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1 heaping teaspoon Firefly Chai, Mountain Rose Herbs (a rooibos)
1 heaping teaspoon Honeybush Vanilla, Teavana

My husband wound up going to Trader Joe’s for our groceries instead of Wegman’s, so no replacing of Zhena’s Vanilla Chai. This is my attempt to make something like it…

…and it worked! Not only did it work, but I think it’s even better! the cardamom, cinnamon, etc in the Mountain Rose Herbs chai are so fresh and top notch that it brings this Chai up a level. I mention the cardamom specifically because I think it is that together with the vanilla which gives it that nutty flavor that you don’t get with chai alone. Fantastic with a little honey and a splash of milk.

I’m so glad I tried this, because it is not only delicious but actually much more cost effective – I have 7 oz of loose tea for about $10, and Zhena’s is $6 for 22 bags which only weigh 2.33 oz!

Oh boy, I did it. I placed an order at Teavana.

They sent me a sample of a Youthberry/Wild Orange Blossom/German Rock Sugar concoction, and being a Caffeine Fiend (and this very low in caffeine) I was wondering how I would use it. Then I had An Idea – if it’s orangey, I can mix it with some Earl Grey! I love a little sugar with Earl Grey as a treat, and an orangey flavor can make an Earl go into Lady Grey territory. I sniffed at the tea, and it’s uber fruity, but nothing that would hurt an Earl Grey tea base.

I threw my sample ounce into a tin with my Harney Earl Grey Supreme and Bingo! This is delicious. Orangey and pineappley Earl Grey. Fruity, but you’d never doubt this was black tea. The little bit of sugar is complimenting the tea, but it’s not overly sweet. Lovely! I’m glad I was reckless and threw the whole sample in my tin!

This chance combination: Vanilla Comoro by Harney and Sons, and Chocolate Almond by Talbott Teas.

I was so tired from a long week at work that I thought I could use a wee bit of caffeine even though it was evening. As I was preparing this pot, one teaspoon of the tea decaffeinated, one with caffeine, I had a deja vu. “Didn’t I do this before? And wasn’t I restless the entire night because of it?” flashed through my brain as the tea steeped. Ah, no turning back now!

The result was as I expected. A delicious, nutty, chocolatey vanillaish dessert tea…that kept me tossing and turning all night. Oy oy oy I will NEVER learn! No matter how tired I am, I will not sleep at night if I have real tea this late – even just a little!

I was tired, but I wanted something tasty, picked up Read my Lips and I knew it wouldn’t be strong enough. Looked at Queen Catherine and knew she was bold and threw in a bit of roasted mate for good measure.

I’ll admit, it’s not the tastiest in the world, but man it’s keeping me awake. I’ll have to play with the ratio a bit, but as of right now it was 1 tsp RML, 1 tsp QC and .5 tsp mate

There’s a hint of mint, but a little too much roastiness/sort of woodiness from the mate. Next time I’ll get it right.

This morning I decided to take a stab at matcha blending. I wanted to combine two matchas from Red Leaf Tea: Black Currant (flavor level: robust) and Almond (flavor level: “There’s matcha in there?!”), but they are both extremely powerful in the flavoring department and I feared it would be too much to drink them just like that. Fortunately I still have some plain matcha left over from the Red Leaf taste test, so I did 1:1:1 of each of those three matchas, and turned it into a latte. It turned out great! The combination of fruit and almond is French to me for some reason, and I felt like I was drinking a matcha version of a Dammann Fréres tea. The extra plain matcha slightly toned down the strong flavors but everything was still very curranty and almondy. I’ll definitely be making this combo again.

1.5tsp Passion Fruit Black by thepuriTea, 0.5tsp Organic Chocolate “O” by The Tea Spot

A while ago there was a thread in the discussions about interesting flavor combinations we wanted to see in teas, and someone mentioned passion fruit and chocolate. I knew I had to try it! And now I am finally getting around to a first go at it. I use a perfect teaspoon to measure my tea (1.5 actual tsp), but I have a 12oz cup so I usually measure out one perfect teaspoon, then somewhere around a half a perfect teaspoon to approximate 2tsp of actual tea. For blends, then, it’s difficult to do an even fifty-fifty, and so I had to decide whether I wanted more chocolate, or more passion fruit? In the end I went for more passion fruit, like eating a passion fruit tart with a drizzle of chocolate on top. My favorite chocolate tea was a no-brainer for this, as was this passion fruit black from thepuriTea, which is the best passion fruit black I’ve tried.

The tea smells mostly like passion fruit, perhaps with a particularly chocolatey black tea base. That’s really what I get most out of the taste as well… really it tastes like delicious passion fruit tea, and then maybe a hint of chocolate but it’s faint enough that it seems like an aspect of the base instead of an actual flavor. Pretty tasty, but I want more chocolate in this! The flavor combination is nice enough but not necessarily something I will seek out in the future. Maybe if the blend was a little more even, I guess.

