Salted Caramel

The dry leaf aroma = ecstasty! O-M-G! Seriously, this is what ecstasy smells like. It’s not good, it’s not fantastic, it’s ecstasy! In layman’s terms, it smells like caramel hot off the stove. Mmm, caramel toffee with a bit of sea salt. I can totally get that from the aroma. Oh, I can’t wait to brew this up!!

The package of my sample says to steep this for 4-7 minutes. Seven minutes is a little long for a first steep, so I’m going with 4 minutes. Wow, the aroma of the brewed tea is exactly like the dry leaf! It also brewed up really dark and opaque. Ah, my mouth is watering! I just want to drink this right now!!! The whole room has been flooded by this tea’s aroma. My fiancé even asked if I was making food, haha! Why can’t you just cool off faster?!!

Finally, it’s not too hot to sip and it is LEGEN-wait for it-DARY!!!!! AHHHHH!!!! THIS IS INCREDIBLE!!! It doesn’t even need milk or sugar! I can drink this straight! Wow!!! I can’t believe how extraordinary this is!! Like eating a caramel toffee and then drinking a great black tea! Oh so sweet and delicious! If it were Christmas, I’d call this a Christmas miracle!

I didn’t actually see coconut flakes in the blend nor do I smell or taste it. If coconut’s in there, it must be toasted coconut flakes because everything in the dry leaf mix is brown or golden. Nor is the salt individually identifiable. I think the coconut and salt in this tea just contribute to the overall rich, buttery, awesome flavor.

Even the aftertaste is ecstasy! There’s no astringency and maybe just the tiniest hint of bitterness as it begins to cool. But I’m very sensitive to bitterness, so I don’t think most people would notice this. And honestly, it doesn’t bother me in the least. Second steep for 8 minutes, and this time I added skim milk and Truvia right away. Now it’s a much sweeter caramel tea and much more liquid candy-like. But just like with Love Tea #7, the first cup is my favorite.

This is just the perfect caramel tea! This is what I wanted the caramel tea from ESP Emporium I recently purchased to be. Perfection!! Right here! In my cup! Yesss!!!

I feel like so many new teas I’ve tried have been getting extremely high ratings from me lately. But this tea truly does deserve it. DAVIDsTEA is quickly becoming my new favorite tea company! Everything I’ve tried is a hit! These people know what they’re doing! I’m definitely going to have to order more of this when my sample is gone!

EDIT: Tasting note 300!

Yum! Picked up 25g of a bunch of new teas from Davids today… to celebrate the first paycheck of course :D! (So happy there is no tax on tea here) Also picking up some last minute teas for the tea swap aaand some awesome cute kids stickers! Yay!

This is a pretty decent caramel black. Good job Davids. It’s creamy and sweet – and I looove the addition of the sea salt with the toffee bits. Brewing it at home was great – not bitter at all after steeping for about 3 minutes, and when I accidentally walked away from my resteep for 10 minutes, it was also not bitter! That was very lucky. I added milk anyways :P

Man I am rambly lately. Ramblo. Anyways! Right now I don’t need a caramel black in my cupboard, but when I do I think this one will be it. Lots of toffee chunks, and I loved the rounded flavour the coconut gave it (coconut sucker alert).

Maybe I will try it as an iced latte – but I might just stick to hot. With a dash of rum. OR Caramilk Liqueur? hmm

I bought this tea maybe forever ago when it first came out. Just a sample size. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about trying it. I’ve never had the opportunity since I think of black teas as morning teas. Having them any later would seriously mess with my sleep. And I keep forgetting to bring it to work and my weekends have been very busy lately. Sigh. There’s a lot going on right now. Today, I’m actually going to take the 3 hour trip to see my parents, so I’m really supposed to be leaving soon. But I need just a bit of time for myself this morning with a cup of tea. So I guess I’ll be arriving later.

This tea smells really great dry. I may have brewed it a little too long. The taste is not really that pleasant to me. It smells like caramel candy and it even tastes like it, but there’s also something weirdly sourish and unpleasant. I don’t think I’ll rate it since it may be because I let it brew for like 10 minutes. I did use a lower steeping temp though. Added a bit of milk and sugar to make it tastier. It’s ok now, but I think I’ll stick it in the fridge for husband to finish.

