Savoy Tea Company

Slow Saturday morning start. Yum. The caramel stays on your tongue long after you’ve swallowed. Definitely not a tea to hurry through.

I always approach floral teas cautiously; I’m not a perfume-y person and so many of them taste like cheap cologne (sorry, flower lovers). But this, a tastelet from a work friend who ran to our favorite little shop in NW Arkansas, is nothing to be afraid of.

The flavors run as advertised. Black tea—mild; lavender—plenty; jasmine—mild to minor, but that’s OK by me; natural flavors—I’m catching some vanilla behind it all.

One for milk and sugar and china cups and big hats and feather boas and stuffed animals.

If you haven’t, today you might say a prayer for the little girls in Moore, Oklahoma, who are without a “lovey” to hug. When I think where we were—physically and emotionally—24 hours post-storm, my heart hurts for those families.

This is not a substitute for a box of Russell Stover cream centers. It’s tasty; you can pick up on the chocolate and coconut, but it’s still light enough your chocolate cravings know you’re trying to put one over on them.

(The only chocolatey tea I can think of that has the “heft” to be a plausible candy bar substitute is 52teas Malted ChocoMate.)

Still, a nice treat and change of pace.

Informal inventory of my decaf stuff reveals I’m way overstocked on rooibos/chocolate and rooibos/vanilla blends. Not a problem; drinking up the inequity will hurt no feelings here.

This particular blend smells luscious. (Yankee Candle, are you listening?) Thick, rich chocolate orange. Double up on the teaspoons, drop in a few extra cocoa nibs, walk away for 10 minutes…dessert!

Drinking this today, cold brewed from the fridge with nothing added. It is just awesome this way. I liked it well enough warm, but cold…well, it looks like I’ve found a new favorite. No temptation to add anything. It is pleasant, refreshing, just wonderful.

Unless you hate cardamom. Not a problem for me. I love cardamom, oranges, spices, everything in it. MMMMMM.

This isn’t currently on the Savoy Tea website; it can’t have been that long since we were there…picked this up…uh, in September-ish?

It’s a nice blend of chocolate-orange; more orange than chocolate after a (recommended) monster steep time of 9 minutes. Rich and thick.

Savoy Pomegranate Grape Green

One thing I’ll say for this tea, it does smell grape-y. Like green grapes, very distinctively. Yeah, I know, the first ingredient in the name is Pomegranate, but that’s not really the flavor I get from it. To me, it
tastes a little like green tea and a lot like grapes.

A better tea snob than I might be able to distinguish the various dried fruits and elements. I’m nowhere near that discerning, but can say it’s a pleasant tea to start my day, mild and amiable. With pomegranates, red currents and raspberries on the ingredient list, I would expect this to be a bit tart. Instead, they blend together to give the whole thing an underlying sweetness.

It’s an unusual tea, not one I would choose to have every day. It isn’t that I OBJECT to it’s grape-y goodness. The flavor is amiable enough, but grapes don’t readily come to mind when I’m thinking of tea. There are times when this flavor is just not something I’m craving at teatime.

I line my tea boxes and packets up in the cupboard and when it’s time to have a cup, they each get their turn. (It’s my method of making sure nothing gets forgotten and pines away for the next twenty years.) Admittedly, there are days when this particular blend gets banished to the back of the cue because I’m just not in the mood for it. Some teas are very assertive in their flavors, like a friend with a big personality that can be great fun on some occasions and terribly annoying on others. There have been days when I’ve greeted this tea with great enthusiasm and others when my response was “not that one again!”

But by golly, if I’m in the mood for something grape-y, this is definitely my go to. It’s good hot or cold and stands alone just fine without any sweeter, an unusual quality in a fruity tea like this one.

Almost like candy for breakfast. Nothing new to say about it after half a dozen tasting notes; caramelly, lemony. Only for mornings when there’s time to enjoy it. Because of where I buy it, when I drink it, I have strong sensory connections of leisurely days in the days of the Ozarks. I am in deep need of a strong dose of “somewhere else.”

