Cuppa'T Specialty Teas

Normally I wouldn’t have bought straight up hibiscus for myself because I’m really not a fan, but it was a gift so I’m trying to find creative ways to use it where I don’t have to experience the taste of straight, pure hibiscus…

The first attempt at that was with a homemade hibiscus brown sugar syrup! I was making ‘two ingredient pancakes’ (the ingredients are banana and egg) and I didn’t want standard syrup with them. I also added some fresh sliced kiwi to the plate, as well. I think on its own this syrup would have been too bold, fruity, and tart to work with the pancakes which ARE very banana flavoured and sweet, but not so much in a way that would work with the sourness of hibiscus. The kiwi was a good bridge between the flavours because it’s also fruity and works with the banana, but has an acidity to it that ties in with the sweet, sour syrup.

Overall, as a dish, I think this worked – and the syrup was easy enough to make as well: concentrated hibiscus brew mixed with ground cinnamon and brown sugar and reduced until it has the consistency of a typical syrup. Easy enough!

Pictures: https://www.facebook.com/resteep/posts/10210814283367095

Finally had a somewhat decent sleep last night. I was only woken once by the neighbours, by the baby, I assume. And yay, I feel almost human. I just might be able to function at some capacity, just maybe. There’s good reason that sleep deprivation is a torture technique.

Oh what a wonderful thing sleep is!

I had forgotten about my remaining samples from tigress some time ago, and today, now that I have an extra brain cell or two, I pulled them out. This is the first one my hand got a hold of.

Good choice. Brisk malty base with a good healthy layer of maple on top. A real pleasure.

Thanks, tigress_al, for popping this one into the bag.

Cold Brew!

Not as cucumber forward as I’ve tasted in the past but still highly nostalgic and familiar tasting with that lovely mix of different sweet tangy red fruit and citrus notes and the undertone of sweet ripe tomato. It’s just a fruity umami explosion and one of the most unique herbal blends that I own. Revisiting really hit the spot. I’m definitely noticing a trend in some of my tea making the last few weeks (this one in particular) where I’m leaning towards more bright fruity or crisp vegetal notes that sort of signal a change in season for me. It’s maybe, kind of, sort of starting to be Spring…

Drank this one iced; I brought the tin of it in to work though because I was talking to a coworker about “vegetable teas” and this is still one of my all time favourites I’ve ever had so I wanted to show her and have her taste it as a sort of “Look, teas with weird ingredients can still be amazing!” type of exercise.

Not surprisingly she loved it; it’s just super fruity and fresh tasting – this awesome medley of citrus notes with hints of cucumber and tangy tomato. It works so damn well!

Allowed myself to dip into my stash of this tea over the course of the week in order to make a cold brew! It’s becoming increasingly necessary to have a cold brewed tea option in the house as it gets warmer and more summer-like here in Montreal; I’ve discovered that my apartment gets VERY hot, and while we have air conditioning in the kitchen/eating area of the apartment I have no way to cool down my bedroom…

I foresee a summer of cold brews and ice cream, for sure.

Strong orange, strong tomato, strong apple, and a hint of cucumber. Sweet and refreshing, and really quite hard to go wrong with this herbal blend! I might have to sweet talk my mom into mailing me another 100g or so of it from the local tea shop in Regina I used to buy it from.

Upping my rating, also.

Tried this one hot for the first time,

Iced/Cold brew is definitely the way to go when making this one. It didn’t taste bad/was perfectly drinkable on the whole but I think brewing it hot drew out a lot of tangyness and exaggerated the tomato notes in the tea quite a bit to the point where they were actually the main flavour. And I can get on board with tomato tea, but when you have things like lime and hibiscus notes I think that more umami/savory aspect works much better as like an undertone supporting the fruit notes and keeping them from feeling over the top cloying. Definitely not as the primary taste.

Probably gonna switch back to drinking this one cold brewed in the future.

