Plum Deluxe

This came as a free sample in my most recent order. Unfortunately, it’s under a teaspoon, and since I only own giant mugs, I’m afraid I might have misjudged the amount of water necessary. I thought it tasted pretty decent, but I put it in the fridge overnight, and unfortunately, it was kind of weird tasting by morning. My first impression was that the flavoring was nice and rather accurate, but I wish I’d had more than a sip or two to go by!

Wow, am I in the minority here. The dry leaf smells decadent. I feel like this had no flavor, though, probably because the base teas are very light. This tasted mostly like raspberry essence, and light malt and tannins. Not much cocoa. For something called Cocoa Truffle, I would’ve expected more chocolate and body, both from the black tea and the puerh. Then again, they used a Ceylon black and those typically underwhelm me in blends.

A weird thing about this tea, and this happens sometimes with flavored teas like this one, is that the raspberry essence aggravated my lungs, like I could feel them tightening up. It’s not an allergic reaction. The best way to describe it is the feeling of inhaling a chemical irritant, like cleaning agents.

I want to love this one because the raspberry and cocoa aromas smelled so damn good but the liquor itself just didn’t have any oomph. And, yeah, the lung thing.

This tea is the perfect combination of juicy apricot and fresh lavender. I love how many blends from Plum Deluxe include lavender! This one is so good! So refreshing and lovely warm or cold. My ounce of this only made a few cups, and if their prices were more reasonable, I would certainly order more.

This flavor isn’t too special, sadly. It’s quite a light black tea with some indistinct fruitiness. Certainly not bad, it just didn’t really live up to its name or stand out in any way.

Hmm this reminds me of a cherry tea from Adagio that I didn’t enjoy. There’s just something about cherry flavoring that for some reason tastes chalky, artificial, and weird to me. I don’t taste any almond sadly. I enjoyed this tea a bit more in subsequent cups, though it was always too tart, and the only flavor I ever got from it was cherry.

The fruit flavor is quite light and pleasant. As usual, I’d prefer a different base, but it’s pretty nice. Lightly fruity and gentle.

This blend had maple as an ingredient, so I was really hopeful. Unfortunately, the flavor is only of plain black tea? And it’s a bit on the dry side, not really malty, deep, or special. Just an average plain black tea. Milk helped, but it was just so plain.

STTB

I finished this off because there wasn’t enough left (~0.5 tsp) after I removed my 1 tsp so I just used it all.

The oolong here is lightly roasty, but not strong by any means. There is some vague stone fruit flavours, however I didn’t get any distinctly mango flavours. It was quite subtle but still enjoyable. I didn’t find this very exciting – nothing remarkable – but still nice to try.

The apple flavor is quite delicate. I definitely see where this tea is going. Mild spices, but mostly just sweet apple. It’s really light and refreshing. This is the way I wish more apple teas could be!

The flavor here is mostly herbaceous sage. Definitely no sugar for this one. I had some veeeery sweet pancakes, and this was immediately the tea that I wanted to wash them down. Sage in tea can just be so refreshing! And there are other supporting ingredients in here, but I can’t tell what.

This has that same herbaceousness I’ve come to expect from butterfly pea flower. Most of the flavor is dominated by some light fruitiness combined with the slightly unpleasant butterfly pea. It’s okay, but not better than other teas of this variety. Most of the blend was flowers, and it could have been much more balanced. I wish it were just a little flower for the color while focusing more on the fruit flavor. The main fruit I taste is lemon.

The flavor is a little artificial, but I still enjoy it in most sips. I taste a nice fresh pear. I also taste some light spices that go very well with the pear. I also get some alcohol from the flavoring. It’s not my favorite pear tea, but it’s definitely grown on me since my first cup of it. The resteep is pretty decent too. I wish the spices were a little stronger, but they really are nice with the pear.

The flavor here is pretty mild. It’s definitely lightly orange and maybe a touch of spice. The resteep was pretty tasty as well. A light, gentle tea. I would have preferred bolder flavors, but this was nice. The sample didn’t have as much tea in it as other samples, so perhaps this was a little underleafed.

