I bought a groupon for this company ages ago and the expiration date is finally coming closer, so I went ahead and got the tea. I don’t know why I hold on to groupons and the like for so long… I’ve essentially already paid for the tea, and often, like this one, I only spent an extra dollar after the groupon was applied. I really prefer ordering sample sizes of teas I haven’t tried yet (and I know I’m not alone), but unfortunately CTH only offered 4oz packages on the teas I was interested in, so I narrowed it down to two (which basically equalled the amount of the groupon). I often forget how much tea 4oz is, but it’s quite a lot of tea! Especially of light-in-weight greens, which both of the teas I ordered seem to be.
This is one I knew I was going to order when I first bought the groupon. I haven’t seen this flavor around, but it sounded amazing. Nut gelatos are my favorite kind. The dry leaf does smell a bit like a creamy pistachio gelato, but also like a lot of other things: this tea has a lot going on in it, between the nuts (trois noix, actually, with pistachios, almonds and macadamia nuts), chocolate pieces, chamomile blossoms, and “cracknel bits”, which the internet tells me are some kind of biscuit.
I steeped it according to the instructions provided by CTH, and it brewed up a dark, cloudy yellow. I’m left wondering… where’s the aroma? It really doesn’t smell very strongly, which is surprising; I have to stick my nose right up next to it to get anything. The aroma I do get is actually very much like pistachio gelato; somehow, all those myriad of flavors come together. There’s a scent that I’m pretty sure is the chocolate, but it’s somehow fooling my brain into thinking I’m smelling a sweet pistachio nuttiness instead.
The taste is pretty good, but I’m left wanting much more. The flavor is so light! Not just the “flavorings” but the tea overall. From what I can tell…the green tea is present at the beginning of the sip, but it’s light astringency is smoothed over (though it retains a bit of a drying texture) by a creamy, nutty flavor, and the aftertaste makes me feel like I was just eating a cone of pistachio gelato. The flavor is growing a bit as it’s cooling, or maybe with successive sips it’s building in my mouth. I suppose it is chocolatey, but again the combination of all of those flavors tricks my brain into thinking pistachio gelato. I must try this with a longer steep time to see if I can boost the flavor, because what’s there is awesome! I keep on bumping the rating as I’m writing this… it started out as somewhat disappointing, but the flavor that’s there is so delicious, that I like it more and more. Well, I have a lot of it to figure out the perfect steeping parameters.
