Angrboda

Another one from that sampler box. Apple and lemon. Slightly odd combination if you ask me, but on the other hand I was also surprised at how well vanilla and mint went together so you never know.

The bag didn’t smell of anything at all, really, but when I poured the water on, I get a strong scent of lemon and underneath it apple. So that bit checks out. (Can you tell I’m biased?) It’s just that it’s so perfumed. It smells more like something you might dab behind your ears rather than something you would drink.

I’ve tried their green lemon tea before and found it wildly synthetic in flavour so I’m not getting my hopes up about this one. I was right. It is indeed the same perfumed lemon that they’ve used for this one. I can barely find the apple underneath.

I’ve been through three out of five varieties in this box now, and I’m reaching the conclusion that I kinda already new. This sort of thing is NOT the way to introduce yourself to the world of white teas.

I’m saving the pai mu tan I got the other day for a special occasion (and I’ve got one in mind) and this sampler box is seriously making me look forward to it.

This is another one of the bags I got today, although it’s not from the white sampler box. (There was a special offer on two boxes and I couldn’t not get two! Shh!) This is just ordinary black with fruit.

The smell of the dry bag is overwhelmingly melony. You are not in doubt for a moment what sort of additive we are talking about here. It’s the same thing while it’s steeping although it does turn a little more synthetic in nature.

The brew is dark and it immediately gets that oily layer on the surface. Any good quality loose leaf tea gets it too after it’s been standing around for a good while but in this one it’s instant. I assume it must have something to do with leaf size.

The melon is very pronounced in flavour, but it’s not sweet. It tastes rather more like the skin of a melon rather than the actual flesh. Or a melon that isn’t quite ripe yet. Not sure what the drawing on the box is supposed to be, but I’m assuming when we say ‘melon’ here we’re talking about cantaloupes.

The tea at the base is completely uninteresting, and really it’s not actually meant to be interesting at all because all you’re ment to get is the melon. And that really is all you get.

All that aside though, I’ll inflate my opinion of it a bit in rating, mostly because I do find it an interesting flavour in tea, and one I wouldn’t mind trying on for size in a better quality loose leaf.

I shall try my hardest not to prattle on pretentiously about everything else but the tea I’m drinking with this one. Promise.

When I tried the Soft Fruitea, I mentioned that it had been contaminated rather a lot by the jasmine of this one what with the bags not being air tightly individually packed. I also mentioned that I expected this one to be better, so let’s see if it is.

It smells pretty floral and mostly of jasmine, and that really seriously comes out when pouring the water on it. Like with the Soft Fruitea, it does get extremely dark for a white. Really it’s like a light black tea.

I can taste blossoms of both kinds, especially and not surprisingly especially jasmine, and very little tea. It’s not as cloying as the other one was and while it’s not by any measure great, I was definitely right that this one was better.

It’s an addiction, buying tea, is. I can quit any time! wild eyes
I have my prejudices and snobby opinions about the sort of tea you buy at the supermarket. The cheap mass produced teabags containing second grade tea at best. It’s very rare that I actually get some, but every once in a while I find myself in front of that shelf in the supermarket just to see if there’s anything new. A flavour or a combination there of that I haven’t seen before and I suppose it’s an okay way of checking if it’s worth trying it out at a better quality. I don’t know where in the world this brand is available, but it and Lipton are probably the biggest supermarket brands here in Denmark, and not one I’m usually all that impressed by but good enough in a tight spot. My main peeve with them is that if you read the brewing instructions on the box they insist on boiling water regardless of the type of tea. I don’t care what they say, I absolutely refuse to pour boiling water on green or white, the end.

Anyway, they had this sampler box of whites. And curiosity overwhelmed me. How much of a mess have they managed to make out of the delicate, valuable white tea? I figure if it’s awful, it’ll be good enough for the travel mug in the morning (and easier to prepare in a hurry) than my more expensive but better quality whites and greens.

It smells heavily perfumed and a lot like jasmine actually, which prompts me to see if there is a jasmine variety in the box. Guess what, there is.
Dear teabag producers. Jasmine scented tea is NOT a good choice to put in a sampler box, as it will turn everything in the box into a jasmine scented tea. -Me.
I can find the smell of grapes and pear, but it seems sort of synthetic.

