15695 Tasting Notes
Gongfu!
Managed to sneak in a session this morning! I’m glad I did because, after an afternoon of unsuccessfully dealing with a lot of bureaucratic red tape, I would probably be ten times as grouchy than I am currently without all the caffeine in my system! This was a great tea though. Even with a frankly ridiculously over packed gaiwan, the liquor had a very pleasant richness to it and tasting notes of brown sugar, hot summer hay, chrysanthemum, and juuuussstt a little bit of date sugar. Sort of a “sweet and brown” tasting tea, but in the best sort of way!
Tea Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CdMK_rDuzPj/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYnyS_ISK2Y&ab_channel=Darlingside
Last tasting note of the night, for the mug that I’m currently just finishing off.
This is kind of advertised as a herbal Earl Grey, but it’s a bit more complex than a simple EG blend and there’s actually a lot of different ingredients – including several different types of fruit and labrador tea. The overall taste is pretty nice, though! It’s smooth with an herbaceous undertone but also quite an aromatic and floral leaning citrus taste. While maybe a little more orange than _bergamot, I get what they were going for here and I think it works in a tasty way!
Would I know this was meant to be like an EG if I hadn’t closely read the package? Nah, I doubt it. However, I would definitely still be enjoying my mug and that’s honestly the most important factor at the end of the day.
Past experience have taught me to keep my steep times very, very short for this tea. The result of doing so is a pretty good tasting mug though! There’s something just slightly off about the mouthfeel and I can’t exactly place it. I think, maybe, it’s that the overall body of the tea doesn’t seem to fit with the taste? Like, it’s a mix of tart hibiscus and more sweet and round violet but with kind of a thin body and a little astringency? It’s hard to wrap my head around. The violet taste is great though – just tinged by the hibiscus. This is the least aggressive that note has come off to date, though!
Ordered this one a while back.
I admit that I was mostly just attracted to the stand out aesthetic of the drink, which is many thin layers of white vanilla cake cream sandwhiched between a darker orange red fruit filling, with a sort of smoothie like consistency. I was also curious what PresoTea’s “tropical” flavour would taste like though, since that’s pretty vague. Turns out it tastes like a combination of mango, papaya, and strawberry which is actually very good. Worked surprisingly well with the cake cream too.
I think PresoTea carries other better flavours, but I would maybe other this again!
This is a fruity, sweet and enjoyable rooibos with a nice lightness to and an overall refreshing taste. However, it definitely tastes like strawberry and not dragonfruit. I liked it, but I just couldn’t make my brain get anywhere close to blurring those flavour lines enough to come even close to something passably dragonfruit or even just tropical.
It’s not lost of me that this tea is eerily similar to Harlem Muse, from Viridian Tea, which I also drank quite recently. I think I prefer that tea much more though overall, but I know it’s because of my predisposition to favour white teas greatly over green teas. The jasmine note here is pleasant though! I just wish it was much less grassy tasting than it is.
Cuppa from last night that just so perfectly hit the spot. It was sweet and juicy with that really ripe floral grape note that I love and expect from this tea, coupled with a different type of more aromatic floral flavour. By the end of my mug I just badly wished I had brewed a larger mug.
Sipped on this one earlier today. Got a lot of rooibos along with cinnamon, ginger, and a bit of a peppery undertone. Some banana, but honestly not really enough banana to justify a name like “Banana Bread Chai”. I did like that it was more of a baked banana though; definitely the right style for this tea just not the right intensity.
Confession… I have been putting this tasting note off.
I’ve been hesitant to do the tasting note for it not because I dislike the tea or don’t want to talk about it, but because I like the tea a lot and there’s simply just so much to say about it. Like, to the point where it’s intimidating. Where do I start!?
