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Back at last from my holiday! I’m not even going to contemplate attempting to catch up with 10ish days worth of posts, so I’m just going to jump back into the dashboard from this post forward. If anybody posted anything that you would like me to see while I was away, please drop me a comment.

One of three teas I bought while in England. In York I was taken to a Whittard of Chelsea shop and they had this 3 for 2 deal, so I picked some. I hadn’t planned for anything in advance, I was just taken there and uh… left more or less to my own devices for a few minutes, sorta.

I’m not sure how the brand sits on the quality scale, but I think it should be something above supermarket brands. (Lipton, Pickwick… I’m looking at you!) Not sure if we’re as high up as, say, Kusmi and such. But okay. It’s loose. They have a real shop as opposed to a supermarket shelf. That’s good for something

The tea itself has bits of vanilla pods in it and it does smell like vanilla. It’s not an overwhelming aroma, more like an added sweetness that definitely isn’t sugar. If I didn’t know it was vanilla, I can’t say for certain that I would be able to identify it as such, but then again, I don’t go around sniffing a lot of vanilla, so I’m afraid my idea of ‘vanilla aroma’ is a bit out of proportions with reality. Real vanilla aroma is not, after all, as strong as in vanilla essence…

So, yes. It smells like vanilla, and it tastes like it too. It actually has a surprisingly nice flavour of vanilla. Not too much but not too little. It’s easily identifiable with the aroma, so if you can recognise that as vanilla, then you’re good to go. (This is beginning to sound a little backwards and complicated, isn’t it?)

I’m not sure though if it lives up to the vanilla tea standards of for example JacquelineM, though. You seem to be the resident expert on how this particular flavour is best done, but until someone shows me otherwise, this is good enough for me. Good enough, anyway, that when I run out of this one, I’ll give Kusmi’s vanilla black a go. I’ve been eyeing that one for a while and wondering if I might like that, since I like their caramel so much.

Or a combination perhaps. I seem to recall having successfully tried something like that before. We shall see, we shall see…

But anyway, back to the tea at hand. The base blend is Ceylon and Keemun, which at first taste seemed to be a bit heavy for the flavour, but after I’d got a little further down in the cup I decided that it wasn’t really. Had the base been more delicate, I think the vanilla would either have completely overpowered it, or the whole thing would have flown away in a flavourless gust of wind.

I liked this. I can see myself getting very fond of it, actually.