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Advent Day 17

Vanilla breakfast tea. It’s very smooth, has a good vanilla flavor and is super easy to drink without any cream, but it gets a little boring after several sips in.
Out of all the time I’ve spent in Australia, I never made it to Melbourne and have no idea why this tea would be a reflection of it. I hear it’s a lovely city.

AJRimmer Advent Day 17

This smells like gingerbread, but tastes like spicy curry minus the curry. There have been a couple of teas I’ve tried recently like that. They have all the other delicious spices in the mix aside from the curry. My association with curry makes for a distraction when trying to ID the chocolate. I can do it, but my brain keeps going back to curry. It also reminds me of a chocolate bar that had a lot of curry (the dish, not the spice) flavors in it. Trying to focus on that association while sipping. There is a little bit of heat left in my mouth after each sip. Cayenne, is that you? Curry or chocolate bar, I like it either way!

Advent Day 17

It’s an EG. It’s nice and smooth. Easy to drink straight. Tried adding some cream but the berg couldn’t hold up to it. It doesn’t stand out in the world of EG for me.

Advent Day 16

This tea is a lie. If I were hoping for kiwi, coconut or cherry I’d be disappointed. This here is a strawberry tea. Bright fresh ripe strawberries. Not the big kind that you find in the grocery store, the kind you buy as a plant at a nursery and grows the tiniest strawberries that hardly seem worth the effort but then you taste them and are blown away by how much flavor they pack. Then you realize they self propagate like crazy in all the pots around them. So you get two sets of those stacking planters and you find you have enough strawberry plants for 24 slots and think you are going to be rich in delicious strawberries come summer time. But the year is 2020 and summer doesn’t exactly happen like normal. It doesn’t get hot enough to signal your plants to flower and fruit so you spend all summer watering this stack of plants that give you noting. At least there is this tea to remind me of the taste. Cold steeped for several hours.

Advent Day 16

They went easy on the hibiscus. ‘Preciate that. It’s not even pink when brewed. Starts off lemon sour and sweet in the sip where I can start to make out peach. The finish starts off very peachy with artificial sweetener. I’d have guessed stevia, but it isn’t listed in the ingredients. Maybe it’s whatever they hyper sweetened the dried fruit with? As the too sweet okay-ish peach flavor winds down I’m greeted with the sudden taste of ash. Like someone burn a peach to ashes? Luckily the ash only lasts 5-10 seconds and then fades leaving me with the vague flavor of dried peach, wondering WTF just happened and sipping again to relive the horror.

Prepared by cold steeping for several hours. Maybe there is a sweet spot in there where it’s more palatable.

AJRimmer Advent Day 16

I think I should have cold steeped this. It has a bit of hibiscus which I didn’t spot until it was steeped, but not an unbearable amount! I get the sour/tart on the sip with a strong citrus note, but the finish is really aromatic! That’s where the blueberry rolls in and lingers until it becomes super light and perfume like. I kinda like this one.

Advent Day 16

Glad to have this to start my morning. The jasmine is bright. It dominates the sip and the finish, but the green base starts to peek through a little in the finish. It doesn’t quite have that intense level of jasmine that some teas do. It also doesn’t have the pure crisp jasmine flavor that I notice in silver needle jasmine. After several sips there seems to be a light accumulating soapiness to the sides of my tongue in the finish. Strange. Overall a very nice cup.

Advent Day 15

TWO advents with a chocolate rose combo for the day. The first was on a black base and this is honeybush, which I want to pronounce as honeybooosh right now for some reason. The scent of rose dominates, but the chocolate isn’t lost either. The flavor is more ethereal than tangible. It’s very light and perfumy. The tea I had earlier seemed to be wanting in the mid note range and this is missing the base note range. Maybe with their powers combined? There is a slight tang on the back and sides of my tongue in parts of the sip, but I can’t decide if I dislike that or not. Tempted to try cream, but also afraid I’ll ruin the cup.

Advent Day 15

Sweet break?! From what? Apparently not from hibiscus. This tastes like sour berries and then metal. Is this what cilantro tastes like to some people? It has a sweet and sour scent that I get a whiff of every time I go in for a sip. I hate it.
Cold steeped overnight.

AJRimmer Advent Day 15

I smell rose in this! I can taste it a bit too. A fresh rose flavor, not perfume at the first half of the sip. The chocolate notes come in at the end and linger in the finish. There is a tartness to it that I associate with cacao shells. It has high notes and it has lower notes, but I feel like it’s missing mid notes to really tie it all together and make it richer. I like it, but I want more from it. Tried adding cream to it, but that was the wrong move. Maybe a more concentrated steeping next time?