Cuppa'T Specialty Teas

Malt to the extreme, with just a hint of vanilla.

This was just something I made for a quick cup last week, prior to packing/moving craziness. It had just been a while since I had a more traditional/simple breakfast blend and that’s what I was in the mood for. Glad I keep this one around even if it’s nothing spectacularly fancy.

I’m drinking this right now with some peppermint agave added into it because I was in a bit of a festive black tea kind of mood but the cup is kind of behaving stangely? It’s pretty damn sweet, which makes sense because I added lots of agave, but I’m only just getting a whisper of the peppermint/candy cane notes that I wanted from the cup. It’s strange to me how much of the general sweetness of the agave has come through without the mint doing the same. Aside from that it’s not a bad cup – very thick and full bodied with a ton of malty raisin and bread-y notes. It’s exactly what I want from an Irish Breakfast in terms of flavour, just not what I want from a peppermint Irish Breakfast…

Very nice “breakfast” mug of tea made and drank on one of the days this week where I was actually up and out of bed earlier enough to make tea before leaving for the metro – a rare occurrence for me as I tend to sleep as long as humanly possible and minimize my time spent awake at the apartment. I’m not a morning person; I make my lunch and set out clothing the evening before, as well as shower. I can be up and out of the house in less than ten minutes if I need to be…

I had this mug with oat milk; I’ve been enjoying exploring that type of milk alternative lately. It’s pretty new to me, and I’m finding that I like it in some teas but not all of them – it’s got quite a distinct taste. This pairing was pretty good; I find this tea really full bodied and brisk, malty and bread-y already but adding the oat milk really emphasized the bread-y element of it, making for a strong and full bodied cup that tasted like French Bread and oats? It was good, though.

With some cherry infused creamed honey. I couldn’t taste the cherry, but I did appreciate the addition of the honey sweetness in this super brisk/full bodied malty cuppa. It was a good late evening mug to sip on while cooking; something with the body to keep me going until I hate a bowl of food in front of my fat face after a long day of work…

So I was messing around with my Divination tea a week or so ago, and just having a bit of fun with tea lead reading. It’s not something I personally put stock in as far as genuine belief goes, but it’s always something I’ve found interesting and kind of wanted to learn as a cool “party trick” or whatever…

I like using this tea for it because it’s a CTC grade and works really well in terms of clumping/sitting in the cup in a way that can be interpreted. Huang Pian is definitely not the worlds best tea leaf reading type of tea, if you know what I mean. I also just really like this one because it’s a very smooth blend that takes a while to pick up astringency/bitterness – and when you’re drinking from a cup of tea with the leaf just loose sitting in the bottom that’s a very good trait to have.

Photos here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BlqnqkeHtKz/?taken-by=ros_strange

With cashew milk and pumpkin agave.

This was delicious; very full bodied and rich with creamy malt notes and then of course the beautiful, sweet added flavours of the aforementioned milk and agave. It’s a solid cup though! It made for a really nice late night mug to sip on while curled up on the couch. Very peaceful!

With milk and pumpkin agave.

I honestly feel like all kinds of basic drinking this; it’s so pumpkiny. However, pumpkin is the epitome of fall, and I’ve been leaning into fall flavours/teas so heavily as of late. Plus, I just really enjoy that it’s so full bodied and smooth, with a great mix of creamy malty flavours and sweetness. Can’t beat it.

Song Pairing: https://youtu.be/H20BWllOyWo

Gotta pair it with some equally Autumn feeling music.

Cuppa’T had a flash sale recently for the beginning of September, so I stopped in to see if there was anything I wanted – I ended up restocking my favourite herbal that they carried this summer and picking up 50g of this for myself, and then because I’d bought 100g in total I got another free 50g of tea as part of the sale which I also used in this tea so that I could give 50g to the boyfriend.

