LaFleurBleue

Yesterday morning I woke up at quarter to three, courtesy of jetlag. I decided then to indulge in a nice teapot, while reading, before getting ready for the office, to make up for that way too early awakening. I picked up Jardin Bleu’s sample that Ysaurella had sent me, which kept calling my name but which I wanted to keep for a special day. Here it is.
The tea looks quite nice with little yellow and blue petals mixed with the tea leaves and also smells good dry.
Once brewed, the color is golden honey; the smell very pleasant.
The taste is very mellow, almost tart at first, very fruity, and at the same time there’s a bit of tanginess, a little something that makes it not overly sweet. The strawberry flavor is quite noticeable, but is however not domineering. I honestly did not recognize rhubarb, but I haven’t eaten any over the last 2 years and that probably makes it more difficult.
Overall it’s a very delicate brew, very easy to drink, and which I did not tire of. I could have brewed a second tea-pot right away, had I still been thirsty. While drinking it, I really had the feeling, blue was the perfect color to embody this tea: neither navy, nor baby blue, but sapphire blue, which is IMO neither cold nor warm, and very relaxing.
I’ve seen description of this tea as a morning tea. IMO, it’s much more an afternoon one.
I really look forward to my second and last brew of the sample and will most probably buy it sometime soon (after having emptied a bit my overfilled cupboard though).

Let me start with a digression, which might be useful for you to understand my disappointment.
I’ve always thought that exotic/tropical fruit juices were usually not great and not as good as plain orange juice; as if the blending did not really work and faded the nice and all the specific flavors to something bland and undefinable. Exactly the same thing as for whisky when you compare nice single malts with blends that are just too bland and uninteresting, even though some of them boost of containing “a little bit of all the best whiskies” as I heard it once.
However, I really enjoy eating passion fruits (or having them in cocktails…), as their flavor is much more particular than the fake exotic blend. Hence my high expectations for this single-flavor tea;

Very strong Passion Fruit smell when opening the tea bag. The tea looks also nice with yellow petals and small pieces of fruit (not sure whether it is passion fruit skin or small apple flavored with passion fruit) among the black tea.
Golden honey color
When dry, the tea smells very strong like exotic fruits; once steeped the smell turns slightly more discrete.
The smells and tastes remind me more of exotic fruit mix, than simply of passion fruit; it feels a bit too sweet, too sugary and not tangy enough to be just passion fruit at the right level of ripeness.
The black tea base is quite nice but not really special.
I was happy to see that the tea did not leave a greasy flake at the bottom of my cup.
To make it short, it’s quite nice to drink, but not as good as I expected. After having drunk about on third of the pack, I already feel like I have had enough of this one, which is just good enough to drink at work but not at home for cozying up and relaxing. I will not buy it again though will probably try out more sophisticated exotic blends.

I like it actually much better when I drink it in the late afternoon at the office, than at home some time in the evening, hence my slightly reviewed quote. I tried to understand the reasons why: I guess that the really strong citrusy taste gives me the feeling that this brew has awakening/exciting benefits, while I usually prefer smoother and more relaxing drinks in the evening.
I also am less concentrated on my tea at the office than at home which might make it the best way to empty my stocks of nice but not preferred teas.

When I opened the sealed bag, I did not remember what the tea had looked like when I had purchased it a few months ago. I was disappointed to see that the chamomile was finely grounded almost to powder and that there were not any entire flowers. A rooibos is usually always made up of small pieces, but this one is even finer than all the others I’ve had. Even the tiny holes of my new strainer are not small enough to prevent it from spilling into the teapot. And the strainer is quite difficult to clean as some pieces keeps getting stuck in the holes; I do not have this problem with any other rooibos I have which cannot endear this one to me.
Next let’s come to the tasting. The brew is not really clear, as a result from the dust spilling. The smell is quite nice, strong on chamomile with the sweetness brought by the rooibos.
The taste is ok, but keeps disappointing me.
Two months ago, while staying in a nice hotel in Malaysia, I had a chamomile after dinner that was the best I ever had; the following morning I discovered with pleasure Gryphon tea. This chamomile was just plain flowers steeping in hot water, but the taste was fresh, mild with no hint of bitterness or unpleasant aftertaste, well really perfect. I had not asked for the brand of the chamomile then, which I regret.
Since then my expectations have highly risen. And that’s probably the reason why I’m disappointed here. The hashed chamomile has a hint of something slightly bitter in it. And the rooibos base from Le Palais des Thés is too weak to add enough creaminess to compensate for it.
The verbena rooibos was a better blend than this one IMO.
I’ll try it iced though.

