Cuppa Geek

This is my best friend’s favorite herbal tea and she gifted me a pouch of it about a year ago. I am using this – out of order – for the final tea of the May prompts: a tea with unusual ingredients.

Look at all those ingredients…I didn’t know hazelnut leaves were a thing.

You would think this would be super tart and fruity, but it isn’t. We had it with buttermilk pie tonight and it was a really accompaniment to it. Apple was the dominant note to me, and even though there is no chamomile in this, it really tasted like a great chamomile blend.

It is also a sipdown, which is right on time because this bears a best buy date of four days ago. Does’t matter, it was still as good as the first cup a year ago.

I can’t believe I never added this to my cupboard because today it is a sipdown. I am using this as my tea with lemon flavor on the third time through May sipdown prompts.

I generally dislike red rooibos but I enjoy green, and it is a great base for flavorings and gives me more caffeine free options for evening.

This tea is equally orange and lemon, or maybe a little more orange leaning, but the citrus is soft and not tart. I prefer it as an iced sweet tea to beat the muggy summer heat.

To fulfill May prompt number six! A tea soda….

I had about three teaspoons of this left. How is there no tasting note from me already?

I steeped it three times as Cuppageek recommended for most of their blends using only about a cup of water per three teaspoons, so nice and strong. I poured it into a carafe with a healthy shot of sugar. Chilled in freezer while Ashman worked hard outside.

To make it a soda we simply combined the syrup I just chilled with cold Perrier over ice. And it was delish! This came out just like a ginger ale with a lemon twist. It was really nice to have a bubbly, caffeine free treat tonight. And Ashman, who doesn’t care much for lemongrass, thought it tasted more like lemon and liked it so much he had a second big glass and finished it off, so this is also a sipdown.

Tea number two on my fourth journey through the prompts. Will I complete the fourth round? That’s a lot of tea to drink! Now on to this geeky tea!

This is a sip down. I had both Eleven and Mornin’ Waffles – same blend different name. It is very VERY sweet. Too sweet for me most of the time, but Ashman loves sweets and didn’t complain. Odd thing is that he hates maple syrup and this smells and tastes strongly of it and didn’t object – didn’t seem to notice!

We had it hot and I also made two carafes cold and sweet for him.

May Prompt 2nd time through! A geeky tea…

I forgot this doesn’t pair well with sweet things because it is so very sweet on its own, and I served it with our breakfast of blueberry waffles with blueberry syrup and whipped cream.
(Ashman is off the rest of the week to do some painting and repairs so I will be cooking more and drinking more tea.)

It is so maple-y and sweet and would have been good with a savory breakfast or on its own, but with what we had, it was not a good pairing and that is all on me. My bad. The tea is light because of the oolong base and really sweet from the cinnamon chips and such.

A better choice would have been Golden Molkabari or Bailin Gongfu Black, but thise wouldn’t fulfilled my prompt! Ha ha!

My tasting note for tea number one never went to the dashboard. It exists in my tealog, and was in browse most recent, but nothing on dashboard. Shae still shows up late for me, as in, I read all the new dashboard stuff, come back and scroll to the last point I had read, go back a little more and there is a new note from Shae. Hmmm. It doesn’t seem to do it consistently with anyone else. Guess it is time to head for the bug thread.

So here is my second May sipdown prompt tea – a geeky tea, and this is the last geeky tea I have remaining. All my Star Wars and Star Trek themed teas are gone, as well as my LoTR.
And this one is tasting super good today.

When I first got it, it was not one that excited me a lot, but it has definitely grown on me. The first problem was I drank it with waffles and it just sort of disappeared. It is way too sweet to go with waffles! Having it with oatmeal today and it is a gentle, lovely cup of soft maple and spice oolong.

Nice, gentle, sweet, softly warming.

To fulfill Mastress Alita’s Sipdown Prompt – a tea with marshmallows.

This is my penultimate carafe of this tea and then it will be a sipdown. Although the melted marshmallows make this tea cloudy, it is a delightful summer drink. It also happened to be very good hot. I think this one helped to cement my affection for green rooibos as a caffeine free evening drink because most herbals really don’t excite me – at all.

By Sunday this will be out of my cupboard. I will miss it!

This wasn‘t in my cupboard and has no note? I am sure I have had multiple packs of this one.

This is to fulfill my final remaining prompt for the April scavenger hunt – a tea tied to the weather. We are doing lots of yard work right now and it is already as hot as summer. Not the best. But at least I have a fruity caffeine free option for slaking thirst.

Iced Latte Sipdown (210)

Yesterday was Roswell Strange’s birthday so I had a cake tea! Happy birthday!!!

I also wanted my iced chai but my Spice Girl Eats order hasn’t arrived yet. So, instead I made this as an iced latte and it was…ok. Yeah, I thought this would be better but it was just a typical chai. I would probably drink Pumpkin Chai instead of this if I am being. Honest but if this is easier to access, it’s not a bad option.

