Ahmad Tea

Last night I took my steeper apart to clean it out, but managed to break it instead. So today I’m drinking bagged tea in the office. Frankly, this tea is so good I don’t really notice much of a difference.

After seeing Sil’s review of this tea, I knew I had to try it out. I checked out a few stores that carry Ahmad, but couldn’t find this one. I finally tracked this down in a store that carries grocery goods from the UK (as well as Dr. Who and Downton Abbey memorabilia) and ended up picking up a few varieties of Ahmad’s flavored tea. Spoiler alert – they are all phenomenal!

I REALLY love the black tea used in these bags. I grew up drinking Ahmad’s straight black tea, so maybe nostalgia factors in a little bit. But in all honesty, it’s perfectly strong without being astringent. The strawberry flavor is sweet and juicy. There is a candy-like quality to it, but not in a terribly artificial way. This is a really nicely done tea. Love it!

Backlog:

A really pleasant Darjeeling – nice for afternoon sipping. Sweet, wine-like, and woodsy. Notes of muscatel. Notes of spice. Smooth, not a lot of astringency for a Darjeeling. A really enjoyable cuppa. One of those easy to sip Darjeeling teas.

This tea brews to a nice copper colour. It smells of biscuit, plums, honey, and a slight hint of cocoa.
This tea is great when I’m craving baked goods as it has the powdery taste of biscuit, and a slight hint of apricot and plum jam with honey and citrus. There is a faint hint of bitterness from malt and cocoa. It is fairly smooth easily drinkable little to no astringency after the 4 and half minutes I brewed it for. There is an aftertaste like eating scones. The tea Offers great value for the money.

I’m not normally a fan of fruit teas in teabags. Herbal ones I don’t mind, but for some reason I always seem to find fruit ones really bitter. However, Kittylovestea sent me a sample of this in our recent swap, and it would have been bad manners not to drink it.

I am glad I did. It actually tasted of Strawberry, and the black tea was just the right foil to the sweetness that was coming across. Still an amount of bitterness, but not unpleasant in this instance. Whether that’s the tea or my tastes changing, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter does it?

SIPDOWN! (305) another one from kittylovestea that i was excited to try! Bagged tea be damned, this is a REALLY nice strawberry tea. I think this would make a darn good latte as well! I may have to do some digging to see if i can find a box of this is any of my stores around here just to have these to tuck away at work since bagged seems to be the way to go. I for sure lost track of steeping this one and it didn’t become bitter/astringent.

Thank you kitty!

This tea had small entire leaves lightly scented with a fruity smelling jasmine. The brewed tea requires slightly more leaves than I normally brew with (about 1.5 my normal), and a lower brewing temp or the tea brews very dark and bitter. If you use too little the tea base contributes nothing. The tea smells of a light fruity jasmine and a
fruity black tea with hints of berry and cherry, and a heavier undertone like burnt sugar, and is lightly floral beyond the jasmine.

The taste develops its strongest flavour when lukewarm or cool. It might make a decent ice tea. This tea is not for someone who requires
their tea to be hot. On first sip the tea tastes weak, but develops into an interesting mix of bitter, earthy, malty undertone like charred bread toped by a cool floral, followed, by a sweet, dark red berry flavour with a hint of burnt sugar.

The tea is tannic and when brewed at higher temperatures astringent. I might try brewing it for a little longer at lower temperatures again. I find that if I doubled the leaf at boiling the bitter tones intensify and the mouth feel is almost like drinking coffee. The jasmine is quite light it bends into the flavour of the tea and while its smell is quite fruity it tastes more of a cool floral. It does not taste powdery though.

This tea while offering value for the money is not as flavourful as the bagged jasmine black I recently bought. I think I prefer a slightly sweeter, stronger flavoured base underneath the flavouring and I prefer a sweeter fruitier jasmine. The hunt continues for my preferred jasmine black, I’ll keep looking although this is not my favourite
flavour in tea I find it quite sophoric and the other jasmine black I own actually can put me to sleep.

A bit of a bitter aftertaste, but overall a very well balanced tea. Just enough hints of lemon and lime to give the black tea some flavour, but not enough to take away from the blend.

Quite a nice tea. Smells like a strawberry candy but tastes like a black tea with a strawberry essence.

I bought this for the tins. On Amazon, you can get this in a 4 pack of so-cute-it-oughta-be-illegal little English phonebox tins (not pictured here). I justified the purchase by reasoning that I could drink the tea at work where I still use bags and use the tins at home for tea storage.

Well, the tins are just as cute in person, maybe more so, but my greedy little eyeballs breezed right over the description that they’re also banks. So each one has a coin slot in the top. Sigh.

They come with a bit of tape over the coin slot, and I added a second, bigger piece, and I’ll just put the label for whatever tea it is on top so it looks less wonky.