I can pick up the pear in the flavour and it tastes natural. I can’t really find the grapes and the tea on which it was based does taste white, but also very bland and dull. I should like to know exactly which white tea this is supposed to be. It doesn’t help that these bags are not packed individually in an air tight way so it has picked up some of the jasmine from that other one in the box. I expect the variation with jasmine and orange blossoms will work a lot better than this one.

I have to say that it’s possible that I feel about pear the way I do about peach. I love the fruit, but I don’t much care for them in tea. Still, the tea as a whole totally lived up to my expectations.

ETA: I just added this tea and rated it 41, but on the tea’s profile it says 61. How does that work?

A blend from my local shop. And I don’t know why I initially added and put unknown as the brand, since it’s a perfectly normal shop that actually has a name. I don’t know who their wholeseller is, but that’s a detail. Anywho. It’s actually called ‘Isabella blend’ but they renamed it since. I don’t know, I preferred the first name, as I quite like Princess Isabella. She’s cute and she was born on my birthday. :)

I’m probably only borderline in on the Vanilla Vogue with this one, but I wanted something else than plain vanilla. And the description does say ‘notes of raspberry and vanilla’. Judging from the very strong raspberry aroma that it has, I would say that it has more than notes. There has definitely been raspberry aroma added to this and although I can’t immediately find any vanilla in the smell, I think it would be a relatively safe bet that it has been added too.

This is, with rose petals, jasmine, raspberries, vanilla and something called ‘pink sweethearts’, possibly the single most girly tea I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know what the sweethearts are supposed to be. I remember trying to eat one and getting zero flavour out of it, so I’m guessing maybe they’re responsible for the vanilla/raspberry aroma.

I’m on my very last bits of this. I’m making it in my smallest pot and even then I probably shouldn’t fill it all the way up. Just the one cup then. That’s kind of sad, really.

Dark in colour and with a rather odd aroma that sort of reminds me of raspberries what have been baked. And hey, the sweetness of vanilla!

The tea itself is a bit bland when it comes to the fruit and the vanilla, although it may be because, with the limited supply of leaves, it’s been brewed a wee bit on the weak side. It makes me wish I could have made it properly. It tastes mostly like a fairly bland and faded mix of the teas and then the sweetness comes through in the aftertaste.

No real vanilla coming through except in the aroma, although, with the description I’m wondering if that might actually be the way it’s supposed to be. You know, it does say ‘notes’, not ‘flavours’. So it could be that it’s supposed to be tasted as a combination of flavour and aroma. Rather complicated, but there you are.

Or maybe, it’s just old. Still I’m finding myself wishing that I had stocked up on this when I was buying the other day.

I got inspired for a vanilla tea just now so I made me a small pot. And then my head wasn’t really in it so I wasted a whole spoonful of this nice vanilla tea but going to put the leaves in the pot and failing to pour out the water that I had used to heat the pot up first. Very ARGH!-worthy when you only have a sample-size tin. I wish I had more of this to mix with. I’ve got a TON of stuff now that I’d like to blend it with, but alas.

Huh. It would appear that I’m currently following 70 Steepster accounts. 70! Looking at my dashboard page I think we can reach the conclusion that some of those must be inactive and I probably ought to clean it up a bit.

Anyway, I chose this tea during my little ‘accident’ yesterday because ever since last sunday when my boyfriend was here and we had this awesome caramel ice cream that totally tasted like childhood, I’ve been slightly obsessed with all things caramel.

The dry leaves smell heavily of caramel and it has tiny cubes of actual caramel in it. There is a very big risk that I’m going to offset the entire balance of this by uhm eating them. (I tasted one, they’re yummy!)

Strangely enough, where I found the two other black teas I bought lighter in colour than I had expected, this is just the opposite. It’s darker than I expected. A little darker than maple syrup. Granted it’s slightly oversteeped, but still.

The smell is not as sickly sweet as you might have expected. Or at least I did. It smells like caramel and not so much of tea, but still not completely overwhemingly sweet.