Iced tea!

Made this one at work a few days ago; the whole staff was thoroughly freaked out by the notion of a tea with cucumber and tomato but when they tried it they all agreed that it was surprisingly delicious! Lots, and lots of sweet orange and apple notes and then a cooling, crispness from the cucumber. It’s vegetal, but very softly and in a refreshing way. Also, between the orange, cucumber, and tomato notes in the finish it’s also surprisingly sweet! I mean, overall it’s a challenging flavour to describe; but it just works!

I also made this in a glass cup for the first time ever so it was the first time I got a completely clear look at the liquor colour and it was really pretty! Just a soft, sunset like sort of peachy colour with a bit of like a red ‘blush’ sort of tint to it? Mostly orange, though. Just stunning to look at, though!

Cold Brew!

Currently sipping on this one; it’s pretty refreshing and fruity! Main notes are cucumber and orange, which is a really nice pairing! I love, love, love the bright juicy citrus and the refreshing, cooling cucumber combo together. It also has undertones of sweet tomato goodness, and a finish that’s quite apple-y. It’s kind of hard to explain WHY the mix of fruit and vegetables works so well but it does – it’s just sweet and tasty!

Now that I have more of this one on hand, after restocking during Cuppa T’s flash sale, I’ve been thinking of other ways I might be able to use this one and I think it could make a REALLY interesting base for a cocktail. Imagine it as the base for a sweeter, fruitier Ceaser? Two or three parts Market Fresh cold brew, one part Lapsang Souchong if you wanted more tea flavour or one part Mezcal if you want more booze but still SOME smoke, one or two parts vodka depending on how strong you want it, maybe some muddled cherry tomatoes to increase that aspect of the flavour? Rim a glass with some sea salt, garnish was a celery stick? I think that would make for a REALLY interesting take on a Ceaser.

But I don’t know – what other kinds of cocktails do you guys think this might work in?

So, I revisited this weird tomato tea today.

It’s been hot/sweaty enough inside our house today to melt a man’s nuts off, so I definitely opted for an iced tea over trying this one hot – though I definitely want to try it that way too, eventually. Like an idiot I forgot to measure when I was scooping the leaf for my concentrated hot brew of this before pouring it over iced. Obviously my guesstimation was wrong, because when I did pour the hot brew over ice to make my finished product it was WAY too strong/intense.

Honestly, I hardly tasted the tomato this time around at all! What I did get was a punch in the face of intense, sweet apple and orange notes with hints of lemon lime and a refreshing, pulpy vegetal cucumber note. The cucumber was actually my favourite part of the blend; I’ve just honest to God never found a cucumber tea I didn’t love. It’s just cooling, and refreshing and one of the most hydrating tea ingredients, point blank. Oddly, I think because of the cucumber as well, this had an almost melon like taste too. I think that’s because the white part in watermelon rind and cucumber skin sort of taste the same? So, they’re a little interchangeable flavour wise.

So yeah, this still had some great things going on for it flavour wise – but bottom line it was just too strong/intense, and the fruit notes were really sweet.

Saw this at Cuppa’T and I HAD to own it. Why?

Tomato.

I’ve only ever tried ONE tomato tea and it was really fucking weird. Not bad though, just weird. It was also a savory tea, and this one is certainly meant to be sweeter/more fruity, what with the lime and apple in it. I wish I’d taken better notes when I drank this cold brew because there was some interesting complexities to this one, but alas my jot notes and shitty and don’t do the layers of flavour real justice.

Next time.

- Top notes are really fruity; lime and apple with a soft tartness
- Body is still mildly fruity, with a refreshing ‘break’ in between the fruity from the cukes
- The tomato IS there too; but it blends into BOTH the tangyness of the fruit
- As well as the refreshing, vegetal taste of cucumber
- The mouthfeel is very smooth but the flavour of cucumber & tomato pulp is strong
- So, it’s sweet, tangy, umami, and a little savory
- All while being REALLY refreshing and juicy

Honestly, my feelings were ALL OVER THE PLACE while drinking this one. I liked it, but I kind of hated that I didn’t feel at rest while drinking it – if that makes sense at all. I don’t know what I expected though, honestly.

