15816 Tasting Notes
Adventaggedon Day 21: Tea 4/8
This was very pleasant! I sipped on it nearing the end of my work day and found that it was a really approachable and not all that astringent/tannic Darjeeling while still having all the classic second flush notes that I would want – namely the beautiful sweet muscatel grape note! I remember I found my first tasting of it in the first half of the advent to be a little biscuit-y and that wasn’t true this time around but I still thought the cup was equally good!
Adventaggedon Day 21: Tea 3/8
Cold Brew!
Not my favourite tea in the world but it ended up meshing really well with my lunch today which was a pleasant surprise. It’s very, very sweet with a kind of general berry/blue raspberry type of flavour but it was sort of just the right amount of sweentess and juicy flavour to cut through all of the spice from my very onion and chili heavy nachos from lunch. Anything subtler than this probably would have been drowned out by the spice so, yeah – it was good!
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.
Adventaggedon Day 21: Tea 2/8
This was my first tea of the day – I finally remembered to make one of the T2 breakfast teas as part of my actual breakfast!
It’s a nice tea though not anything I’m immediately drawn to, unlike the Singapore Breakfast. I get the nice malty black tea base with a hint of maple and it also held up really well to a splash of creamer. Mostly I just found myself a little confused about what the New York/Maple association is!? This is maybe a little stereotypical but it kind of seems like a Canadian Breakfast more than New York, no? I probably would have gone with a subtle apple flavour for a New York breakfast because of the ‘Big Apple’ nickname – but that’s just me.
Adventaggedon Day 21: Tea 1/8
Another chai! Honestly, one of the things I seem to get sick of every year when I do advents is Chai but I’m actually really impressed with the pacing of all the Chai blends this year – plus they’ve all been different enough that this might be the first year where I don’t feel like the Chai has been over done…
The dry leaf smelled good and I didn’t have any doubt that this would have been lovely as a hot tea but I was really craving an eggnog latte today and this was one of the only teas in my assortment today that actually made sense to steep that way. So, eggnog latte it was! Quite delicious but certainly heavy on the nog. I did taste the additional cardamom and anise notes though which definitely weren’t from the eggnog but did compliment perfectly!
Adventaggedon Day 20: Tea 8/8
Truthfully I think this tea is kind of trying too hard? Like, it’s not a bad tea but it reminds me really heavily of DT’s Strawberry Rhubarb Parfait but without the rhubarb and with a sort of weaker taste overall. It’s got the hibiscus kind of tartness that leans into the strawberry which means you can’t latte it, which always bums me out with strawberry and cream teas. Since I can’t make it richer that way, I kind of need the flavour to be a lot more punchy and vibrant than what I’m getting.
Plus, we’ve already tasted a strawberry/cream blend from T2 all the way back on day one! That was a green tea base, so I can understand wanting something caffeine free. However, the flavour balance itself of that tea was actually a lot stronger to me than this one…
Adventaggedon Day 20: Tea 7/8
I wasn’t sure this morning whether this was a new tea or simply a reblend of a tea I wasn’t familiar with but I see now it’s the latter that is the case. The dry leaf smelled awesome though; definitely heavy “Mango Lassi” kind of vibes from the sweet mango and creamy vanilla notes.
I think I oversteeped my cup so I don’t want to be too harsh but I just found the taste didn’t really match up at all. The mango was pretty strong but definitely more of a tropical and almost green mango type of flavour with that faint pine-y taste that normally I really love. However the sort of pine/turpentine note of a greener mango is definitely out of place when it comes to ice cream. Though, I didn’t really get any creaminess either. Like I said, though, I think my steeping was too aggressive because the black tea was very harsh and tannic in a way that almost never happens for me with 52Teas blends. It could have very easily been over steeped and burying some of the more subtle flavour notes of the tea.
I’ll definitely give it a do over after advent season finishes and I have more time.
Adventaggedon Day 20: Tea 6/8
Gongfu!
