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Cake and tea. This is fodder for the writing mind. (Probably, to be honest, especially cake…)

This one was shared with me by Dinosara and an excellent choice for sharing it was too. Vanilla blacks have turned into something of an obsession for me. I am searching for the perfect vanilla flavoured black, seeing as I can’t apparently get the actually perfect vanilla black that Chi of Tea sold. That one was so awesome and just right in every way.

This one has bits of vanilla pod in it, which is a plus. I don’t care if they only impart very little actual flavour, they have a huge significance aesthetically. The perfect vanilla flavoured tea much have them, I think. It also, according to Upton’s information, has artificial flavouring. I’m less keen on that. The perfect vanilla black should be flavoured with real vanilla. Not an artificial approximation of vanilla.

(Unless by artificial flavouring they mean giving the tea a flavour which it does not have naturally, in which case it’s an entirely different crate of fish. I don’t consider this very likely though…)

The aroma is strong on the vanilla notes. A sweet caramel-y vanilla, hanging heavily over the surface of the tea itself. It smells right, I have to say. It smells like my memory of the aroma of the aforementioned Perfect But Unavailable vanilla black, except it lacks the note reminding me of coconut which in turn reminded me of a specific sort of licorice sweets. I don’t get that whole association chain here. Still, it’s close enough that I would say the prospects of finding the perfect vanilla tea is looking quite good at the moment.

The flavour does not hit you in the face with vanilla. It’s definitely there, but this is tea-flavoured tea which ALSO tastes like vanilla. Not just tea that tastes like vanilla, the end. That’s a mark in the positive column, as is the fact that while it is somewhat modest and doesn’t overpower the base, the vanilla is easily detectable.

It has a dry feeling to it, though. It’s not astringent as such, but it is a dry sort of flavour (also, it’s dark brown. Been a while since I had a synesthesia inducing tea, actually) and this then led me to actually look up taste-colour synesthesia, which didn’t seem to yield very many useful results. Maybe it’s not a very common type, and I’ve only got it in a mild form, I think, due to how it doesn’t always work. No matter what,
’¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨4yurjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjh (Luna helping me type there. I choose to share the antics of my cats rather than deleting them) it caused me to forget about the tea which is now lukewarm.

So anyway, it tastes dark brown, which is more the colour of black tea, seeing as vanilla on it’s own has more greyish sort of flavour. That dry flavour that caused that whole side-tracking thing with the synesthesia is not really something I think would be part of the perfect vanilla tea. It’s distracting, and for that I will say that this is not the perfect vanilla tea either, although a very good candidate indeed. If the dry note had not been quite so strong, it would have been a different matter entirely. Maybe also with a touch of that coconut-y note as well. Then it would have been worth at least ten more points.