My second tasting from the nice samples provided by Ysaurella…
The weather is hot and sunny; the clouds and rain should only come later in the day. However I felt like having comfort food today to make up for my almost gone cold and for the absence of Hubby.
Pomme d’Amour smelled like the perfect antidote to any gloominess.
I was afraid to have left it steeping a bit too long, as I’m not sure I was not on the wrong side of 5 minutes, and that I had put too much of it, as it had really swelled inside my strainer. The little apple pieces in particular had especially filled out.
The color was a nice caramel honey; the smell very sweet and candy-like.
Then I sipped and was relieved not to find any hint of bitterness. My first surprise was that the caramel taste was lighter than I expected, but fortunately tasted like home-made caramel and not like the fake-caramel flavor which is often used in industrial foods and beverages, especially herbal-dust in bags heavily laden with artificial coloring and flavoring that is sold in most supermarkets.
The tea base seems really nice. Pomme d’Amour tea has the very natural taste of real fruit heavily dipped and cooked in sugar. This is undeniably a very high quality product.
I have to confess that I have only one bit of a toffee apple once in my life, many many years ago. My cousin who had shared a part of her delicacy with me was not very happy when I told her I did not like it very much, as it was too sweet and sugary; and that’s about the only recollection I have of it.
I am not the biggest fan of desserts, especially cakes, and am really quite picky about those; however a good Tarte Tatin is among my favorites. So I tried to find out what differences there were between Pomme d’Amour tea with what I love about apple cakes and Tarte Tatin. I came out with those findings:
- I usually like the apples to be a bit tangy, as the fruit tanginess complements the sugar-butter caramel better;
- I also much prefer when the cake is prepared with salted butter, especially crystal salt. To my opinion, the twist added by the salt make all the flavors stand out.
Of course, this tea did not promise to be “Tarte Tatin” flavored, but Pomme d’Amour and I believe the promise to be perfectly met.
If you have a very sweet-tooth, it should be a bullseye hit.
If you have more of a sweet and sour tooth, it might not be so convincing.

I’ll drink a second batch of this tea with great pleasure (and the first one did not linger long in my pot), however I know that I will not buy it, as I probably would not finish the batch, and that I have to be careful selecting candy-sweet flavored teas.

This morning, I still have a cold with a highly stuffed nose and reduced smelling and tasting abilities.
I decided then it was the perfect day to try the Chai I got from Gryphon’s Treasure box, and whose spice laden smell through the plastic bag was never enticing to me, when I had my full capacity.
I know it’s supposed to be drunk with a cloud of milk, but I can’t do that, as just the smell of milk is enough to unsettle my stomach.
The spice taste is really strong, there’s definitely aniseed, cumin, cardamom, something that remind me of Cayenne pepper, a strong aftertaste of clove. It really smells like a spice market in Aceh and that’s quite amazing. However, all those spices tend to overwhelm me, but not in a very good sense.
Under all those perfumes, I cannot identify anything that remind me of tea and I am wondering whether the tea base is strong enough – what I’ve noticed regularly with Gryphon is that they were strong advocates of “less is more”, but sometimes this quest for subtlety goes to far and translates into a tasteless brew.
Chai is also supposed to be drunk with sugar. After my first small cup “nature” to get the most of the flavors, I tried one with honey, thinking it would be interesting to see the flavors’ mixing. My honey is rather strong and that was not a good idea; the honey did not manage to cover the spices just added something else to a pot already overflowing.
I finally decided to make it simple with raw sugar; it’s definitely required. With sugar added in the brew, the spices flavor blend together and seem like subdued in comparison with the plain and too rough brew.
It’s like trying to preparing a dish that requires long slow cooking (like Boeuf Bourguignon or Osso Bucco for instance) in a hurry and eating it before the ingredients have had the time to blend and turn a standard dish into a nice tasty delight.
However to my opinion, even with sugar, this Chai reminds me too much of a dish overflowing with spices, but in which both meats and vegetables would have been too sparsely included. It was my first Chai drinking experiment and may well probably be one my last.
For the record, I did not really appreciate the few “Christmas teas” some friends pushed to me in the past, because of that and the spice overload was definitely not as strong as in this one.

