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The problem with the whole concept of a “cold” tea, is how can you rate it if you can’t taste much? This is…kind of minty, kind of lemon-y, kind of ginger-y, kind of sweet. I don’t know. It’s pleasant enough. Does it help? Heck if I know! I just know that I’m bummed I can’t try the 52teas Butterbeer that just arrived; but I don’t want to waste it!

In the meantime, I need to decide on tins of tea to buy for Mum’s store. It’s going to have to be DAVIDs, because that’s closest. She said 4-5 teas, so I told her I was thinking:

- a lighter black
- a dark black
- a flavoured black (she wants flavoured ones)
- a flavoured green (since DT’s straight greens aren’t that good in the first place, no point in getting one) Edit: Actually, I’m saying that because I don’t like green tea that much, and none of DT’s have won me over. Maybe I should consider a straight green after all…
- something with no caffeine, maybe a rooibos

So then I’m thinking:

- not sure, not Nepal Black because it’s so hard to scoop and I don’t want people putting their fingers in the tins
Edit: David’s Breakfast, maybe?
- Assam Banaspaty
- Read My Lips
- ?? Daydreamer maybe, if it’s still in stores?
- ?? Rooibos de Provence?

I need to decide soon! If you guys have recs for these categories that you think have broad appeal, let me know!

Edit: Oooh, maybe I could also talk Mum into including a sixth and make it Kanpe?

One step forward, six steps back…

By which I mean I’m drinking up the last of this, but just added 6 more to my cupboard. So much for “down to 100 or less by the 7th.” Oh well. At least I’ve learned my lesson by now about buying more than sample sizes of anything first-try. (With the exception of Teaopia’s Love Spell, since I’ve never had it before, and it won’t be available soon – may as well just go for the 50g, I know it’s good.) So most of those additions to my cupboard won’t be around for long.

[ Edit: Just discovered that Love Spell is apparently one of Teaopia’s “top 20,” so they are keeping it after all.]

This one is SO good, and a definite re-purchase at some point, even though it is stupidly expensive despite having barely any tea in it. (It is pretty hard to dent my high opinion of DAVIDsTEA, but these days even I have to wince when I open my bag or tin at home and discover, say, the half a slice of dried orange I found in my tin of Mango Madness. Seriously, I paid for the weight of that? What the hell am I even going to DO with that, use it as a cocktail garnish?!)

This is so creamy – especially sweetened with honey, which always adds to or brings out creaminess in teas – and like I said, I love creaminess! Creamy coconut is really the strongest impression I get from this one. Other people have said “caramel” and I get where that’s coming from, but I don’t know if it’s the first description I would have used if I hadn’t seen other people describe this tea that way. Perhaps if you could imagine a fruity version of caramel; that’s what this tastes like. There’s a sweet fruitiness to it under the cream and coconut.

So I guess that’s the mulberries. Although, to be honest, I’ve never had a mulberry. So I’m not sure exactly what they are adding to this tea other than that fruity note.

I decided to try for two steeps of my last leaf of this, so I steeped the first cup for 5 minutes and the second cup for 9, both around 90 degrees. I honestly expected the first cup to be weak, but it really wasn’t…and in the second, if I concentrate, I actually faintly taste the Bai Mu Dan-which-barely-was.

In other news, Tea Annoyances, it really sucks when “your” bathroom in the house is also the main bathroom because you drew the short straw for bedrooms and are the only member of the household without your own bathroom…so everyone uses your bathroom to shower, have baths, shave their legs for two hours, etc. AND YOU DRINK A LOT OF TEA.

De-cupboarding this tonight. I just wanted to note that I had it with a splash of milk for the first time, and it’s really fabulous that way. (For the longest time I had cut milk completely out of my tea on the basis of it negating so many health benefits to tea. Not that health benefits are the reason I drink tea, but if I’m going to drink so much of it, it would be best to maximize its benefits. Unfortunately, easy tea lattes from Teaopia near work got me re-hooked on tea with milk, so now I am always stuck bargaining with myself – 10 cups without, 1 cup with…)

Unfortunately, this is not an easy re-purchase, because the store it’s from is in Banff. I could order it through their website, and I might eventually do just that – but I’ll hold off for now. (I also asked about a chocolate Earl Grey on the DAVIDs Facebook page, as I’d be curious to see how DT did this idea.)

In the meantime, this one has really grown on me and I will miss it!

For god’s sakes, this wasn’t in my cupboard, either! Still at 111 teas, dangnabit. My goal is to be down to 100 or less by July 7th!

