Fortnum & Mason

This tea wins the “prettiest package” awards without even trying. I was instantly attracted to it in the F&M store, and even though it was expensive and I was over-budget, I bought it. Was it worth it? It’s a very good afternoon tea, well behaved (as a gentleman should be), and yet unique enough to make me want to spend more time with it before I rate it. It will be somewhere in the 80-90s, I just haven’t nailed it yet. But if you are looking for a Christmas gift for your favourite tea-drinker, then look no further. This is bound to impress and delight.

I found this to be completely undrinkable and threw out the tea (though not the tin) after the first cup. Flavours all over the place, very little to like, really.

I know it’s supposed to be an experimental, ‘fun’ blend, but it was definitely not for me.

Beautiful tin, though.

My favorite

An old standby, it is always a good, solid choice, but never an exciting one.

This Yunnan smells of chocolate, tastes of malt, and has a hint of smoke in the background. Sweet but with plenty of character, it is one of the more interesting Yunnan teas that I have ever had, and one of the better black teas that I have. It’s character makes it perfect to drink in the autumn, while dreaming of bonfires. Although it’s marked as a lighter tea, there is some kick, mostly due to all the flavour it packs, and not so much due to any bitterness or astringency. A great tea for a crackling fire and some roasted chestnuts.

This was my husband’s choice of afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason during our London honeymoon. (For more details on our fantastic afternoon tea experience, see this tasting note: http://steepster.com/Charoma/posts/199271).

He generously shared a few sips with me. ;) And wow! This was one delicious tea! It was buttery and crisp and smooth. Not bitter or astringent in the least. Just a perfect cup of Gyokuro! I highly recommend it to any green tea lovers.

On our honeymoon, my husband and I went to Fortnum & Mason to have afternoon tea! What could be more fun than having traditional high tea in London?? :D I made reservations at the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon in Piccadilly about a week or so before we left. We were seated in a gorgeous tea room with a live pianist. We ordered from the standard “Fortnum’s Afternoon Tea” menu, which comprised of a different pot of tea for each of us, finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and preserves, and afternoon tea cakes.

OMG YUM!!!! Everything was to die for delicious! I was swooning with every bite and sip. The finger sandwiches were cucumber with mint butter, coronation chicken, rare roast beef with gherkin and caper dressing, rare breed hen egg with mustard cress, and Fortnum’s smoked salmon with lemon dill butter. Wow! Soooo good! And I don’t even like half that stuff, LOL!

The scones were the epitome of perfection. The clotted cream (which I don’t think I’ve ever had before) was melt in your mouth delicious. We had lemon curd and raspberry preserve, which were equally tasty. The individual cakes and patisseries were super cute and super yummy. I swear they served us a rose eclair! Click here to see photos: http://instagram.com/p/f0K-Agl-lN/ and http://instagram.com/p/f0LmSKl-mA/

I highly recommend a stop at Fortnum & Mason if you’re ever in London. Even if you don’t want to have afternoon tea, their store is HUGE! I’m talking five levels of awesomeness. They sell all manor of things from jackets, scarves, gloves, and fancy lady hats, to Christmas ornaments and decorations, jewelry, perfume, wedding cakes, chocolates, and of course, all things tea! I wanted to get a souvenir teacup, but the cheapest one I could find was about $75. O_O Yeaaah…I didn’t get the teacup.

ON TO THE TEA!

This tea was very delicious! It is pretty much everything I’d want a Ceylon tea to be. It did tend to go bitter since all the leaves were left in the pot. After finishing the first pot, they brought me more hot water, and then I could steep one cup at a time. It was much more enjoyable this way.

I think the waiters thought I was funny because when I asked for more hot water, they said, “Would you like a new pot of tea?” I told them I was fine with re-steeping the same leaves, and really they had a lot of flavor left in them! I enjoyed many delicious infusions. Come to think of it, maybe they just wanted to charge me more money for a new pot? I don’t know.

