Tea Desire

I visted the Tea Desire store in Vernon last week and I picked up a bunch of little two-cup samples that they were selling quite cheaply. This one smells like an Italian spice mix – appropriate since tulsi is in the same genus as the sweet basil many of us cook with. It has that same basil flavour but mixed with some peppery notes. I’m not sure the "lemon’ part of the name is entire deserved as it isn’t very noticable, though what’s there meshes well with the basil. Very interesting – it makes me curious about trying other tulsi teas.

Thank you Kittenna for sending this sample! I do have a special place in my heart for chai. It’s one of my first tea loves.
This particular chai is pretty mild. I usually prefer my chai to be strong on the spice since I pretty much always dilute it with milk and sugar. That’s just how chai was meant to be had! Though the spicing is light, the flavors are all there. cinnamon, cardamom, cloves. yum! The black base is smooth and mellow. Very tasty indeed.

I’ve prepared this tea in two ways: hot and cold-steeped.

First off, the dry leaf is pretty. Colourful from the various dried blossoms and petals. The aroma is deliciously dark, like black currant jam.

Hot, I steeped this for not quite three minutes at approximately 70°C. The smell of the steeped tea is full on black currant. When it comes to the taste, it’s simple, yet elegant. Mostly black currant, but the delicate white tea base comes through a bit. The whole experience of this tea, from the first sip to the last, is great. It leaves a delicate aftertaste of black currant, sweetened blackcurrant. I’m sure the cornflowers are lending a sweetened touch to the currants here. The smell and the taste bring me back to my favourite beverage while I was living in Sweden: black currant sparkling mineral water. Do I ever miss that stuff.

Cold-steeped, this smells way more heavy on the white tea than the blackcurrant. I can barely (I seriously just subconsciously wrote “berry” and was about to add the “ly” to it) smell the currants at all. My previous experience with cold-steeping white teas hasn’t been so swell. They tend to turn a little bitter for me, so the aroma here kind of scared me.

But, it tastes fantastically cold-steeped as well. A perfect balance between the white tea base and the currants. Very refreshing for the hot weather we’ve been experiencing over here. Oh dear, I’m sure if I added some club soda to this, it would make a reasonable facsimile for the Ramlösa mineral water.

Another from Krystaleyn! I got a ton of chais in our swap which has me all excited, since chai is pretty much my #1 tea love. I decided to start with a basic one and work my way up to fancy flavors. It’s a wet, cloudy day and I’m home alone, pretty much perfect for some warming & spicy tea.

I made this with honey and almond coconut milk, and oh my! This is an excellently balanced chai: there’s a little bit of everything going on, and no spice really takes over. Clove, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon and peppercorn are all there, playing nicely with the black base. This isn’t one of those POW spicy blends, but it’s not mild… I think it falls nicely between bland and overwhelming. Nothing fancy, but a solid and delicious basic chai.

Thanks for the sample Kristaleyn!
What an interesting chai. I quite like it. The first cup anyhow. The second one… well it was missing something, though I’m not sure what.
The green and chai spices mixed well together, into a surprisingly warming mix. I assumed that it would be on the lighter side. Not that I mind!
There is a mild apricot like taste, so mild that I can barely taste it.
Pretty good overall! Only… I wouldn’t want this every day. Just once in awhile.

So this is… interesting.

The apricot in this tea is definitely the foremost flavor that I can taste. Following that trails in just the wisps of pepper and clover, with ginger and a hint of fennel coming in at the end.

A unique and flavorful take on a chai blend. It isn’t my favorite by any means, but they definitely get two points for a bold take on new flavors. If you like fruitier teas, and a little less cinnamon in your chai… this could be for you.

I on the other hand, want cinnamonstrosity ;)

This is a very interesting chai. Thank you for the sample Krystaleyn!

This is the first time I’ve had a Smokey green. The smoke flavor is delicate and plays against sweet apricot and pepper nicely. Ginger and clove are well balanced in this cup. I’m getting a bit of fennel at the end. A very nice cup.

I’ve really been craving a minty tea lately and this is all I really have. I’d love to find a fabulous chocolate mint tea, preferably black. Any suggestions?

Mate Mint is a great choice if you want something with a spearmint punch and gives you energy. The dry leaf smells strongly of spearmint, but not in a medicinal way at all.

When it comes to taste, it’s also very straightforward: spearmint. There is a bit of mate in the background but I’ve personally always liked the taste of it. To me, it’s almost not even there.