I also have some good news! Don’t know why it took me so long to let it out here. I was offered a permanent job this week. This means I can finally go to the dentist. weeee! And we can maybe afford husband’s law school without taking on loans. :)

Hummm. I’m not sure what to think of this tea! It was… nice. I have a pleasant buzz now and the flavour was mild/smooth. It did not however, taste like caramel or salt. Even with added sugar and a dash of salt! What I did get was a sweet malty tea with a base I can’t quite place.
Unfortunately, it had that nauseating aroma that is a red flag for my allergy issues, but I was strangely ok drinking it. No backlash yet!
There are artificial ingredients in here, a pet peeve of mine, so I doubt I’d buy more for myself, but hey it was pretty darn tasty considering!
Also, I do hope this is the right tea I am logging. It was from the travelling tea box and didn’t indicate where it was from. Mystery tea :)

Thank you Cedes for sending me some! I do love this cup! Its not as salty as I would like but I’m a total salt-a-holic!!
It is perfectly sweet, slightly creamy, and a nice black tea.
It could be more complex but it is what it is – a nice caramel flavored tea.
I just want MORE SALT!! LOL
Oh and I totally forgot to mentinon the coconut – never really had a chocolate coconut tea – its also very good! Great flavor balance here.

This is a yummy and sweet first cup of tea today. This tea suffers from the same problem as other “salted” teas I’ve had… Where is the salt? Don’t get me wrong, this is a yummy tea, just doesn’t match the name. It tastes identical to Caramelissimo by Teavana. This is a good tea for when you are in the mood for creamy caramel. I used some sweetener and milk with mine. I’m just acting like this is a maple creamstick. lol

Thanks to Jackie T for this sample.

So I have a love affair with salt. I always have. I put it on everything. This year my Easter basket from my Mom had all kinds of gourmet salts in it, yum! Even black lava salt from Hawaii, I was so excited! I love chocolate with sea salt, and also caramel with sea salt. This tea was recommended after my not-so-great experience with Cococaramel Sea Salt from Teavana, so I am excited to try it.

The dry leaves smell like sweet caramel with an odd hint of vinegar, and the tea liquor is the same. It’s not terrible, like the vinegary smell in Butterscotch from Angelina’s Teas, but I definitely noticed it. Thankfully there is none of that sour taste in the tea. There is a malty and buttery flavor with a light, rich caramel aftertaste. I’m definitely tasting the caramel, but not so much the salt. Maybe a little bit in the aftertaste, or that may be because I want to be able to taste the salt so bad! Overall, this is a nice tea, even without the salt. I will just have to keep looking for my perfect sweet/salty tea. Thank you, akgrowngirl for this tea! :)

-Dry blend has medium black tea leaves and twigs with small pieces of candy and coconut.
-Dry leaves smell like sweet caramel with a little hint of vinegar. Tea liquor aroma is of sweet caramel and vinegar.
-Tea liquor is a clear dark brown color.
-Malty and buttery flavor and finish. Light rich caramel aftertaste.
-Best with milk and sweetener.
-Good tea. A sweet caramel cup. Little salt noticeable.

Not really writing much in the way of notes tonight because my left hand is being uncooperative for whatever reason and it’s annoying me to type.

Anyways. This pretty much tastes like a caramel black to me. Not getting the “salted” part, but the caramel black part is pretty darn good! Nice malty black base, overlaid with sweet caramel. No need for sweetener. The coconut helps round out the flavour well. It reminds me of Buttered Rum, but perhaps, dare I say it, better??

ETA: Ok!! I just figured something pretty major out – steeped, this tea smells exactly like Creamy Nut Oolong!!! I think the flavour is reasonably similar too, but not quite the same. I am so thrilled I made this connection! Can anyone back me up???

Also, I steeped this one for practically infinity (more than 5 min?) for my second infusion, and miraculously it is absolutely delicious, no astringency at all. Ahhh. We may have a tea winner here, after all! Can’t wait to try this one again and verify my enjoyment :)

ETA again: Very long third infusion today (in less water) results in a watered down version of this tea which is actually quite drinkable. I probably wouldn’t bother with it unless I didn’t have other options, or I’d steep the leaves in only about 3 oz. water to concentrate the flavour, instead of the maybe 5-6 oz. I used. Fabulous flavour though.

I was trying this tea for the first time while going through some paperwork in preparation for next semester’s practicum, and I decided to take a quick break and write this tealog. Although I am enjoying this tea, it isn’t one that I anticipate repurchasing in a large quantity in the future. Sporadic small sample sizes would be sufficient for me.

I can taste the caramel, and the smell and aftertaste are so familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Hmmm…I guess it reminds me of the chocolate scented scratch and sniff stickers my teachers used to put on my homework when I was a kid. But unless your teachers put the same stickers on your homework, that comparison won’t really help most of you.