Strangely enough, this tastes more like tea than it does of caramel. I was expecting something sweet and smooth and instead I got something lightly astringent and with a rough sort of flavour that makes me wonder what it’s based on. It just say chinese and ceylon tea, so it could be anything. The caramel is there, but it’s like it’s caramel without sugar. It’s good enough, but it’s not really what I was expecting. I’m thinking a bit of sugar might bring out the caramel more but even as I’m missing the sweetness, I’m strangely reluctant to test it.

As mentioned, though, it was a bit oversteeped, so not doing that might make a difference. I’ll try that the next time and possibly adjust my rating accordingly

Second steep is very similar to the longer one of the first round. Bit more spicy though. And it goes quite nicely with this pear I’m having for breakfast.

Okay, first of all, WTF? I could have sworn that Chun Mee was a chinese tea. This prompted me to look through my books on the subject and it would appear that Chun Mee originally came from the Jiangxi province and has since spread to the rest of China. It’s produced in Yunnan now, for example. So why shouldn’t it have spread to Taiwan as well, just like Gunpowder? But it just still feels weird to me that it’s not chinese.

The name means ‘precious eyebrow’, and apparently refers to the way the leaves are twisted. I don’t know, they don’t look very eyebrowish to me, but there you are. They have a nice dusty green colour and the aroma is sweet but not very strong.

In the cup it gets a nice yellow colour. The shop recommended an 8-10 minutes steeping time which I just couldn’t make myself do, especially since my literature warned me that if oversteeped this is a tea that can get devilishly bitter, so I took the first cup after about the usual 4-5 minutes and let the rest continue to stew. It had the same sweet but vague smell that was kind of difficult to find, like the harder you breathed in the more it just sort of slipped around your nose. This did not change significantly with increased steeping time.

I have to say that the first cup did have a relatively weak feel to it, but it was still a full bodies sort of flavour. It was a bit astringent and it had that prickly sort of taste that I personally think of as what they mean with ‘spicyness’ in tea. With increased steeping time it turned a bit more astringent and developed a more sour sort of after taste which went on forever and ever. Not sour like in a lemon, more like sour like in a cup of coffee that has gone cold.

The Gunpowder Blend that I had yesterday had that same sort of aftertaste to it, and I’m nearly certain that they must have used Chun Mee for that blend. And seriously proud of my self for having figured this out too.

I think I definitely preferred the slightly weaker one of the two cups I had, and I think it must also have a couple more steeps left in it.

First of all, this is NOT to be confused with Gunpowder as we know it, as in the green tea. While it does contain green tea and the green leaves are easily recognisable, they don’t look like Gunpowder to me. The name has more to do with the nature and taste of the blend. (Also, I’ve translated the name from danish, in which the tea Gunpowder is never mentioned)

This is supposedly a secret blend. I suppose that’s why on the shop’s website it says what it contains. English breakfast, a green tea and lapsang souchong. So apparently it’s only the identity of the green tea that is so sooper seekrit. My wild guess would be Chun Mee since that’s a strong enough green to do well in blends and the green leaves definitely look like they’ve been twisted.

Since it has green tea in it, I thought it best to let the water breathe for a couple of minutes before pouring it on. In the meantime, all you can smell on the dry leaves is the lapsang souchong, but it’s got a milder sort of smell with something sweet too, which I expect must be the seeeeeekrit green tea.

Considering that two thirds of this, at LEAST, is black tea and one of those is lapsang souchong, this has a very light colour. It smells really good though! The lapsang souchong isn’t at all as overpowering in the brew as it is in the dry leaves. It sort of reminds me of a wet cat who has just come in from the rain, and I’m showing my colours as a cat person when I say that I kind of like that smell. It was just the first thing that popped into my head when I smelled it. A normal person would probably describe it as a full sweet smell with a note of smoke.

This is really great! I could definitely get used to this. It’s like a very mild lapsang souchong that has been given just a little bit of sugar. At first you think you might as well have been drinking a weak lapsang souchong, but then the rest of the flavour comes out. The sweetness of the green tea and the fullness of the english breakfast and then the sharpness on top of it all.

If you don’t like lapsang souchong’s smokey flavour, I would suggest trying a blend of just the english breakfast and a green tea.

What’s this? A new addition to the collection? “But Angrboda,” I hear you say, “we thought you said you were on a fairly strict weekly budget this month and that it was Stingy-Month?”
Erm, yes. Yes, I did. And it still is. Just with the exception of the hour it took to walk down to the little local shop (and it’s the same shop, btw, it just changed it’s name), pick out *cough*five*cough* new teas and walk back again. AHEM!