This lemony caramel tea makes me smile. So does a morning spent with my nose in a commentary discovering the deeper meanings of the Israelite tabernacle furnishings so I can write about it for grade schoolers. Geekness at its finest :)

Still haven’t tried this with milk, but I need to. That would turn it in to a caramel-cream Earl Grey.

Phooey. Lost a whole rambly note on this one.

In short, it’s so light in color, even after 4-5 minutes, you wonder if there’s been mal-steep-function.

Conclusion: this is just supposed to be delicate. I don’t think I have a delicate or refined bone in my body; which may be why it puzzles me. (I expect black teas to wear ten-pound Doc Martens.)

This is a quirky, odd duck of a black/rooibos blend. But oddly, the apple fits with the rooibos which fits with the chocolate; it just leaves you a little pleasantly puzzled. Like those days when you discover a plaid jacket that doesn’t exactly not go with some pinstriped pants and you decide to take a fashion risk and then wonder all day if they really match or not. (Or maybe that’s just me :)

Rooibos fans will like this, I think.

Work buddy surprised me with half a sample packet of this. She says it takes a little sugar well, but I had it straight.

The orange flavor trumps the oolong personality, but it’s pleasant stuff. Nice pithy-rindy-peely orange flavor, not tart or fakey.

I used to do a lot of whole grain baking. The flour I used featured a recipe on the label for orange cardamom cookies. It’s one of those recipes I always intended to try and never got around to but it sounded good. I always imagined it would taste like . . . Well . . . Like this tea.

This is good. Nice mild orange flavor with no nasty acidity, pleasant cardamom, and a hint of vanilla. My only complaint is I am strongly tempted to add cream and sweetener, cause I know they’d be awesome.

I guess I’m just a sucker for a good dessert tea.

The chocolate-vanilla-mate balance is even; it’s pleasantly drinkable without additional milk or sugar, but if you’re hoping for the sugar buzz of a buttercream truffle or a glop of Pillsbury fudge frosting … not quite.

After a lovely week of downtime, I’m wrestling with a case of post-holiday, here-comes-January-and-taxes, darn-I’ve-gotta-take-down-the-tree, my-favorite-jeans-don’t-fit blues. Seasonal depression breathing down my neck like cold orc shadows.

In an attempt to keep from drowning my glums in the last of the Christmas candy in one gnarf, I made myself the tastiest tea I currently have to hand. I haven’t had marzipan in years, but this is what I think it tasted like. The orange-almond-vanilla combo in this is so sweet and confectionary, it’s a good dessert substitute.

A sample-sized packet was not enough of this!

Manomanomanoman, oh, man…I wish I had Smell-O-Net so you could get a whiff of this, dry. The smooth, marzipanny almond is so rich it’ll make your eyes roll back in your head. I want a candle that smells like this. I want pillows that smell like this.

The first fresh cup was fabulous—tasted every bit as good at it smelled. Orange and almond predominate, with the rest of the godies serving as backup singers (doo-wop!)

Second steep is still smooth; more almond, less orange, and oh, wow—there’s some pretty decent green tea under there!

Unfortunately, this isn’t on the Savoy website—must have been an in-store holiday-only treat. Locals, grab it while you can ;)

My first dragon pearls! Savoy is fast becoming one of my favorite walk-in-the-door tea sources. For a cheapskate like me, they’re a leetle pricey, but no shipping/handling and no waiting. (That’s the walk-out-the door advantage.)

Dropped two of these little gems, about the size of your pinky finger tip, into a big clear mug, added the recommended 8 oz. water, and … at first, not much. Was a little worried about impending tea fail, even after four minutes, because the water seemed awfully pale for a Yunnan.

Not to worry. I ran it through a little tea strainer into a smaller, opaque cup, which showed a little more color—bronze. Flavor was pleasantly surprising. A little savory and brothy and yep! cocoa as advertised.

Off to try a second steep. (Do dragon balls bounce back? ;)

It’s my Birthday and, as promised, I had Paris Morning dessert style (with sweetener and coconut milk) for the first time. It was as awesome as I imagined it would be and a great tea to have on my birthday.