Let me tell you, when it comes to function, this stuff really works. My last semester of undergrad was quite rough. Between finishing up courses for my honours double major, writing a thesis, working part-time, and being the VP of an on-campus club, those eyes needed to stay open. I sadly needed to turn to a certain drug: caffeine. I resorted to caffeine pills for a while but those only worked like the first two times, so then I turned to this. And I’m so glad that I tried this. It gives you a real buzz, but a healthy one, if that makes sense. So mate in general for the win!

I dug this one out of my tea box. Haven’t had it in a couple years and apparently they don’t even make it anymore. Well I’ll be, it’s yummy! Don’t know why I didn’t just finish it off earlier.

The osmanthus adds a wonderful drop of sweetness to this. Very hot, the tea has the perfect balance of green tea and osmanthus, but I find that as this begins to cool off, the osmanthus begins to take over. It’s still nice, but I prefer when the combined tastes are equal. The pieces of dried osmanthus in the dry leaf are quite tiny but they definitely don’t stay quiet.

Sip down from months ago. I would buy this again most likely. I’ve actually gone through probably a pound of this stuff over the past five years and even though I never gotten tired of it, I just don’t know if, that this point, I’d stick to it as a staple anymore.

It’s nice to have this one back in my life. I’m sipping on this hot, but am oh so tempted to cold steep a jug later. I’m picking up on mostly pineapple and coconut. And I like that the base is mild.

Yikes, time flies. All work and no play makes Swedish Chef a dull Börk.

Sipdown to the extreme. This is awesome iced, but how could I be shocked. Pineapple, lemongrass, and coconut in a swirl of Sencha and Bai Mu Dan is a recipe for sheer iced tea awesomeness. It smells tropical and gentle, and for me, taste-wise, this is a perfect balance of all of the above flavours. I shall purchase more someday.

I’m glad I finally picked this one up after all these years. I bought a 50g pouch of this not even two months ago and I’m almost finished it already. The dry tea itself looks so light and airy. Delicate. And there are beautiful yellow rose buds in here. And it smells wonderful. It’s primarily pineapple and lemongrass. It makes me think of summer. I can see this making a mean iced tea.

Steeped, this actually smells creamier? Like there’s some vanilla caramels mixing in with the coconut. Onto the taste. Also delicate and very gentle on the palate. I get primarily coconut with a touch of pineapple. There’s a perfect balance between the Sencha and fruits. Out of most of the flavoured green teas that I’ve tried, I find that it’s difficult to achieve that extra flavour from the fruits without oversteeping the tea itself and thus creating a bitter tragedy. So I’m delighted that I can steep this for a couple minutes (actually, I accidentally steeped this for almost four minutes this time and it didn’t get bitter. Yay!) and actually taste the coconut and pineapple. I’m surprised that I can’t pick up any lemongrass, as there’s a fair amount of it in the mix.

Usually when I can’t make up my mind about which tea I should have, I just grab my genmaicha as I find it’s very reliable. This one is becoming one of those teas too.

This was one of the first teas I ever bought from Tea Desire. So many moons ago. This review is a little unfair though because I’m going by some of this tea that I gifted my mom around two years ago. As a side note, she personally loves this tea but still has some for the mere fact that she developed a throat infection that lasted a long time and tea agitated it for a long time.

But, onto the tea. If memory serves me correctly, when I bought this tea I was also a fan of it. I distinctly remember the bright, sweetened raspberry note the dry tea gave off. And taste-wise, it was basically a raspberry green tea. The raspberry was a bit artificial but not overwhelmingly so. I could smell the mango and papaya a bit but once steeped, the aroma went away and I couldn’t taste them either.

Now though? After sitting for two years, the artificial quality of the raspberry note has been amped up even more and the taste isn’t so appealing. It’s ridiculously raspberry, but in a juice crystal kind of way. I can no longer finish a cup because it’s too artificial and cloying. But again, maybe it’s because it’s been sitting around for two years. Either that or my tastes have changed.

This is another tea that I bought when one of the stores and shutting down and everything was on discount. Despite growing a little tired of rooibos, this is one that I’m glad that I actually decided to buy.

Dry, this really does remind me of raspberries and cream. When I was small, I used to go to my grandma’s to pick raspberries in her garden. She’d then wash the fresh, juicy raspberries, put some in a bowl, then add some half-and-half, and I’d eat them just like that with a spoon. The aroma of this tea reminds me of that.

The flavour is quite lovely. Once steeped, the creaminess fades and isn’t palpable aroma- or flavour-wise, but the raspberry stays strong. I find that raspberry and rooibos make a great pair because the tartness and brightness of the raspberry helps to mask the things about rooibos that sometimes bug me.

I bought this primarily for the sake of having something around that may work as a great tea for when I’d be sick. The funny part is that whenever I’m sick, I always forget to actually drink this one.