Again with the lost tasting notes! Ugh, second time today.

1 sachet of Earl Grey Mallows, 1 sachet of Pomegranate Rose, both Impra Tea

I had a quite a greasy dinner tonight, plus a big beer, so now I’m feeling a bit bleh. Not good since I wanted to get some work done tonight. I thought some tea would help (though I don’t honestly think I’ll be getting anything done! :P)

Because these teas don’t seem eager to oversteep I thought I would try them both at the same time in the same amount of water. I like berry-bergamot blends and rose-bergamot blends, so I definitely like the idea of a berry(ish fruit)-rose-bergamot blend. It turned out pretty well… the bright bergamot cuts through some of the sweetness of the pomegranate. I wish there was more rose, of course. With double the leaf this tea is finally showing signs of being too strong for my tastes as the cup cools, but it’s not too bad.

1.5 tsp Raspberry Black by Monterey Bay Spice Company + 0.5 tsp China Rose from ESP Emporium

Originally I was going to have a cup of just China Rose this morning because I haven’t had a straight up rose black in a long time. But then I kinda needed to try some of this raspberry tea, so I decided to make a Raspberry Rose instead.

It’s a good blend! Rose blacks are often so strong that only a bit is needed to get a rosey flavor, and that’s true here. The tea smells and tastes of roses and sweet, juicy raspberries. This is really a great blend of flavors! Honestly I think rose goes well with lots of different fruits. Adding a bit of this rose congou, which has a nice, tasty base, to the MBSC fruit black gave it a little something more interesting (I have, in the past, found MBSC fruit blacks to be a bit underwhelming in the flavor of the base… not bad, but not interesting). Anyway, it’s a good combo that I might have to keep around.

‘Monterey Berry Blend’: 1.75tsp each blackberry, black currant and raspberry black teas from Monterey Bay Spice Company.

This cold steep was surprisingly really tasty! I worried that it wouldn’t be because the Monterey Bay black teas have generally tasted low quality to me, and sometimes that can result in nasty cold steeps. But this seems to indicate that the flavorings are of decent quality, it’s just the black tea base that’s not so great. Cold steeping tends to smooth over ills in tea bases, and so it has here. This one is definitely very berry flavored; they all mesh together very well, but I can also pull them out individually. The blackberry, which was kind of odd hot, here provides a nice earthy, berries-from-the-bush note that is very pleasant. Glad to know that these cold steep well, and I’m looking forward to playing with blending these!

So I had a little bit of Earl’s Garden from DavidsTea left; not enough for a 12oz cup, but about a perfect teaspoon (i.e., 1.5 actual tsp). I didn’t have great success with it hot anyway, so I decided a cold brew incorporating it would be good. I usually put 4 perfect teaspoons in my 16oz cup, so this time I put in one scoop of Earl’s Garden, one of The Earl Grey from teapod, one of China Rose (black) from ESP Emporium, and one of Chung Hao Jasmine (green) from Upton. Kind of like Rosy Earl Grey, but with the added berry from the Earl’s Garden. Turned out great! Fruity with lots of berries and bergamot, floral with strong rose and jasmine. Really quite a delicious cup of tea, and one I might recreate by doing the last three I mentioned above with the fourth scoop being Black Currant or Red Fruits black tea.

It’s time for another sample-busting, stash-cleaning cold brewed iced tea. I was looking through samples for one that would be good iced and that was almost empty, and came across the Coconut Vanilla White from TeaFrog, which I did not enjoy hot but found to be delicious iced. There wasn’t quite enough for my usual cold brewed formula, so I threw in a bit of Vanilla Jasmine from Golden Moon. In the end the blend was about 3.5 tsp Coconut Vanilla White and 1.5 tsp Vanilla Jasmine. It turned out pretty tasty, unsurpisingly. I wondered if the black tea-based Vanilla Jasmine would overwhelm the white even in a small quantity, but there’s still plenty of coconutty white in the flavor.

I decided to try to start going through some of my lingering samples by cold steeping them for lunch, which has the added benefit of using up more tea than a regularly brewed cup. Yesterday I was adding the rest of my sample of Tea District’s Marvelous Mango to my cup, but there wasn’t really enough, so I decided to throw the remainder of my Upton Vanilla Black in as well. Vanilla Mango sounded decently tasty. Fortunately Jen set up this combination tea so that I can easily log it! It ended up being about 2 tsp Mango to 4 tsp Vanilla, cold steeped in 16oz of water. I was surprised that the vanilla wasn’t stronger, especially since it made up the majority of the tea, but the cup was acutally more mango-y with some hints of vanilla. Pretty tasty, and it made me want to experiment with vanilla-fruit combos in some of my other cold steeps.

