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Third steep. Its unique smokey-chocolate flavour is gone and what’s left tastes like a rather bland and boring Ceylon. Meh.

Resteeping the leaves from last night. The tea has pretty much unfurled completely and I noticed that the leaves are quite skinny and they almost look like bits of ribbon floating in my cup when I’m steeping.

No cocoa flavour this time, just the smokey-tannin taste that I’m beginning to associate with Yunnan tea. I’ll probably be able to get at least one more steeping out of the leaves.

To be honest I was sort of expecting something a bit more…well, pumpkin-y. This tea has the spice alright, but that’s it. False advertising, I say!

I dug this one out a cookie tin filled with random teas that is probably several years old (at least). When I added the water the tea instantly turned bright, pinkish-red – Y halo thar Hibiscus (again).

Not that it’s really a big deal with this tea as it really needs something to balance out the perfumed sweetness of the rose. The rose, by the way, is just on the near side of making the tisane too perfumed – but the other, more tart ingredients mostly make up for that. Not bad for something that’s been gathering dust for awhile.

I shared a pot of this with my mother, brother, and boyfriend as we decorated my mother’s X-mas tree this evening. This time the tea was steeped in a four-cup pot with only two teabags, so it was more dilute than normal, but still quite festive-tasting. The plum flavour was a lot stronger, though not as sweet as before, and the cinnamon, while warming, was a lot less in-your-face.

It’s so neat watching the pearls unroll; they wiggle and wave little fronds about like they’re alive. I decided to cut back on the amount of tea a little and only use three balls this time. The tea has lost some of its cocoa flavour but the tanins also have less of a kick to them. It’s still a rich, robust, and satisfying brew.

*looks into the box * Huh, this tea’s been vanishing faster than I realized – there’s only three bags left. It feels so unbelievably good on my sore throat though, so I might get another box just to add to my herbal medicine collection.

I normally drink this tea with milk, but with my cold I figured it might be best to skip that, so I just drank it plain with a teaspoon of honey. Even after a relatively short steeping time and added sweetener it has a pretty astringent bite to it that left a bit of a dry taste in my mouth, so I can see why many people don’t like this tea.

You know, I love that this can be drunk as a medicinal tea but it still tastes great – there aren’t many teas or tisanes that can say that!

Backlogging from earlier today. I drank another dose of this when I first woke up.