The Republic of Tea

Nice licorice flavor. Could be spicier. Second steep is thin.

I got a sample of this from the Republic of Tea mailing and while it was kind of them to send, I would have liked if the tea was actually good.

Its just so blegh! I did not understand what was going on inside my tea cup and I couldn’t finish it. The name is appealing but it just doesn’t work.

-Round natural unbleached teabag.
-Teabag smells of sweet, tangy mango. Tea liquor smells slightly malty with a hint of fruit.
-Tea liquor is a dark amber-brown color.
-Fruity flavor with a malty finish.
-Best with milk and sweetener. (Milk lessens the mango flavor).
-Very good tea. Perfect for a juicy morning tea.

-Round natural unbleached teabag.
-Teabag smells of sweet blueberries. Tea liquor aroma is more faint.
-Tea liquor is a dark reddish brown.
-Malty flavor with a slight blueberry finish.
-Best with milk and sweetener.
-Very good tea. Almost bitter unsweetened, but perfectly juicy with milk and sweetener.

Not bad, for what it is. The tea is nice and smooth, though as others have said, the vanilla isn’t extra strong. I may try it again with a little vanilla extract added. It gets pretty bitter in left in for a long time, though!

Had this with a friend after an amazing dinner at Joe’s.
As for this cuppa… Still good, but a little sour. Lowering the rating a bit as I think this was tried the first time before the Tsaa Sweet Temptation discovery.
Anyhow, I am waiting for my contract at work to finish. It keeps getting extended in little bits. I’m grateful for that, but… is it wrong that I’m getting antsy because I expected to have some time for organizing/cataloging my teas and now won’t have a chance/space for maybe two more weeks?? Seriously, I just want a week off with my teas! :D

Backlog from yesterday. I had this with my dinner while at Panera. At first I had my doubts about eating there but it was super convenient at the time and then I saw they carry Republic of Tea and I took it as a sign. (Have some nasty memories associated with that place, Kristaleyn, they can be replaced!)
Anyhow, this tea… Hmmm. Well it was great, I really felt as if I was drinking red velvet! with a fraction of the calories (I did add a packet of rock sugar). And no milk needed! sometimes I find milk enhances/detracts from a rooibos dessert tea. In this case, I feel it would have taken away from the natural creaminess that was already there.
When it was really hot, I found the intense astringency a bit annoying but as it cooled… it toned down significantly. Also, I wish the flavour was a bit more intense, just a tad. Otherwise, I am in love! :)
Anyhow, I’m headed to a tea tasting today!!! I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks now. Yeaaay!!

While visiting my grandmother several years back, I tasted this tea. At first, all I could smell were the roses. Then, the naturally sweet-smelling black tea shone through. Although the scent of the roses was strong (yet not overpowering), the taste was very light.
I guess this tea is alright, but not my favorite.

Round, no-string bag. Appearance: small CTC. Liquor: lighter brown red. Smell: fragrant, peach and citrus notes predominate. Taste: peach and citrus flavors predominate, with some noticeable ginger. The black tea is present, but the sharp notes are subsumed by the flavoring. Passable without milk or sugar, but becomes more tart as tea cools. A small amount of sugar helps this tea, by bringing out the ginger notes. This also has the effect, though, of reducing the “tea” flavor. 4/10.

This tea is ok, not outstanding, but it will do for the price. It is probably better than the Tazo brand of matcha that Starbucks uses.

If you drink tea and hot chocolate instead of coffee because you don’t bloody like the taste of coffee, don’t drink this tea. The tea smells just wonderful in the can and you definitely get both the chocolate and coconut aroma, but it contains chicory. I personally don’t think chicory belongs in tea because if I wanted to drink something that bitter and reminiscent of coffee, I would just drink coffee. If you like coffee, you might like this tea.

Personally, I gave my can to a friend who mainlines coffee. She thought it was a little strange, but not bad.

Another RoT chocolate tea I am actually a fan of. This truly does smell like chocolate-covered strawberries and the taste is pretty darn close to the smell. For someone is trying to pay more attention to what I eat, having a dessert-like tea without caffeine is kind of a nice stand-in. Granted I’d rather actually eat a chocolate-covered strawberry than drink this tea, but I can’t eat those as often as I can drink the tea. It’s a nice trade-off.

I do get that rooibos sourness I see other reviewers commenting on, but I don’t feel like it breaks the tea. I don’t generally drink much rooibos tea, so my experience is limited and this is one of two that I’ve tried which I actually like.

