IKEA

I tried adding milk and sweetener to this tea like some people suggested, but I didn’t find much of an improvement. There was maybe a tad more blueberry flavour but not enough for me to revise my rating of this tea. This is one tea that’ll probably go up for adoption some time in the near future.

Eh, I’m not terribly thrilled with this tea. Supposedly it’s blueberry flavoured but I’m not tasting much beyond the basic tea base. There is a hint of blueberry but it’s too subtle for this tea I’m afraid.

There was really no flavor here, blueberry or otherwise. It’s usual that I can’t taste any blueberry flavor in teas. And the black base for this was very mild and flavorless too.

I am logging this as a sipdown (102) because even though there is a little left, that is going into a blend of iced teas, so this will be the last unadultered session that I have with this tea.

I had a ton of this tea. An entire 100g pouch (which is a ton for me!), and I didn’t even like it that much. I’ve also had it for probably 4 or 5 years. But I did find that I enjoyed it well enough cold brewed, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months… regular cold brews, nearly every other day, and now it’s gone. It was kind of one of those teas I never thought would be gone, haha.

I cold brewed this tea again, but this time it’s somehow thicker and creamier. It’s a weird sensation. Still a flavorful and tasty iced tea.

I’m bumping the rating up into the 80s on ths one because I’m really enjoying it iced! I cold brewed it last night for about 24 hours. The liquor never got very dark, which was initially disconcerting, but it’s still full flavored. A solid black tea base to hold it up, flavored liberally with vanilla and gently with the sweet-tart fruit flavor of rhubarb. The vanilla really brings out the caramel notes in the Keemum, and the rhubarb kind of sits back behind everything else, adding a fruity and almost floral flavor to the vanilla. This tea now reminds me of some other, higher quality tea, but I can’t place it now. Perhaps even one of my French ones, because it inexplicably made me think of Paris while I was drinking it. In any case, I’ll definitely make this one iced again!

I picked this tea up ages ago on a whim at Ikea because I love rhubarb, and it was on sale. Brewed up the tea is a deep reddish brown, and it has a pleasant aroma and flavor. It’s nothing truly outstanding, but certainly a nice cup when I’d like a fruity black tea that’s not berry-flavored. So many fruit black teas seemed based in berries, so this is a nice departure. The rhubarb doesn’t make the tea tart, and I have a feeling that the vanilla assists with giving it a smooth and somewhat creamy taste, as it keeps a low profile otherwise. Not a tea I’ll reach for all the time, but a solid, tasty tea nonetheless. Oh, and I’m not sure what the sell-by date on this bag was, but I’m certain I’m way past it and the tea is still flavorful. Then again I have a jasmine tea I bought in China 7 years ago and I still think it tastes fantastic, so what do I know. :)

The blueberry flavor is subtle, which is a good thing for me. It’s a nice aromatic mid-afternoon or morning tea.

LIght vanilla/fruit aroma to dry leaves. Full-bodied but not overpowering once steeped. Fragrant with vanilla notes. Mild flavor. Watch “sell-by” date when purchasing at IKEA.

Oh, steepster. The reasons for my absence are manifold but positive. A book to write, a new boy to date, a birthday month and much travel, two separate bouts of illness (flu, 1; head-cold with lingering cough, 1) which may or may not be related to the aforementioned travel, and the fall video-game release blitz have together conspired to keep me happily drained and preoccupied to the extent that what little remaining energy I have has been diverted to things other than writing tasting notes. I have been sticking with tried and true favorites. I have not purchased tea in over a month. This may be a good time to purchase lift tickets in hell.

But!

Last night I was feeling bored with the usual suspects, and I’ve had this left over from my swap with Auggy, so I decided to give it a brew. I didn’t notice until I actually sat down with it that it also contained vanilla (I probably could’ve deduced this from the name, admittedly) — but that is, in fact, the greater portion of the forward flavor in this cup, and it dominates the aroma. Once you sip, you get the warm fuzzy tongue-hug of vanilla immediately, and this gives way to a noticeable sweetness and the very, very slightly sweet flavor rhubarb mixed in. It’s not quite tart the way that rhubarb is, but there’s an astringency in the cup that seems to play into the memory of that tartness…and it’s not rhubarb-as-seen-in-strawberry-rhubarb-pie, but rhubarb the way it tastes when you get stalks of it fresh and eat it that way, only scaled back and toned down enough to not cause your mouth to pucker. It’s a very subtle flavor, but not difficult to spot — maybe ‘gentle’ is a better word than ‘subtle’.

