Harney & Sons

I tried this tonight again because of another tea that I wanted to compare this against, not that they share the same ingredients or anything lol but it was an excuse to try this tea. I’m pretty sure I’m about done with this one, so the remainder of my sample will be going to a good home. Bergamot and I do no seem to dance well together. :)

Thank you Travelling Tea Box A! I do know who included this but i know by the time i get around to reviewing all of the items I snuck out of it, i’ll have forgotten it. So consistency and all you know :)

I was totally distracted while making this. I lost about an hour of my work day this morning when the mailman showed up early which meant i HAAAAD to open my travelling tea box, sort through it, package up teas i took from it etc… you know how it is. PLus i received 2-3 other packages in the mail and i was like it’s CHRISTMAS!!!!!! well as close to it as I’ll get since this year won’t be really christmassy with all our friends being out of town and no time to visit either set of our parents.

Anyway…i’m rambling. This tea… i made while trying to grab lunch and takle 13 different things at work. i distractedly picked up the team to sip and WOAH! HELLO! It was like WOMAN! PAY ATTENTION TO ME! YOU WANTED ME! NOW LISTEN UP!

I’m not sure what I was expecting with this tea. I think I pretty much had decided i was either going to hate it or love it. The jury is still out on how i feel about bergamot. Well folks, i love this. Its not a tea i’d drink all the time, but it IS a tea i will thoroughly enjoy and likely replenish when I run out. It’s vanilla..and citrus and smooth. It isn’t a dessert tea but it’s not quite a MORNING tea if you know what i mean. I feel like i should be drinking this with a scone. of some sort. it’s fruity..and yet not.

I will have to give this even more attention when I have less urgent things from work. All in all, a giid first step in my travelling tea box!

Just received the new 2012 batch this week and it is sublime.

This is tea for the purist. An absolutely delicious aroma, classic assam color, perhaps slightly on the darker side. The taste provides just enough sweetness, just enough honey notes, and there is very little astringency. This is quite simply how I like my tea – unaided by external forces, so no sugar, no milk (or in my case almond or coconut milk). It is full of body yet smooth and soothing that you just want to keep it in your mouth and savor it just a while longer.

This is what a cup of black tea should taste like. Next up is the full leaf assam, and I’ll provide a comparison in that tasting note.

I purchased this on a quest for a daily yet versatile cup of black.

The aroma of the dry leaves is somewhat smokier than I had expected, yet the more I inhaled I sensed a bit of sweetness as well. The aroma is about as full bodied as the tea, and complex enough to make you consider exactly what’s going on there.

The cup brews fairly dark and like the dry leaves has a somewhat smoky scent. Oddly enough, I don’t really taste the smokiness, which came as a surprise. Instead I sipped a round, rather full bodied cup of black in which the assam and keemun flavors battled one another for dominance.

It’s a solid tea, enjoyable at that. Better after a meal than on its own.

Picked this up at the local tea shop. This is a delightful fruity tea. At first sip, I tasted the guava, but then I got a hint of coconut. I’m sure the other flavors are in there too, but I’m having trouble finding them. I may not have the best palate for them. I like that it’s a blend of green and black teas – might be the only way for me to enjoy a green. A great way to start a Tuesday!

I had a bag of this at a local shop. It was yummy. I need to look into more of their teas.

When I was younger my mom and I had a tradition on Friday nights. We would make tea in our fancy teapots, buy small cookies, and put everyone on nice plates while we watched our favorite show, Providence. For years after the show was cancelled we were still looking for the tea we drank during that time, it was a sweet, spicy cinnamon flavor that tasted even spicier with sugar.

I found it! I have tried so many cinnamon teas to get to this one. This tea is incredible, you do not need any sugar to taste the sweetness of it. It’s rich and warm, perfect for cold days and a little jolt of caffeine.

I especially look forward to drinking it with my mom when I go home for Thanksgiving to relive our memories :)

The taste and aroma of these leaves and liquor are very, very good. Perfect for a cold autumn morning.

Oh the smell of this tea is fantastic! It’s sweet and tart with warm cinnamon. The flavor is a lot softer than I expected but it’s delicious :] The apple isn’t as tart as I thought it would be. Yay for yummy tea :D

This is an ancient sample that came from Jenn and it’s probably over a year old now so I don’t know how this is influencing the tasting. I don’t know about this tea though… normally I am a fan of fruit flavored teas but this is just o.k. to me, I feel like the flavors are just clashing with each other and not coming together in a cohesive way. It’s kind of like a rummy cough syrup. Okay, I will stop whining now. It isn’t something I would buy from Harney and Sons but it’s drinkable…

Following hurricane Sandy and over a week without power, I was forced to camp out in a local Barnes and Noble on numerous occasions for two of life’s great necessities: hot tea and wifi. Harney supplies B&N with tea, and while consuming hours of free wifi, I had the opportunity to try some new teas. The one that lifted my spirits the most was Harney’s Holiday Tea. Days later, I was compelled to order a tin of said tea from Harney to celebrate the return of power!

