T2

Upgrading my rating a bit, and I will repeat here my update on Melbourne Breakfast, since I’m making these both the same newer way (tl/dr: More is Better!):

I’m finding I prefer much higher amounts of leaf than I had been using, so like a level(ish) tablespoon (a bit under 4 grams) for two infusions in my 300 ml cup, sweet and a splash of milk is delicious … Also pertinent: instead of using an infuser in my cup, I used a small teapot. The infuser is pretty big, but free floating then strained is better.

This has been promoted to “Will definitely buy again.” :)

I like this one. I’m not sure yet if I’m re-ordering right away since I have so many teas to try, and I’m not sure it’s an automatic Must Have Always for me (yet, anyway), but I thought I’d leave a few notes based on my own observations for others who are thinking of trying it. Firstly, I didn’t know it was supposed to be a “pancake” flavor, and that didn’t pop into my mind while tasting it … if you are expecting an assertive pancake-y presence, you might be disappointed. Secondly, if you see “cinnamon” and think “eh, maybe not,” because you’re not into strong cinnamon / spicy flavors, don’t write it off too soon. I don’t get a lot cinnamon here — which for me, is a good thing, unless I’m going for a more spicy chai experience. For me, it’s also not a brisk get-your-butt-going Breakfast Tea; it’s more a cozy snuggle sweet comfort dessert tea. If you like dessert-type and / or flavored teas, you might enjoy this a lot. I did.

This has a lovely vanilla/chocolate fragrance with just the faintest notes of it in the flavor. It’s brisk and lightly tannic. The vanilla gives it a sweetness but it’s not a sugary sweetness in the slightest. As another reviewer mentioned, it’s great with sweet or savory foods. The fragrance reminds me of a chocolate babka in the oven – chocolate, vanilla, sweet bread and sugar – but in a great way, not a sickly sweet way. It’s a little lighter in body than I tend to consider a breakfast tea to be, which is not a problem unless you’re really searching for a heavy solid tea. This one has a bit more brightness to it. No bitterness at all, but it is lightly tannic. There is a touch of smoke, which I probably wouldn’t have noticed had I not read other reviews. It is very light, though – I don’t tend to care for smokiness in a tea, but it’s not a problem here.

This is a nice, solid traditional black tea to me. It is a touch lighter than some breakfast teas I’ve had, making it just as nice in the afternoon. It is definitely tannic but not bitter. There is a certain brightness to its fragrance, and it is extremely smooth. I know this probably won’t help anyone else, but to me, this is what a good basic tea should taste and smell like. This is my first tea from T2, and I’m looking forward to trying my other ones! I should note that this was a tea bag, in a 6 oz mug. I tend to like my tea stronger than average, but this was plenty strong for me. (I probably average 1 tsp/4 oz with most teas.)

Home – 8:30 PM

The Great Cupboard Excavation
Untasted teas remaining: 44

This was one of several teas I picked up when T2 was having a huge sale and a lot of limited edition boxed teas were $5 each. I’m not the biggest lover of coconut, but I don’t dislike it either, and it certainly helps if it’s joined by chocolate and caramel.

I’m not sure I taste much caramel here, perhaps a little burnt sugar. Mostly it’s coconut and chocolate. The coconut is a little bit creamy and reminds me of the sweetened shredded coconut you buy in a bag. The chocolate is the dark and unsweetened kind.

It’s tasty, like a chocolate-covered toasted coconut macaroon. But like I said, I’m not a huge coconut person, so I’ll likely pass this on to someone who is!

Wow, just brewed up my first cup of this tea, and it seems SO, SO familiar. And suddenly I remember. This tastes exactly like a hand blended tea I used to buy at a stall in Modiano Market in Thessaloniki Greece, that they called “Balsam.” Lovely, but it would be an awful lot cheaper for me to have it sent (to Athens) from Thessaloniki, if they are still selling it there. ;)

352/365

This has been languishing in my cupboard for a while, but now it’s getting colder I finally pulled it out. I don’t know why this one strikes me as a winter blend particularly, but it does. Some kind of association between white and snow maybe? Anyway – this is glorious! The main flavour is coconut, but it’s very natural-tasting and not at all soapy. There’s also a delicious hit of white chocolate; very creamy and decadent. The chocolate does make things a little oily, but fortunately there’s not too much impact on the texture.

I wasn’t sure about the white base to begin with, but in hindsight I actually think it works really well. It’s not as floral as I expected it to be, just sweet and subtle. The overall flavour reminds me a bit of those white Ferrero Rocher – are they called Raffaello, or something like that? Those. This tastes like those.

Delicious! I’ll happily drink lots more of this one.

Home – 1:30 PM

This is an oddly-named tea. Yes, it has rose petals, but really it’s a tropical fruit-flavored green tea.