I almost feel like there’s no point in rating this, as Teaopia is not keeping this one, and it’s really only a passable chai or mate anyhow. I originally bought it because I discovered that mate helps me come down from my ADHD meds without a horrible crash. (Amphetamines = good, horrible zombie-like crash at the end of the day = bad.) But I have since stopped taking my meds because they are not currently covered by insurance, and I’m not in school anyway. (The terrific irony of my meds is that I cannot get through school without them, but I cannot make enough money to afford them while in school! So now I am simply trying to learn to cope without them again, period…and if that doesn’t work, maybe I will have enough savings for them when I go back to school.)

In the meantime, if I need a mate, I have discovered Chocolate Rocket from David’s, and that’s a more than acceptable substitute!

It’s definitely got a roasted flavour to it, and something to it which is almost dusty…or gritty…hard to explain.

But with milk and DAVIDsTEA’s vanilla agave, it’s more than saved, and quite tasty! Two cups of this one this afternoon before I need to go to work, and another successful de-cupboard (in real life, if not on Steepster).

You can actually see the bottom of the tea shelf now; there’s enough space freed up that you could put something like a tin of peanut butter or something in there.

So I had this conversation with my mother an hour ago:

Me: So, um, Mom…just to warn you…I entered something for some free tea…and I’m in…so there should be various teas arriving over the next few weeks. BUT IT’S FREE.

[Emphasis on “various teas,” because I fully plan to claim that any and all teas I order for the next few weeks are part of the free thing. MUAH HA HA, a cunning plan.]

Mom: Okay, well…at least I know what we can do with those teas when they get here!

Me: (deeply startled) …What?!

Mom: We’ll take them to the store!

[My family just bought a wool/knitting store. Evidently there is complimentary tea, and my mother wants me to be in charge of that.]

Me: That’s…not how it works, Mom. I’m supposed to review them!

…Yeah. I’m thinking I need to focus on drinking up the teas that are downstairs a lot faster so my family will less resent the arrival of more. Also, so that it looks like my “tea boner” (as my sister calls it) is getting softer and not harder and leaking liquor everywhere.

Oh man, sorry for that last mental image. :P

With that in mind, I’m drinking up the last of this. I’m actually using up all the last I have of this, maybe about 2tsp, so quite generous leaf for me – something I will need to keep in mind in the future when I try it again. This is one that I botched in the pitcher. Such a shame, because it’s really good! I will have to put it off as a re-purchase, though.

I’m drinking it hot, and while it really seemed like one you should ice, it’s excellent hot. It’s got a fantastic creaminess to it – I absolutely love any kind of creamy flavour or texture in a tea. The lime is perfectly balanced, not at all too sour.

I can also taste the apples, but unlike in Tropicalia, they are not too far forward in the taste, more like a supporting player of the lime.

Looking forward to getting this again and trying it cold (and made properly this time). I was going to try and chill half of this cup, but honestly, I now just feel like finishing it. Some other day!

I went to de-cupboard this today and discovered it’s not in my cupboard in the first place. ANOTHER ONE, HEAVENS!

I recall being quite disappointed by this one after Read My Lips. Of the two, Read My Lips is by far David’s superior chocolate tea. I was not exactly in love with this one at first. Har har.

I also recall that I started off steeping this one at my “cautious” black steeping time of 3 minutes, which I gradually learned is a mistake with DT’s blacks, which generally need a good 4 or 5 minutes to get the best flavour. (Actually, I’ve learned that it’s a mistake with many blacks, unless I plan to try for extra steeps – which I admittedly don’t do often because I’m too fickle most days to drink the same tea twice in a row. The number of blacks which need a shorter steep are vastly outnumbered by those that can stand up to a longer one.) At three minutes, this had next-to-no strawberry flavour – the strawberries were overwhelmed by the chocolate, which nevertheless had a flimsiness to it, a lack of richness.

At four or five minutes, this one is way better, with the strawberries coming out to balance the chocolate. It’s a very enjoyable mix of chocolate and berry sweetness.

I know that, and yet, the last two cups in this bag just haven’t been as good as I know this one can be. Maybe it has just gotten too old, who knows. I will have to re-visit this one at some point, but for now, I have too many to drink up to re-purchase it.

Man, I really don’t like being unable to click to take this out of my cupboard. I miss having the closure here.

(Apologies in advance because it is 2 am and I know I will ramble.)

This one just came out yesterday with Cherry Cola; and while I’m generally too lazy to bother getting anything done before my work day starts, I hauled ass out of my house early yesterday just to get to DAVIDs for this one so I didn’t have to wait even a day to try it.

Getting the impression I like root beer? Oh yes. I’m such a kid. Depending on the day, I can never decide between orange, cream soda or root beer as my favourite pop. I’ve mentioned before that I essentially gave up pop for tea, yes? So I imagined this being the best of both worlds.

