Della Terra Teas

I won a Facebook draw for a “Try Me” size of any tea. I picked this one and WOW, it totally blew my mind! It tastes a lot like apple cider, but much lighter. My first thought was to make a hot toddy with this tea… aaand I probably will on my next cup. Heh.

I have to apologize for the significant backlog of notes I’ll be posting shortly (although I may not write too much about everything) – I’ve been drinking plenty of tea but have been so swamped with work I haven’t had the time to write anything! At least I’m almost done one annoying part of my project now… after putting in about 20 hours this weekend in an attempt to get it over with.

Anyhow, I won this from Della Terra from their Facebook page! Thanks! I’m not sure it’s necessarily a tea I’d have picked out myself, but I’m eager to purchase a bunch of Try Me packs, so it’s great to eliminate one more tea from the possible bunch I haven’t tried (pretty much everything).

Based on the description of this tea, I was pretty much expecting an earl grey, and was not disappointed. As this looked to be a CTC tea, I stuck to the recommended 2 minute infusion to prevent bitterness, however I’ll admit that I loaded my first thermos-ful with milk and sugar as that’s how I prefer my earl greys (well… I prefer straight earl grey creams over sweetened earl grey with milk, but I felt it would do). Anyhow, I appeared to be correct in my assumption. This pretty much tastes like a decent earl grey, not too heavy on the bergamot, and with a fairly nice base (or at least, it did its job well and wasn’t astringent/bitter). I’m not sure if the orange bits really add anything (I wish they had!)

I managed to make quite a nice second infusion of this one as well, steeped for 2 or 2.5 minutes (can’t recall), but discarded the leaves after that.

Thanks for the chance to sample this tea, Della Terra! Now pretty please put an awesome special on so I can go crazy ordering teas? :D

Mastress Alita’s sipdown challenge – April Tea #7: A raisin-y tea

An obvious choice for this prompt… also the oldest raisin tea I have AND a favorite!  It’s a sad sipdown… I rated it very highly.  I THINK I have this same blend from Tealyra, but I really don’t think it tastes exactly the same.  But that might be because the Tealyra blend is much newer.   This one has more of a rustic flavor, and definitely raisin… more like its name — the Tealyra blend is more one noted with mostly cinnamon.  This is a favorite but it was time to finish it already.  I will PRETEND the Tealyra is just as good…
2022 sipdowns:  53

Another amazing tea from Della Terra! I’ve tried a bunch of them now… there was only one I wouldn’t buy. The steep color here is slightly deeper than the golden raisin’s color that fell into my infuser. I thought that was a bit odd.. the black tea should have a deeper color. But it’s the perfect black tea to showcase these flavors. It definitely tastes like a cookie! If there was more oatmeal included in the blend, I think it may have tasted more like an OATMEAL cookie. But wow is this one delicious. Vanilla, cinnamon, raisins and a bit of oatmeal are the perfect combination in this blend to make it great!

Excellent flavors, blended perfectly, so nothing is overpowering. Tastes exactly like an Oatmeal Raisin cookie.

The smell of this tea is so intoxicating!
Brewed a pot of this this morning since I woke up early because of daylight savings. I must say, this tea is FANTASTIC! This is the first Earl Grey tea I’ve tried and the creme flavor compliments this tea and adds to its perfection.

One of my FAVORITE dessert teas! As posted in my testimony for DellaTerra and the review on their website, this tea allows me to “hang glide down the Andes Mountains”! I love this tea and when I have it for dessert I add 2 teaspoons of sugar into it. (which may be TOO sweet for some people, but I use this tea just like an after dinner dessert so I add a lot of sugar!) :) I love DellaTerra and this is one of my personal favorites, along with a couple others that I’ll post tasting notes for soon.

Another home run from Della Terra!

The first thing I noticed after I brewed this is that it SPARKLES. And I was so excited about it that I had to go over to Rayn and go “Rayn, Rayn! Look at this tea! It sparkles!!!” And he confirmed that yes, it was in fact sparkling. It looks like little glitter is just dancing around in the tea! So cool!