Equal parts Market Spice Butter Rum + Touch Organic Keemun x (a filter you used to make Marco Polo yesterday and didn’t rinse out very well) = a Bob Ross happy accident that sort of resembles warm root beer. Eh, I took a chance :)

Equal parts dried elderberries + cocoa nibs x a steep while I was in the shower = raisinets! (Nobody said immunity boosting had to be dull.)

Oh…with a little curious kitchen alchemy, I think I have whipped myself up a new friend: equal parts chicory, cocoa nibs, lemon peel. Long five-minute steep. He’s mellow, sweet, chocolatey, healthy, low-caf, and chocolatey. Did I say chocolatey? Next time, we’ll see if he plays well with milk. Or orange peel instead of lemon. This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship…. ;)

With all due respect to the vendor, when I saw “Chamomile Black Tea” on a seller’s website (can’t remember whom) the Cheapster started whispering in my ear: “Don’t buy that. You can make it!” And so I did. Tossed a teaspoon of bulk-bin chamomile leaves in a steeping basket with some good-quality leftover Keemun. Badda-bing! A very pleasant afternoon treat. The Keemun toned down the strength of the chamomile; the chamomile added a little uptick to the black tea. This will be a repeat blend in my kitchen!

Post-holiday glums usually hit me in the gut like a sack of wet potatoes, so I made a preemptive herbal strike yesterday and bought an ounce of St. John’s Wort. As herbal medicinals tend to taste like tree bark, I dumped an experimental teaspoon in with a second steep of my Bonita Peach green rooibos. It worked—no bitterness and enough fruit flavor left to make it somewhat tasty. Next time I’ll go halvesies with some fresh leaf.

This morning, I was in dire need of raspberry leaf infusion for medicinal purposes, but straight-up, it’s not a happy-good-morning wake-up flavor. So I pulled out a bag of my old favorite Traditions strawberry tea and filled a DIY bag with the raspberry leaf. Pulled the strawberry out first and let the rest steep strong. Tasted pleasant and did the trick.

Equal parts this morning: some elderly Adagio Caramel plus some Ahmad Hampton Breakfast to put some meat on its bones. (Hampton Breakfast—now that’s one to boot you out the door. Strong stuff. Boots like Herman Munster’s.) Drinking it fast before I realize I should’ve put some milk in int.

The first and only 100-degree afternoon we’ve had would be the one when we’re decorating for third grade VBS and poor, panting sweaty hubby nearly herniated himself lugging in our “small” floor vault for our Evidence Room. But the lasers (orange yarn) have been activated, the file boxes are stacked and stenciled, the badges and lanyards are ready, the aloe-vera gel fingerprint sensor is in place, and it’s time to rest up for tomorrow’s adventures.

And in doing so, something gentle and minty and COLD is perfect. One bag Celestial Seasonings Sweet Apple Chamomile, a healthy wad of applemint and two snips of catnip. Yep, we’ve had so much horticultural fun this summer, we got one. Tazo thinks it smells good. Other ingredients in this mish-mash are strong enough, I can’t detect a specific smell or taste.

Working on using up scraps and exercising a little tea budget discipline till fall (couple of unexpected doctor runs with pricey prescriptions is—ha—making that a lot easier). Half-and-halved some Metropolitan Tea Monk’s blend with some Irish breakfast pekoe this morning. Good way to add some perk to plain black tea; good way to tone down a strong fruity flavor if you’re not that perky.

I cheffed! I cheffed! Not cooked…cheffed ! Dredged and orange zested and hubby tried roasting garlic and we put it all together to make a variation of Chicken Balsamico with a little orange juice thrown into the liquid (http://carinosathome.blogspot.com/2012/07/chicken-balsamico.html). And we didn’t ruin it! (Again, this is one of those statements that will make some of you laugh heartily at my expense.)

Anyway, with some orange zest left, it seemed sensible to toss it into a tea strainer with some dried lemon verbena. Smells citrusy-sensuous, tastes pleasantly orange zesty, and is a perfect aperitif after one more helping of pasta than I really needed…

Junkyard Tea in a Mason jar after a long, humid day opening up a stuffy, stinky farmhouse to welcome 84-year-old dad home after a long absence. Still continuing to discover all kinds of unexpected treasures Mom had stashed away in the oddest places. Today, lodged between two afghans in the cedar chest, a handmade, never-worn vintage 50’s era shirtdress made of funky, swirly cotton fabric—and it just might fit. My sister thinks it was intended for my grandma, who was born in 1892.

It sounded tasty: 3 parts pu-erh, 1 part cacao nibs, about 8 orange mint leaves. Cold brewed overnight in the fridge. Fully executed, not so much: too much pu, not enough mint. Oh, well…you can’t tell me master tea blenders don’t bumble a few while they’re practicing.

Won’t repeat those proportions, but it makes plausible backyard sippin’…currently the tidiest place in my little patch of earth, and I had to mow to make it bearable; the rest of the house looks like the leavings of a yard sale. Who are these wretches that keep sneaking into my house and discom-rupting it?