Maple Pecan Tea

I love the smell of the bags (all maply syrup and pecan), but the smell of the brewed tea has a slight burnt taste to it, which reminds me of Stash’s decaf caramel creme that I could never enjoy.

The taste, though, is really nice. The black tea in this one is much stronger than the Pumpkin Ginger. There’s a definite pecan taste, and the sip finishes with strong, thick, maple notes. There’s a hint of caramel there, but it’s rather fleeting and I’m not sure if I’m imagining it or not. I don’t think I’ll try this one at 5 minutes; I think it could easily turn bitter.

It’s a very gloomy and rainy day today. And it’s cold! Well, LA cold anyway. I have the fireplace on and I’m craving a rich delicious comforting black tea for a bit of an afternoon pick-me-up.

I purchased this tea in November of last year and my tin is still nearly full. I couldn’t remember if there was some reason that I hadn’t been drinking this tea all winter long. This tea has two of my favorite flavor components, maple and nutty goodness.

Unfortunately, this tea isn’t great because there’s no real flavor to it at all. It’s a reasonably tasty black tea with a slight (very slight) touch of maple. Disappointing! I mixed a heaping tsp. of maple butter and lots of almond milk into the tea, and that made it taste okay. In reality, I’m really just drinking a warm cup of sweetened almond milk. Humph.

So, I’ve been somewhat underwhelmed by the maple-y flavor of this tea before, so I decided to up the ante today and do a double-strength steep. I used a rather larger than normal size mug, just to be on the safe side. My plan was to steep it for as short a time as possible, but I ended up steeping it a teensy bit longer than my gut told me to… and the result was VERY astringent, even with sugar. I attribute this to the fact that there’s basically tea dust in the bag, instead of distinguishable leaves… a quality issue that RoT teas frequently have. :/
Anyway, the tea was WORLDS better after I added about a tablespoon or two of milk to my cup. Mmm, maple-y goodness! I didn’t even really have to sweeten it all that much (been trying to do less of that anyway). The pecan flavor isn’t all THAT strong, but it’s there. So, the moral of the story is that milk makes this tea quite delicious, but without it, it’s almost not worth drinking.

This is another instance of me trying to like flavored black tea and failing. When perfectly brewed there are only the very faintest hints of maple and pecan; mostly it’s just black tea, black tea, black tea. Sometimes I add maple sugar to it, but even that can’t do much to help. Bummer.