My local DAVIDs is busier and busier these days, to the point that I walked in last week and did a double-take in shock when the store was empty. That never used to surprise me! And when I got there yesterday, there was a line-up of about four people while all the SAs were serving people (including one little old lady who looked to be buying probably about two hundred dollars worth of gift sets and then being picky about how they were packed). The woman behind me – holding her $1 iced tea mug – was clearly agitated by this, saying, “There’s a line-up for the damn tea?!” I kind of wanted to ask her if she didn’t want the tea store she frequents to be financially successful.

(Unexpectedly though, she turned out to be quite sweet. As I didn’t want her making dagger eyes at my back, I offered to let her go first when an SA freed up. “Oh no, dear, you were first! You go ahead!” Some people, I can’t figure them out.)

ANYWAY. The tea.

I got 160g of this packed into a shiny silver tin and the tea in my $1 mug as well because they were, unexpectedly, serving this one at my store as the TOTD instead of Cherry Cola as scheduled. Not sure why. But I kinda squeed to myself when I tasted the dollar TOTD, because it really, seriously tasted like root beer! I know I’ve groused on here before (in my DT’s Tropicalia review) about people saying that teas taste “just like” something else, but this is as uncannily close to “just like” as I think a tea can get.

So I rushed home to make my own pitcher of this one. In order to do this, I was planning to throw out the last fifth or so of my pitcher of DT’s Lime Gelato.

Now, I would not normally do that. I’m not really the child my taste buds think I am. I would normally wait and drink the last of the last pitcher. Unfortunately, that particular pitcher really, really didn’t turn out so great. I cold-brewed the Lime Gelato for about 4 and a quarter hours, and then yanked the leaves out because I was concerned about it eventually getting bitter the way Kiwi’s Big Adventure did. And it was unbelievably tasteless. Faintly lime, faintly green tea, and…that’s it. I talked to an SA in the store, and she told me that she doesn’t think Lime Gelato cold-brews well. Oops. So I’d just been using it up in boozy mixed drinks. And I planned to throw the rest of that failed pitcher out, because it just wasn’t that pleasant to drink even then.

As it turns out though, my loose-leaf hating sister actually drank it! Although she apparently told my mother, “Weird, it smells much stronger than it tastes.” (gigglesnort) And then she and my mom puzzledly went through all my teas in the cupboard trying to figure out which one it was! …Of course, they didn’t because they don’t know that half my stash (including that one) is actually in my room so that no one in my family but me knows how many teas I actually have. Shhh…

So. This isn’t a review of Lime Gelato, but I had to mention that because it’s made me nervous now about cold-brewing. This was the first time ever that the cold-brewing method has failed me, and I couldn’t help but think, “What if it doesn’t work for Root Beer Float?!” But I figured, nah, none of the listed ingredients are things I haven’t cold-brewed before – I think? – and it should work, no problemo.

But. Twelve-plus hours of cold-brewing later (yes, I lost track), guess what?

Root Beer Float cannot be cold-brewed either!

Now, I might not have realized that if I hadn’t had a to-go cup from the store, because it does still have a root beer taste to it and is drinkable. But nothing like what I had from the store! Sheesh! So just a heads-up for anyone thinking of slow-brewing this one cold…nope. Don’t waste your leaves.

So I just made some hot. This review is for that instead. If I can cool this enough before I go to bed, I will maybe try half the cup cold.

First, the smell is amazing. It does smell like root beer, both dry and wet – even hot. It’s another one of those “huff over the cup” teas.

Hot: The first sip was disturbingly tasteless, but it seems to be one of those that gets more flavour as it cools rather than less, so I gave it a few minutes and…yeah, there we go. Root beer and vanilla! I taste the base more hot, and I think it is rather middle-ing…there’s a faint bitterness to it. But I’m okay with it as the flavour is pretty well done. I can’t really separately taste white chocolate in this, and for that I’m grateful as I despise white chocolate.

I really just wish it was sweeter. I know that people have been bitching endlessly about stevia in DT teas lately – although I’m not sure why, it’s even considered safe for diabetes according to what I’ve read – and this tea does not have it. I wish it did. I have not had much of an opinion on the stevia thing until now, but now – I think they should have added it to this one in particular, and I do not understand how so many recent teas have that ingredient which probably don’t need it and this one doesn’t! I do not want to be adding too much of my own sugar to the tea because I don’t want to change the flavour, but this is supposed to be root beer. It should not be about subtle flavours. I don’t want to swirl this one on my tongue trying to pick out notes. I expect tea, but I also expect it to taste a little more like it will rot my teeth.

Cold: Okay, I should probably save this as I’m falling on my face. But this is definitely better cold (as I’m sure you’d already assumed); I keep seeing people on the FB page saying it needs fizz, but floats go flat! It has that nummy flat float taste.

