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Winter is coming! Or at least autumn is, you should have seen what it rained this morning. Summer is on the way out and I was finally in the mood to make some tea. This is a new purchase, from this very summer, and my first, fast tasting of it

First, this smells like the french-est tea ever blended. French teas, do you have a mental idea of what that style is? This is precisely it, like the most paradigmatic french tea ever. (well, and there is Vert de Provence as well. Maybe a few others, Thé au Tibet also comes to mind as the most french imaginable Earl Grey tea, but no other tea I ever had, and I have been having a lot of french teas, is more French tea than this). Really sublime perfume, far too complicated to categorize – fruity, flowery, with tea underneath. And it was one of the few The-o-dor teas I could buy locally and hello, welcome Acte II.

But at my first try I suspect lotus is an ingredient even if they do not explicitly mention it. And lotus in tea is for me like tuberose in perfumes – it ruins things. I did not quite love it as much as I loved the smell, but I must experiment some more.

It is still a wonderful, balanced, quality tea by the way.

I have been desperately craving another Theodor the, their Peché Mignon, their melon and peach green tea. This is their green mate with melon and peach and well it was on stock – and it´s just as amazing!

I made it iced, cold brewed and then strained for maybe half a hour (with mate and tea, I find it gets bitter if I leave it much longer than say one hour even when cold brewed. Even hibiscus I do not like to leave overlong. Only rooibos I leave overnight). It really tastes a lot like Peché Mignon, even their own page makes a reference to it, but with a mate base. I suppose this description won´t be much help to anybody who never had the fortune to try Peché Mignon but it means it tastes naturally and strongly like melon and peach, in balance somehow. Pecadito reportedly has some passion fruit as well, which I think i detect on the aftertaste and makes it non-cloying somehow.

Love it, this package will probably not survive the summer here.

A little while ago Anna sent me a sample of Lupicia´s Jardin Sauvage – a Jekyll and Hyde tea for me. I loathed it when brewed hot and absolutely loved it when I cold steeped it overnight. It did wake me to the possibilities of cold brewed flavoured green rooibos, which is such an awesome concept for me in the summertime.

I was reminded of that Lupicia tea when I chanced upon this green rooibos with peach. Blender is another of those kind of generic german (austrian in this case, i believe) blenders – you know, not expensive teas, lots of flavoured teas, a certain propensity for adding sunflower petals, dried carrot or pineapple or grapefruit rind to unlikely teas. This one just has the sunflower petals and it´s pretty much what you would expect – not as awesome, or subtle or full ot interesting secondary flavours as the Lupicia. But it is nice, and it is much much cheaper than the Lupicia, a definite plus particularly for a iced tea. Flavour is mostly artificial, but not too cloying and it´s kind of one of those correct does-what-it-says-on-the-label teas. No surprises or hidden depths, but it does make very nice, and very lazy, iced tea – put some tea in a bottle, pour water and put in dridge, strain whenever you want it, sweeten if you want. I suspect the 100 grams I got will not make it to autumn.

How I misjudged this… I got it on the recommendation of the saleslady, and it was not the rooibos i was looking for. First couple times I tried it hot, I disliked it – I am coming to realize I dislike the flavour of mint brewed in boiling water. But after i discovered the cold brewing process, oh it was love. This just might be of my favorite iced teas ever – the rooibos, the mint, the rose.

Finished but a rebuy for sure.

I had a surprise swap with Scheherazade and this was one of the teas she selected for me, and the one I picked first to try (i want to try Om very much but kind of not in the mood for something I know will be strange and different right now). This smelled heavenly, and it´s a blender I do not know.

The tea itself, is a bit baffling – smells like caramelley apple which is a win indeed. The tea base reminds of Dammann´s and specifically their Pomme d Amour tea. But while I am not crazily in love with Dammann teas in general or that one specifically this one cames out worse out of that comparison – the tea base is (even) weaker and there is a kind of tannin like acridity which I can not quite name but which is not working for me.

This is from another sample Courtney sent me, thank you!

Weather is dreadful, dreadful, seems to have turned to the worst ever since the equinox and it being officially spring. I wanted a tea-ey tea. Something with presence. Body. No elusive, light, stuff. And this was an excellent selection for that mood.

It´s unmistakably a Ceylon tea, it has what I call the copper-y-ness of it. It´s slightly more astringent than I expected, though this seems to be an altitude grown tea, which might explain it. It´s not going to be a favorite orange pekoe ( the azores one is to me, just superior in everything) but it makes a nice cup of tea and is a good example of why this type of tea was so popular for so long.

This is one of those teas which has some sort of magic when it hits the water – I could just be smelling the water all while it steeps. It changes, it is a absolutely delicious caramelly gooey fantastic scent always changing a little. Fabulous.

But the tea itself when I drink it, it does not quite live up to all of that promise. Maybe I am not using enough leaf, thanks to both Ysaurella and Sil very kindly having sent me samples, I still got a bit more to experiment. Indeed a fantastic tea, but one which is being just a little bit mysterious to me.

Another tea from the european travelling box, a teabag this time (and whoa, only one more tea to sample from it I think!).

Not much to say about this – ceylon with cranberry, and not particularly strong tea base. Quite drinkable.

I confess, I got this (and Safari Breakfast, and maybe I will get choco-nut as well) for the tin. Tins, ohh I had drooled about these tins ever since I first saw them and when i spotted these on sale at iherb, thought it a good excuse to test their cheap shipping ( not bad at all, around 3 weeks to Europe for 4 dollars up to a certain large weight).

And the tins, oh they are as nice as I hoped, and they look so wonderful in my kitchen. The teas, being teabags kind of fill a need, I have a lot of tea, kilos of tea, but I do not have a lot of teabags and sometimes it´s just more practical for when making tea away from home. Individually wrapped teabags would have been even nicer, but then I guess there would be no justification for packaging it in tins.

This is a earl grey with some jasmine. I am not a earl grey person, and I am very much not a earl grey made with my local tap water person (weird alchemy, my tap water and bergamot, I just do not like the mix). I got to try this with mineral water next.

No rating till then, but first impressions, not bad at all.