I love liquorice and if you ask my boyfriend, who’s english, he’ll tell you that us danes have a weird taste in liquorice. But anyway, this was too interesting to pass by. Smell and visual tells me that they’re not lying about what it contains. I can see lots of bits of liquorice root and it smells a LOT of the aniseed oil.

Anybody here who have ever tried making a pure liquorice root tisane? Then you’ll know that it gives off a lot of flavour immediately after getting in contact with the water, so I’m not worried that it’ll be overpowered by the heavy aniseed.

I was expecting a darker brew, but this is a sort of vaguely reddish light brown colour. It still smells rather a lot of aniseed but the liquorice root is definitely coming after it.

Interesting flavour! Or rather, double flavour. You get first the aniseed in the middle of the tongue and then as you swallow the liquorice root appears along the sides of the tongue. Instead of getting two flavours in combination, you get one flavour sort of taking over from the other. It’s quite nice, but I can’t really find much tea flavour underneath. I can only find a very vague astringency as a proof that it’s there underneath.

ETA: Wow, a little bit of cane sugar really brings out the liquorice root here!
ETA again: Toned the rating down quite a bit because even the small pot is enough. More than enough actually.

Say, isn’t it ‘passion fruit’ in two words? Anyway, I’ve been awake for hours and hours and we’re moving rather quickly towards noon actually. And I haven’t had a drop yet. Not because I didn’t want any, I just didn’t know what to pick. And then in a convoluted sort of thought patterns that I couldn’t trace even if I wanted to, one Arnold J. Rimmer makes the choice for me when the following quote popped into my head. “You are the fruit of their forbidden passion. You’re forbidden passion fruit.” (Red Dwarf S3E6 The Last Day) And I thought, hey why not? (Again with the setting, self! What gives???)

Smells sweet and kind of floral and with a note of something that kind of reminds me of yoghurt, strangely enough. It has a sort of dusty taste to me that makes me wonder if it’s fading and at the same time it tastes more ‘real’ than your average cheap flavoured bags. I think it’s the lack of syntheticness that does it.

Unfortunately I accidentally oversteeped it a little bit and the fruity flavours have drowned somewhat. The tea as such hasn’t turned unpleasant at all, it’s just not really all that sweet and fruity anymore. However, a smidgen of cane sugar, and we are back in business. Very nice.

I have been challenged by a fellow Wrimo to get to 25K before midnight on my NaNoWriMo novel. That means I have currently a little less than three hours to get three thousand more words down. That should be doable IF I can find some discipline to do it and don’t give up and go to bed. Now, I’ve just got to the bit where the actual plot really starts, so it’s turned a bit more difficult. (And why is it all my posts here must have a setting?)

Obviously tea is required for this little project, and I turned to the only proper white one (meaning one of good quality and/or without additives) that I’ve got. I don’t know why, really, it just struck me, when I was looking in the cupboard as a creative type tea. I am also going to put on some creative type music and write, write, write.

For some reason this also inspired me to bring my first yixing pot back into use. It’s been dormant for a while. It just seemed proper somehow. Every time I scald this, I regret that I didn’t have as many pots back when I bought it as I do now so that it’s not seasoned to one particular kind of tea. I’ve got it to the point now where you pour clean boiling water in it to warm it up before brewing and then it has visibly changed colour when you pour it away.

Obviously, I’m not going to get a ‘clean’ taste of this particular tea out of this pot, but I’m not good enough at tasting the differences that it’s generally a problem. Just an aesthetic sort of little complaint. At least it has never been used for anything other than greens and whites, so at least it’s not going to take on a side note of Lapsang Souchong or some such. Obviously, I desperately need a new yixing pot. Or several. grin

I can’t say anything about the proporties really because I don’t know if they’re really the REAL proporties, but it’s sort of a light yellowy colour. The smell has a note of chamomile (which I’m 98% sure has never been made in this pot), and underneath a nicely sweet smell. Thankfully, I’m not getting any chamomile flavour, but the pot has definitely affected the flavour. It tastes more green than white, but with a light astringency and a sweet grassy flavour, I’m not really going to complain about it.

