The Tea House - Covent Garden

Generally speaking I try to reuse my tea tins so if I have a tea that’s sitting in an envelope and an empty tin, I will move it over. I emptied my Rishi Ginger Pu-erh this morning and decided to put this tea in it, but also realized I’ve never logged it or rated it. Heavens!!! My boyfriend brought this back from London last fall.

The dry leaf is dark and twisted in the style of a formosa oolong and I can see bits of flower petals and orange peel in this blend. I have done a few short steeps in the gaiwan this morning.

The tea steeps up to be a very light amber color and the orange element is very strong in this blend. I am also getting the flowers but I am not sure what they are, orange blossom flowers, perhaps? It’s difficult to tell what role the oolong is playing here but I believe it is lending a few roasty peach notes which are nice and pleasant. This has a very sweet aftertaste, which is a little bit too much for me unfortunately. It almost seems like there’s sugar already in it… I think I could have done with a little more oolong and a little less flavoring in this one.

I think I will have to try this cold brewed, and perhaps it would be nice with a touch of lemon to offset the sweetness a bit.

This is an AMAZING tea!!
With sugar and milk.. it tastes like chocolate truffles.

The smoothness of this tea aswell.. I can almost taste the chocolate powder on the truffles, it’s so perfect. I can’t detect as much of the coconut as I had wished but nevertheless it was delicious! It tastes more like dark chocolate rich tea, a rich tea but don’t think that this tea is bitter, it’s not that type of dark chocolate taste.

the aroma in the bag is much much sweeter than the taste, it smells a little bit like irish cream tea, which I must admit made me a little worried about this tea.. but! I can’t taste any irish cream when I actually brew the tea.

The price for this tea is really quite cheap for the quality of it, which is great!! This is the easter collection from The Covent Garden Tea House – so I bought 2 bags of it!! And now having some, I might even buy more!! I can compare this tea with the caramel sweetheart from yumchaa.. this choco truffle is the perfect chocolate tea that is a rich truffle treat, the yumchaa one is sweeter, just a heads up!

After coming home from being outside all day I needed something to warm me up. Yeah, it was relatively very warm for winter today, but that wind was still biting. I decided to steep this one in a cup of hot cocoa. Mmm, tea hot cocoa. I think the flavor that’s coming to the forefront here is the ginger, though it took me a bit to identify it. It definitely works well with the chocolate. The other flavors make a kind of spicey background but aren’t very distinct through the cocoa. This was a good tea for this kind of brewing because it had enough spice to come through the cocoa.

Are my taste buds off? Even though I prepared this myself it still tastes like it was steeped in a dirty sock. There is no water kettle where I am staying so I’ve been heating my water up in the microwave like everyone else. I can only assume this is putting a damper on my experience. :-?

My stomach still hurts this morning so I’m having a pu-erh which is supposedly known for its’ stomach soothing properties. This is one my boyfriend picked up in London. Rest assured it looks like most other mini touchas you have seen and it appears to be a shu.

I steeped this for around 3 minutes in the western style this morning. It is very dark, earthy and brothy now. I might try to do this one day with shorter infusions. It has a lot of camphor in it which makes me wonder. I hear often times it is put there artifically with shus. It does obscure the taste of the tea a bit for me. I am not a huge fan of the camphor.

Winter really does put me in a spicy tea mood, I guess. All this summer and fall I’ve gotten really into green oolongs and floral teas, which is pretty much the exact opposite of a spicy black. This offering is another thanks to maisonlula. It’s another in the orange-and-spice genre of teas, and this time the spices are ginger and cinnamon, both of which I can smell distinctly in the dry tea along with the orange. There’s supposed to be some vanilla as well, but it’s not obvious in the dry leaf.

Steeped, the tea smells very gingery… I haven’t yet had a ginger black tea (most of my ginger teas come in the form of lemon-ginger greens), so I am intrigued. It definitely smells very spicy. The flavor is less spicy than I would have expected. I can taste the ginger, but I don’t really get a bite from it or anything. Unfortunately a bitterness from the tea base here seems to overwhelm other flavors besides the ginger/cinnamon notes. Even then, I would wish for those notes to be stronger. This may be a tea that is a good candidate for taking home to drink with additions so I can brew it really strong and still drink it.

I’m going international today trying another sample from Maisonlula This tea is quite yummy. The combination of the spices and the apple and orange are in perfect harmony. Reminds me a little bit like a really good apple pie or cobbler.

The weather is yucky and not very wintery, so I thought this autumnal tea might be appropriate today. I got this in a swap from maisonlula, and I am excited to try some more teas from this tea shop, which I visited when I was in London last spring.

I’m not sure of everything that’s in this tea, but I think there may have been some aroma cross-contamination between it and some of the spicier teas also in the package. The steeped tea smells like a cinnamony, Christmasy spice tea, but that does not carry over to the taste. There I get some tart berry flavors and a smooth, heavy marzipanny almond that coats that mouth and takes over the aftertaste. It’s a little like Harney’s Boston if you added a variety of berries instead of just cranberry. There is a hint of spice in the taste that I’m not sure if it is intentional or not, but it’s not unpleasant. The black tea base isn’t as smooth or rich as the one Harney uses for Boston, but it’s not bitter and it doesn’t really impede my enjoyment. Overall a pretty tasty tea!

Mmm, marzipan. Ok, so I can tell this isn’t the highest quality black tea base in the world, being that it’s a little bitter/astringent at less than boiling, but this is still the only straight almond black tea that I’ve come across that really tastes like almondy marzipan to me. The low quality tea base bothers me more than it did before, so I guess my palate is refining itself as I lose myself in high quality oolongs, heh. Still pretty tasty, but I wish I could find one with this level of almond and a better base.