The advent Gods must be pretty pleased with themselves today because I complained yesterday about how I simply don’t believe good Gunpowder tea exists and then not 24 hours later they served up a second straight Gunpowder for me to deal with. That’s cosmic karma.
Because I just don’t love plain Gunpowder and because the sample was fairly large I decided that I’d make the most out of it and try some fun, weird tea experiementation and home blending. I saw earlier this week a company on IG that was selling a blend of Lapsang Souchong and Szechuan peppercorns and that immediately caught my attention. If you’ve never had a straight Szechuan peppercorn it’s a one of a kind experience. They aren’t hot but they do immediately trigger a very intense sensation when you chew on one – it’s like your mouth simultaneously goes numb but also has this static-like “prickling” sensation. Sort of like the fuzzy feeling of having a limb that’s fallen asleep beginning to wake up. At the same time, you can’t stop salivating and the taste is like an intense fruity, almost citrus-like, explosion. So the thought of that pairing with a really woodsy camphor heavy smoked tea? Ooh, baby – no we’re cooking with gas!
So, for my home experimentation I mixed in a few pinches of a really aggresively smoked African black tea with about seven or eight gently crushed Szechuan peppercorns and then I steeped that gongfu! Now, the reality is that I probably would have much preferred to just be steeping Lapsang Souchong/smoked tea and the peppercorns but that’s not what I was doing – so I did get quite a bit of vegetal green tea taste from the Gunpowder. However, it was baked with an extra push of delicious savory smoke and a very distinct lemony taste from the peppercorns that complimented perfectly. No mouth static sensation because I didn’t have as many peppercorns as I think I’d need to trigger that plus they weren’t as directly exposed to my tastebuds – but the overall fruity taste definitely translated!
It was a very unique steeping experience and 100% an improvement upon just drinking the Gunpowder tea straight up.
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kU03zXHZys&ab_channel=DuzMancini
Adventaggedon Day 20: Tea 5/8
Oh… no. Nope. Uh uh. Hell no.
So, this was another gold dusted tea which I didn’t love but I at least expected that from the name. However, I think it’s the first tea out of any of my advents so far that I truly found undrinkable. I’m really interested in hearing with Cameron B.’s experience with it was like because I knew immediately from the moment of opening the packet that something was off here. The orange smelled really acrid and pungent like stale fruit that had sat in a sweltering hot car for an entire afternoon.
I hesitantly took a couple sips after steeping and immediately the taste made me feel gross and my gag relfex kicked in. Something about it realllyyyyy reminded me of cardboard or wood shavings – that was the half of the taste that just gave off really stale kind of flavour notes. It was the better half because the rest was a deeply off putting rancid sort orange pulp and bitter pithy orange rind taste. I always feel really bad throwing out a cup of tea and I usually try to drink the ones I like for educational purposes if for no other reason. I simply couldn’t make it through the cup of this one…
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUl23t6Oago&ab_channel=SubPop
Adventaggedon Day 20: Tea 4/8
Cold Brew!
This sort of feels like a weird advent inclusion because the ‘summery’ quality of the blend is literally built right into the name. Thankfully, unlike the other ‘AquaINSERT WORD’ tea we’ve already seen in the advent, this one does actually have a clear flavour direction. The dry leaf aroma was pretty floral peach though steeped up it’s closer to just being a sweet peach candy type of flavour with only a hint of a floral undertone. Definitely a bit tart and bright, but not as hibiscus dominated as it could have easily been.
I enjoyed it but I also felt like it was a little generic as a peach herbal tea and a bit more forgettable that the peach tisanes that have already popped up from other companies.
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYp6T9uHYg&ab_channel=TheDistricts
Adventaggedon Day 20: Tea 3/8
It was nice to revisit this tea today even though I got a lot of green tea again today and maybe would have preferred some other tea types in the mix. I liked the strawberry and basil flavour of this blend the first time around though and I kind of liked it even more today because I got my wish from the initial tasting. The basil came off much, much stronger today!
