Warm Bread Pudding

This is very good and the smell is delicious. The rum raisin aroma is the pervasive one. I was hoping, a bit, that this tea would be very similar to my beloved “Brioche” from the American Tea House, but it is more like rum raisin and Brioche is much more cake-y.

The NecessiTeas and I have a troubled relationship: we are in a repetition compulsion that goes like so: I make an order of $90 or $45 dollars and pay them promptly via Pay Pal. Three weeks later I call them and nobody answers. I then send a plaintive email and get a response that my package is in the mail. Package arrives shortly thereafter, always post-marked one day after my bewildered email. I honestly do not have a dysfunctional relationship with any other tea company.

So…anticipating that this would be a problem, I placed a reorder for this tea a week before my first order arrived. It’s nice that they offer sample packs for $2.00 but I really feel as if ordering from them is a huge imposition for them. I feel like some sort of tea mendicant who is as annoying to them as a panhandler. It’s too bad that their tea is so good.

My order from NecessiTeas finally came! This is the first tea I’m trying from NecessiTeas, and I’m glad it’s a good one.

As a fan of bread pudding, I find the aroma of this tea to be irresistible. So yummy.

I can taste the rum – Nice! The rum really accentuates the raisin flavor of this blend, which is a good thing as I find that very often with raisin flavored blends, the raisin flavor can be somewhat indistinguishable. The custard and cream flavor adds a sweet smoothness to the tea. YUM!

A very pleasant tasting tea. I like that the flavors are strong. This yum factor almost makes up for the long wait I had for the order… if the other teas I’ve ordered are as good, I’ll be willing to place another order in the future.

I can’t believe I even ordered this, since the thought of bread pudding makes me make a yucky face. I don’t like puddings in general on consistency grounds, but the idea of bread pudding is just gross to me. Of all the things one would make a pudding out of, why bread? When I was in college I lived in a co-op and one night a week I was the main dinner cook for something like 140 people. Bread pudding was pretty regularly something the menu planner had decided I should make and during the whole process of preparing the bread I kept asking myself why?

So it was only for the sake of completeness that I ordered a sample of this. And I say for the second time today, it works surprisingly well. Who would have thunk it? Probably the main reason it works, for me anyway, is it doesn’t really taste like bread pudding. It tastes like the ingredient profile that goes into bread pudding, but without the main objectionable ingredient: bread.

In the packet, the blend smells mostly of raisins and rum. Steeping makes the custard come out to join the other two flavors in the aroma and I’m glad that I can also smell a sort of full bodied sweetness that is the black tea. Liquor color is black tea against my white cup; looks a lot like the Coco La Ven sample’s liquor.

It’s nice. It’s not as interesting as the Coco La Ven, but it is well blended and flavorful. There are no sore thumbs sticking out here, none of the bitter rum flavor that plagued some of the Necessiteas greens that contained rum flavoring. It’s a raisin, cream and rum flavor with a solid base that supports it well.

As I close in on the last of my Necessiteas samples, I’m drawing the following conclusion: they’re best at rooibos, followed by black tea, followed by white tea, followed by oolong, followed by green tea. There are clunkers in each of the categories except rooibos, but for the most part, their black tea blends are worth trying.

ETA: I am at the end after all. I do have a weird mystery tea sample in my possession, but I can’t identify it. It came without a label, and it appears to be black tea. It isn’t Cafe Latte, because I ordered that and they refunded my money because they said they didn’t have any. All of my other ordered samples have been accounted for. At first I thought it might be Cinnamon Bear, but it can’t be — the cinnamon isn’t nearly as strong as the tasting notes here describe. So it will remain a mystery. Which is too bad. It isn’t as good as the Coco La Ven or this, but it was ok.