The entire experience was absolutely perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing. We left completely full and absolutely happy. I don’t think I’ll ever eat such delicious scones or clotted cream ever again. Perfection, I tell you! This tea seems to be fairly priced as well. According to their website, you can buy 50g for £7.50, which is about $12.25. Of course, I just went on a crazy shopping spree on the 52teas website and purchased about $70 worth of tea. At a discount, mind you! I only paid $55. ;) So, this purchase will have to wait. But if you enjoy Ceylon teas, this one is great!!

It is a classic for a reason. I love this tea. The bergamot asserts itself just enough to compliment the bright base tea. It brews rich and flavorful and aromatic. I love this with chocolate and with any kind of cookie. It’s a wonderful pick me up in the afternoon

Brewed a batch of this on Thursday. This tea reminds of a French Horn – seemingly gentle and sophisticated, but it can pack a punch, if brewed long enough. Also a really beautiful tea.
I will be really sorry when I run out.

Had some of this this morning, with honey, which overpowered the tea’s taste somewhat. I needed the honey for my sore throat. What surprised me was how dark and malty this tea can brew, considering that there is no Assam in the blend, only Darj, Yunnan, and Ceylon. Interesting.

I’m ill again (blame it on the open-space that I work in), and I needed something to brighten up my mood, the room, and ease my sore throat – hence this tea. It’s one of F&M’s better blends, and I’m still puzzled as to why it doesn’t appear on their site. A secret tea blend? It is beautiful enough to evoke The Secret Garden. Now I want to go reread The Secret Garden :)
I just got an email from Teabox, telling me that they apologize for the way FedEx treated me and my package, and saying that they will resend it via regular airmail, and refund me on more than half the purchase price for my troubles. Best customer service in the world, and I’m most certainly going to pay them a return visit! They have a lot of teas on sale, including a mind boggingly good deal on their Darjeeling samples.
Teabox.com is where they are at, and I am shamelessly plugging them because they have dealt with a problem that they hadn’t created, with grace and kindness and generosity, and so they deserve to be plugged.
If you are interested in my “tale of woe”:
Teabox sent my package with free express delivery via FedEx. I got a call from FedEx Israel while at work from a very snarky service representative that told me that I had received “a package from India”, and that the Health Department required an import permit for the tea that it contained. I was shocked. I’ve been receiving tea from abroad for over three years, and this is the first time that I’ve been told that I need a permit from the Health Department. I asked the lady if she was joking, as the tea in the package was all 10g samples (hardly import quantity), and this has never happened to me. She paused and unpleasantly replied that she is not joking, but they are more than willing to take care of the paperwork for me. At a cost. Out of curiosity, I asked how much, and was given the outrageous sum of “at least $60”. Around $20 for the paperwork, and another $40 for handling fees, plus they wanted around $2 for every day that the package was in storage while they “took care of the paperwork”.
Now the package cost me $56 total, so it was customs free, and “the paperwork” included filling in a few forms, and not paying a tax or anything on the goods. The lady made a great point of letting me know how difficult and time consuming it would be if I were to do the process myself, plus, I would still have to keep the package in their office until the process was complete. Now, here is where I got angry, and told her that she can return the package, or burn it for all I care, since I’m not going to pay them a dime.
1. They are the only party that stands to profit from this ridiculous “Health Department” process, and I’m sure that the Health Department doesn’t give a fig about my tea – otherwise they would have required a special form to be filled in advance.
2. Out of the hundreds of thousands of packages that arrive into Israel daily, customs just happened to zoom in on my package, which is below customs value, and contains tea samples?
3. If shipping and handling was prepaid, why do I have to pay $40 “handling fees”, and if the fees are required, why was the FedEx representative so eager to let me know that I can haggle over them?
4. I don’t enjoy being intimidated, and I don’t enjoy being talked down to, and I most certainly don’t enjoy being ripped off. Having all three happen at the same time – infuriating!