Back in civilization, sitting with a hot pot brewed, I just love the wild mixture of scents from this blend. Each stage has differing smells: With the dry leaf, it’s orange-cinnamon that dominates, with the wet, it’s the toasty underlying black tea, and with the liquor, the flavors that hit my nose the hardest are the vanilla and almond. Sipping this, I get the spiced cinnamon and cloves early in the sip and at the front of the mouth. While the back half of this sip, the orange-almond-vanilla shows it’s face. A little bit of spice sits at the tip of the tongue and the back of the mouth after swallowing. It’s a very wild medley of flavors, but it finds a way to work. I can fully understand anyone who considers this blend to be over-the-top. Overall, I find this tea, fairly comforting and warming.

I’m one who usually does not care much for these sorts of wild blends; I’m more of a tea purist at heart. But this is one blend that I can enjoy. It’s not something that I could drink daily though. But, cuddled up with a good book, on a cold winter night, this tea finds a home. Oh, and it works well too in the midst of post-hurricane madness, ehh.

Nice basic green. Sweet, slightly vegetal, and smooth :)

Mm this is a very simple green tea and it’s just what I was craving! It’s light and is very fresh tasting

I bought the little tagalong tin of this, smelled it and went “WOOO!”. It smells like red hot cinnamon candies :D So I was going to save my little tagalong bags for when I’m out and about but I had to have one this morning. I was in desperate need of an urgent wake me up.. and this certainly did the job! It’s a lot more sweet than I thought it would be but it’s still got that cinnamon kick to it. It’s still spicy :] MMMMMM

This one is crazy dusty. I’ve never seen a tea quite like this before, it’s almost as if a little cloud of cinnamon bits follows this around wherever it goes. Extremely cinnamony flavor, a very dry flavor. I am deffinately a cinnamon lover, but the first few sips of this where absolutely repulsive. It deffinately rated about as well as my first abysmal attempt at a milk oolong. Blech. It’s got a bit of an off flavor to it, one that I can’t quite place. I’m going to say that the cinnamon is almost soggy. I can’t explain it, not entirely sure if it’s an accurate description. It tastes more like something that got wet on accident and fell into my cup.

However, I’ve got a whole tin of this and it’s gotta dissapear somehow. So I’ve kept at it, and I’ve found that over time it’s grown on me a bit. It’s not completely horrible, just mostly horrible. An aquired cinnamony taste, perhaps?

Thank you Ashmanra for this tea sample!

One of the goals in my fathers life was to “See the Country he fought for” which meant…in July, we drove in our 1950’s era Chevy from California to New York City and back. (I remember hearing talk of this desire to ‘see the Country’ from many Vet’s when they retire.)

It was HOT! AND, I had to sit next to my brother Steve who had better not cross over to my side of the car!
There wasn’t air conditioning in the car as we traveled Route 66 through Arizona (stopped at the Grand Canyon), New Mexico and the Painted Desert (explain that one to kids), down into the humid Southern States (ate buscuits and grits). We saw the KKK march down the street in Colombia, S.C. and I was afraid.

I wrote about this adventure some time ago and how my mom made balogna sandwiches for lunch along the way. We stayed in cabin style motels (which were common in those days) and I saw my share of
strange places to eat. Hamburger and hotdog joints shaped like Oranges, Trees, Hamburgers, Hotdogs, Dogs and Dinosaurs.

Dad was looking for historical places. Williamsburg and George Washington’s Church, Lady Liberty, Gettysburg and the crown jewel, Washington D.C. (that was full of cool places like the Smithsonian)!

For my father, going to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the
Iwo Jima Memorial was his duty. Wandering through Arlington Cemetery alone for a long, long time was something I didn’t understand as a young girl. “Dad…come on!”

This was his trip of a lifetime and a dream come true.

I appreciate him now and what that meant to him.
My quiet father had a great life. He was loved and respected by everyone. He had a wonderful life for the son of the town drunk, raised in a shack. I have a lot to live up to.

Tasting:
Ashmanra sent me a lovely tea sample that I’ve held onto for the right time to try.

This is an Oolong, fragrant with the scent of peach and apricot as soon as I opened the packet.
I steeped the beautiful long wiry leaves in 175F spring water for
2 minutes after a quick rinse.

Oh the delicious ripe sweet fruit…amber peaches, freestone’s with all the honey rich juiciness. This was one of those ‘got to have it’ Oolongs!

I steeped it longer, then shorter in a Gaiwan, tasting and testing the flavor. There was a hint of spearmint in the aftertaste. Yes, going back later…it was still there…that spearmint. AND, a toastiness that I love in Autumn tea’s.