One thing: definitely add sweetener. I use Sugar-in-the-Raw pretty much exclusively for tea because I think it dissolves better and isn’t as sweet as regular sugar. In this cup, the sweetener brings out the sweetness you expect from a chocolate-covered strawberry. I usually use about a teaspoon (three small sugar bowl scoops) and I always put the sugar in the cup before pouring the water so it has the most time to dissolve.

I have to be honest, I went in to the tasting of this tea with a bad attitude. I am not a big fan of RoT. Generally speaking, I find the bag size is too small and the price tag is too high. Also when I think strawberry and chocolate, I think Neapolitan ice cream. I really don’t care for Neapolitan ice cream. This tea doesn’t stand a chance.

Steeped for 5 minutes. First taste was ok but a bit bland. Added sweetener (which is my usual habit). Sipped again. I have to agree with Bonnie’s review – this isn’t bad. In fact I kind of like it. Read the label and noticed this is rooibos. I tried but I can’t taste rooibos in this at all. It is just a pleasant mix of strawberry and chocolate actually more cocoa, with a hint of vanilla. It tastes natural to me, not fake or candy. It is rich enough to enjoy, yet not overbearing in the cup. This is not something I would drink everyday but it is a pleasant caffeine free calorie free desert drink. Glad I tried it.

I was thinking about this tea the other day and decided to revisit it: I remember liking it but it has some REALLY bad reviews. Why bad reviews made me decide to drink tea I do not know: probably out of curiosity. No way I liked something so bad it got a 34, right?

Well, after a fresh-brewed cup, I still do like it. It tastes kind of like a mild mix of chai (allspice & cinnamon) and sleepytime (chamomile, peppermint, lemongrass). It’s certainly not a great taste but it’s not bad. The issue, of course, is that I listed only 5 ingredients I could really taste when there are supposed to be twenty. So, 15 missing? I distinctly remember a hint of vanilla, wintergreen, lemon balm & rose in previous mugs that are just totally missing here. Even then, that’s 10… out of twenty. Looking at the ingredients list, I feel like having all of the tastes here would be just gross. Chicory, hibiscus, blackberry leaves? Belurgh.

I’m a bit conflicted on rating this in the end: the cup I drank deserves a bit higher but the cup it SHOULD be deserves lower. I will most definitely be finishing my tin if they all have a similar flavor, but I can’t actually recommend this to anyone as I have no clue what you’d wind up getting. It’s basically a grab-bag of ingredients, and not all of them go together.

It seems like everyone is making fancy iced tea today, and I have some fresh fruit in the fridge so I thought I’d experiment! Cut up a huge strawberry, macerated it in sugar and lime juice while the tea was brewing, poured it over ice and added a ton of sugar and a splash of pineapple juice. Fruity, minty, sweet, a little tart, and SO refreshing. It’s already brutally hot outside (thanks, NY weather), so I think I’ll be adding this to the regular iced-tea lineup: good thing limes are 10 for a buck!

After spending an entire day baking in the sun at an event I most definitely did not want to be at (and getting sunburned to boot), I was in desperate need of something cold, sweet, and refreshing. I’m sure there are lots of teas that fit that bill, but for me my go-to “oh dear lord I NEED some iced tea” tea is Moroccan Mint. And since there are about a hundred different variations of it everyone is bound to have a favorite: this one is mine.

This was actually one of my very-first loose leaf teas years ago. I remember my surprise when the gunpowder unfurled and busted open my tea ball! It was love at first sip, and this has been a staple in my cupboard ever since, even when I had to leave most of my teas behind for dorm life. Of course, I don’t use tea balls or spoons now for tea like this so I get to watch it bloom beautifully. This is such a pretty tea—I really love watching tea brew (kind of weird?) and this one is some great eye-candy.

The peppermint in this is very strong: many other Moroccan Mint blends are either not quite minty enough/are too minty for me or they use spearmint (which for some reason makes me ill). The mint-to-green-tea ratio is perfect here: you get a punch of cooling mint followed by a really interesting green. There are almost no grassy/vegetal notes, and like many gunpowders it has a hint of smokiness that perfectly counterbalances the sharp, strong mint and also has a nice depth of flavor. I do like this hot, but iced and with way too much sugar it’s just… perfect! Thirst-quenching, heat-cooling, lip-smacking delicious.

I’m not a huge fan of RoT, but I do think some of their fruity black teas are decent. Every year I get a few samples with a catalog, so I decided to try this.

There are twenty herbs in this…….TWENTY! I smelled the teabag, but got more aroma from the envelope it came in. From a distance it reminded me of Bubble Yum bubble gum. Closer sniffication reveals Rooibos, allspice, anise, lemon grass, cinnamon, and vanilla.

