Today has been very good to me for these reasons:
1.) It marks the end of one of the most stressful weeks in my whole schooling career
2.) My winter vacation is now officially starting
3.) I got home from [another] very long day and I checked my mailbox to find that my samples from the wonderful Bonnie and my big box o’ samples from LiberTEAS were in there! Hooray! I now have enough tea to last me a lifetime (I counted and I received 65 samples!)
I was at a loss for which tea to try and I’ve been eyeing this tea for quite a while (Bonnie so graciously included it), so I decided to dig in and make myself a cup.
Side note, not only is this my first taste of THIS tea, it’s also my first tea EVER from 52teas…. Needless to say I’m excited!
The dry leaf smells a lot like (who would have guessed) maple syrup….. That is nice, but I’m hoping that I can tell that this is a pancake tea, not a maple tea. Anywho, I steeped with boiling water for 5 minutes and 30 seconds. The liquor/wet leaf smell is (again) maple syrup-y, and the liquor itself looks like (wait for it)…… maple syrup.
I read some reviews, and after trying the first few sips plain (more black tea than flavored black tea), I decided to add some brown sugar.
HOLY HUNK OF BURNING HEAVEN THIS IS GOOD! It does taste more like pancakes than maple syrup! Like when you have the perfect ratio of pancake to syrup and the pancake absorbs some! There’s a somewhat grainy note and a slight astringency towards the swallow that makes it taste like a pancake! It also has a nice little shock of sweetness that cuts through.
Yes yes yes yes yes. I definitely have to try more teas from Frank (there’s some in my other samples!) and this is going on my “Buy ASAP Or I Might Die” list (unfortunately it’s a pretty big list…..). Thank GOODNESS this is in the permanent collection now, because next time I order my cupboard will never be without some of this!