Since I was in doing so depleting my tea supply a little, I just had to stop by Savoy Tea Company to replenish my supply and see what was new. While there, I couldn’t resist having one of their bacon cupcakes. OMG Om nom nom…

This came in an unmarked baggie from a work buddy. Black tea with birthday sprinkles sounded like a nice antidote to a dreary gray Friday morning.

It’s very similar to H&S Vanilla Comoro; the sprinkles don’t do much but add a little levity to it. Milk would probably boost the buttercream illusion; I just didn’t get that far. Tasty and fun.

“I love Paris in the Springtime, I love Paris in the Fall,
I Love Paris in the Winter when it drizzles,
I love Paris in the Summer, when it sizzles…
(song from the musical “Can Can” by Cole Porter)

Ah, Paris Morning…How do I love thee? An awful lot, apparently. Running out of this was my main reason for returning to the Savoy Tea Company. Not that I needed more tea (I’m generally up to my eyebrows in it) but because I was out of THIS TEA and by golly, I had to have more right away.

I found it on my first visit to this shop while sniffing various sample jars. I caught a whiff of tea, vanilla, and bergomot and had to try it. If Paris is the city of love, well, it’s amore. Just taking it out of the cupboard makes me start getting all poetic.

This is a luxuriant tea, sensual and fragrant. Of course, the whole tea experience could be described as such. It’s time consuming to heat the water, steep it within the proper time frame, and then you have to wait for it to cool (though I’ll admit to occasionally dropping an ice cube in my brew out of impatience—I’m not much at this zen of tea stuff.). My point is, this is not the sort of tea to guzzle away in the course of a day or two. It’s more the kind I hoard like fine jewelry or expensive perfume, taking my time so I don’t run out too quickly. But even so, the days pass all too quickly and I’m alone again, staring at the empty place in my cupboard where my lost love once resided.

Paris morning is lovely stuff hot or cold brewed and like most of my favorites is fine alone, although cream and sweetener are fine for special occasions. Like my birthday. Yeah, maybe I’ll have it that way then.

Even though this is one of the more plausible decaf teas I’ve tried recently, there’s just a hole in its middle where the kick belongs.

I oversteeped, not deliberately, but even with a bitter-er bite because of that, the lovely unadulterated black tea personality isn’t there.

Sigh. Oh well, off-kilter tea for an off-kilter day. (Time change, out of sorts, cloudy, cold, complications…you know, just a Monday. Glad today’s troubles are light and momentary.)

Woke up in my own bed after a week of air travel and hotel life craving great honkin’ wads of CHOCOLATE. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate a tub of Betty Crocker double fudge frosting in the cupboard, so this seemed like a plausible substitute.

It smells wonderful dry. You know that first whiff you get when you walk into a really good candy shop? Yeah, that. Pouch sniffing on this one is imperative.

Steeped, it’s not as strong as its scent—few chocolate teas are, but still nice. The chocolate vibe is stronger with the cream, but that could change with the addition of a little milk or half-and-half. Aw, shucks…I may need another cup.

I hate airline snags and snafus, but am grateful that a re-route to Northwest Arkansas airport last week prompted my husband to make a quick detour on his way home to pick up this little sample.

Be it ever so humble, enjoy where you are today.

I’m pretty certain Savoy is either relabeling Harney & Sons Paris or there is another company out there that has copied it almost exactly. That means I love the tea, but I’m not sure I’ll go out of my way to get it from Savoy again when I order from Harney frequently anyway. If you’ve had H&S Paris you’ve had this. :)

This was specifically the reason for my return visit to Savoy Tea Company. (Oh, who am I kidding? It’s a decent tea shop less than two hours from my front door. Of course I’m going to stop there every time it’s possible.)

Must be one of their more popular blends, because when I placed my bulk order, the lady asked if I’d read on Facebook that it had just come back in.

What grabbed me on the first sample pack was the luscious creamy caramel texture and flavor with a little bergamot thrown in. First cup out of this batch, I noticed more bergamot and it was a little pushy. (Stand back, you, and let the caramel through!)

I’ll check time and temp more closely next time around and see if I can whip it back into submission. Otherwise, I may just have to go to the Ozarks again. Darn.