I consider myself quite lucky to have this tea. After finishing quite a bit of the the tea from our first foray into Teavana, truly our first trip into a loose tea store, we were looking around on the website.
Lo and behold, things are on sale!
My fiancé and I look at quite a few things, and add a couple to the cart, but we can’t make a decision as to what exactly all we want to try. We were really indecisive at this point, we hadn’t quite reached our ‘MUST BUY EVERYTHING’ tea frenzy. However, compared to most of the other teas on the site, this was really quite cheap (on sale for $10 a tin). So I added two of them to my cart. But I don’t pull the trigger.
The next day, I browse around Teavana, and these are now out of stock. Bummer! But… what’s that… my shopping cart isn’t empty? I quickly hit the checkout button, and pray for the best.
I’m fairly impressed with this tea, for a number of reasons.
For one, the rosettes really are quite cute. My sister, while simultaneously enjoying and mocking my tea collection at work, referred to them as ‘little tarantulas’, and the description has kind of stuck. The variations between the gold and brown needles give an almost alive look to the beasties. That is, if you don’t notice the string around their middles!
The tea itself brews into a dark, smooth tea. The flavor is rich, but very mellow. It’s just a simple, perfect black tea. It’s a very comforting tea that can truly tie a bow around a long day.
It’s an amazing feat of alchemy to drop three tarantulas into a pot of boiling water and pull out a trio of sea anenomies. Another feature I really like about this tea is that it holds up very well to resteeping, which I don’t find to be true with most black teas. The flavor doesn’t change, the color is just as dark, and the brew is as smooth as ever.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the sale price of this tea was the majority factor in my purchase, followed by the instinctual need to hoard something that you may never see again. At $10, I consider this tin of tea to be an amazing purchase. At $20 a tin, it would have made a cute gift, or a novelty to keep around to serve to people new to loose leaf tea. Higher than that though, I can’t say the novelty would have been able to overpower my ancestral money-guilt.
