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Sipdown #13

I’m 40 weeks pregnant today! Come on, baby! Mama wants to meet you!

I woke up to weird pelvic pain at 6:29am. Contractions feel like waves, right? This was not wavelike…luckily it went away once I got up and walked around. You usually only have a 3-4% chance of delivering on your actual due date, but since I haven’t had the baby yet…my chances of delivering today are around 15%. Still not great. :/ But I have a 61% chance that the baby will come within a week! :)

I polished this tea off last night during a game of Go with my 4 kyu husband. The score was 104.5 to 72…I got massacred. LOL! But it was a lot of fun since it was a teaching game. I’m really going to miss this tea (and Butiki Teas in general). Although I did notice that apparently Red Leaf Tea sells something called Golden Dragon Feelers that looks exactly like this. I’ll have to try that one out sometime.

Well, now that the pain has subsided, I think I’ll try and go back to sleep. I’m gonna’ need energy if I do go into labor today. Wish me luck, everyone! I’m hoping to have a medication/intervention free birth, which also means the baby needs to decide to come on his/her own so I don’t have to face an induction. An induction can start a cascade of unnecessary interventions. Since I’m GBS negative, I don’t even want an IV. Inductions mean pitocin, which means an IV. :/ But I still have 2 weeks before they’ll start talking induction. OMG, I pray I don’t have 2 more weeks of being pregnant! I don’t know if my body (or mind) can take it!

This was a free sample with my latest order, which I think was back in October. The brewed tea aroma is heavenly! It smells like warm monkey bread fresh from the oven. Mmmm! The flavor is very similar to the aroma. I taste cinnamon and bread, vanilla and cream, and some other wonderful mixture of complementing flavors. This is so delicious!

Even though cinnamon bread is the predominant flavor I keep coming back to, this doesn’t strike me as a heavily cinnamon spiced tea. It truly blends with the other ingredients to make a whole new taste. The slower you drink it, the easier it is to identify the other flavors. I also detect a hint of something citrus-y in the aftertaste. Mmm, but I’m enjoying this so much it’s kind of hard to drink it slowly. I keep gulping it down, haha!

I don’t know why, but I was kind of put off by the name. I expected smoke and strong, harsh flavors. This is delicately balanced and very nuanced. It’s soft and potent at the same time. I really really love this! I think I may have to place an order…I know, I know! I’m really not supposed to! But this is too good to be true. I am so in love. It loses just one point for the name; I’d rename this blend “Monkey Bread.” It tastes exactly like the monkey bread my mother-in-law makes except in tea form. Yum!

I’m 1.5 weeks from my due date! I’m sooooo ready to meet this baby and also to get my body back. I had the easiest pregnancy up until the last couple months. I’ve gained more weight than I should have and I’m not all that tall. I think my body wasn’t built to handle this much weight, so I’m pretty much in constant pain. Sleeping is the worst. Any time I’m laying down, I hurt everywhere: hips, thighs, abdomen, back. It’s obnoxious! I get about an hour of sleep and then I wake up in so much pain that the only way to get rid of it is to stand up and walk around, which obviously means I’m exhausted and fatigued. This is much harder than I had anticipated. I walk at the speed of a 95-year-old lady. I constantly feel like I have to pee even when there’s no pee in me. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night because I vomit in my sleep. Yuck. I feel helpless. It’s rather pitiful. I can’t wait to be normal again. And of course, it’s all worth it. But that doesn’t make the pain any less at this moment. At least I’m not afraid of labor anymore! The number one word to describe how I feel about labor is excited! Bring it on! Well, that was a huge digression but at least an on topic one. :)

ON TO THE TEA!

I tend to steep this once for 5 minutes and then again for 15. That way I get two cups out of one teabag. Today I kind of forgot about it and steeped it for 20 minutes out of the gate. Whoops! Anyway, this tea is a surprise. I guess I always assumed red raspberry leaf would be red and taste like raspberries. But it’s the color of your average herbal (a dark amber) and tastes like mint. Watered down mint; it’s not super strong.