I think it delivered?

GCTTB

I think I messed up when brewing this. I steeped this for 6 minutes at 80C and it basically just tastes like grass. Maybe a little floral but nothing to write home about. It was pretty though and certainly fun to try. Thank you Roswell Strange for sharing this one.

Sipdown (208)!

So, before I added this to the GCTBB I set aside one of the bricks for myself so I could try this Western style to contrast against the Gong Fu infusion of it that I have previously tried. You know, I thought this would be more appropriate as a Western infusion but ultimately I liked it better Gong Fu.

It’s not that it tasted bad Western, but overall I just thought it was much weaker in regard to overall flavour than my Gong Fu experience was. Sure, it was vegetal/grassy from the green tea and the rose itself was nice, smooth and natural but the whole thing was just kind of watered down tasting to me.

Still made for a calming cup before bedtime though.

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaAFGnuIhu4&index=189&list=LL1M1wDjmJD4SJr_CwzXAGuQ&shuffle=1707

Purchased these ones from Cuppa’T because I was looking for one, more interesting thing to take home and these “bricks” were pretty unique and inexpensive, plus I recalled Lala writing a review on them at one point a while back…

I ended up trying them out for the first time Gong Fu, but in a split session because I started it on Christmas Eve in the evening but then we went out to eat supper at a really fancy restaurant for my mom’s birthday before I could finish the session. I ended up finishing it when we got home, though.

The first half of the session was really lovely, and interesting. The rose in the tea is actually way more strong and well defined than I would have imagined it to be – in fact for the first three infusions it was pretty well all I could taste. Honestly, I didn’t mind though because it was fresh and realistic tasting – no gross chemical/artificial quality to indicate it was someone trying to imitate the fragranced sweetness of an actual rose. After the initial wave of rose it gradually mellowed out and I could taste fresh, crisp vegetal notes from the green tea – snow peas in particular.

After that we went to supper – which was wonderful. I got a baked brie dish with the most amazing red pepper jelly and basil pesto toppings. It literally felt like it was dissolving in your mouth as you ate it, and it was just incredibly satisfying. After that, I moved on to a salad that was… interesting. The only ingredients in it were iceburg lettuce, diced tomatoes, and a very nice herb and buttermilk dressing. What made it really unique, though, was that they literally served it as a third of a head of lettuce. So, still intact. Then they dressed that third of the head with the diced tomato and buttermilk dressing. So, I had to cut pieces off my head of lettuce. It was really unique, presentation wise, and actually I kind of liked having control of the bite size thanks to cutting it…

When I got home, I finished the session. It wasn’t nearly as good; possibly because it was later infusions but also maybe because the leaf had been sitting a while. I try to avoid splitting up sessions, when I can. More vegetal than anything else though; less sweet/fragranced and more of a semi bitter grassy character? That is, until it started becoming watered down enough to not taste like much at all.

EDIT: For the record, I also used two bricks for this session because it was a larger gaiwan and also the bricks are relatively small/tiny so two seemed a lot more appropriate than one.

Midday cuppa!

I was feeling a touch festive this afternoon, so I cracked open some walnuts and have a nice cup of tea paired with walnuts and Christmas Sweater shaped sugar cookies as an early afternoon snack.

This tea is ok; it has a custardy component which is I think where the “eggnog” comes from in the name but it’s more cinnamon/clove with creamy undertones and hints of orange than it is straight up eggnog to me. Actually though, as I sip on it this isn’t the only tea I’ve seen that uses that custard and cinnamon/clove pairing to recreate the taste of eggnog though! DAVIDsTEA released a tea this year that uses that exact combo of ingredients to make an eggnog flavour – and I actually think DT’s does a better job recreating it. I wonder why that is? The difference in base teas? Or maybe this is just heavier on the spices which brings me out of the imagery a little more.