Yes, this was one Oolong that I wanted to have in my cupboard!

Thank you Ashmanra, this is a uniquely beautiful Oolong!

I am Jack’s indignation.

It’s not like I haven’t had this tea before. I have, and it was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. Certainly worth sharing with Mum, who likes both peachy and gingery things. The last time I had this, I noted some bitterness, and I knew it was my fault for leaving the teabag in the cup as I sipped. I was certain that wouldn’t be a problem this time, since I planned to remove the bag after the tea’d steeped. Hmph. I was wrong.

I have to learn to trust my gut. A box containing black, bagged tea recommends steeping for five minutes in boiling water, and upon reading this my gut went, no, that’s asking for trouble. But I went ahead and followed the instructions anyway, and the result was a brew not too bitter to be drunk, but too bitter to be really enjoyed. This tea really does have a lovely peach flavour (I tasted and smelled a bit of ginger last time, but it wasn’t there at all this time), which was greatly marred by the bitterness. The worst part was that Mum’s a Tetley tea drinker, and every time one of “my” “fancy” teas turns out blech, there’s this only-partly-imagined accusatory glare: “My Tetley would never do this to me.” I say again, hmph. I blame H&S for the dodgy instructions, but myself for not knowing better. Next time I’m going to try a three-minute steep, and I’m going to take the tea out of the bag, put it in an infuser, and grate some fresh ginger into it. That should do the trick. (Thank goodness I have a box of this to find the right formula…)

I’m going to have to lower my rating from 75 (my “hey, this is pretty good!” range), though, to something in my “decent, but could be better with help” range, because I think it really does need help to shine.

I can’t believe I’m drinking a black tea unsweetened. I’m not happy about it, but I’m trying really hard to (a) wean myself off sugar—not completely, but at least off the need to immediately add it to every brew; and (b) educate my palate, something that I don’t think I can do if I’m so heavily dependent on some sort of sweetener to enjoy everything. Usually I just take a couple of unsweetened sips before adding fun things (milk, sugar, honey, condensed milk, whatever). What I’m trying to do now is have one full, unadulterated cup if I have more than a sample of the tea, and only then do I get to play around with future infusions. Unfortunately that means that this experience is tinged with just the slightest hint of resentment. =)

The dry tea smells just peachy. I can’t decide whether it’s the fruit, a candy, or perfume-y/artificial. Initially it was pretty overwhelming, but as I got accustomed to it, it began to smell much, much more natural. So in the end that part of it worked out pretty well. I couldn’t detect any ginger in the dry leaf’s fragrance.

Brewed, the peach fragrance is only very slightly muted, and the ginger fragrance sort of pops its head out and waves hullo before disappearing again. I can’t really smell the tea itself, either; it seems to really just be all about the peach.

The tea tastes peachy. While each sip has that pleasant burn/bite of ginger, the flavour itself isn’t really present. I think this is unfortunate, because a better balance would really make this tea shine. I’d also like to taste the base tea, but everything is overshadowed by the peach.

Surprisingly, I had no trouble at all with astringency, unusual in my experience with black teas (and I’m really sensitive to it). I did have a problem with bitterness, but that was entirely my fault: I got lazy and left the bag in the cup, choosing to chug the tea instead of getting up and disposing of the bag.

As grumbly as I am about it, not indulging my sweet tooth did, I think, improve my experience and evaluation of the tea. That said, I’m really looking forward to my next cup, because I just know that I’m going to love this sweetened. =) I also can’t wait to try it iced. (Because peach!)

Tea amount: 1 bag
Water amount: 6oz/~175mL
Additives: None
Dry mouth factor: 2/10

Second steep note: I know, steeping a bag a second time is usually pointless. But as this was an experiment, I didn’t want to “waste” a new tea bag on it.

I’m not feeling well. I went to Tar-zhay with Mum the other day, trying to hunt down some of that seasonal/holiday milk (red velvet!) momo said was there. I didn’t find the milk, sadly, but I think I may have come back with some cooties. The fun tickle in the throat, the malaise, the occasional nausea…all the usual party guests are here.

I took two Tylenol and wanted to take some Airborne (the orange kind). I always take it in cold water, but just discovered that I can take it in hot water, too. So I went ahead and boiled some more water and poured it into the same cup and dropped in the Airborne tablet. FYI, it bubbles way more aggressively in hot water than in cold and is lots of fun to watch. =)

Anyway, this orangey rooibos hot fizzy concoction was really good. I love Airborne by itself, and this was much better. It’s so good, in fact, that I wish I could take Airborne more frequently than every 3-4 hours; I could happily guzzle this all day. Next time, I’ll try this with a new teabag to see if the stronger rooibos flavour is an improvement.