Then I smelled the tea: ripe strawberries and a little bit of rose. No pu-erh smell. After a few seconds, it was time to taste. I taste earthy pu-erh with no hint of fishyness. Then the juicy strawberry flavor, like strawberry candies. I taste just a hint of mango.

I’ll be honest, I was expecting this not to work. At all. But it totally does! And seriously, tea that sparkles? Della Terra just keeps impressing me.

Got this one from jess and I love honeybush!!! I’m already tired and its only 9 pm but I have been all day and tonight I think I will sleep soundly thanks to this tea. You can just taste that wonderful maple flavor! I never new I liked maple so much lol. Thank you jess for this wonderful tea!!!!

This is another “Oh noes, I haz eated mah tea!” Della Terra Teas blend, by which I mean that you open the packet and you want to eat the tea. It smells like lemon cookies, maybe even lemon sandwich cookies, with the vanilla notes ‘n’ all. I don’t even know how I didn’t eat this one. Cookie Monster’s sitting in a corner, sulking.

[Edit] I forgot to mention that this tea is really pretty! I didn’t remember the photo, which showcases its beauty quite well, so I was surprised when I opened the packet and got a good look. Black tea with these blue highlights and flecks of gold. I rarely notice how a tea looks, so it basically has to bat its eyelashes at me and be all, hey, look at me, I’m pretty! Such a little tart, this one.

I wasn’t able to coax the flavour I wanted out of the blend, sadly. It was so frustrating, like dropping your keys in the car, between the center console and the bucket seat, and then being able to almost-but-not-quite reach them. The flavour I got out was that of a nice black tea, good but not great. The bergamot was present but really not bold enough, especially given the heady fragrance. I steeped three minutes because I recently got schooled on the dangers of over-steeping black tea, but I think maybe the DT black tea base is more forgiving than the 52T one…? Next time, I’m going to try my usual five minutes for this one and see how it works out, because I really, I really want to taste the taste that the fragrance promises.

[Edit again] Sorry, I also forgot to mention that, like 52t’s Gingerbread Chai (which I also had today), the aftertaste is perfect. Perfect lemon cookie! I would love to get the formula right for getting the taste to be just as perfect. I mean, who wants to sit there, aggressively exhaling, just to get the perfect aftertaste, ya? Even living alone I feel silly doing it.

Tea amount: 1 level tsp/~4.75g
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: About ¾ tsp Demerara sugar

Drinking the last of my sample of this tonight, and I’m sad to see it go! I noticed tonight that if I sip on this right away it tastes a bit odd to me, almost kind of bitter, but as it cools it develops the velvety chocolate I loved last time.

I’m doing homework at 10:15 on a Saturday because all my professors decided to be “nice” and make everything due the week before Thanksgiving break instead of after. What is there to do except sip chocolate tea while writing literary analysis?

A terrible thing happened today: my dark chocolate went missing. But never fear! After reading Nik’s wonderful review today I knew there was a solution, since DellaTerra so kindly sent me a sample of this with my order.

This tea smells absolutely divine, and I’m not just saying that because I’m tired and just studied for my philosophy of religion class tomorrow. It really smells amazing, like shoving one’s nose into a bag of cocoa. I put an extra teaspoon into my steeper because I wanted lots of chocolate flavor today.

And mmm, completely delicious. This is so close to the flavor of sipping on a cup of cocoa, and I’m sure it would be just like that with a little milk. I really like the teas from DellaTerra and this hits my dark chocolate spot!

I closed my eyes and pointed and ended up with another Della Terra Teas blend. I gotta say, I’m getting really spoiled here. I also kind of feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken record with my unbridled glee. Every time I feel like a blend couldn’t be better, couldn’t be more accurate, I get one that is. This is such a blend.

