end as an aftertaste of the tea, but it was not as prominent as it was in smelling.

Overall, I enjoyed the tea, but few that I could not drink it more than a few more times.

This tea was very good from start to finish.

The scent of the leaves was decadent; banana and chocolate. You can see little pieces of dried banana and pineapples throughout the black tea. After brewing (hot with sugar) the aroma of the tea mirrored the leaves; banana and chocolate. The aroma was in no way overpowering, in fact it adds to the tea. The taste starts with banana, then the chocolate then pineapple and cherry. I missed the strawberry, but that could have just blended in with the chocolate.

While this sounds like a lot going into one mouthful, and it is, it is still in no way overpowering. It is sweet and delicious but carried by the black tea note that appears underneath everything else going on.

Honestly, if you do not like banana splits you will not like this, it incorporated just about everything into one cup. And just like with real banana splits, you cannot have this tea everyday, a cup or two here and there and you will be satisfied. Enjoy.

As we know, I enjoy flavored black teas, I very much enjoy NY style cheese cake, but apricots I have no opinion on, I could love them or hate them. This was a smooth black tea, you can definitely taste the apricots, which I’m afraid made it a little bit too bitter for me. Unfortunately I did not get the cheesecake taste. Tried it hot and with some sugar, but might have been better (more cheesecake-like flavor) with milk and or as the 52teas suggests a latte.

You know, I think I went the entire summer without drinking this tea. And that’s just wrong because this is so much a tea to drink iced on hot days. Today, however, was cold and rainy and I spent a day out in the (wet) grasslands for one of my courses, so I needed something to warm me up.

I experimented with this to make it more like a genuine pina colada – I sweetened with some agave nectar and added some milk – all it needs is some rum, which sadly I am lacking. The milk turned the tea a rather nasty greyish colour, but ignoring that it was really tasty, very much like a hot pina colada – sweet, creamy, and fruity. Delicious!

This tea is excellent iced. I sweetened it a bit with honey while it was brewing and really all it needs is a bit of milk and a dash of rum and voila – pina colada!

I steeped this extra long and as a result the honeybush flavour was a bit more prominent. I think I’ll keep it at 7 minutes as that seems to generate a nice balance between the honeybush base and the pina colada flavours.

I’ve noticed that the liquid is surprisingly dark for a honeybush, more of a very dark amber colour than a reddish tone. The scent is still amazing – I keep wanting to stick one of those little cocktail umbrellas in my mug. XD

When I first tasted the tea while it was still quite hot, the honeybush was the more dominent of the flavours, but as it cooled it became sweeter and more pina colada-like. This is tropical memories in a mug, ladies and gentlemen. It takes me back to hanging out on the beach at Caye Caulker in Belize where I went on a field course the summer before last. Good times. :)

When I open the bag I have to make sure that I’m not mistaken and have an actual pina colada drink under my nose. Well not really, but you get what I mean. The scent is EXACTLY like the drink IMO.

The taste is quite realistic aswell. I’m quite distinctly picking up both the pinapple and the coconut flavoures, though it could perhaps use a touch of creaminess. I’m not picking up much of the honeybush right now except for a vague herbal background flavour, but then, I used the minimum recommended steeping time listed on the package, so there’s room for experimentation. I’d also love to try this tea with honey to see what that does to it.

I am learning to like spicy food. I used to hate it. Wouldn’t touch it. My brother, on the other hand, would put tabasco sauce on baklava if given the opportunity. I distinctly remember a dinner with family friends at a pizza place where he and the son of my parents’ friends drank some of the stuff out of the jar. Disgusting, but I digress.

I still consider myself to be towards the bottom of the curve in terms of appreciating spicy food. I still can’t eat most Indian food without spending the rest of the night in an…unfortunate situation. And anything super spicy will upset my stomach. However, I enjoy stuff with a little kick and the Chai Agni that Carolyn had sent me took me to a very happy place, so I was excited to give this a try.

If you took the heat out of kimchi and put it in a chocolate chai, that is what my experience with this was like. It was hot. Now your definition of hot might differ from my definition of hot, but this was hot enough to drown out any hope for me of getting much else out of it. I could barely taste the chocolate aspect of it, and the spices from the chai were completely gone.

It could be that I happened to get a particularly large proportion of pepper in it, and I really hope that’s what happened, but that experience has scared me off of trying this again for a while. I mean, it was so spicy I knew it was going to make my stomach very, very angry if I didn’t stop drinking it so I had to dump the lot. If you want to make yourself sad, spend a good 20 minutes making chai and then make yourself pour most of it down the sink. I’ll give it another try once the scar of the spice has cooled down significantly enough. For now, I can only recommend this to someone who finds the idea of chocolate kimchi appealing.

This is amazing. I ended up coming down with a cold, right around Christmas. Drinking this at night, while watching the news – definitely helps the sniffles and makes me feel all warm inside (and considering the Canadian winters,that’s a plus!)