A sipdown!

I am using this to fulfill the health tea prompt for the sipdown challenge because I have not been sleeping well lately. So here I am drinking tea at nearly 1 AM in hopes of falling asleep and staying that way for at least eight hours.

It might be working…I started yawning midway through the first pale blue cup.

March Scavenger Hunt Prompt #5 – a sleepytime tea

I am actually drinking this packaged as Draught of Peace, but it is the same tea. I can’t believe it doesn’t even have a listing because I have had several pouches of it and could have sworn I reviewed it before.

Basically, the cuppageek caffeine free blends were just about the only such blends that I consider to be actually delicious and not just okay. Nichole avoided all the things I avoid in herbals, like stevia and everything single thing being hibiscus based.

This pretty blue tisane is lightly minty with appley chamomile. It is relaxing. I am on my last pouch and I will definitely miss it.

Sipdown

I wanted to really like this one, especially because Sil wrote yum all over the package. But this tasted like a muddled mess. Dense and nothing really clear. I was pretty disappointed. Still, I’m grateful I got to try it so thank you Sil!

I don’t know why Sil bought this one and then decided to stick me with it. Neither of us really like floral teas so it was an odd choice. That said, always happy to try something new and this was better than expected so thanks for sharing, Sil! I made this as a latte and was partially terrified it would be milk potpourri. However, it wasn’t overly floral given the ingredient list. It was floral but also a touch malty. It was fine and I drank most of the latte. However, I added this to the SVTTB in hopes it finds someone who enjoys floral teas more.

Sadly, this is the last sample of Cuppa Geek in my stash. It tastes like a light blueberry on a nice black base. I don’t get many more elements than that, but I enjoyed this cold with milk.

I originally disliked this tea because it had one of the pepperiest honeybushes I’ve ever tasted. I couldn’t taste any other flavor outside the pepper. There’s very little black tea in the blend, and the flavoring is pretty mild. I randomly tried this tea again recently, and it tastes fine! It’s a very mildly flavored honeybush tea. Really I’d guess chocolate orange if I had to guess. It did have chocolate chips, though that seemed like a weird choice for butter beer. It’s certainly not amazing, but it’s okay!

The blueberry flavor is pretty authentic and tasty! The black tea goes with it well. I don’t really taste any elements other than blueberry and black tea, but it does a good job at those flavors. It goes well with milk. This one is simple, but impressive.

This needed to cool so that I could appreciate its intricacies. Now, I taste some mild spices along with some nice floral hints. Actually, I taste more floral than spice, but I enjoy the floral flavors. It’s nice with some milk!

Oh, so nice! This leans sharply to the maple side of the name and is creamy and pancakey—more so than Celestial Seasonings’ version which compared to CuppaGeek, now comes off a little thin and artificial.

This was a nice twist on seasonal chai with the addition of orange and chocolate. It reminded me of eating a Hershey bar while drinking a cup of Constant Comment.

Made this cup of tea after finishing my mug of Night Trap today, and I think I kind of subconsciously picked it as a direct response to feeling disappointed by the lack of balance/general “flat” flavour of Night Trap. Yes, this is kind of a busier tea with a lot of flavours going on but the way the sweet mint/candy cane, blueberry, and milk chocolate flavours steep out in the cup is actually surprisingly pretty cohesive and all three elements feel like they have the room to taste completely distinct. It was a really enjoyable mug!

There’s sort of a lot going on with this tea but I enjoyed it! I sort of felt like some of my advents didn’t feel nearly seasonal enough so there was a stretch where all the ‘extra’ teas I was having in the evening were especially festive in terms of names/flavours to sort of compensate for that. This is a weird but delicious mix of milk chocolate, blueberry jam, and crisp cooling mint notes that probably shouldn’t work together but kind of does is a very interesting way.

But lets be honest… I brewed it up because of the name.

Backlogged Advent Note
Homemade Advent Day 19
from AJRimmer
This one is a nice breakfast tea. There was also quite a bit of sweetness which I assume was from the sprinkles. Unfortunately, I didn’t taste anything specifically that reminded me of birthday cake other than the sweetness from the sprinkles. I enjoyed my cup of this but wanted more in terms of it fitting the concept. It was a nice and sweet breakfast black tea without milk.

Backlogged Advent note
Homemade Advent Day 20
from AJRimmer
I thought it was funny that earlier in the advent I was talking about how excited I was for a lemon lavender tea. If I remember correctly I loved that herbal one but didn’t taste much lavender. Well… here’s another lemon lavender tea it’s like you read my mind that I wanted to try more of them.
This one delivers the lavender and the lemon! I didn’t get the cookie element from this one but it did give me lemon cake vibes. Which is close enough for me since I love cake and lemon loaves. The lavender is quite subtle but the lemon here is the primary flavor. It’s a light and delicious dessert tea. I could see myself picking up more of this one! Cuppa Geek has some great spring/summery flavored blends. Drank this one without any milk or sweetener.