I actually like Irish Breakfast a fair bit, and generally prefer it to English Breakfast or all the other ‘breakfast tea’ derivatives. However, my boyfriend really likes Irish Breakfast. Prior to meeting me and having his tea world explode with possibilities, Irish Breakfast was actually the only tea he owned and drank regularly and even with my introducing him to a whole bunch of other options it’s stayed a favourite. He goes through it like no bodies business, so I thought it might be nice for him to have something similar but just a little different on hand to play with/alternate in between different cups so that he doesn’t go through his Irish Breakfast quite as quickly.

My first impression of this one is that it’s nice but not mind blowing. Certainly, like Irish Breakfast, it’s a VERY full bodied, bold and brisk flavour. I thought the creamy element of this one might soften it a little, but not the case. I’m undecided on whether or not that’s good or bad. It is creamy, not as in your face as anticipated? The dry leaf smells creamier to me than the steeped tea actually tastes. The biggest thing that personally I was “meh” about was the fact it was really astringent? Like, almost uncomfortably so.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s because I made this in my tea press and it sat for a while? However, that’s 100% not been an issue for me with other teas with more finicky bases so I can’t be certain. I think, in my case, the best thing to do is going to be to retry it the exact same way as before – except in an infuser mug rather than the press. Then, I’ll know for sure if it’s the tea itself or the method of making it.

As for the boyfriend, he tried it today and while he liked it he said it definitely needed some sugar. Also, he always adds milk to his teas, so his cup wound up with milk and sweetener though I drank mine completely straight. He does prefer the traditional Irish Breakfast, though.

Anyway – for now, I’m holding off on rating this one.

Sipdown (1007)!

Another “kinda sipdown” where the remainder is going into the TTB…

This was my last tea from yesterday and I drank it while catching up on Canada’s Drag Race and AS5 – I think that VariaTEA may have picked this up already, but I am kind of obsessed with Jimbo!! Also stoked for the AS5 finale – I feel like I could reasonably see anyone of the finalists taking it, but of course in my heart I want Shea to win!

I think I’m ready to say goodbye to this tea – in part because I think I’ve just experience everything I can with it, but also because my herbal/rooibos sample drawer is so full that I can’t close it right now…

From Friday…

This is old tea, so that explains why this cup tasted this way, but… the chocolate and orange was so flat/lifeless and stale tasting, but the cardamom!? Man does that cardamom hold up! I think I just need to add something with some sweetness (milk or agave, maybe) when drinking the rest of this just to perk up the flavours a little bit. I’m near a sipdown now, though!

Lovely trio of chocolate, orange, and cardamom – all well balanced and a great escape from the many more generic/similar “red fruit” herbal teas that I’ve been drinking in the evenings the last few weeks…

Hot, with chocolate agave and cashew milk.

I really feel like the name of this tea should reference the cardamom in the blend in some way because it’s definitely the strongest flavour in the blend. Even after adding in even more chocolate in the form of chocolate agave, the ‘ranking’ of flavour notes in this blend was still cardamom, chocolate, and orange. It’s nice though; very sweet and silky cardamom notes and with the nuttyness of the cashew milk and general sweetness I kept thinking of halva. Really tasty…

Cold Brew!

This is only “meh” as a cold brew; I mean nothing is inherently bad about it I just think the flavours here are a lot better suited to hot tea. It’s very, very cardamom heavy and that note kind of masks all of the other ones to a pretty large extent. However, underneath that cardamom is a hint of milk chocolate creaminess and some orange peel/rind notes. The sweetness from the chocolate actually gives the cardamom a bit of a candied/chocolate coated vibe that makes me feel a little bit like I’m snacking on some sort of gourmet treat.

Yeah – very much getting the vibe from this that someone who really enjoyed it would be a bit of a ‘gourmand’. It’s just got a fanciness about it from the mix of very rich, indulgent/decadent flavours. I wish I enjoyed it more as a cold brew, but it is what it is. I’ll finish it off, and try to make the most out of the cardamom notes that take up so much of the profile. Cardamom is just better hot, that’s all.

Hot tea from yesterday.