It’s quite nice, actually. The green tea base is mild and a bit grassy. There’s a lovely juicy mélange of tropical flavors here. I can definitely taste mango and passion fruit, and perhaps a bit of peach as well in the aftertaste. There’s only a hint of floral here, so I really don’t get why they chose this name for this tea.

It’s tasty though, I may keep this one around. I’ll likely sell off part of it though, since I have 100g and I’ll never drink through that much.

Home – 8:30 PM

This is an interesting concept for a tea – genmaicha with blueberry and sage. Looking at the dry leaf, I can see the little fluffy pieces of sage mixed in.

Unfortunately, for me there’s too much sage here. I will concede that the flavor goes well with the genmaicha, but I feel like it completely overpowers the blueberry. Plus I’m not the biggest fan of sage, and I love blueberry so this makes me extra sad.

Hopefully someone else will enjoy this one more. :)

I made this before I left for work this morning and it was absolutely delicious. The vanilla adds such a creamy edge to the black base without being too sickly sweet for a breakfast blend.

I drank this straight, without milk or sweetener, and it was perfect that way. I’m tempted to add a dash of milk next time though, just to enhance the creaminess I got from it. I can see this becoming a good friend of mine during the chilly weekday mornings leading up to Christmas.

Considering how often I mention the fact I’m not a fan of floral teas, it surprises me how many of my bedtime herbals contain chamomile and lavender. For some reason, these are the blends I lean towards at night as they almost always do the job of sending me off into the land of nod.

I picked up a cube of Gone Surfing with my T2 voucher on Saturday and made this for bedtime last night. The aroma from this was heavenly. In fact I just laid in bed sniffing this for ages before I even took a sip, and that alone made me sleepy and relaxed. The chamomile is the main star of this tea, with lavender and rose blending beautifully with it, and the spearmint toning the whole thing down so that it barely registers as floral at all.

Did it do the job of sending me into a nice snooze? You bet it did. Did I have an amazing night’s sleep? Ah, well, no… I didn’t. I woke up several times during the night and had some pretty bizarre dreams. This is not something I’m used to at all. I’m going to give the tea the benefit of the doubt though as I felt so relaxed after drinking it. Hopefully the weird dreams were nothing to do with the tea!

Work – 3:30 PM

For some reason, I was feeling like a genmaicha today. Luckily, I have a T2 green sampler box at work that still had a packet of this tea in it.

Tasty tasty. I will say that there must not be much matcha in this, as I can’t really taste it much and it’s not affecting the color. Otherwise, it tastes genmaicha-y. The green tea is more grassy than vegetal, and has a dried leaf flavor.

The nice thing about genmaicha is, if you enjoy the flavor in general even a less refined version is still really tasty.

But really, I could just drink an infusion of entirely toasted rice and be perfectly happy. ;)

P.S. – Now I’m browsing Yuuki-Cha and drooling all over myself…

Another T2 sample that’s a huge let down. I’d been looking forward to trying this one and I almost ordered a cube of it a few weeks ago when I made my last T2 purchase. I’m glad I didn’t bother. All I get from this tea is slightly chocolate flavoured water. Perhaps this is a steeping issue (I brewed mine for 7 minutes; possibly it needs longer) but I really don’t get a lot from drinking this. The cooler it gets, the weaker the chocolate becomes, and I’m basically sipping just water now. Definitely not on my shopping list tomorrow!

This smells delicious in the packet and also once steeped. It’s very strong on the strawberry front and I do get a luscious dollop of cream, too. However, taste wise, this is a bit of a let down. It’s very tart from the hibiscus, and the creaminess I can smell just doesn’t materialise. As a fruity tea, this isn’t bad. I do taste the strawberry (not so much the apple), but it’s really sour. I’m not enjoying this as much as the smell (and the name) led me to believe I would. I don’t think I would even enjoy this iced.

I made this after a late breakfast (cold, leftover pizza from last night! Hey, don’t judge me… I’m having a well earned Slob Day today!) and it’s exactly as I expected from a tea named Just Peppermint.

There are no gimmicks with this. It’s simply peppermint. I find it refreshing and cleansing, and it was nice to sip on after my pizza breakfast! I actually preferred this a lot more as it cooled down, rather than the first few sips I took after steeping. There was also a very generous amount in the sample – there’s a least another perfect teaspoon full left, if not two.

I have several other peppermint teas I prefer over this, and as an after-meal drink I would always lean towards a blend with both peppermint and liquorice, so this isn’t one I will be stocking up on.

No work for me today, yippee! It’s my birthday tomorrow, so I fancied turning this weekend into a slightly longer one and booked today off. I’m heading to the T2 shop tomorrow, so figured it was about time I went through my stash of samples to see if there are any I want to purchase more of. I have both the Famous Fruits and Hero Herbals sample boxes, and this is from the Fruits.