This was really more a review of my pot than it was of my tea, wasn’t it? If you’re curious, you can go and check out what I said about this tea earlier and compare. :)

So we’ve had the Almond Avalance and the Peach Pandemic seems to be winding down. I saw (I forget who you were, sorry! Suzi?) someone mention that they wouldn’t mind it if the next big trend be something with blueberries. I support that. Blueberry Blitz, yes please.

I’m getting more and more fond of this one for every time I have it. I thought the first time that the blueberry was nice but subtle, completely in contrast with everybody else. I had a cold at the time. The next time I tried it I was getting better and there was much more blueberry flavour in it. Now there seems to be even more. I’m worried about what might happen if I keep drinking this. ;p

Mmmm. Good morning tea when you’re on holiday. (Now for that NaNo wordcount. cracks knuckles)

The Hedgerow Special was fun and all, but just to chase away the floral taste (and you wouldn’t believe how many attempts it took to write that omg! (and now I’ve messed this up too argh!)) you can’t beat something sweet and (for me) tested a lot of times. (Ha!)

Oh dear, this is bravery and courage of the worst kind. Another adventure into the Big Tins of Mystery. It started with the question, “what tea should we have? Something plain or something with something in it?” and the reply was, “something out there.” Now we’ll see if my mention of the BToM might have been a dreadful mistake. And alternative name for it might have been ‘Bracken Water Blend’, but this sounded nicer and more like something you might actually want to try and put in your mouth.

I had lemon grass, red rosebuds and honeysuckle flowers. I have no clue what the latter might possibly taste like, but it does smell kind dusty and kind of smokey. Certainly doesn’t smell like honey. We mixed all these with Ceylon Pekoe for the base.

It has a light brownish yellow colour, which is probably just due to the Ceylon and it smells really a lot of honeysuckle. That’s not a smell that’s easily mistaken. I can pick up something sweetish too which I think must be the rosebuds.

We tried a sip which was followed by silence. And the remark that it was odd that no side effects had been encountered. Yet. (Now I’m having my grammar corrected in a really sort of demonstrative way with looks and everything!) Anyway, I can taste a heck of a lot of honeysuckle and underneath it I think I can find some lemon grass. The rosebuds seem to be only there for show and the tea is um well camouflaged. To make a short story long it’s a rather flowery concoction.

This all sounds very off-putting, but it’s not really quite as it may sound (or smell). The word ‘refreshing’ has been spoken. I think we can say that we’re leaning more towards Care of Magical Creature than we are towards Defence Against the Dark Arts here.

(And another plus, it seems to make the drinker kind of silly. Wait, are we sure that’s really a plus?)

Oh my Steepster account, I hearts you like air. And like tea. And like my LJ account. Which says a LOT. You inspire me to do experiments with long forgotten samples like today, which is loads of fun, even when largely unsuccessful in finding undiscovered diamonds. And on top of that I get to babble about each one at length which makes it even more fun. Never leave me.

Right, so I’ve made an emergency pot of Lapsang Souchong. I need it on top of all this experimenting. Especially that last one there which I think must have been the worst of the lot. (Especially because it could have been avoided if I had not stupidly decided reading the info on the package regarding contents was unnecessary)

This is a stable. This is always a great cup of tea. Smokey and rough and JUST right. Enough experiments for me. I’ll stick to this for the rest of the evening.

Another one I found in the previously mentioned Big Tins of Mystery! It was out of a Celestial Seasonings sampler pack that a former friend (we fell out, probably for the best) once sent me for my birthday along with a few other things from CS. I remember being quite taken by the boxes. Pretty pictures. They had actually made an effort on decoration. I wasn’t particularly interested in the actual contents though, which I found disappointing on account of 75% of them being herbals. I don’t care about tisanes. They are not tea and they are not interesting. (And many of them aren’t that well tasting either) Oh and FYI as a personal little peeve, rooibos falls under this category. It is not tea.

Anyway, berries! I like berries, so while I haven’t bothered to look at the ingredients, I’m feeling semi-confident. I mean if I only have one bag out of a whole sampler pack left, then surely the others must have been used up, right? And if I didn’t like them, there would have been more than one left, right?

