Mandalay

Mandalay is a cousin of Esprit de Noël blend. A cousin by cinnamon & cardamom filiation

The scent is strongly spicy, not floral at all.

The dry leaves are so beautiful, a large amount of petals of sunflower is mixed with some red spices.

Steeped four minutes only to ensure not having a too spicy cup, the tea was perfectly balanced between the spicy notes and the rose note.

If you want to taste this tea, you should be spice lover otherwise you can be very disappointed. Rose flavour is really sweetening the liquor and is really present but the main notes remain spices, cinnamon & cardamom on the top.

I won’t have Esprit de Noël (sometimes called Noël) and Mandalay in my cupboard at the same time.
I have to think about that but I really appreciated the rose flavour in this blend so not sure I’ll won’t change my dear Noël by this blend sometimes.

Spring, after taking its own sweet long time to arrive, decided to pretend to leave after all. It´s cold and windy, very disappointing. But it´s making me turn to my tea corner and drink and sampling those samples I was saving, as a treat and a way to cheer up.

Mandalay was another sample so kindly sent by Ysaurella. I had been so intrigued by her references to it. And this is just not what I was expecting. I was expecting a chai, and while this is spicy, it´s a totally different type of tea.

I had today just tried a perfume (mother´s day is coming. everybody wants you to try perfume, you can not walk on the street past perfume shops without being offered a sniff). It was a woody spicy ladies´ perfume, with a cedar base and flowers, patchouli maybe. And in my mind this tea is irresistibly linked to that perfume – a sort of “dry” floral with woody overtones. In the perfume it was cedar, here it is the spices, cinnamon (which I guess is woody as well) and others (cloves? cardamom?) and then a bit of rose indeed, but the mix of roses and cinnamon tastes melded somehow into something woody rather than separate. A very interesting taste.