Ok, word of warning, NEED TO STEEP FOR A VERY VERY LONG TIME, I mean atleast 8 minutes or 10 even.. honestly, it makes such a difference, best with sugar. It does taste nice, you just really need to steep this for a long time to get the gingerbread out. LOVE IT!

It is good.. It wasn’t as good as I was expecting, I’ve had better rooibos.. it must be the chai or something.. maybe I don’t like this mixture.. I added milk and it tasted much better but somehow I can taste a spice that I’m not really liking.. is that anise seed I taste? :(

This is so delicious with some sugar and cream. Honestly, it’s so lovely, I’ll be buying quite a few boxes of this.. I think it does need the sugar and the cream..

I can definitely taste the spices and the orange and the ginger, I can’t really taste the vanilla in here.. I’m a little gutted as I wanted it to be much sweeter than this, but it definitly has that sort of spice and zing.

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This tea is so tasty hot, so I thought it would be good cold steeped, but I was so wrong. There was some horrible disgusting aftertaste… it’s a shame because I wasted some of this tea on what turned out to be a failed experiment. I guess if I want nutty cold steeped tea I should stick to Trois Noix.

I was most of the way through this tasting note when I reached out for my tea cup and bumped it with my hand instead of grabbing it. I almost knocked it off my (very tall) desk (actually a counter in a lab) onto the tile floor, where it would have assuredly shattered, but I somehow managed to grab it. Not without spilling a third of it on my desk and partially on my keyboard, however. Fortunately, my keyboard is pretty old and thus is pretty much impervious to liquids; unfortunately, I neglected to unplug it before wiping it off, and succeeded in somehow canceling my previous tasting note and thus deleting what I had written. There’s little more frustrating than taking time to write something up on a website and then having it magically erased. When you rewrite it, it’s never as thorough as before.

I threw the little that was left of my Chocolate and Cream black from TeaFrog (~1/2 tsp) into this cup to go ahead and use it up. I forgot to start my time when I poured the water, but I remembered about 30 seconds later, so the tea got a little extra time (because I once again forgot to stop it early). The aroma of the brewed tea was primarily that of a strong black, with a decent dose of almond, but not overwhelming.

The flavor of the main part of the sip is really the black tea with a hint of chocolate and bit of almond, followed by a strong, full marzipan aftertaste that fills your mouth and almost convinces you that you’ve been eating the confection (if it was sweet, I’m sure it would taste exactly like it).

Aaaand now that I said my keyboard was fine, the space bar and apostrophe stopped working, so I had to find another keyboard. Bleh. Anyway, tasty tea. Not so great for keyboards.

Cold brew of the day, and delicious. I previously speculated that this would be good iced, and it definitely is. I think the hunks of dried apple in the tea totally make it. Incredibly appley in a fresh way, and with just a hint of natural sweetness. I had a bottled apple black tea a while ago that was way oversweetened, and this tea is what I wished that tea had been. I will definitely be cold brewing this one again!

What’s this? A tea not from Paris? No, this one’s from London. I suppose this one is a little unusual for me recently; I mean, I like apples, but I don’t currently have any apple teas. In fact, a spiced apple tea was the very first tea that I drank and what allowed me to get into tea, but I haven’t drank any in quite a while. I’m not sure what it was about this tea that made me buy a bag of it at this shop (well, I’m guessing it was the aroma, but I’m not sure why an apple tea called to me that day). I think I was intrigued also by a non-spiced apple tea, since so many of them seem to be. The dried leaves are indeed full of hunks of apples and small pieces of strawberry leaves. It smells like warm, sweet, juicy apples, not bright crisp tart ones. It almost seems like there’s a caramelized or brown sugar aroma to it, like a baked apple (but not one baked with spices, just baked!)

The brewed tea has much more of a black tea aroma to it with an underlying appley sweetness. The taste is nicely appley in a juicy way, but it’s not overly flavored. It mostly tastes like a black tea with a bit of apple. There’s a warmth to the tail end of the sip, again kind of like a baked apple flavor, and a bit of what reminds me of apple skins. It’s a well-rounded apple flavor that works nicely with the black tea. And, since it’s summer and I can’t stop thinking about iced tea, I bet it would be really good iced as well.

Well, I’m back from Europe, though I’m leaving again for Chicago tomorrow for a college reunion. In any case, choosing a tea from the many I brought back was an almost paralyzing decision, and while I initially wanted to start out with one of my fancy French teas, circumstances dictated that I needed something else. I needed a black tea to combat afternoon jetlag, and I needed a tea without too much going on since I’d be doing other things at the same time. This one was a natural choice.

I’ve been casually looking for an almond tea that said almond to me in the way that I love, namely marzipan or almond extract, but I had yet to find one that really was right. When I was in London I stopped at this tea shop, and when I smelled this tea I knew I had to buy it. The dry leaf smells powerfully, amazingly, like the freshest marzipan or perhaps the aroma of a bottle of almond extract. Interestingly this tea company had a different plain almond black tea that smelled much different, but this one was specifically marzipan: what I was looking for.

Brewed, the aroma changed quite a bit and the marzipan aroma wasn’t quite as all-powerful as it was in the dry leaf. The black tea base became a real partner in the aroma, and this was born out in the taste. It’s a nice, strong black tea with a very almondy, marzipanny flavor. There’s also a kind of generally nutty note underlying things as if you were acutally eating a nut, probably from the almond pieces included in the blend. The tea was very slightly bitter, but it wasn’t too much. I don’t usually sweeten my teas, but I have a feeling that a bit of sweetener would probably really turn this into a marzipan bomb.

Overall, I’m very pleased with this tea, and I feel like it’s a nice blend of the marzipan and black tea flavors without being too much of one or the other. A good purchase!