In an office in Singapore, the temperature is usually very cool (and way below that of outside air); I’m not that sensitive to the cold and my friends in Europe can attest to that as some complained it was too cold in my home in winter. However I’m quite sensitive to strong temperature differences between places.
This sitting in a cold draft feeling explains why I drink more tea here than I used to, because sometimes I really need the hot cup to keep my fingers from getting blue and to warm my insides – environmental nonsense in a country where a very cool outside temperature stand around 27°C (around 80°F). Drinking tea also helped me compensate for my drastic cut in my daily espresso consumption (from 5 to 6 a day to 1)
At the office, the coffee is excellent, but the available teas are really average tea-bags, that I’ve all tried and drank once but either knew I had to avoid at all cost forever or could drink but did not feel like having again.
I decided then that life was too short to waste on drinking brewed dust, bitter and sometimes even vile-tasting brews which left me almost queasy after one cup.
I wanted something convenient, easy to clean, not fragile, as I can be a bit of a klutz and knew I would have to carry my cup back and forth between the kitchen and my desk. This last criteria definitely ruled out the Bodum Tea for one set, which I was already afraid to break when putting down on the store’s table, and for which the salesguy told me it was great because you could still use the filter (plastic mesh) with another cup, when the double-glass cup got broken by the clumsy customer.

After a while, I came across this set, which was on sale, and available in a nice fuchsia color.
I liked the design, the glass looked sturdy, easy to handle, without any risks thanks to the silicon wide ring. I also liked that the filter was a very fine mesh, through which rooibos could not go through. What I found a bit disappointing was the glass capacity (bigger than the Bodum though), especially as there was a larger glass with the same design available but without the strainer and cover.
It’s very convenient to use, rather easy to rinse, without having to use a sponge or brush to take the tea / rooibos leaves outside of the strainer. I usually manage not to have tea dripping on my desk when taking the filter out of the cup or back into it; the strainer handle fits really well, never gets hot. The filter is really stable once set onto the cover dish. The large silicon ring around the glass allows for a very comfortable walk with the glass full, the grip not feeling slippery at all even with clammy hands, unlike when holding a normal glass.
The glass and strainer get stained by tea (which I do not mind but some others might). However my main concern is that the plastic mesh is already quite crinkled, as if it could not completely stand boiling hot water temperature. I have trouble to believe this filter can be as long-lasting as a stainless steel one. I had not directly compared it with the Bodum, but both had seemed very similar.
As it is, I’m very happy with this set whose advantages are obvious everyday to my clumsy self.
Had I found before the Forlife strainer, I probably would have bought two of these, one for home, one for the office instead of this set.
Time will tell which one of the two (stainless steel vs. plastic mesh) strainers is the more long-lasting one…

Not as bad as the same brand fake Oolong tea
The content of the tea bag is once again hashed very fine. I’m not sure whether the jasmine taste comes from real flowers mixed with the tea or from oils, or worse artificial flavoring.
The tea turned very bitter quite quickly; when the tea was growing colder in my cup, the bitterness became stronger and really overwhelming. The tea seemed a bit murky, though with less particles in suspension than the oolong.
All in all, it might be drinkable with a shorter steep time, but to my opinion will at best remain a very generic jasmine tea with no finesse and no interest and most probably a not very pleasant tasting one.

Sold by 100 tea-bags for a dirt-cheap price (or so I hope). I tried it at the office, for the sake of checking that I did good bothering with rinsing my mesh-filter. I had not had my fine-tasting Sun-Moon Lake tea in a while; so much the better, as there were no ground for fair comparison.
The content of the bag is hashed really fine, not making it possible to see if you’re brewing leaves or stems.
The color of the tea is really brown, like maple syrup, while I was expecting a oolong to be something closer to a light yellow. It seems a bit murky, with some almost invisible dust floating within.
The smell is slightly oolong, but I had to almost wet my nose to notice it. The taste is in between a vile cheap black tea and a oolong, but lean more on the vile cheap black tea side. The lingering taste got even worse, after a few sips. And the tea seemed bitterer while it was cooling, even though I had taken the bag out quite quickly.
I’m not sure whether the black tea feeling only came from a stronger oxidation.
Anyway even this one cup was quite difficult to finish and left my stomach a bit queasy. I’ll never pick it up again and can only recommend every one to steer clear of it.