It smells like… sweets. Not particularly fruity to be honest. Rather more synthetic and very very sweet. I do notice though that it gets a highly suspicious bright red colour while steeping. This is worrying. I have some very bad experiences with that particular colour. I haven’t even tasted it yet and already I’ve poured the rest of the water into a small pot to heat it up and the kettle on with water for a pot of emergency Lapsang Souchong if I’m right.

Okay. Here goes. takes deep breath and summons all reserves of courage

Ack! Yuck! Spitty!

I was right about that bright red colour. It tattles about the presence of the dreaded hibiscus. That stuff seems to be in just about everything and I just can’t get it down. To me it has a dreadful metallic sort of taste that reminds me most of all of blood. No thank you, says I.

It’s a mystery though that there was only this one bag left. I must have traded the others, but why did I keep one?

I gave up on the mango thing. I just couldn’t sit there and essentially drink hot water with a bit of perfume in it. And since it wasn’t what I had been inspired to have in the first place, let’s move right along to this. This too is ancient and haven’t been stored right, but I have better hope of this having retained some of it’s original flavour.

It smells like washing up soap. I think it must be the lemon grass and the orange zest. I believe I can pick up a hint of coconut too, but mostly it’s just washing up soap. I mean citrus.

Fresh taste, yes a bit actually. I think it has faded somewhat too, but at least it actually tastes of something. It has a hint of something minty that settles in the after taste. It must be the undisclosed spices. This isn’t really something special. I can’t pick out the individual flavours, but even if I could, I’m not really all that impressed.

I still don’t know why I bought this sample, but at least it’s better than what I had before.

Not having much tea luck at the moment. That should teach me to pay better attention to storage. But at least this is drinkable.

I have two large tins in my kitchen in which I stuff various samples of stuff that are too small to be put in proper tin or I don’t otherwise know what to do with. Consequently the contents of these tins are frequently forgotten about. I had a rummage through them because that Stockholm blend thing that Luthien had was inspiring me and I wanted one of those ‘big’ blends with lots of stuff in it instead of these simpler things that I normally go for for a change. I found some lemon grass, honeysuckle flowers and some red rosebuds that I didn’t even know I had! Also a sample from previously mentioned local shop that I’m not sure why I got in the first place. It doesn’t really look like something that I would expect to like all that much… Anyway, this one is a teabag that I got through a trade at some point.

It has a number of things against it. 1) It’s bagged. 2) It’s ancient. 3) It’s been stored in a plastic ziplock bag. 4) in a tin containing other stuff too and consequently reeks of rooibos.

Obviously I’m not getting my hopes up here, but I’ve only got this one bag and I might as well get rid of it.

(I just realised now there’s a typo when I added the tea. ‘Manog’ tea, indeed. snicker I’ll fix it as soon as I’m done with the post.)

It smells a little bit of mango, still. It also smells like sugar and something sort of lemon-y. And of chamomile, weirdly enough. Quite a lot of chamomile actually. I wonder if, during the trade, tea bags might have been accidentally switched around so what I’ve actually just made is a cup of chamomile tisane. Well, there’s only one way to find out.

Nope, it’s not chamomile in disguise. There’s a little bit of astringency (yay learning this!) and that’s about it. It has very little flavour of any sort of in although it does actually vaguely remind me of chamomile. The reason I can say though that it isn’t actually real chamomile in disguise is that chamomile, even really ancient chamomile of dubious quality, in my experience doesn’t really fade in flavour the way this stuff obviously have. The dominant taste of the whole cup here is hot water.

I’m a bit wary of rating it because I would like to believe that in a better stored non-ancient bag it would have been better, but I have to go with what I’ve actually got.

Goodmorning Steepster.

After all these almonds, I feel almost treacherous for having chosen a different nut this morning.

I probably ought to have logged this one as a blend but I had already pulled it up on Steepster when I decided on a whim to add the little twist. What this actually is, is two thirds hazelnut black form Adagio and one third chocolate black form Adagio. After the almond vanilla success, I guess I just felt sort of inspired. :)

Also, I’ve had my eye on this hazelnut tea for a while in a combination with just a little bit of chocolate milk. I’m guessing it might turn into something Nutella-ish. Which would be AWESOME!

