Jillian Send Message

I’m not generally a fan of hibiscus blends but the smell of this tea drew me in – like cherry liqueur – so I purchased enough to make up a pitcher of iced tea. I can distinctly taste the tangy hibiscus but somehow it isn’t as obnoxious when it’s cool and sweetened with a bit of simple syrup and agave nectar. The flavour is more berry-and-pomegranate than cherry to me, lightly tart and tangy. I’ll be honest and say that I’ve never actually had a Shirley Temple so I don’t know if this tastes at all like the real thing.

The local Save-On-Foods had these on sale so I picked a couple bottles up for me and the boyfriend. This one is a little bit on the sweet side, especially now that I’ve gotten used to making my own iced teas which allows me to regulate the sugar. It’s still far better than a can of Lipton Brisk in that regard though. The blueberry flavour is distinct though maybe a tad artificial which is a odd as this tea only had natural flavourings. It makes a nice refreshing drink on a hot summer day like this.

First of all I’m going to get the obligatory joke out of the way and admit that I (and apparently everyone else at the local DT store) calls these ‘zombie pearls’. It’s just too good to pass up.

This is the first time I’ve tried an African white tea, or for that matter, any tea from Malawai. I found the way this tea was rolled interesting – they were less like the small, pea-sized pearls you see in Chinese white jasmine teas and most like tightly wrapped large clumps. It took several steeps for the leaves to unfurl completely so this is definitely a teas suited to those lazy days where you have time for multiple steepings. The steeped leaves looks a fair bit like those of silver needle white teas except that these have splotches of bright rust-red on them.

The flavours of the first steep (at 3:30 min) were reminiscent of sweet hay with a vegetale undertone while the second steep (4:45 min) was less vegetal and more buttery smooth with a pleasent sweet tone. I really enjoyed this tea and it’s great to see Davids Tea carrying a high-quality plain tea like this.

Drinking this with milk and a bit of agave nectar and I still can’t really find any pastry flavour, however the sweetness does bring out the chocolate flavours nicely and gives it a great dessert-like quality. So I’m still giving this tea a good rating.

This is a very British tea – I feel like I should be drinking it at a garden party, sipping it out of fine china while I nibble on finger sandwiches and shortbread. Sadly the truth is that I’m drinking it on the couch in front of my laptop out of my ‘A Lannister Always Pays His Debts’ mug. What can you do? *shrugs *

The base is a solid, medium-strength black tea – probably a Ceylon of some kind. The lavender notes are subtle and gentle and there a hint of something citrusy in the background. Like most of Murchie’s black teas this one is best with milk and maybe a touch of sugar or honey.

I’m drinking the tea with milk this time and while it does smooth out the flavour the pumpkin notes still aren’t very strong. I can pick them out, but if I didn’t know they were supposed to be there I would probably miss them. That said, I love this particular combination of spices particularly the addition of the nutmeg. So because of that I’m still going to give this tea a decent rating.

I’ve got enough left of this tea that I’ll have a go at turning it into a proper chai latté.

Black forest cake has long been one of my favourite desserts. There’s a bakery in town that makes it just perfectly from scratch and there really is nothing else like it. Unfortunately this tea is nothing like the actual cake. I’m really not tasting much cherry flavour at all and the chocolate cake flavour is quite flat with a weird almost cardboard like note. It’s slightly better with milk and sweetener, but not by a whole lot. And who’s bright idea was it to put hibiscus in a blend that has nothing to do with tart flavour profiles?!? Stash is one of the worst offender for this so I don’t know why I’m surprised.

If you were thinking of buying this tea because you love black forest cake, my advice is to save yourselves and take a pass on this tea.

This was one of the collection of pitcher packs I purchased the last time I was in my local DT store. The temperature has been hovering around the mid-30s (celcius) and it’s going to be even warmer on the weekend so it really just isn’t hot tea weather right now.

Most of the iced teas I drink are fruit-flavoured so coconut iced tea was a bit of a new thing for me. It may well become a permanent thing because it was ridiculously delicious. The dominant flavour is coconut but leaning towards fresh coconut meat rather than toasted coconut. I did sweetened it a little bit but the blend has a sweetness all of its own and a light creaminess that reminds me of coconut gelato or sorbet. My only problem with this tea is that it leaves a odd sort of cloudy precipitate in the jug and glass, possibly from the oils in the coconut. It’s nothing too obnoxious, but it means I’ll have to be a bit more thorough rinsing out the pitcher when I’m finished it.

Definitely going to be stocking up on this tea before the summer is done.

Everyone seems to be giving this iced tea rave reviews which makes me a bit puzzled as I didn’t really care for it. Maybe it was the way I steeped it?

I put the pouch in one of those iced tea pitchers from Davids Teas and filled it half full with boiling water. The steep time was only about 2.5 minutes so I don’t think I oversteeped it – but you never know. After that I filled the jug the rest of the way with ice cubes and cold water – nothing too esoteric. I found that i just couldn’t taste much lemonade flavour in the tea – I maybe got a little bit of it when I added some sweetener but that might be because the simple syrup I used was lemon-flavoured.

So what do you guys think? Are my tastebuds just out of wack?

Is monkey bread an American thing or something? Because I honestly have never heard of anything like it until I saw this tea.

The dominant flavour is more honey than caramel to me but regardless the tea has a pleasent mild sweetness. There’s a nice, subtle hint of cinnamon though I’m not really getting very much bread or baked goods flavour unfortunately. Not bad for a red rooibos blend, but I don’t think I’ll be clamoring for LiberTeas to reblend it.