I guess the best place to start is maybe the beginning? That takes us back over a year ago to what was, for all intents and purposes, just a normal work day except for this small “what if” moment that was sparked while just eating lunch. What if we could make a tea blend that used an indigenous ingredient, in partnership with an indigenous tea company, to benefit indigenous people. It was a big what if and it would rely on A LOT of different things to all line up perfectly. We would need the support of multiple departments and we would to find an indigenous owned tea company to partner with. However, if we were going to do this thing right then it couldn’t just be our tea. It would need to be their tea too – that part was crucial. Since DT has never before worked with another tea company to create something cobranded, it was also a big ask…
But it pays to dream big sometimes, and in this case everything lined up perfectly. Once we had decided as a team that we were all hands in to make the dream of a full circle Indigenous Tea blend happen, everything just started coming together so quickly! We were so, so very fortunate to connect with Denise and Marc of Tea Horse and, after doing so, really spend the time to learn about the wild rice (Manoomin) that they work with. I cannot express enough how absolutely and completely generous they were with their time and their knowledge. They were involved in the development of this tea from the very, very beginning. We actually brainstormed several different flavour directions that we could incorporate the Manoomin into and there were quite a few different rounds of tasting before we really narrowed in on this specific flavour profile, and then even more rounds of tasting after that while we perfected the blend.
I’ll share a small little R&D secret here… This tea actually started off as a Wild Rice Pudding concept, which then morphed into the maple and vanilla leaning creamy blend we landed on! Our final blend ended up being on a black tea base, and incorporates Manoomin but also Canadian maple sugar and different berries from across North America along with some coconut and an aromatic vanilla flavouring. We tried herbal versions, but it was important to Tea Horse to incorporate Camellia Sinensis. I’m gonna paraphrase here, but essentially they explained that part of their own brand is a celebration of different cultures coming together. Even their own company name, Tea Horse, is an homage to – yes – the Tea Horse Road but also First Nations heritage and culture. I just think that’s so beautiful!
So maybe this is the part where I talk about what this tea actually tastes like. For starters, most people probably don’t know what Manoomin tastes like. First things first, this hand harvested wild rice is actually a grain. Yeah, someone definitely messed up when naming it in English back in the day. The flavour of the roasted manoomin that Tea Horse works with is honestly just super cozy with a lot of toasty, nutty flavours. I would describe it as very, very close to a light to medium roast Hojicha or something like Soba Cha/Mugicha. It works really well with the body and malt of the black tea, and of course that roasty coziness is a perfect compliment to a subtle addition of maple sugar (which has a hint of red fruit undertones to it) and the creamy vanilla. It’s not a super sweet/cloying tea at all and I think if I had to make a comparison to any other tea blend that DT has carried it might be something like a cross between a Genmaicha and Vanilla Orchid. The berries don’t really add much to the flavour at all, and truthfully are a little bit more for visual – though they do contribute some natural sweetness.
I love this tea hot and it’s something I can drink a ton of in one go without feeling bogged down – and on a super personal note, my favourite teas tend to be the ones that are low maintenance with their steeping that fit a ton of different moods/situations and I feel like that describes this tea really perfectly. I also know that with the DT store teams this has been a really popular tea for use in iced lattes. Now, I’ve had this with milk and I do think that’s a lovely addition. I have not yet personally tried it iced though, so for now I just have to trust the store recommendation…
This tasting note kind of feels like a novel at this point, but I just love this tea so much and it was just a long but insanely rewarding and fulfilling journey to get here! I’m so, so proud of this tea that we were able to create with Marc and Denise and I feel like it captures their hard work and spirit as much (if not more so, honestly) as it does the work that we put into it. I couldn’t have possibly asked for better people to work on this blend alongside!
If you want to check out Tea Horse, you can find their store here: https://www.teahorse.ca/about-us/
If you want to learn more about Manoomin – including the most INCREDIBLE description of the harvesting process – you can listen to the podcast that DT did with them. It is seriously well worth an hour of your time!
https://www.davidstea.com/ca_en/explore/about/steeping-together-podcast/season-2—-episode-5/
And because I haven’t mentioned it yet, if you do decide that you want to buy this tea then 10% of the proceeds will go directly to the David Suzuki institute for use in their Reconciling Ways of Knowing program, supporting Indigenous communities.
Tea Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/CcoRisTOuEX/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh5XSgozfTA&ab_channel=TwinFlamesMusic
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
Sipped on this one while working from home today. I noticed a lot more of the salinity of the tea as it was really hot, along with both the fruity and woody qualities of the carob. As the tea cooled, the caramel went from simply sweet and mindlessly present to a more thick and gooey caramel with more of a weighty quality to it. Really good! My mug didn’t feel like nearly enough tea, and I’d finished it so quickly.
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