This tea came as a free sample in two different Plum Deluxe orders, so I steeped them both up today. The flavor is pretty nice. Light spices on a mild black tea. A little bit sweet and desserty. Not too appley, which I was fine with since I don’t love apple spice teas. I enjoyed this one much more than anticipated! Its rebrew randomly tasted like snickerdoodles! I’m not sure why I ended up with stronger spices in the resteep!

Yet another tea from Shae…and this may be my favorite of the bunch so far! Chocolate-flavored tea blends can be pretty hit and miss for me, but this one is absolutely delicious. Both the chocolate and raspberry flavors are coming through clearly and the base tea has a nice earthy richness that compliments the dark chocolate perfectly without any of the funkiness you sometimes get with puerh blends. It’s even better with a splash of milk!

This tea is unbelievably good. The coconut and lavender are both so bright and refreshing. I had this cold, and I savored each sip. If it weren’t so expensive, I would make pitchers and pitchers of it. It’s just so well-balanced and delicious. Its second steep is just as delicious as its first. The third cold steep gets a little tangy, but still tasty enough to drink. Definitely a favorite. Not chai at all though. Just coconut and lavender.

A refreshing and bright black tea that’s perfect for an iced summer treat. Highly recommend cold brewing for the excellent strawberry flavor!

Samurai Travelling Tea Box – Tea #37

So, it looks like posts from the “Great Steepster Freeze of 2020” aren’t being lost (just a bad glitch with the cache) and sections of the website are slowly catching up, so I’m going to roll the dice and continue posting tasting notes so that my queue doesn’t get completely insane…

If anyone is able to read this tasting note in the present, when all the issues are still taking place, this is the response I got together from the Steepster FB account:

“Things may be a little spotty while we begin making the transition of Steepster over to Adagio. I’ll pass this [information] along to our team and hopefully we can get things working properly again soon.”

and

“…unfortunately, the transition of the website is ongoing and proceeding less smoothly than we had expected. The damage to the original code is more pervasive than we had anticipated, but we remain optimistic about the site’s future. Please bear with us as we go through the difficult migration.”

After that I asked if they could provide a rough estimate of the timeline for the remainder of the migration based on the current challenges they’ve come across and pace of the migration thus far. This was the response:

“It’s really hard to say. Like I said, the issues are deeply rooted and we want to take the time to get it right. But we are working on it and hoping to get it up and running ASAP.”

Tasting note starts here!

I had this as a cold brew on my way to the office today! I don’t think I had a chance to share this before the cache glitch, but I’m officially able to announce now that I was promoted at work – my new title is “Tea Specialist” which is pretty nifty sounding. It’s hard to explain all the intricacies of what I’m doing now, but a lot of it has stayed the same while I’ve taken on more things directly related to the QA. Part of that means working from home three or four days a week now, which has been an adjustment. This was actually the first day this week that I’ve come in to work at the office…

If I remember correctly, this is almond and mango? That seems like a weird flavour combination to me, but I’m always up for something strange and different. Turns out that this is way more almond than mango, and I don’t really taste the fruitiness much at all. That’s okay, because the almond flavour was delightful – very thick and creamy with some sweetness but overall more of a toasted/roasted almond than the brighter or borderline boozy almond flavours that are associated with things like marzipan or amaretto. It thought it fit very well with the oolong tea base!

Adding this back to the box because it didn’t blow me off my feet, but I’m very happy to have gotten to try it!

Refreshing and light fruit mint tea. Tried brewed hot and then poured on ice, as well as cold brewed. The cold brewed brought out the melon that was almost hidden in the hot brew; the mint was stronger in the hot brew. A lovely summer choice.