But why am I spending so much time on the tins? Because the tea is utterly unremarkable. It’s dust in a bag that brews up to an average, slightly tart/sour, english breakfast blend. I have 99 more of these and I’ll drink them easily; it isn’t crap. But there’s not much to say about it. It’s a lot like all the tea I drank before I knew more about tea.

Much better than the Impra from this morning. Still an inexpensive bagged tea but the jasmine is very natural. The standard Chinese green base is nice and vegetal. A good bagged choice.

Still think this is quite a nice bagged green. It does not however go well with Doritos. That did not stop me. :)

Debating this with myself – I think I may stop giving a rating number at least for now. I still have my personal rating scale on my profile at the moment. My ratings have been consistent with my scale but it is subjective. My numbers are often higher than other opinions. It seems awkward to lower my numbers to match other’s scale, and I don’t want to appear to be inflating numbers either. Maybe I think too much.

Chinese green tea fannings in a bag. Ok, I’m biased towards Ahmad tea. They make some of my favorite bagged teas and my comfort loose leaf earl grey. That admission aside, this is way better than it has to be for bagged green tea. Seriously, have you had some of what passes for green tea in the grocery store? Most of it is barely recognizable as tea. Some of it even tastes like paint. This tastes like a simple Chinese green. It lacks depth but it will do when you need a fix on the quick.

I avoided strawberry tea for the longest time as I expected to hate it. Gmathis sent a Cheapster Steepster award winner of a strawberry tea bag my way and changed my mind. Now this one is one I had planned to buy the first time I saw it. Ahmad is my favorite company for tea bag tea as they just seem to get it right more often than not. Before I could find it Brett sent this my way. I opened the envelope and swore I had just opened a box strawberries out of the fridge. Awesome. Steeped for 4 or 5 minutes. The taste is lighter than the smell but it is pretty close to the real deal. I like that it is light enough to taste the tea. It gets bonus points for that. If you are going to drink bagged tea it might as well be a good one. I will still buy this when I see it in the store. High yum factor. 85 is pretty high for a bagged but worth it to my taste buds.

Steepster seems to be acting up so hopefully this post and can be read. I Slept in late this morning. Need tea. Most of my stuff is still packed up. I found the tea bags I intended to take on my last day of work but had forgotten them. Heated the water in the microwave (which I hate doing) and steeped for… uhmmm, well until the water was cool. You would think I had never done this before. This one seemed pretty forgiving. The lime pops. It kind of opened my eyes. Then I taste the lemon. Bonus, I can taste the tea. A lot of grocery store bagged teas aren’t balanced. Ahmad generally does a great job as they have done here. Lemon and lime are never flavors I have on their own so I think they taste natural in this but maybe you would disagree. Anyway they taste nice here. The base seems mellow. In their Earl Grey the base has rougher edges. For a no fuss cup this worked well.

This morning I grabbed this because I only had one left and it was easy. The scent and flavor of this hit me today as fresh from the porch rosemary with cinnamon, clove, and ginger. Of course none of those are actually in this nice bagged tea. Good morning cup.

I see cardamom listed as an ingredient every now and then but usually with a bunch of other ingredients so I really had no idea what it tasted like. It is kind of like ginger and clove had a kid and maybe sprinkled it with a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg. It is sweet. It is not exactly perfumey, but more like soapy. I think I like it. I certainly would not turn down a cup. Not sure I would buy a box. I like the Ceylon base. Thanks Brett.

A great value if you can get the giant 500 g tin of it. The bergamot is a little light, but I don’t mind that. The black tea flavor is nice and strong so the bergamot becomes more of a bolstering after taste. It’s quite pleasant if you don’t like to be assaulted by bergamot.
Tea gets bitter quickly, so I don’t recommend steeping it past 3 min

The taste is natural and enjoyable. The mango flavor is not too strong, but complements the black tea. Ahmad has updated the box, and perhaps the tea as well, since they now call it Mango Magic with real fruit pieces, and list 2% mango in the ingredients.

I visited a British store and found this adorable red english telephone booth tin filled with packets of this tea. (I really bought it for the tin, the tea was like a “free gift with purchase” deal.) I’m drinking it for the first time now and it is really good and strong. My new electric kettle boils my water like crazy and it takes about 30 minutes before the tea is sippable afterwards, but I think it really makes my teas crazy strong. I usually just stick with Twinings English breakfast but this is a great alternative.

I have a hard time making up my mind about this tea. I don’t generally use cardamon, so I am not used to the taste. It is sweet, but unusual kind of sweet. I can taste both the cardamon and the ceylon tea base, which go together well, but I think I would only drink this if I were eating spicy, especially Indian food.

Very strong aroma as the tea is brewing. Much better taste than Bigelow’s Raspberry Royale – the raspberry flavor is natural, though I do not taste the tea underneath at all. A good dessert tea; it would go well with dark chocolate.

Another solid fruit tea from Ahmad. The flavor tastes natural, like fresh apricots. I think this would be great as an iced tea or cold-brewed.