Thanks for Ysaurella, whose post on this tea caught my eye and helped us swap some teas we had in our respective cupboards.
I felt I had to start my tasting of her samples with this one;)
Thanks to my recent fantastic infuser, I could see that the green leaves were rather nice and bigger than I expected when I had served the dry tea.
The smell is really nice, sweet and very fruity.
The taste was fine, though not exceptional. What I liked is that the different flavors taste natural (as I’ve had a not so good experience with a flavored green tea from Le Palais des Thés before, I was wary of that. The flavors were however a bit weak in comparison with the green tea base and not as striking to my palate as to my nose.
I also thought some japanese sencha powder had been added to it, as there was a lot of it at the bottom of my teapot. I also found it to be quite astringent while I was finishing my teapot (after 6 cups or so).
However I have to say that I’m not sure I’ll ever like a green tea, as much as a nice black-blend, a oolong or a white tea. I believe this tea might rate among the green teas I liked best.
And some of Ysaurella’s other samples really have a smell to die for. To be continued…

I’ve always used tea-balls but was very frustrated lately with those, as I felt they did not allow for large leaves to really unfold and on the other hand were letting quite a lot of rooibos small parts seep into the pot. When I found this infuser at Dempsey Hill, it just seemed absolutely perfect and I did not hesitate at all before buying it.
I use it generally with my teapot, whose opening is a bit wider than a mug, but the infuser is very stable thanks to the handle. The cover is perfect to keep the water warm during infusion, as my normal teapot cover cannot fit with the infuser in.
The tea leaves have a lot of space to unfold with a cylinder 6 cm long by diameter 6 cm (2 inches 3/8). The quality of the stainless steel and of the seals seem pretty high, and quite up to par with a similar infuser I had seen sold by WMF for 3 times the price.
I’ve used it with different kind of teas and rooibos and am definitely very happy with everything about it. Very easy to use, very easy to empty and to clean, perfect size for my teapot or large mugs, good looking design, no stain on the table thanks to the cover being used as a dish for the user – with the silicon coating on this side, no accident ever when bringing back my tray to the kitchen (and it sometimes feel like I have two left hands…). Last the holes are indeed very very tiny which makes it the best infuser I’ve ever used for rooibos.
On small flaw, if/when I leave the handle above the opening of my teapot and forget to put it on the side, it gets a bit hot, which is not so pleasant to take it off. I never was burned just felt surprised and a bit too hot at the fingers.
And the price is ok, especially for the quality (around 20 USD).
I would definitely buy it again, and may also offer some to my tea-addict friends.

Definitely one of my favorites rooibos
The blend is both subtle (much more than Rouge Rushka) and not so subtle (less than Marco Polo Rouge). The citrus scent can be very easily identified but it’s nicely blended with other flavors that do not make the citrusy taste overwhelming. I’m currently drinking the second half of my second box of this tea. I’m not sure I will replenish this supply at Christmas, but I know for sure I’ll buy it again in the next years.
Depending on the moments, I tend to prefer Rouge Bourbon when I’m in the mood for a sweet sugary-feeling vanilla taste, or Marco Polo Rouge, when I’m in the mood for a very mellow evening drink, or this Nil Rouge, when I feel like having a drink feeling slightly more refreshing.

Had this at the office, to try.
There was no lipton yellow available to compare it directly; but those two teasare rather similar to my opinion;
The taste of the Dilmah Premium might be a bit less generic, but it remains a black tea with only very tiny pieces of leaves in the bag. I tried a second steep and got slightly colored hot water; with a Lipton, the second steep was weaker but still tea.
I’ve got to bring something to drink my good teas instead of those craps.

I have had a few more bags of this one (for which I bought a complete box, in addition to the 2 teabags from the Treasure box). The more I drink it, the more I like it and find it the perfect Earl Grey, that I want to drink again and again.
And I’m so impressed by the number of steeps possible with one single tea-bag.
Very expensive, but it’s worth while at least a try. The best blend from Gryphon with Nymph of the Nile, to my opinion.
My husband also liked it a lot and asked for more, while usually he just finishes the first cup or regularly even does not finish it.

I have only 2 tea bags of this one, from the Gryphon Treasures box, and I’m quite unhappy with myself for having spoiled this first try. I’m convinced the water was too hot and I left it steeping the 1st time for too long (water like 95° and almost 10 mn steeping…)
I’m not used to drinking sencha, so I confess not to have lots of experience and memories to compare it with.
Despite my extremely poor handling of this, I found there was something interesting in this tea.
The color is a light greenish-yellow. The smell is very pleasant, very Japanese tea and not only that, but also something very sweet, slightly flowery. The taste is also quite delicate, green but not only, very sweet (despite a slight bitterness in my first brew due to mishandling).
This tea reminds me of a piece of silk material, less shiny than satin but perfectly smooth and very fine.

