YAY! I received my tea from 52teas today! It was an awesome day for it too because I’ve been feeling kind of odd all day, like the head I currently inhabit doesn’t really belong to me, and finding this package in my letterbox when I came home from work helped the mood considerably.
I got this one and two others and I’ve spent a good half hour just trying to decide which one to try first. I’ve even been sniffing at all the bags, but they’re packed in a smell-proof pouch, which for some reason smells like curry. Maybe the postman had Indian food for lunch, I don’t know.
Finally I decided that this one was shouting the loudest in the chorus of “TRY ME! TRY ME!”
The leaves look nice. Not the hugest leaf size in the world, but there are plenty of liquorice root bits and cinnamon bark bits and the whole thing smells sweet and sort of a bit like cough medicine. I had a nasty throat infection a few years ago and the doctor prescribed me this absolutely vile cough medicine to help me with the cough. It smells a bit like that, so at this point I’m a leeeettle bit worried.
Those who have tried steeping a bit of liquorice root all by itself will now that it results in a very yellow liquid. The colour of this tea is hard to describe. It’s sort of a normal sort of dark sort of goldeny tea colour, with a sort of liquorice rooty yellow sort of edge to it. Sort of.
The aroma is not reminding me nearly as much of cough medicine now that it’s been steeped. Now it’s more like a set of individual smells. I can pick up the cinnamon and the liquorice root easily enough and if I concentrate a bit, I can pick up the tea underneath as well. Cinnamon and liquorice root are both really sweet things and the tea is sort of binding it together and preventing it from getting too sweet and cloying. It lends a bit of strength to it. I keep sniffing at it, trying to figure out how to describe it and if I’m not careful, it’ll just go cold, so let’s just leave the aroma and appearence bits at this.
It’s the taste that matters, anyway. At first go, I’m thinking it’s a bit watery. I don’t know, maybe I should have used just a few more leaves. It felt a bit thin. I’m not getting any of the sweetness from the cinnamon and liquorice root. I can find both, but they don’t taste sweet. The cinnamon is reminding me a bit of chai, and it’s making me wonder if a spot of milk might not suit this tea nicely. On the other hand the thought of liquorice root and milk together just doesn’t really work in my head at all.
Mostly, I’m just picking up the tea, and while it doesn’t say anything about the origins of it other than it being Indian, it definitely feels Indian too. It’s got a full sort of flavour and the liquorice root and the cinnamon is just sort of undertones rather than taking over the flavour.
It’s not really what I was expecting (I don’t even KNOW what I was expecting), but I definitely like it. I think I’ll have to experiment a bit with milk and cane sugar, because I think it might work with either of those two. But not both, I think. Not at the same time, anyway.