The main cup aromas were Rooibos, allspice, anise, lemongrass, and wintermint. My palate detected mainly Rooibos & allspice, while the anise hit the back of my palate. I did notice slight hibiscus in the aftertaste. Overall, a very mild cup.

I remember seeing somewhere that one of their teabags contains between 1.0-1.3 grams of tea. The standard is 2.25-3.0 grams per 6 to 8 oz cup. So you really do need two teabags to get a decent cup. That means IF I wanted to ice this tea (a general rule is to double the tea for iced tea), I’d need 3 or 4 times as much!! NOT FOR ME. :-[

To top it off this is a 20th Anniversary Tea! What a major letdown. I mean, I can’t believe they thought, ‘YES!! This is our best representation in celebration of twenty years in the tea industry! Now go celebrate!!’ This was NOT a celebration in a cup. Twenty ingredients is a mishmash in a cup-way too many, which turns out to be a mess in my cup.

I need a good FF Darjeeling RIGHT NOW! That’s a tea that is worthy of…….and IS a celebration in a cup. :))

Cupped & Reviewed: Friday, May 18, 2012.

I had a tea disaster earlier this evening involving expired milk that was mis-labeled so I decided to go with something safe and relatively simple. I haven’t had this since I first got it in March, actually (I’ve honestly had too many new ones to try since then—I need to stop buying tea!) but it’s just as comforting as I remember. The dry leaves smell like heaven, creamy and almost caramel-like.

That caramel smell carries over to the actual tea, though it’s not really that present in the taste which is as sweet and creamy as I expect it to be. That’s kind of vague, but… basically, it’s a very sweet & mellow tea with lots of milky flavor. It’s got that hint of floral/vegetal taste that you’d expect from a lighter oolong, but those notes are definitely in the background. I’m not ashamed to admit that I add a pinch of sugar to this to bring out the milky notes even more! Sugar in oolong is kind of blasphemous to some, but it really works here for me. I almost want to add some milk just for the hell of it… but I don’t have any. Ah well, next time!

I was just saying last week how I’d love to try a good chili-mango tea, and the tea shop I went to last week had this. Actually, my dad bought it-he likes spicy too-but I took a couple tea bags back home for myself.

So, this is my first green rooibos and I was curious how this would taste-I have only liked a couple red rooibos blends. The bag smells pleasant enough-kinda mango-peachy and buttery.

The brewed aroma is more of the same mango-peachy-buttery. Very warm and pleasant-almost golden. The liquor itself is kinda a golden-orange color. The flavor is more of the same mango-peach-butter troika. It is really enjoyable. Sadly, there is no chili to speak of in my cup. So, the quest for a good mango-chili continues. Also, not having had green rooibos before, I can’t say for sure that I actually tasted it here-it may have just been the flavoring. Still, it’s tasty, so no penalties. I might buy it at some point.

Tea of the moment at work. I do like this one. It makes for a nice light cup of tea in the morning with just enough of a kick to get me through to lunch! I also like that the Bergamot isn’t the scene stealer here…sure it is there, but not in your face. Bring it morning! :)

First things first, I bought the loose leaf version of this tea. The shop I stopped in today had both for the same price and well that much was a no brainer. Long story short…I’ve been looking for an Earl Grey I liked for a long time now. So a few weeks ago the latest Republic of Teas catalogue turned up with a sample of this tea and I gave it a go and I found I really liked it. So I finally bit the bullet and bought some. I think I like that the bergamot flavor is really light (for me) and it makes for a very light and smooth cup of tea. So glad I grabbed some. :)

This is pretty good, although not as yummy as the “Sun Tea” version (Orange Red Carrot). It’s a nice medley of fruit and spice, although both flavors are muted. Worth a try since it’s herbal/green rooibos (my fave for its sweetness). I wonder what this would taste like with a dash of cinnamon/cinnamon tea…

Finished up my Traveler’s Tin today by brewing the last 2 bags at one time (a good tip from the first tasting note on this tea’s page. It makes it tolerable. I just didn’t like it brewed with one bag.

Drinking iced from my Lock & Lock bottle.

And the good part is that I now have the cute little travel tin to reuse. I was able to peel the labels off pretty cleanly, and I think some rubbing alcohol might clean the little bit of goo that’s left so I can make my own labels for it, and try carrying some loose tea in it. Might have to air out a bit first – the tin smells of ginger, which is odd since I could never detect it in the brewed tea!