Empório do Chá

Good taste

Nice tea

a sample from a friend (obrigada T) and well this is weird. Meringues (marshmallows?), raisins, cardamom and orange in a green tea base. Unexpected.

The green tea is huge leafed, seems like a chinese sencha to me. The orange and cardamom work well together IMO by putting it in chai territory. But either I screwed up the brewing (? not too hot, not too long) or the base is not too good – it is astringent and slightly bitter. Not an unpleasant experience, but not quite to my taste. Obrigada na mesma, T!

BTW I think this is blend 22141 from Dethlefsen&Balk.

I must rant a bit, please excuse me. The fashion for tea right now is pretty tea with plenty of big huge recognizable fruits and flowers – I am still not sure what cornflowers bring to tea but it´s like they are in 33% of all current black tea blends. In the case of this tea it gets quite ridiculous. Whole figs, whole blackcurrants. And by the Brazil nut effect when trying to get a couple spoons of this tea here comes two whole figs and a blackberry. And I had just bought 50 grams. Of course that was not typical, there were maybe 4 whole figs in my sample. So of course brewing this tea would vary wildly if you were including the whole figs or not, and surely while figs would bring fig flavour, they can not replace tea. It is frankly ridiculous to use fillers these large. And I just picked up the figs, chopped them with a knife and tossed them back, and tried to select a more representative sample, tea and fig pieces.

And of course there is the other issue with the so pretty fillers, that their flavour is much more fragile (though admittedly complex when very fresh!) than that of plain flavoured black tea. Flavoured black tea is impervious to the ravages of age and air in a way that all these pretty fillers could never be. And very few of us use all the tea we buy within a short period of buying nor can we control how long the seller has had the tea in stock. This tea is a tea I just bought, but where even so the tea itself is not fresh from blender, the use-by-date is January 2013, so not particularly recent.

All this rant leading to while this particular blend of flavours sounded like an awesome idea and the scent of the tea was wonderful, the tea I brewed was pretty mediocre. The mix of black/green does not quite work, it ended up tanninic and wimpy at the same time, and the flavour, ah maybe it is not fair to judge but the fruit taste was faded and elusive, since the aged figs and blackberries did not seem to carry much scent. Pretty tea rarely ages well.

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I like it better hot, but it’s still nice lukewarm in the summer.

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Only a bit more left in my stash. Damn…
Oh well, guess I’ll have to drink it up.

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Confort tea needed

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I love love LOVE blackberries, they remind me of summers spent with my cousin picking these delicious berries to bake pies, putting one in the bowl and several in my mouth straight from the stem.
This tea, on the other hand, tastes nothing like summer to me. It’s not bad, not at all, it just lacks… something.

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