The smell is great! Nutty and chocolaty! I can’t decide if I should have added a little more chocolate or if it was just the right amount. I’m leaning towards just the right amount. It’s not something that’s particularly sweet, it’s got a sort of dark flavour and it’s very autumny.

Obviously I’m trying a cup with a bit of milk too. Just enough to cover the bottom of this (admittedly pretty wide-bottomed) cup and the result is a bit of a disappointment. The flavours of the hazelnut and the chocolate are mildened by the milk to the point of almost disappearing.

It was good without milk. Not so much with. Lesson learned, although it’s come as rather a bit of a surprise for me!

HAH! It really IS an almond pandemic. :D Everybody’s drinking almond tea.

Backlogged ever so slightly. Got another one of these to go this afternoon when going home from work. I know I’m supposed to be in stingy-mode and I am really being careful about saving money, but I was allowed this partly to celebrate that I have all of next week off (yay holiday!) and because I had collected nine stamps so it was free anyway. :)

I made sure this time to get it without anything sprinkled, sprayed, dumped or whatever on top in the hopes that it wouldn’t be drowning in cinnamon. Turns out the extremely cinnamon-y flavour the last time wasn’t really because of all the cinnamon they put on top. It just IS very cinnamon-y. I could still pick up vanilla and sugar too, and I’m still uncertain about anise, cloves and cardamom. Now that I’m home I’ve been in the kitchen sniffing and tasting a few of my spices. Now I’m also thinking allspice, but again, not sure. The only thing I could tell for certain was that there was something sweet in it that wasn’t cinnamon-sweet, vanilla-sweet or sugar-sweet. I just can’t figure out what sort of sweetness it might have been.

Also, I briefly had an association to do with oranges. Like… I really thought I ought to be able to find orange, but couldn’t. Odd.

Still not really sold on this here chai-concept. But you can’t say I’m not giving it a chance.

Goodmorning Steepster.

Continuing on the almond pandemic we’ve had around the site lately, after I went to bed last night and just on the verge of sleeping, this combination popped into my head.

Usually I have noticed a trend of preferring green and white in my travel mug in the morning, but today I wanted to try this, so black it was.

I took half and half (just about) of Adagio’s Vanilla black tea and the black almond tea from my local shop, Den Lille Tebutik (they’ve changed their name since, though, due to having been sold, so now I’m debating whether or not to edit the teas I’ve logged from there).

It worked really well. The two flavours suited each other and the vanilla countered some of the enormous sweetness of the almond and making it less of a dessert tea. I really liked this combination and will have to see if aforementioned local shop have a vanilla tea so I can try to recreate it.

Wake up, self. Look alive. Have only just done barely 300 words on NaNoWriMo today. As previously mentioned work was particularly tiring today. I hate meetings, I do. I much prefer to just zombie about in the lab and get the daily specimens out of the way.

I need to get some more words down, just half an hour more of writing would be acceptable.

So we took a black one because blacks always feel like they have more caffeine in them (even if they don’t really) and I went for this one, because I felt like something flavoured. One of my extravagant Adagio teas. I wish I could afford to shop there regularly. (I’ve seen a cucumber(!!!) thing among others that I’m absolutely desperate to try!)

It’s sweet without actually being sweet-sweet. It sort of tastes like vanilla smells instead of tasting OF vanilla. Hard to explain, but I’ve found that I rather like it a lot.

I’m still carrying around some tentative chai-inspiration from the chai-cino experiment of the other day, so I’ve tried a cup with a bit of milk. Not a lot, just exactly enough to cover the bottom of the cup (mind you, my current cup have a fairly wide bottom (snicker) and it’s not really working. Possibly it should have had a bit more milk, because somehow it’s like the watery-ness of the tea is all the more obvious. I think it’s because of the colour. You expect something with milky viscosity and don’t get it. It’s odd and sort of distracts the mind so you forget to pay attention to the flavour.

So, closing my eyes and taking another sip. Weirdly, this actually does help on the viscosity issue! It’s all in your mind, apparently. I wouldn’t say the milk really brings the best out in the tea here. On the contrary, the milk seems to get a kind of semi-sour sort of note to it. You know like milk that hasn’t actually gone off but has lost the sweetness and has just started to taste of fridge. I have to say that I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t work with milk. It sounds like something that would have been lovely with a bit of milk.