Blue Sky

This counts for my sample reduction because while I didn’t polish it off, now I only have enough of this tea left for one cup. I’m also encountering the tea dust that always seems to occur at the bottom of a tin/pouch, which means this cup is a little stronger than I would normally prefer. Still, I totally love this tea. I can order it online from Tea Palace (located in London), and shipping isn’t too bad, but I have a feeling it is a tea that won’t be in my cupboard until I make another stop in London. Of course its going to be quite a long time before I am ordering any new teas online, so its kind of beside the point! Still, I will miss this one after my next (last) cup.

This tea is just one of those teas that makes me smile as soon as the hot water hits the leaf and a wave of wonderful aroma comes out of the cup. It’s just so good! It’s also one of those blends where I don’t even know what all the different flavors are, but I like them. Yes, I get the florals, including the rose, but there’s also a fruitiness that I’m not quite able to identify. Sometimes I wish I knew, and other times I don’t really care because whatever it is, it tastes good.

Sipdown! So my clever scheme to empty tins was briefly foiled when I realized that I had already moved the lychee congou into a smaller tin, and the larger tin was being used for Lupicia’s Grapefruit Green, and there is more lychee congou than I can quickly sipdown in there anyway. But! I did find that my sample tin of this was nearly empty, so I cleaned it out and now I should be able to shuffle some teas around again. Also through more creative shuffling I now (nearly) have four empty large tins. Too bad I need seven! I guess I will have to break down and order more.

Anyway, back to this tea. I’ll definitely miss it. Floral and fruity and even a touch creamy, which I think comes from the mallow blossoms. When I eventually get back to London and the Tea Palace, I just might have to pick some more up.

I went back and read my first tasting note of this tea, and wow I was impressed with this tea the first time around. Which is funny because although I remember really enjoying it, I didn’t remember being totally blown away, which is why I hadn’t gone back to it yet. But I was tasting a lot of new teas during that time period, including a lot of other incredible ones, so I guess it makes sense that I might lose track of how much I liked things. Anyway, the aroma of the dried leaves and of the steeping tea smells incredibly delicious, like tropical fruit and flowers.

It doesn’t take long to remind me why I found this one so entrancing in the first place. It is so my kind of tea (especially right now): intensely floral, a touch of fruitiness, a grounding tea base that isn’t completely overwhelmed. I love how mixed florals all taste a bit different based on what flowers are in the tea and what’s the dominant flavor, and it also means that I never feel like multiple floral teas duplicate what I already have. Which is one way of saying that this is going to have to be a cupboard staple.

From dark and rich to sun-shiny and fresh today. This is my second tea that features a large number of somewhat indistinct mixed florals + fruits, but they have totally different characters. This really is a “blue sky” tea… it makes me think of springtime flower-filled fields and ripe, juicy orangey-yellow fruit (you know, citrus, tropical fruits, the like). The green tea base just adds to that fresh feeling. An all around delicious, if slightly unseasonal tea!