Something about the tea reminds me of the flavored blends from 52teas — the apple flavors in particular. I don’t know if that’s the leaf or just a consequence of the rhubarb flavor. I am indecisive.

They say ‘Keemun’ for the leaf. I can see it. It just doesn’t have much character as Keemuns go; most of what you’d expect from it gets swallowed up by the vanilla, which is perhaps the point.

Not bad! Not something I’ll be looking to replace, but I like it better than I thought I would, and I’d be interested in trying other teas like it — which is apparently not as unlikely as it sounds; in searching for this online I discovered another vanilla-rhubarb tea from Sweden, produced by Friggs, whom I know from previous conversations with a Belgian friend of mine produces some kind of magical blabar (blueberry) tea. And I remember that because, blabar is an awesome word for ‘blueberry’, and anytime my friend says ‘Friggs-Blabar’ it entertains me.

I don’t normally buy flavored tea and I didn’t buy this one. My mom saw it when she was at Ikea and got it for me since I love rhubarb. It does smell very rhubarb-y upon opening the package. I don’t smell the vanilla at all. After brewing, the rhubarb calms down and something that might be vanilla comes out. But the taste is all rhubarb. Not a bad thing but vanilla might be nice, too, since it’s in the name.

When I was at Ikea the other day, I couldn’t resist picking this up. First off, it’s rhubarb flavored. I’ve never had a rhubarb tea before (shoot, I’ve only had rhubarb itself maybe twice, both times in pie form) and I’m always up for something novel, even if it ends up icky. Second, it was cheap ($2.50 for 3.5oz!) so even if it was icky, I wasn’t going to feel bad about blowing a couple of bucks on it. Third, it’s tea and apparently I have a disease that makes me compulsively purchase tea whenever I see it for sale.

This tea is definitely more vanilla than it is rhubarb but it’s a pink-tinted vanilla. There’s vanilla but it has a noticeable hint of something else that just tastes lightly pink. (Or maybe that’s just me. Does anyone else ever taste colors? And I’m not talking about when you eat fingerpaints.) Eventually I figured out what the pink taste made me think of – lychee. Yeah, yeah, I know. This is rhubarb. But I still think this tastes like a lychee tea, though more on the lychee fruit end, not lychee flower end (no hint of rose). Of course, this could be because my only exposure to rhubarb has been in pie-form and, since I didn’t add half a cup of sugar to my mug this morning, I don’t really taste the similarities. Not that I’m much more versed in lychee – I think I’ve had lychee once but I have had a couple of different lychee teas and that has to count for something, right?

After having this yesterday, I made a pitcher of it iced and sweetened (I’m from the south, afterall). However, it’s too sweet! I think next time I’ll make a pitcher of it plain and see how that does…

After the weirdness with the French Breakfast tea this morning, I wanted to give a full cup of something a try. So, I made a cup of this.

I bought this maybe six months ago on an Ikea outing. My husband loves rhubarb, so I thought it might convert him to tea. Since we hadn’t opened it until this morning, my plan obviously didn’t work. :) It’s a nice cup. The vanilla stands out more than the rhubarb. I added a bit of agave nectar, which really rounded out the flavors.

It has a “best by” date of a few weeks from now, so I doubt I’ll be able to finish it all. But I’ll certainly be trying to get a few more cups in before then. I might even try this to make a pitcher of sweet tea now that we’re entering warmer weather….

Slightly more bite than Ikea’s blueberry Keemun counterpart, it holds up really well to the milk + sugar treatment. May be too bitey without the milk, though.

The blueberry flavour is there, but it’s definitely subtle. Adding milk and sugar enhances it, and it’s great for mornings.

The blueberry flavor of this tea is certainly subtle—unfortunately, I think, a bit too subtle. It’s inoffensive…but it’s barely a whisper. The flavor might be heightened with milk and/or sugar, but on its own its flavor is not really a good approximation for—for example—Tealuxe’s Blueberry White.