My brain is so random

Thanks to Faith for including this one in a recent swap. I don’t drink a ton of DavidsTeas, but occasionally there is a flavor I get curious about. I love salted caramels, so this was definitely one of them, though I don’t know what coconut is doing in there. Salted Coconut Caramel?

I smell the coconut in the steeped tea, and it smells a bit like some of the chocolate-coconut blends I’ve had, though only with a faint chocolate and with more of a caramelly background, which makes sense.

Well this is pretty tasty overall. Caramelly, coconutty, with a hint of savory to it, which must be due to the salt. Ooh I just got a sip with a lot of burnt-sugar caramel to it, which was delightful. I have also come to realize that although I love coconut in general, I often am not the biggest fan of it in black tea blends (though I often love it in whites or greens). Dunno why. This does have a bit more coconut in it than I would prefer. Why is coconut necessary in a caramel tea? It’s just weird to me. Still, this is pretty tasty despite it, and I am glad I got a chance to try it.

Thanks, Will Work For Tea!

I know there are a couple French salted caramel oolongs (or “burnt butter”) and I didn’t know this of course until after being in France. So this is the second best thing I think.

I looooove salted caramel. If you do too, find the cookbook Baked Explorations…the salted caramel brownie recipe is to die for. This tea isn’t as good…but I get a feeling it might be pretty awesome with Chocolate Cake tea mixed in..hmm.

Buttery, caramel goodness is definitely this tea. As usual the salt is hard to pick up, sort of like Pinkberry’s salted caramel yogurt a couple years ago, but at least this feels more like it has it. It’s kind of heavy on the toffee but it’s sooo good.

How did I forget to review this? I did a sipdown of it last week just to say I did, get rid of it and log it. Forgot.

So when I smell the dry leaves I’m all like “blech.” I only brewed it because there was barely enough left for one cup, not worth swapping, and I didn’t want to chuck it out. So I figured what the hey.

I was actually surprised it tasted better than it smelled, to me.

I have to give you a weird comparison here, though I’m not sure if you’re going to get it or not. It makes perfect sense to me though.

You know how there are basically two obviously different types of BBQ flavored chips? I mean the flavoring, not the brand. There’s the “mesquite” type, like the (Lays black bag) and the less spicy ones, my fave, like the Humpty Dumpty brand or the Lays (orange bag I think). I don’t like the mesquite ones. I like the orangey ones.

Likewise for caramel, there’s the creamy, buttery kind, and the burnt toffee sort. I like the creamy ones.

I find this tea is more the burnt toffee sort of caramel. If it were potato chips it would be Mesquite BBQ.

The smell is worse than the taste though. And it’s definitely not overly salty, but I’m cool with that because I just want a good black caramel tea! Kusmi isn’t quite flavorful enough for what I’m searching for, and it’s not creamy enough (though definitely good!) I’m still searching.

I am hoping to find a creamy NON rooibos caramel tea. Della Terra has one but it was out of stock when I placed my last order.

Anyway, this wasn’t as off putting as I remember but it’s not like those little Kraft caramel candy squares, and that’s what I’m searching for.

This was really yummy.
First, you get a yummy sweet note and then at the end of the sip, you get a little bit of the salty to balance it out. I am not a fan of salty things but this is actually really well balanced. I only got 20grams in case I didn’t like this, but 20grams certainly won’t last too long.
This will be a welcome addition to my collection filled with sweet teas!

Hello my fellow lovely Steepsterites! I have missed you (and tea) to be honest. It’s just been a crazy few weeks with extremely lastminute wonderful adventures all around this lovely Vancouver Island. For that reason, I am not so bummed about not being able to drink as much tea as I normally do.
On one of the adventures, I managed to pick up this tea as I am an absolute sucker for salted caramels. Therefore, this tea was on my list from it’s initial release (it wouldn’t have mattered if it got the worst reviews.. I would have still tried it).
This is my second round of this tea.. my first was lastnight as I was researching phage therapy for an undergraduate independent research project I’m doing this summer. It was rather mild as I kept the steeping times around 3.5 minutes. This morning.. after checking the recommended parameters, I bumped up the steeping time to 5.5 minutes. The result? Lovely. Still not as salty as I would like, and the caramel is a little muted, but overall it is a really really smooth tea. Wonderful black base (that obviously can take a longer steep time without turning bitter).
Notes of caramel, possible hint of salt… with a wonderful, full black tea base. I think I’ll be keeping a bit of this around. It’s not knock my socks off, but it’s darn good!
I hope you are all having a lovely summer thus far =)

EDIT:… one thing I forgot to mention as a down side is the scum that is in my cup from one steep of this tea. I’ve never really experienced it being that bad or unappealing as this tea.. hmm.. Still very drinkable though.