I plan on never using FedEx again if I can help it in any way possible. I plan on purchasing again from TeaBox and spreading the word about their customer services, and hopefully soon also about their tea, which I understand is very good.
End of rant :)

First to review this tea, which is non-existant in Fortnum’s website. I wonder why.
First of all, note the blurb. It could feel at home at the back of a Moleskine notebook. What a pretentious way of saying that this is a blend of Darjeeling, Yunnan and Ceylon teas, together with Safflowers and Cornflowers. I’m guessing it’s Yunnan tea and not Keemun from China, as there’s no smokiness to this tea.
The tea looks gorgeous. Gorgeous. The combination of smallish black tea leaves, blue Cornflowers and reddish-orange Safflowers is fantastic. It brews beautifully, the wet leaves look fantastic, and the liquor is a deep, deep red that reminds me of maple leaves on a golden fall afternoon, with the sun glowing through them. This is the first tea that I’ve seen that can actually light up the room. Not brewing it in a glass teapot or gaiwan or test tube brewer is a SIN.
Now for the flavour: this tea is robust, and can very easily be over brewed and become bitter. Use less leaves and shorter brewing times than you usually would for black teas. It is astringent, so if you don’t like that in your tea, look elsewhere, but it’s also somehow delicate. It’s oily mouthfeel and gentle sweetness won’t take milk kindly, I should think. It reminds me less of caramel and more of honey or honeydew. It really evokes a garden aflame with red and orange flowers, and hummingbirds and bees zooming madly through it. There are some bass undertones in this tea (where the bitterness stems from, I believe – the Ceylon), but it ends on a bright, high note (likely the Darjeeling). A complex blend that is worth F&M’s generally outrageous price. Comes in a wonderfully beautiful caddy.

This is uh…an interesting looking tea. I’m going to have to go with Terri on this one… i put a small taste into my mouth and then promptly had to spit it out. Ew…this is uh… not good.

I took a trip to England over the summer and fell in love with elderflower everything, so before I left I snatched up the only elderflower tea I could find—this one.

After a very short steep it’s already a little bitter, but the aftertaste is sweet and floral. I imagine this would be great iced.

I have been away from Steepster for so long! Sigh, have been too busy to taste tea properly lately…

I am happy that when I finally have the time to do so, I am rewarded with a great cup! It’s smooth, brisk, and aromatic. It reminds me of the endless cups of wonderful Ceylon teas that I had when I visited Tea Trails in Sri Lanka last year. It’s unusual for me to like plain black tea so much but it is just THAT good. :)

sipdown! this is a sweet and malty yunnan with a dash of fruity goodness thrown in to the mix. I like this one a lot – in fact many of the teas NofarS was kind enough to send to terri (who graciously saved me some) have been delicious and wonderful. I’m certainly glad to be able to cross them off my list of all the teas! :)

mmmm i like this one! even though it has a little astringency to it, it’s not unpleasant. I could get behind drinking this one on a more regular basis if i needed a darjeeling to add to the rotation. I still think that i’d rather drink a straight up black tea most days though.

sipdown! i really like this one. I seem to find F&M’s bolder teas to be quite delicious. this one was a lovely bold tea that was perfect for this early morning.

sipdown! thnks terri and nofars. While this is a decent enough cup of tea for me, there’s a bit of astringency here that i’m not a huge fan of. it’s not unenjoyable but it means that this is not a tea that i need to keep in my cupboard :)

Ooops, accidentally forgot to set a timer this time! I specifically wanted a breakfast tea today, and this one was fuller this time around. Maybe the longer steep is the key! One milk, one sugar.

Honestly, this tea doesn’t jump out at me as anything spectacular. It might be because I usually drink more of the flavoured teas, but this even seems to fall short of Twinnings breakfast tea. Maybe I’ll try a shorter steep next time.

Pretty mediocre Darjeeling. It might just have been the leaf grade, but I found really the only use for it was in ice tea. Pretty bitter and astringent (the astringency is actually why I believe it is a Darjeeling!). But I guess what else is there to expect from a BOP?

This is a full-flavored, straight forward bold English tea. The bright Ceylon tea leaves balance out the malty, darker Assam. Take the edge off with a splash of milk and it makes an ideal substitute for coffee at breakfast time.

See my full review of F&M Royal Blend here:
http://thirstyfortea.com/2013/07/18/fortnum-masons-royal-blend/