I remember this one being a lot richer the last time I had it as opposed to this time around; it was very light bodied, and I know that it wasn’t underleaf and it got a pretty standard steep as far as herbals go…

I mean, the orange was tasty and I got some nice, but very light, cardamom notes so the combination there was pretty solid. Where was the chocolate, though!? The whole sip I felt like the chocolate notes that were present were an aftertaste. Like, the main flavour had already passed, and this was just the shadow that remained. Of course, that meant that the actual aftertaste was pretty well nothing. Just a full stop, flavour wise.

I wanted to find this sweet, enjoyable and relaxing but mostly this time around I just found it to be pretty bland.

Another new Cuppa’T edition to the stash!

Yesterday I decided to take a venture down to the Farmer’s Market on my day off; I ended up with a pretty solid haul which I’ve been enjoying throughout the weekend! In addition to a pouch of this tea, I ended up nabbing:

- A sack of locally grown potatoes (very excited to cook something with these)
- Some homemade cookies for the not-boyfriend since he had kindly requested some
- Two loafs of lemon dill bread from my favourite baker
- Some vegan friendly, stone ground flour chocolate chip cookie mix
- The worlds BEST pineapple/mango salsa
- A jar of garlic infused honey (not sure what I’ll use it with, but excited to figure it out)
- A bottle of creamsicle turmeric nut milk (SO GOOD)
- A bottle of “Vitamin G” fresh pressed juice; it’s orange/cucumber/ginger/carrot/lemon
- And a homemade raspberry mint ‘freezie’ to enjoy while I shopped

I mean, that’s a pretty fucking good haul.

The bread got snacked out throughout the weekend, the salsa used today with some nachos I made for the family, the juices drank and enjoyed, and the first set of cookies given to the not-boyfriend and now it’s time for me to enjoy the tea! I’m starting off with a cold brew, because it’s hotter than the underside of a nutsack today.

This one jumped out at me because I don’t really have a herbal tea on hand with chocolate and orange and I thought it might be nice to since I do really love that flavour combination. Initial observations about this one drinking it cold brewed are that it’s REALLY heavy on the chocolate though. Like, easily the most prominent flavour is the chocolate. There’s some orange going on here, but mostly in the background and it’s hard to pick it out until the finish of the sip when the smooth, creamy and intense chocolate notes are subsiding.

Apart from that, this one does seem fairly straight forward: lots of chocolate and a little bit of orange. It’s smooth and sweet without tasting cloying or artificial. Cold brew may not have been the best way to go about making this for the first time but if I can accept that this is just much more chocolate than it is orange I think it could be a pretty tasty tea to have around in the meantime – especially for evenings.

Hot straight, because I wanted something tart.

Not “kill me now” level of tart though, so I only steeped this for two minutes which was enough time for the liquor to get an impressive pink colour but not enough time for my tongue to feel like it was shriveling up and receding into my mouth when I took the first sips. I recently had “balsamic white wine beets” at a restaurant, and weirdly enough as I sipped on this that was all I could think about flavour wise. Just tart, acidic and vinegar sort of sour…

And now I just want salad – with hibiscus balsamic dressing on it.

Begrudgingly made a cup of this one earlier in the week – I need to work on drinking down some of the teas I have a fair bit of that I don’t particularly like…

Honestly, in the last four years hibiscus has grown on me to a point where I genuinely don’t hate in in most blends so long as it doesn’t completely cover the other flavours going on in the blend. However, I’m still not a big fan of it in its pure, unadulterated form. It’s too tart, and has this weird quality to it that reminds me of a mix of sheer sourness, beets, and blood. Barf.

Thankfully my coworkers like it more than I do, and they helped me finish off most of this mug. I may just use the rest of the hibiscus I have left for cooking, or maybe even see if I can grind it up and make like a lip stain or something out of it. You know, alternative uses that don’t involve drinking it – ’cause bleh.

Iced. Tea Press. Honey.

Still working on, slowly, finishing this one off…

100% I was pretty scared to try this one out as an iced tea; I was ready for a blast of intense, horrific tasting tartness. However, I think by adding honey and keeping the steep time very short and controlled I was able to actually crank out a pretty solid iced tea! It was sweet, and yes tart as well but not overwhelmingly. If anything, it tasted like some sort of sweetened berry kind of drink. Really refreshing, actually.