Anyway – it was a nice enough cup and even if I wasn’t feeling the ’nog I do think it was very wintery/festive in spirit regardless.

Missed the bus the other day so I had the perfect amount of time at home for a cup of tea before the next one came – but only if I grabbed something that was already upstairs in the kitchen and made that. Since it was a hot cuppa, I went for this one since all the tea in the kitchen is my mom’s and most of it is more suited for iced tea than hot.

Mostly this was smooth and custardy, with almost equal undertones of spices and orange. The orange was nice, albeit it out of place for an “eggnog” flavour. The spices did more to enhance the custard notes in a way that formed the taste of eggnog though. Cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom all seemed to be present. Even with smooth, silky vanilla and cinnamon/nutmeg coming together though this STILL didn’t have quite the taste of eggnog.

Still delicious though! I’m gonna have to try it again with a spot of milk and see if that changes things for me.

This was the only other tea I drank yesterday.

Like I mentioned last night, I spent the majority of the day in the emergency room. Basically, what happened was that on Sunday evening, after I got home from work at DAVIDsTEA, one of my teeth which was abscessed burst. I had just been eating the raw green peppers I was putting on my pizza, and I took a bite into one on the side of my mouth where the tooth was abscessed and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back; or burst the abscess, in this circumstance.

I have had abscessed teeth other than this one; but this is the first time I’ve ever had one burst. Without a word of a lie, it is probably the most painful thing I have ever experienced – and that pain didn’t stop until well into Monday. I was up literally all evening Sunday/Monday morning in writhing pain – during which I downed almost a whole bottle of advil to no effect. At one point I passed out from a combination of the pain and sleep exhaustion, but was back awake and crying in pain in less than an hour. Finally, at about 5:30 in the morning after hours of trying unsuccessfully to get through to an emergency after hours dentist I caved and called my mother and we went to the emergency room.

I was admitted in the ER at about seven in the morning. At some point the side of my face with the abscess swelled up to the point where I could hardly see out of my right eye.

At roughly eleven, we were finally called out of the waiting room to see a doctor. They took my vitals around noon, and shortly after that a medical student came and interviewed me and, with my permission, did an ‘exam’ of my mouth before the nurse came back and also did one. Around 1:30 they finally gave me a shot of a high dose pain killer, which did the trick and finally offered me some relief. I was prescribed the same pain killer to take at home, an anti inflammatory drug, and some antibiotics for the infection. By two in the afternoon I had been discharged.

I went home to my mom’s for a few hours, had my Dammann Freres advent tea, and then we were off to my dentist’s office – at some point during when we were in the ER and getting moved from the ER into an actual room my mom had gotten through to the receptionist when they’d opened up for the day and they’d advised we stay at the ER while my dentist made time during his day to get me in to be looked at in the late afternoon/early evening.

At the dentist, they took some X-Rays and then booked me in for an after hours extraction of the effected tooth on Friday – they can’t pull it until the swelling completely goes away and infection is totally cleared.

After that I went to my mom’s for the rest of the evening just to sleep/rest. At some point I ate a quiche – my first real food of the day. I was also served a cup of this tea, which my mom had originally purchased from Cuppa’T as a surprise to serve when I’m at her place on Christmas day. She said I looked like I could use it right away though; so she broke her own surprise to surprise me/give me some kind of positive experience throughout the day…

The tea was great – but even if it had tasted like shit I would have still been appreciative for a hot cup of something comforting. It tasted sort of like Eggnog in so far as the vanilla notes and then the cinnamon/nutmeg came together to resemble something creamy and ’nog like. The citrus notes in the blend broke the illusion a little bit, but were also still pleasant…

As it stands today; I’m all kinds of groggy, and still quite sore/tender. The side of my face where the tooth abscessed is still swollen/puffy to the point where it’s very visible but not to the degree it was yesterday where I could hardly see out that eye. I took the day off at job #1 to catch up on all of the sleep I missed during the ordeal; but I plan to work at DT tonight. So we’ll see how that goes.

