It’s official. I’m at the point in tea over-acquisition where I no longer know what I even have. Scary. Very scary. I forgot I had a sample of this, or I would have tried it before trying the TeaFrog Chocolate and Cream flavored black as a baseline.
In any case, the dry leaves smells exactly like Florence minus the hazelnuts. Really tremendous, deep unsweetened chocolate fragrance that borders on syrupy and is really smelling awesome to me as an after lunch tea right about now.
It diffuses some after steeping and becomes about equal parts tea and chocolate. The tea has an aromatic sweetness to it, a slight sugariness.
It tastes about equal parts tea and chocolate, too, which is a nice balance. The sweetness of the tea is not enough to sweeten the chocolate significantly, but the chocolate is not bitter (it just isn’t really sweet). I’m thinking some milk might make this even more tasty.
I’m thinking this is a reorder and that it isn’t an either/or choice between this and the TeaFrog. They’re very different. The TeaFrog is more tea-as-base-for-flavor, this is more tea-as-part-of-flavor. Which I’d have at any given time would depend on mood, I think.
I do wonder as I start to narrow down the universe of teas whether I’ll start to gravitate toward some teas more than others even within my narrowed universe, but I’m hardly to that point yet.