I’ve also been experimenting with adding milk or cream and a swirl of DT’s vanilla agave to bring out the float-y aspects more, and that’s AWESOME. This is another get-me-through-the-work-day tea.

And with that, I’m up too late and talking too long and I’m out!

This is nearing a de-cupboard, and I always hatehatehate removing teas from my cupboard without reviewing them (for my own records, if not for other people – I’m sure most people who were curious about this one have already tried it), but I have almost nothing to say about this one. Hence there being no review of it until, uh, June. I was excited for this because I love wacky teas, but eh. It’s just kinda meh on first, second and third impressions. And yes, I did get jelly beans in my sample, but I never honestly noticed them making a significant difference to the taste. I probably would have been better off eating them.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike it. Actually, I think I steeped this cup longer than previous cups and it’s pretty good. It’s mostly got a strawberry flavour with something else fruity and sweet underneath that and an underlying creaminess to the whole sip. Not bad at all.

And yet, there’s a fullness to the sip that’s just missing. Even for a rooibos (which never has the fullness of flavour that I associate with tea-tea). I don’t know – it has the same problem that much of the spring collection did in that there are Swiss cheese holes in the flavour. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder if that whole collection was rushed for some reason.

And actually, it gets more hole-y as the cup cools. Some teas have more flavour when they cool – this is absolutely not one of them, as it tastes more and more like sweetened water as its temperature drops. Ick.

It’s all right, but I don’t mind the fact that it’s gone from stores/online only now at all. It was a cute idea for Easter, anyway.

So the other day I was sitting down to play some Fallout 3 (an evil run, heheh) and eat a small dinner on the side. On a TV dinner table nearby, I had a Jamaican beef patty and a cup of Teaopia’s Soleil de Provence (which I just discovered that I’ve never added to my Steepster cupboard, making me even more concerned about how disorganized it is – I’m sure I need to remove stuff, and apparently stuff is missing from it! oh no!). I finished the patty very quickly while my tea was still cooling, and then stupidly left both the full mug of tea and the plate of crumbs on the table while I paused my game and left the room very briefly for a reason I can no longer remember.

…Did I mention I have four cats?

Yes, two males and two females. The females are both hell on wheels, and the males – while sweet – are both dumb as sacks of broken hammers. One of them, Kaleb, is a bit smarter than his brother Mustang, but makes up for it by being incredibly anxious and skittish.

So while I was out of the room, Kaleb jumped up onto the table to get the beef patty crumbs. When I came back into the room, he panicked and bolted.

The table – sturdy enough to leave drinks on with no fear, but not sturdy enough to withstand a 12-pound cat launching himself off of it – tipped so fast that Malcolm Gladwell would be shocked. The plate and mug both hit the stone hearth of the fireplace (which is beside the TV, and no, we don’t ever use it) and shattered…although the tea thankfully just sank into the stone and didn’t appear to get near the ton of cables associated with the TV, the PS3, the DVD/VCR player, the PS2, etc.

Not actually that big a deal in the end, except for a broken plate, and, oh yeah, MY FAVOURITE MUG!

tear

It was my Taco Time mug, which I think my boss got us one Christmas when I worked at Taco Time. Yeah, it was not a pretty mug (I mean, it had a fast food logo on it!); but it was a substantial-sized mug that was great for lattes, it was white and reflected the color of the tea, plus it was something I’d gotten at my first-ever “real” job (where I worked for six years!) and just basically had sentimental value.

I know it’s my fault, but I’m seriously bummed about the mug.

But.

This gave me the perfect excuse, didn’t it?

I have wanted a glass tea mug for, oh, just about forever. But I could not justify the purchase when we have so many mugs. Well, I had to make myself feel better, didn’t I? And I needed a bigger mug for lattes. I already have a Perfect Mug that my mother gave me a few Christmases ago – it’s sort of a charcoal color, and I don’t know if they even sell that color anymore. I like it a lot, but because it’s so dark it’s hard to see the color of a tea’s liquor.

So now I have this one! I’m very excited, I love it. The glass feels amazing on my tongue and teeth (I hope I’m not the only one who considers the texture of the cup before purchasing) and I just love that I can gaze at the color of the tea as it steeps and while I drink it. The infuser is less clunky than the old design – hard to explain, but it has less of a “lip” near the top where tea leaves tend to get stuck in my old one.

My only issue with it is that it clearly looses heat faster, and is dangerous to pick up by anything but the handle when it’s freshly steeped. But that’s to be expected – after all, it’s glass.

Limited edition? WHY.

When I run out of this tea, I seriously think my life will end.**

:(

A real review when I’m not about to be kicked off the computer.

**No, not really.