Normally I wouldn’t have bought straight up hibiscus for myself because I’m really not a fan, but it was a gift so I’m trying to find creative ways to use it where I don’t have to experience the taste of straight, pure hibiscus…

The first attempt at that was with a homemade hibiscus brown sugar syrup! I was making ‘two ingredient pancakes’ (the ingredients are banana and egg) and I didn’t want standard syrup with them. I also added some fresh sliced kiwi to the plate, as well. I think on its own this syrup would have been too bold, fruity, and tart to work with the pancakes which ARE very banana flavoured and sweet, but not so much in a way that would work with the sourness of hibiscus. The kiwi was a good bridge between the flavours because it’s also fruity and works with the banana, but has an acidity to it that ties in with the sweet, sour syrup.

Overall, as a dish, I think this worked – and the syrup was easy enough to make as well: concentrated hibiscus brew mixed with ground cinnamon and brown sugar and reduced until it has the consistency of a typical syrup. Easy enough!

Pictures: https://www.facebook.com/resteep/posts/10210814283367095

Finally had a somewhat decent sleep last night. I was only woken once by the neighbours, by the baby, I assume. And yay, I feel almost human. I just might be able to function at some capacity, just maybe. There’s good reason that sleep deprivation is a torture technique.

Oh what a wonderful thing sleep is!

I had forgotten about my remaining samples from tigress some time ago, and today, now that I have an extra brain cell or two, I pulled them out. This is the first one my hand got a hold of.

Good choice. Brisk malty base with a good healthy layer of maple on top. A real pleasure.

Thanks, tigress_al, for popping this one into the bag.

Drank this one iced; I brought the tin of it in to work though because I was talking to a coworker about “vegetable teas” and this is still one of my all time favourites I’ve ever had so I wanted to show her and have her taste it as a sort of “Look, teas with weird ingredients can still be amazing!” type of exercise.

Not surprisingly she loved it; it’s just super fruity and fresh tasting – this awesome medley of citrus notes with hints of cucumber and tangy tomato. It works so damn well!

Allowed myself to dip into my stash of this tea over the course of the week in order to make a cold brew! It’s becoming increasingly necessary to have a cold brewed tea option in the house as it gets warmer and more summer-like here in Montreal; I’ve discovered that my apartment gets VERY hot, and while we have air conditioning in the kitchen/eating area of the apartment I have no way to cool down my bedroom…

I foresee a summer of cold brews and ice cream, for sure.

Strong orange, strong tomato, strong apple, and a hint of cucumber. Sweet and refreshing, and really quite hard to go wrong with this herbal blend! I might have to sweet talk my mom into mailing me another 100g or so of it from the local tea shop in Regina I used to buy it from.

Upping my rating, also.

Tried this one hot for the first time,

Iced/Cold brew is definitely the way to go when making this one. It didn’t taste bad/was perfectly drinkable on the whole but I think brewing it hot drew out a lot of tangyness and exaggerated the tomato notes in the tea quite a bit to the point where they were actually the main flavour. And I can get on board with tomato tea, but when you have things like lime and hibiscus notes I think that more umami/savory aspect works much better as like an undertone supporting the fruit notes and keeping them from feeling over the top cloying. Definitely not as the primary taste.

Probably gonna switch back to drinking this one cold brewed in the future.

Iced tea!

Made this one at work a few days ago; the whole staff was thoroughly freaked out by the notion of a tea with cucumber and tomato but when they tried it they all agreed that it was surprisingly delicious! Lots, and lots of sweet orange and apple notes and then a cooling, crispness from the cucumber. It’s vegetal, but very softly and in a refreshing way. Also, between the orange, cucumber, and tomato notes in the finish it’s also surprisingly sweet! I mean, overall it’s a challenging flavour to describe; but it just works!

I also made this in a glass cup for the first time ever so it was the first time I got a completely clear look at the liquor colour and it was really pretty! Just a soft, sunset like sort of peachy colour with a bit of like a red ‘blush’ sort of tint to it? Mostly orange, though. Just stunning to look at, though!