For the third time in two days, I wanted to eat the tea. It just smells so much like those chocolate oranges that it’s hard to resist the temptation. I haven’t had one of those chocolate oranges in years, either, which makes it even harder! But I resisted and patiently brewed my tea. The balance was way off in the blend’s fragrance, and this worried me: where the dry tea smelled just like a chocolate orange, the brew smelled mostly (maybe entirely, now that I think about it) like chocolate. I was worried that the orange would be absent from the flavour, as well.

My experience is that DT blends don’t re-steep well. At least, the past two black tea blends that I’ve tried to steep for a second time (Oatmeal Raisin Cookie1 and Dubbele Chocolade2) were both really weak, even after steeping for 10 minutes. My experience is also that the recommended 3-minute steep time really doesn’t pack the flavourful punch I expect. Therefore, I’ve decided to steep just once for about 5 minutes and call it a day.

The chocolate-orange balance was restored in the flavour (and actually appeared in the brew’s fragrance, too, after it’d cooled a bit). It’s quite good unsweetened (my sweet tooth prevents me from thinking any tea can be “amazing” unsweetened, but this is really pretty good), but it’s delicious after being sweetened a bit. I’m going to be thinking about it until tomorrow, when I can next have more caffeinated tea.

Tea amount: 1 level tsp/~4.75g
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: ¾ tsp demerara sugar

1 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/137359

2 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/137472

Special Thanks to Liberteas for this one

Backlogging because I couldn’t add anything yesterday but I did make some notes!

This was a bit more of a gentle EG – not that POW you would expect. There is a quiet creaminess to it too which was nice but certainly not overdone.

This was pretty darn satisfying!

This tea’s name always gets “Creole Lady Marmalaaaaaaaaaaade ♬” stuck in my head. I’m not a connoisseur of chocolate teas. I think I may have had one, once, but I’m not sure. It’s possible that drinking a few other chocolate blends will ground me, but for now I’m blown away, flying high on cocoa clouds. Like yesterday with the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie1 blend, I again almost ate this tea. Dear, dear Della Terra, if you keep on like this, I assure you, some such accident will occur at some point. =)

Dubbele Chocolade smells so, so, so good. You know how no one laughs quite like babies? If someone doesn’t understand what I mean by “squee,” just go look at a baby laugh. They all squee. There is so much joy to express that they simply can’t contain it in their little bodies. They laugh like they will burst at the seams if they don’t. Joy is to baby as chocolate is to Dubbele Chocolade: it’s like the packet will start dancing in your hands if you don’t open it and let the chocolate out.

Here’s a surprise: I sipped my tea, unsweetened, and it was…good! (The good wasn’t the surprise, the good unsweetened was the surprise.) Not good enough for me to finish it that way, but hey, ♬ it’s my teeeeacup and I’ll brew how I waaant to… ♬ I added some sugar and sipped again, and again it was good. In a pinch, I could drink this as-is, which wins it some major points (and earns it a slightly higher rating than Oatmeal Raisin Cookie). But since I didn’t have to, I didn’t…

It’s that time of year again, when the seasonal stuff appears in supermarkets that the mean people don’t let me have year-round. One such thing is Silk’s line of specialty soy milk. Since my tea was still “just” good and not zomg-amazing, I added some mint chocolate soy milk. I really had no idea what sort of concoction would result from this experiment. I’m happy to report that it was incredible. So incredible, in fact, that I’d drunk half the cup before I sat down to write this, so now I have to turn around and go right back to try for a second steep. Thank you, Della Terra Teas! Dubbele Chocolade joins Oatmeal Raisin Cookie as a citizen of my Happy Place.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll try a cup plain or with just sugar at some point. But right now, I am having waaaay too much fun experimenting in my beverage lab. I still have a few finishing touches to put on it, but soon I’ll be able to take some photos and share my pride ‘n’ joy with you all. =)

Tea amount: 1 level tsp/~4.75g
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: A splash of mint chocolate soy milk and ½ tsp demerara sugar

1 http://steepster.com/bleepnik/posts/137359

I’ve never been an especially big fan of Earl Grey, which is what this one seemed to resemble with the bergamot, but I still picked out this tea for one of my try-me packs. I gotta say, it may’ve been because it’s so pretty.