Samurai Travelling Tea Box – Tea #15

I was excited to see a pecan tea in the box – that’s a flavour that I really enjoy but that I think is really hard to capture in a tea blend and I’ve never really found the “perfect” pecan tea. I guess my closest thing right now is DT’s Sweet Potato Pie? But that’s not really a dedicated pecan blend…

This is really nice – it has all those sweet and nutty pecan and caramelized sugar notes that I want and expect from Pecan Pie and it’s also not too sweet/cloying which I really appreciate! There’s even a tiny bit of astringency that adds some depth to the flavour as well. Could it be more pecan-y? Yes, probably – but I still think it’s hitting the mark in terms of delivering a clear and defined pecan note.

The one thing that I really don’t like? The chocolate note.

I am personally just not super into chocolate tea blends in general, but I have a particular frustration with teas that use chocolate as a crutch to either add more sweetness, richness, or overall depth to the blend. As good example is DT’s English Toffee – I want a toffee tea and I feel adding the chocolate to the tea robs me of the satisfaction of tasting that one particular flavour note. The chocolate flavour here is nice – it’s decadent and kind of “truffle-y” tasting, but I feel robbed of the satisfaction of having a really good pecan tea.

I probably will not keep this one for myself, but I was tempted to for a moment. It’s overall one of the better pecan flavours I’ve ever found in a tea.

Just spent 30 minutes trying to clean up the latte my cat spilled on my couch. Sigh… This tea is so gentle and sweet. It’s desserty and so tasty. The green tea is unobtrusive. This really is like eating pudding. It has that specific kind of sweetness like a cooked dessert. Too bad I only had a small sample of this one!

Had this at the start of the week.

I picked it up from Plum Deluxe because I do tend to like herbaceous teas a lot, and I thought the combination of chocolate and rosemary was very unique sounding. The rosemary ended up being a lot stronger in the steeped taste than I would have guessed it would be – even outweighing the taste of the chocolate, but I liked it a lot. There’s a beautiful pine-y flavour to rosemary that makes my heart sing and I also think it works quite well with the more nutty and woody flavoured of the honeybush and rooibos in the blend.

I didn’t really get caramel at all and to be totally honest I was skeptical that I would given how strong both of these two other flavours (chocolate/rosemary) can be, and how hard it is to execute a caramel flavour in a tea blend in the first place. Most of the time it just comes off as sweetness. The chocolate was nice – not too strong, and I don’t love chocolate in general so I thought this was the right balance of chocolate for me personally. I do think anyone ordering this because of the chocolate might feel a little bit let down, especially if the idea of strong rosemary is a cause of trepidation for them.

I’ll finish this easily, I think – but may not be something I look at replacing.

I was disappointed to find that this tea tastes almost like plain black tea. I mean, it’s good black tea, but I wanted to taste the spices. I wanted it to be egg nog! I added milk, and it tastes like a perfectly pleasant black tea.

I received this as a sample from Plum Deluxe some time ago, only now getting around to it. I love chocolate and lavender as a flavor combination but have never seen any tea go down that route and was excited to see they had a chocolate lavender tea so of course I selected that as one of my samples to try. Thank you, Plum Deluxe! And this is a lazy, Sunday morning, so it seems appropriate, even if I do usually reach for caffeinated tea in the mornings and reserve my herbals for the evenings. I felt the mood for this and a cookie for breakfast… the sweet hankering hit me hard today, I guess!

I didn’t really like the aroma from the dry leaf, which smelled a bit artificial/alcoholic in the bag around the chocolate. But brewed up. that isn’t really coming out so strongly as it was letting off. The chocolate is a bit liquer-like when it hits the back of the tongue, but also more fudgy, in both aroma and flavor, but the lavender is a nice, strongly floral note that helps balance out some of the artificialties of chocolate-in-a-bottle flavorings. It carries a lot of weight here. The tea is fine on its own, but I think it would probably do a little better as a warm latte, as I think the creaminess would help it even more. Doubly so with a chocolate almond milk. That may be what I do with it next time.

So, I think the chocolate flavoring could be a bit better, but I am certainly happy there is a chocolate/lavender tea out there to scratch that itch, since it doesn’t do a terrible swing at it and I think it could be even more workable in a latte form.