First off, I get a strong taste of grapefruit. It’s citrusy and rather tart, but super refreshing. I made this hot and it’s nice, I enjoyed it, but I do think I would much prefer this iced. It’s possibly a bit too tart to warrant a permanent place in my tea cupboard, so I won’t be purchashing more of this.

Home – 9:00 PM

After that icy peppermint tea, I wanted something more mellow and sweet. Enter banana!

This actually has quite good banana flavor, much better than I expected (I’m too often disappointed by T2’s blends). It may not be the most authentic banana flavor, in fact it’s reminding me of banana pudding. But I love banana pudding!

The base tea is smooth with a little bit of malty briskness and a touch of astringency.

But mostly this is tasty banana pudding. It even tastes a little graham cracker or vanilla wafer-y. :)

I think my perfect banana tea would likely be a white base, but this one is pretty good!

Work – 11:00 AM

So this is meant to be a pancake-inspired black tea.

Personally, I’m underwhelmed by it. I taste a little bit of cinnamon, maybe a hint of vanilla or butter.

Mostly it just tastes like a bland black tea base, not flavorful in the least. I don’t even know how to describe the flavor other than “tea-ish”, which sounds ridiculous.

How do you describe generic-tasting black tea?

340/365

This is pretty simple – a sencha base with strawberries and cream flavouring. The dry leaf smells fruity – mouthwateringly so – but I wouldn’t necessarily have said strawberry straight off the bat. Fruit punch, maybe?

Fortunately, it tastes like strawberry. It’s quite subtle, but it has a really delicious background creaminess. They definitely nailed that aspect! The strawberry is candy-like and obviously not natural, but it’s not glaringly artificial either. I feel like it strikes a nice balance, and it’s pleasantly sweet and desserty without being cloying. The sencha base is smooth and very lightly vegetal, but that works well with the strawberry so no complaints.

While I’d say this is a nice strawberry green, it’s probably not one I’d go out and buy in full-size since the packaging is so awful – and, to be honest, there are lots of similar teas out there. This one’s good, but it’s not exceptional. Just…nice.

Talk about damning with faint praise!

One of my favourite teas from T2. This, to me, is perfect for drinking after dinner. It’s uncanny how it manages to capture that home-baked, yummy dessert taste. It’s fruity, cosy, delicious and just perfect after a meal. This really does manage to taste like home baked apple goodness.

I’m actually planning on popping into T2 this weekend, and this is definitely on my stocking up list!

337/365

The first thing I noticed about this one was that it contains rose petals rather than the more usual cornflowers, which makes it both different and pretty – an excellent combination! It also smells delicious – really, really peachy!

Suprisingly, it tastes peachy also, which is as amazing as it is unexpected. It’s the best kind of peach, too – not artificial at all, but nicely juicy and fruity. Like an actual ripe peach. There isn’t a lot of bergamot, so this would be an excellent EG for a bergamot hater (I know you’re out there…I think I used to be one of you!) It’s muted and subtle, and you could pretty much pretend it’s not there for what you can taste of it. The black tea base is very smooth with a nectar-like sweetness that perfectly complements the peach flavouring.

I was expecting a pretty standard EG, but this is far from being that. I think this is what I thought Bird & Blend’s Earl’s Paradise would be like, before I was bitterly (and that’s no joke…) disappointed. I’m struggling to call this one an EG, though – it’s really a peach-flavoured black playing dress-up.

Perhaps because we spent time camping as kids, I LOVE smoked teas, and in particular, Russian Caravan blends. They remind me of boiling a billy over the fire and the strong smoky taste it gave the the brew.
This is close to my favourite (just pipped by Tamborine Tea Russian Caravan).
All the smoke I love in a Lapsang Souchong (which is included in this blend), but without an overpowering punch & dry aftertaste which LS teas can often have.

It’s funny, I remember I quite liked this as an evening tea before reading reviews that said it has a beautiful aroma, but the taste doesn’t stand up. So I went back & tried it again, & now I see exactly what they mean. I was letting the heavenly aroma, with its strong strawberry & creamy notes, trick my tastebuds. Once I really concentrated on the taste, rather than smell, it proved less berry, much less cream and more hibiscus. It’s also quite tart, & because I don’t like to add sugar if I can help it, I think it isn’t the tea for me (unless it was just to brew a cup & sit it beside me like an air infuser!).
How disappointing – if the taste matched the aroma this tea would be AMAZING. If the aroma wasn’t SO good, the tea by itself would be pretty good, but once the expectation was set it just didn’t deliver.
Still enjoyable, but I’ll look for a better version.