I remember not really liking the first cup of this I had, but I think I must have oversteeped/put too much leaf in it or something. Because this second cup is very delicious – the dry tea still smelled a bit overpowering, but the liquor ends up with that nice mild and dark orange-y tea scent. It’s very thirst-quenching to me, with the orange taste lending a refreshing note. It also has a nice, slight bite to it that increases as it cools down. And my Earl Grey-loving boyfriend seems to definitely be a fan of this one!

Additional notes: Sipping this favorite. The magic of this one is what is like pumpkin pie filling in the blend. I’m not sure if it’s still made that way (my pouch is older), but describing it as “pumpkin spice” does not do it justice! That just sounds like the spices that go in pumpkin pie, but those are there too. Canned pumpkin filling!! It’s not in the description and you can’t really see it in the picture. The tea just tastes a little squashy/pumpkin. So good.

Additional notes: I want to thank both Dinosara and Momo for selling/sending little pouches of this one. I had a little pouch too, but this is my FAVORITE PUMPKIN TEA!! I just love that there is actual pumpkin pie filling in this blend, I just wish there were moooorrree. Pumpkin pie filling is just genius and should be an idea for all those pumpkin teas that just add spices in it. So I can definitely see going through three small pouches of this! I accidentally steeped this one for 20 minutes, but it was still delicious!

Yes, I saved this one to review on Halloween! The name is accurate with this one, just like the apple pie was yesterday! If I’m not mistaken, this looks to have little bits of pumpkin pie filling in the blend? Like the stuff that you’d buy in a can and then somehow it is dried for tea? If so, what a genius idea! I was definitely getting a pumpkin flavor, and not just the spices that gets added to anything pumpkin flavored. It had a great balance of the spice with the squashy, vegetal pumpkin! As usual with Della Terra, the black tea base isn’t overpowering the flavors. The second steep was just as good, since I used just-boiled water. Peeking in the infuser, the pumpkin filling pieces or the sprinkles weren’t completely melted into the tea. I really like this one, and I think this is the best idea on how to make a pumpkin tea… pumpkin pie filling! (But if anyone knows that this isn’t pumpkin pie filling, please correct me if I’m wrong!) Another amazing tea from Della Terra! This is why I knew I shouldn’t have tried so many in their sample packs… I will want to buy full ounces of most of the teas I’ve tried!

Do not like this one. It’s not very strawberry and the chocolate is mediocre.

I broke my taste buds… no seriously. This tea, tastes nothing like chocolate and strawberries as I drink it…but if i hold it in my mouth and swish it around under my tongue…then it’s like HELLO chocolate and strawberries. It’s weird. I’m disturbed. i also know it’s just me…‘cause i made the other half try it and he’s like ooh chocolate and strawberries. So I’m just not going to rate this tea. Apparently i’m not allowed to taste it properly haha

So I’m going to have to try this one again tomorrow…I’m not getting the same flavour as everyone else. It’s not bad, it’s just not what I’d hoped for. I’ll give it another shot tomorrow and hold off rating it until then :)

Apologies for the backlogging. Steepster was down for a bit.

Anyway, my boyfriend actually won this tea from Della Terra Tea facebook contest, but I borrowed some anyway to see what it was all aobut. I enjoy a good pu-erh tea blend if it’s done right.

Even though the reviews of this are mixed, this is definitely a very good pu-erh blend. I’m getting chocolate notes and it blends well with the pu-erh base (which I can definitely taste). As the tea cools off, it’s enjoyable hot OR cold. I was expecting to have to add some milk to round this out but it didn’t need anything in my opinion. Maybe next time I’ll throw in just to see how it goes.

On the chai side, this does fall a little bit short, though. Which is fine by me since I’m not really a OMG SPICY CHAI person. However, if someone wanted chocolate pu-erh with a little kick? Eh, don’t expect to much. This probably could have benefited from more spices if that’s what they were going for.

It’s still very enjoyable, though, and definitely one of the best pu-erh blends I’ve tried.