Pleasant and refreshing, with a nice Mint taste, that really reminded me of mint leaves, not freshly plucked from the plant but with no fake mint chewing-gum taste. I did not really find the lemongrass, though I’ll try looking for it again when drinking the second tea bag from the Treasure box.
The green tea used as a basis was to my opinion too weak. The third steep already turned quite watery and the fourth was a lightly colored hot water with a very very slight mint-infusion taste.
Last thing, I was expecting some taste closer from Morrocan mint tea; I’m not sure how they brew it in Morrocco, but I believe the tea used is not as green as this one, plus they use tons of sugar. This one was probably better without sugar, but then it just cannot be a real Morrocan taste.
Another blend from Gryphon that I find quite nice, with no wow factor, and definitely overpriced.

I bought this tea at the same time as Garden Teas Palas Suprem, directly at the plantation in the middle of Cameron Highlands.
I started with the other one, thinking it would be more citrus-flavored than this one. I had already find the explanation behind my complete misunderstanding of Orange Pekoe and Pekoe tea, when I decided to open this box (see rating for Garden Teas Palas Suprem). I did not expect a citrus tangy flavor but just full nice leaves.
I realized that the box despite being the same thing as Palas Suprem only contained 75g of tea while the other had 100g inside. As soon as it was opened, I realized why : the dry leaves were slightly twisted, looked quite big and if there had been more, they would have been broken.
I steeped it in a gaiwan, as I anticipated that the leaves should require space in the water to really expand. That was a great idea, as I found it really nice to look at the leaves opening and expanding completely within the cup. After steeping, all leaves were entire and were all between 5 to 7 cm, I had never before seen any so large and unbroken in any tea.
The taste was rather nice for a black tea; to my opinion, a bit nicer than Palas Supreme. If you like unflavored black tea, you should probably try this.
I resteeped a few times without getting anything close to watery, proof that the tea is indeed quite potent. It did not seem to get bitter at all, which I also liked.
I will probably not buy it again as I usually prefer flavored tea, but I may try to flavor it myself (starting with the Palas Supreme tea) as the tea base would then be exceptional and much better than that usually used in the black tea blends, even from Mariage Frères.
I’m really glad I bought those two teas as they helped me get to know better what is a good quality black tea.

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That’s a plain black tea, with rather good quality tea inside the bag. The leaves are all broken within the bag, but are real pieces of leaves, not grinded leaves nor dust.
During steeping, the leaves expand quite a lot and the bag looks almost too small.
The color is a nice golden-brown.
The taste is, I suppose, quite nice for a non-flavored black tea. However, both Boh teas I have (one Flowery Pekoe and the other a Pekoe A leaves) are rather nicer, with nice full leaves, and were significantly cheaper.
I was rather disappointed by tasting this tea, whose main merit was to help me understand my Malaysian black tea was definitely very good quality. My second finding is that I’m really not a huge fan of plain breakfast teas.
I also believe a shorter steeping of around 3 mn would probably be better for the first steep.

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The blend does not exactly look like the picture, as I can see some petals inside but less and not pink, rather golden-brown, like the rooibos itself.
The smell is pretty strong on citrus.
When drinking, the smell and taste that really came to my mind was bergamot, bergamot, bergamot. I like it usually. Both the rooibos and bergamot are nice quality with fine taste, but to my opinion, it’s just a bit too strong on bergamot, which totally covers all the other tastes supposed to exist in the blend. I’ll keep looking for them, but this one will not be among my favorites and for one I wonder whether it would not be better if I let it go old and faded a bit before drinking it. A shame, really.
I’ve just started the box (offered to me without any previous smell or taste°; in case I change my mind before the end of the 100 g, I’ll update this.

This was my first rooibos blend ever and I’ve almost finished the box; there’s just enough for another cup or two, no more.
I really like the mellow taste, hinting of vanilla and flowers but in which the blend makes all the flavors mixed together, so that none of them overwhelms the others. It’s therefore quite difficult for me to really identify the different flavors within.
It used to be my favorite evening drink for a while, then got superseded by Nil Rouge, later on by Rouge Bourbon. But when I tried it again to finish it, I found back what I had liked so much at first about it : a real smoothness that makes it very easy and pleasant to drink, without anything strong about it that might get overwhelming and in the end nauseating.
I do not know if I’ll buy it back this Christmas but surely sometime in the future.

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