Hell of a way to kickstart the Christmas season, though.

GCTTB

Last night, I lollygagged on the Dammann Freres site, filling my cart up with all sorts of deliciousness. Two hundred dollars worth of deliciousness to be exact. I have neither the money nor the space for more tea. That rarely deters me.

But this time, I closed the window and patted myself on the shoulder. So yay!

Black Friday fever is a wicked thing.

Yup, this tea is a surprise. With a name like Government House Anniversary Blend, I was expecting something dark, powerful, and stately. That is to say not strawberry and mint.

It’s nice though. Mint is not my favourite thing, but here it is pleasantly subdued by the strawberry. The tea base is slightly astringent. Thankfully, I had steeped briefly.

An enjoyable cup.

So, last week my Dad and Step Mom had me over for a fondue thing and when I was there my step mom very excitedly showed me the teas she’d recently purchased from Cuppa’T here in town. She offered to make me a cup of one of them, and since I’d tried the Vanilla Green she I chose the other one, which was a green tea with cherry.

However, I can’t remember what it was called! I want to say Sakura Cherry, but I could just be assuming that ‘cause it’s sort of what every company calls their green tea/cherry combo tea. I mean, that’s what DAVIDsTEA calls there’s so maybe I’m just thinking of that name from work? And the tea she got isn’t listed on the Cuppa’T website either, so… it’s a mystery tea, I guess.

Regardless it was pretty good; very strong cherry notes as well as a presence of something really floral. It didn’t look like there was any in the leaf, but could have been rose or maybe jasmine? It was a nice complimenting flavour. The green tea base was obviously sencha which is not my favourite by a LONG shot. However, even I have to begrudgingly admit that it does go with the cherry pretty well. A bit astringent, though.

Wish I could remember what this is called…

This was a pretty good—-I should have wrote about it last week when I drank it!
The strawberry was not quite. Atrial tasting, more like a candy strawberry. I still very much enjoyed it and would probably try it cold brewed next time as mint and strawberry would be very refreshing. The base was a little astringent but not too bad.

GCTTB
I love teas that have a bit of history attached to them and this one is an interesting blend, a mix of strawberries and mint. The mint is fairly retiring more of a mild aftertaste that lends a nice freshness to the tea. I wonder if they used wild/Canada mint (Mentha arvensis) which is a native species that grows wild in wet areas across the country and is quite nice on its own as tea (I usually find it by smell when I step on it accidentally). The strawberry flavour is nice and strong, particularly after the tea has a chance to cool. The black base is a little astringent, so this tea might be a good candidate to have with milk (although that seems a but weird with the mint).

GCTTB Sipdown
Creamy blueberry is a pretty accurate assessment of the flavour of this tea, though it has a bit more tangy tartness than what you’d get from a blueberry. Sea buckthorn is a pretty rare flavour to find in a tea and I wish more companies would experiment with interesting fruits and berries like this.

I love a good Assam. This is malty with just a little bit of fruit in the background. I can see this getting astringent very easily though, so I went easy on the steeping. I’m sure it would take milk and sugar well, if I drank my tea that way (but I don’t usually).

I didn’t pay close enough attention while drinking this tea last night, but from what I remember, I really enjoyed this rooibos. I also drank this while eating a macaroon, so that could have affected the taste. It was sweet and the strawberry was certainly in the forefront. Sorry, better notes next time.

I am not really a fan of the actual dessert creme brûlée but this tea was really good. I definitely get that burnt brown sugar note. The rooibos base wasn’t too woodsy which is good. Overall, dessert in a cup!