Mixed in with the rooibos are the lemongrass and lemon peel which are quite noticeable. The aroma is predominately lemon, although the ginger eagerly follows behind.

Steeped, the aroma also leans more toward lemon. The taste, however, is more balanced, although I’ll admit that this blend is very rooibos. As a side note, I actually got kind of tired of rooibos after trying so many rooibos blends, so anything rooibos-y annoys my taste buds at this point.

I actually tried this in stir-fry. I steeped a cup of this for a good six minutes or so, and while I was stir frying some vegetables in garlic, I poured the tea in there and let it do its thing until it evaporated. I was hoping to get lemon ginger awesomeness but again, it turned out very rooibos-y. It’s interesting biting into a carrot or snow pea and tasting rooibos, but it’s a little confusing to the brain. Also, the lemon showed up but the ginger was lost. Interesting experiment but don’t think I’d bother doing that again.

This is like the fourth time I’m sipping this one down since I’ve bought it so many times in the past, but I think I’ve finally had my fill of Walnut Truffle. There are so many other teas out there, so repurchasing won’t ever happen again.

Funny how years ago, this used to be one of my favourite teas. I swear it tasted nuttier and just overall more flavourful than now? Right now, with half and half, it’s really reminding me of a better version of Florence. It tastes like a nut cluster thing. I don’t even know if this has chocolate flavouring in it, but I swear it’s like nut chocolate. Whatever it is, it’s better than Florence’s chocolate note.

Maybe I’ll lower the rating a bit. Just a touch. I mean, it’s still good for a nutty chocolate black tea, in my opinion, but just not as good as I had remembered.

I just came home expecting to Skype with my mom since my uncle was supposed to take her apartment shopping today but I just got a text that she’s been in the hospital since 2pm because her eye is going haywire and they can’t figure out why. Scary considering she is scheduled for surgery starting on her other eye in a few days.

’Spose I better go get more marking out of the way then.

Seeing that I’ve already finished nearly 150g of this tea, I think that’s a sign that I dig this stuff. I initially kind of ignored this one and only ended up buying it when one of the stores was shutting down and everything went on discount. So glad I did.

The dry tea itself looks warm and inviting. There are generous pieces of walnut in there, and even slivers of red sandalwood (love sandalwood oil so this feature alone intrigued me). The smell? Warm and nutty, and I swear I smell a hint of chocolate in this.

Who needs an actual walnut truffle when you have this? It tastes like nutty chocolate, although the chocolate flavour is barely there. The black tea isn’t overpowering at all, although I do find with this one you have to watch how long you steep it for, lest it’ll get a bit astringent.

Yesterday, I enjoyed four cups of this (crazy, I know), and enjoyed the third and fourth as a second steeping. It was mellower but I could still taste the nuts.

It’s the not-so-final sip down! I already know that I’ll get more next time I go to Tea Desire. I must have gone through 200g of this by now. Who wouldn’t like a liquefied cinnamon bun?

Cinnamon bun latte to go with Lebkuchen.

ZOMG, this + light eggnog + light cream = liquid Christmas. This is the lovechild of eggnog and freshly baked cinnamon buns drizzled with vanilla icing.

At last, I have more of this in my cupboard. I began my Cinnamon Star journey over four years ago, when a Tea Desire first opened in Edmonton. The last time I had it was two years ago after going over a year without out, and still loved it. So let’s see if I still like it.
Tea Desire usually packages this one in special holiday packaging in the late fall, so when I was in the store a couple weeks ago, they were marked down. Score!

I’ve described this tea as a cinnamon bun in the past, and I still agree with that. I pick up on vanilla, almost icing-like notes underneath the cinnamon, and if you don’t oversteep or overleaf, it is seriously like a liquid cinnamon bun. The cinnamon flavour is akin to a cinnamon stick rather than, say, cinnamon hearts, understandably so since the dry leaf is speckled with chunks of cinnamon bark.

So, in other words, this tea still wins at life in my books. One thing you got to watch for though is overleafing. I’ve done that once before and the base easily took over the other flavours.

The second I smelled this, I knew it was going to be a winner. In the large canister, it truly smelled like cinnamon buns with icing on top.

I’ve brewed this for as long as five minutes in the past, and one good thing about this tea is that it doesn’t get über astringent. The black tea behaves itself and the cinnamon and vanilla are truly the stars of the show.

Simply put, it tastes very close to how it smells: smooth, sweet, and spicy. The cinnamon is rounded out by the icing and isn’t too sharp. I almost never add sugar to my tea anyway and I can’t imagine adding sugar to this one because it’s sweet enough already. I just finished my 50g pouch so now I’m going to have to get some more!