Moderately strong on the caramel, very on the light side with the salt but its there. Idk. I guess its there on the end which is where its supposed to be and I just am not caring for it. I think I’d like it more if the caramel was stronger. I was hoping for more but its just not there for me. Sample was frommmm.. i can’t remember? Someone awesome!

Finishing this one up – I have enough leaf left for one more cup. I think I can finish this one and maybe one or two more before Thursday, which excites me. The more teas I finish, after all, the more room I have for new ones! I have been good after all, and not bought any new teas in a few weeks now.

This one is not my favourite in any way, but that does not mean it is a bad tea – only that it is not so much to my taste. It’s actually a very well-flavoured tea indeed, which delivers precisely what it promises on the tin. The front of the sip is sweet, the middle of the sip is creamy and rich, and the end of the sip has a salty finish to it which is perfectly balanced with the sweet. None of the notes interfere with each other; they work together harmoniously. Really, I think this is one of DAVIDsTEA’s best blends of the year.

If only I liked the whole taste combination more in the first place, I would be all over this one. As it is, I’m weirded out by salty tastes in tea, and will probably not get this again. The rating is less for my personal taste, and more an acknowledgement of how well this tea delivers on its name.

Dry Leaf Nose: Very rich in caramel and toffee, with a hint of coconut and black tea.

Liquor: Rich, clear brown

Flavour: The caramel, toffee and black tea are richly prominent, with the coconut as a background. The salt is slightly noticeable, as it cuts the thickness of the flavour.

Backlogging. Can’t believe I haven’t reviewed this yet, I’ve had it so many times.
This, my friends, smells VERY much like Lush’s It’s Raining Men shower gel/Honey I Washed the Kids soap (both of which are amazing, by the way). I get honey from it rather than caramel.
Brewed, it’s a slightly bitter black tea that does retain that honey/caramel flavour that it smells like. This is one of those teas that tastes very much like it smells, which doesn’t always happen. I like this one sweetened with sugar rather than agave (I don’t know, sugar just works better in very gourmand teas I find). I can’t imagine it without sweetener simply because I can’t imagine caramel not being sweet. Also, the appeal of salted caramel is the salty/sweet contrast, and if you don’t sweeten this tea you lose the contrast.
The salt part isn’t really noticeable when this is hot, it’s as it cools a bit that the back of the sip has a salty quality. At first it was neat, but quickly became kind of strange. It’s kind of as though you used very slightly salted water to brew your tea. It wasn’t a sea-salt taste (because again, part of the idea of salted caramel is the texture of the salt), but more of a salt-water taste, and only slightly at the end of the sip. It was a little weird, but I’m not sure how else you can do salted caramel in a tea. I think they did a good job incorporating all the elements without making some super salty tea abomination.

Once I mixed this with DT’s Chocolate Cake. THAT was excellent, and I would repurchase both teas again just to mix them that way. This is still a solid tea on it’s own though.

Travelling tea box!

Yeah…so I figured I’d give David’s another chance since I have easy access to them..but again, i find myself disappointed. This isn’t really “salted” caramel…it’s caramel. Which would be fine except the coconut in this throws the caramel off just a bit.

I haven’t actually tried salted caramel before. Blasphemy! But between the description of this tea, the ingredients, and the smell of the dry leaves, I just couldn’t resist.

The dry leaves are very fragrant and sweet. Like an overly sweet caramel macchiato. It doesn’t actually smell like coffee, but the combination of notes reminds me of an espresso-laced drink you can find at a Starbucks. If I concentrate, I can also smell a Skor- or Daim-like note in there too, although it’s not nearly as buttery as the chocolate bar. The coconut is mainly a phantom note. I can detect hints of it but if I didn’t know it was there, it would most likely go undetected.

The smell of the steeped tea is quite different. It has simplified to a basic, but ultra rich toffee. Taste-wise, it’s basically just caramel. No coconut nor creaminess, and after two cups, I’ve noticed that I can’t taste the sea salt until I get to the bottom of the mug, so looks like it doesn’t dissolve. The shot of salty sediment at the end is interesting, but I wish I could taste a smoother version of that with every sip.

It’s a great caramel black but I’m not sure if I like it enough to repurchase. Honestly, I need to try more caramel blacks before I can honestly say just how good this one is. Although I must say, the scent of the dry leaves is reason enough alone to go out and buy some.