ANGRBODA very kindly sent me a generous portion of this tea. I had not had any since it was first released and I like it more than most people here do. The cherry taste is a bit muted, I agree. But there’s something about the “cola” taste that I love. Indeed, I’ve been known to wear cola fragrance: L’Aromarine Cola Eau de Toilette is the best inexpensive scent I have. This tea tastes like the liquid scent.

There are a bunch of complex notes vying for attention here, I think, which is why it might not seem utterly successful as a cherry tea or as a vanilla tea or as a cola tea, but I like the mix very much.

I had an obscenely sinful amount of fun with this tea. I love the “cola” effect and the blend of flavors. I really have not had a tea like it. I could almost feel the splash of carbonation on my face. It’s a great blend. I may try the carbonated soda recipe that 52teas has presented but I think I would cut the sugar by at least half. My tea stood up to a second brew with no loss of potency, so I can make it last longer.

I don’t know if tea purists will appreciate this one; I, on the other hand, love strange and unusual combinations and blends and this is one of the best, in my opinion, of the always interesting, always loveable, and often outrageously great blends of 52teas. I just paid them for a 6 month program once I tasted this tea, so you can tell that my love is sincere.

This is one that will probably grow on me. After loathing licorice for most of my life, I’ve become a huge fan of it in the last year or two – not the sweet licorice sticks, but actual licorice root. This tea has a lot of that, as well as cinnamon bark and Indian black tea. The result is much creamier than I expected.

I can taste a slight bite from the cinnamon, but mostly this tastes like a creamy version of a licorice herbal tea that I have (and love). I wish there was a bit more of that refreshing licorice taste, but this is good nonetheless.

Again, craving this one when I put together my little teabags for this morning. Not too sweet or bitter.

But! More exciting! I just made my first Den’s Tea order! As I’ve said, I’m reallyyyy trying to get myself to like green teas more, so I figured I’d start with Japanese greens first. I got:
2 oz of Pineapple Sencha
2 oz of Genmaicha Extra Green
Matcha Kaze
and the green tea sampler set, since I really wanted to try their Sencha Fuka-midori

So hopefully there’ll be some delicious new tasting notes soon.

I do like this more and more every time I drink it; it still has a rather synthetic taste to me, but it’s addictive. I mainly taste date, though, with very little coconut and no vanilla.

I was craving this tea today, though I’m still not entirely sold on it..

I like this a lot more than when I made it at work; maybe water temperature had something to do with the odd flavors that I got last time. This time it’s a bit more straightforward: definitely tasting the dates first and foremost, with a hint of creamy vanilla. No coconut, though, which is sad and odd considering there are huge flakes of it in the sample I have.

Um. Hm.

Hm.

Well, I don’t DISLIKE this. I’m just not sure how great it is. This definitely does have a very strong taste of dates. I’ve never had dates that were not of the bacon-wrapped variety, but I now know exactly what they taste like sans bacon. I can taste a hint of coconut in the aftertaste, but no vanilla.

This is a very, very unique tea. I still am thinking on this.

This tea feels so complex… let’s start at the beginning.
The leaves smell odd. It kinda reminds me of the mintiness of tooth paste and pinesol. Or a minty Christmas tree… But luckily the brew smells lighter and sweeter than that. Cause that wasn’t the most pleasant thing I’ve ever stuck my nose into.
The brew is a nice light amber. If you can’t tell I’m nervous about this one mostly cause I don’t like spearmint.
And taste… This is where they pull the rug out from under you. There is some kind of crazy undertone of vanilla or cream or something. I believe this is due to the champagne portion of the flavoring and champagne is an amorphous enough of a flavor that it has to be blamed for the creaminess and some kind of sparkly tingle flavor. Weird/NEAT!
On top of that is a light amount of lime. The lime seems like the binding flavor as it is there but everything else radiates around it. Really it’s like a lime cream soda. Delicious.
And somewhere sitting in its own little dark corner (yea! it’s not prominent!) is the spearmint. The rest of the flavors are very bright so I agree that a darker flavor in the blend is good and necessary to provide the bottom of the blend and let the other flavors spring board off of it. It’s not over powering but as my tea is cooling off it is masking the other flavors a little more. This is where the crazy interplay of flavors come in… mint and champagne must equal “sparkly”! I don’t know how they thought that up but it works with the spearmint flavor coming out so late in the game that you really register sparkles before mint.
After almost finishing my 2 oz. I feel that the interesting points in the blend are a little too much. Cup one is all about discovering and as you can see there is a lot to discover and experience… and then cup after cup you kinda get used to it and the excitement goes away and you’re left with a very complicated tea that you’ve picked a prodded at so it has lost its shine. I really wish each cup brought about the same excitement but… I guess it doesn’t have any staying power for me.
I think 2 oz. for a party where many people will get to experience something new in exciting is a great idea for this tea… but for personal everyday drinking it’s not staying wonderful.