Overall, it’s an enjoyable tea. It’s obviously not something I would drink if I wasn’t pregnant, but I can recommend it to other women in their third trimester. Now I have no idea if this will bring on labor any faster, but it’s supposed to be good for me. So I plan on drinking two cups a day until I run out of tea or the baby arrives, whichever comes first. Let’s hope it’s the latter. :) Come on, baby! We want to meet you!

Uh oh. Looks like Steepster is having problems again. Before posting this note, the tea page said there are 5 tasting notes for it, yet only 3 are visible. :/ Look out, Jason! It’s the case of the disappearing notes again!

The dry leaf aroma of this is stirring something in my childhood memory bank, but I can’t pinpoint what it is. For a moment, I thought it was Hubba Bubba Bubble Tape. Anyone else remember this stuff? http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lgo6dfDbRe1qdnc7ho1_500.jpg But this tea is definitely berry flavored and that gum wasn’t from what I can recall.

Unfortunately, this tea’s flavor isn’t nearly as strong or delicious as the aroma. I’m surprised. Usually hibiscus is quite strong, and I steeped this for 5 minutes. Hibiscus is the dominant flavor at the beginning and end of the sip, with the yumberry sneaking in in the middle. The end of the sip is also really tart, which I am confident can be attributed to the hibiscus as well. Yumberry Hibiscus would be a more appropriate name.

Overall, this is only mildly disappointing. I feel like it could be amazing if the yumberry was punched up to be more prominent than the hibiscus. I got this as a free sample at work, so I have no idea how old it is. Maybe a fresher batch would have more oomph. Regardless, I really like the yumberry flavor. I just wish I could remember what it reminds me of…

This is a nice black base with a light chai spice undertone. The spice would need to be kicked up about 1100 notches for me to call this a true chai. I prefer ultra-spicy chais. It’s not bad, just light and boring. LOL! That’s quite an endorsement, isn’t it? :)

The cupboard sorting feature is back!!!!!! YAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!! Oh, how I’ve missed you!! This is probably the best feature of the entire site (IMO), and I have sorely missed it these past few months. Thank goodness it’s fixed!

The aroma of this one is a little lighter and weirder than the Earl Grey Black by Boston Tea Company. The flavor is equally weird. Have I ever had an Earl Grey Green? I don’t know. I’m not sure about this combo. The grassiness of the base doesn’t seem to mesh well with the bergamot flavoring. It’s not terrible but it’s not yummy either. I don’t think I’m a fan.

I haven’t had Earl Grey in over a year. It’s funny how the aroma of bergamot is immediately transporting. Too bad the flavor here is pretty weak. Although if I’m being honest, I’ve left this stringless teabag exposed to air for about two weeks. Whoops! I’ve been a little busy and thought if I laid it out on the counter I’d remember to drink it. But that strategy didn’t really work.

So although I’m most likely to blame for the poor state of this tea, I still have to rate it rather low. It needs a lot more punch in flavoring to be an Earl that I’d reach for over others. At least the flavoring isn’t harsh and the base isn’t bitter. It’s not bad.

“Office is busy.” Umm, what? Since when does Microsoft control when I open Word on my computer? That’s incredibly creepy. So, I’m drafting this note in Notepad before posting it. Ugh. Notepad sucks. This is one looooooooooong horizontal line. Makes proofreading pretty difficult and kind of defeats the purpose of drafting the note before posting it in the first place.

Anyway, this tea is super weak. The aroma smells like a Ceylon, but the flavor is nearly tasteless. Maybe it would be better if it was fresher and brewed longer. Currently, it’s like drinking warm water with a tablespoon of tea in it. So, this is a bust all around. Stupid Microsoft and stupid tea. :(

For a mint tea, this is pretty weak. I think it’s because this contains “mint flavor.” I don’t know what that means. The green tea base is equally weak in flavor. So, this tea isn’t a winner. But I’ll drink it and then go off to bed like the good little incubator that I am. 3.5-ish weeks left till we have our bundle of joy!

This must be the base Boston Tea Company uses in all their green blends. It’s only slightly grassy probably because it’s old. It’s not bad, if a bit boring. It’s also a tad astringent at the end of the sip.

Maybe I can convince my husband to drink up the rest of these stringless teabags. He tolerates low quality bagged teas, especially greens, a lot better than I do. Some may say he even enjoys them. :) For me, this is mediocre at best and thus rated appropriately.