Thank you Cameron B. for the sample!
This one really excited me if I’m being totally honest. These last few months I’ve tried a couple new Apricot teas, and I’ve been largely impressed with them. In particular, I’ve become largely fond of Tea Desire’s White Angel blend which is a very creamy Coconut/Apricot blend. In my head, I was imagining this tasting similar to that blend but on a black base.
Firstly, dry this smells delightful: very fruity and aromatic with juicy apricot notes and a more subtle buttery kind of smell; the white chocolate I suppose. And steeping which that’s much more muted, it still smells like wonderful apricots!
Taste wise, the first thing I noticed was a bit of a bitter edge to this which made me think of burnt sugar cookies. I’d like to say that went away, but it was pretty present throughout the whole cup; though maybe a little less so once this had cooled. That definitely impacted the experience a little negatively.
The rest was lovely though! The whole cup had a succulent and juicy apricot flavour accented with other less defined stone fruit notes, and that was paired with a very thick, creamy white chocolate flavour with rich milky and buttery notes to it. So that creamy apricot flavour was there and phenomenal and that was ultimately what I was looking for in the first place. Now writing this and reading the companies description a little more thoroughly I see that in addition to these flavourings they were going for Christmas baking and nuts – I don’t recall anything that made me think of nuts, but I suppose the Christmas baking was there in the form of that burnt sugar cookie flavour, and I also tasted a baked bread note very subtly from the black base that could be likened to Christmas baking.
So a pretty accurately portrayal of what they were going for, and definitely a nice tea overall – just with that one small negative. I’d absolutely drink it again though; maybe with milk to kind of mute that bitterness. And playing with steep temp/time could possibly help resolve that too.
