Savoy Tea Co

I’ve never been a fan of nutella as I think its too sweet, but this is pretty close. Chocolate up front and nutty goodness on the back. All made from puerh, so a different base than other chocolate teas. I think this could find its way into my shopping cart sometime soon (along with the salted caramel puerh)!

A unique take on a chai, with cardamom and a methol finish. I’m not sure this is spearmint or peppermint flavored, but there is both a spicy and cooling aftertaste to this tea. Its different, but it reminds me of a blend I would concoct on my own, not purchase from a fancy tea store.

I tried this grandpa style with about 5 pearls in a cup. I liked this way of brewing and watching as the leaves unfolded. The brew was malty with notes of brown sugar. Added water several more times and it continued to provide a nice cuppa. I’d add this to an order :)

A refreshing blend of grapefruit and orange without being bitter or ‘mate’ tasting. I am enjoying this change of pace from cinnamon and other winter flavors. It seems to have enough caffeine to jump start me this morning, and I’d certainly give this a go as iced tea. The second steep has more of a sweet grapefruit flavor. I might need some of this in my cupboard!

Yum, this is a smooth and smoky version of whisky, the peated kind without any alcohol. I might need more of this in my cupboard, and Kentucky Bourbon pales in comparison here. I wish I had more than just a sample so I could see if it could get bitter with too much leaf or overbrewing. I would add it to my next Savoy order!

Milk chocolate without any weird aftertaste, and a hint of vanilla. What’s not to like? I might need more of this in my cupboard.

Advent Tea: Day 9 from Michelle
This one smells and tastes similar to the 52Teas Spiced Rum Raisin Cake tea. I got the same sort of grape flavor but it’s supposed to be plum. I haven’t had too many plum-flavored things so that is probably just what plum flavoring makes me think of. It’s a nice spiced grape/plum tea. I enjoyed how the spices didn’t overpower the flavor of the fruit. Thanks, Michelle for including so many fun holiday blends in our advent swap.

After two solid weeks of coughs and cruds, a couple sub-zero nights, one dead battery, cabin-crazy cats, and one leaking radiator, I am reminded of The Gospel According to Seuss:

…Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How could it be so?”
“It came without ribbons! It came without tags!”
“It came without packages, boxes or bags!”
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.”
“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

Today, there’s a little joy in this rich, wheaty, cup of curls, in a warm house (in fact, the heater is stuck on “on” and won’t cycle off), brilliant sunshine on the snow, warm socks and peace from knowing these winter woes are momentary. Hope you’re surrounded by joy this weekend, too. Merry Christmas, y’all.

Took the rest of this week off for mental health and a little R&R, and I had been saving the inaugural cup of these adorable little golden curls for a morning when I had a little extra time to enjoy them.

The rye bread scent was delicious from the moment the water first hit the cup. I pulled the steeping basket out of the mug, stepped away from the kitchen for a minute, and before I could get back, the scent had already captured my husband, he sneaked a couple of sips, and had already pronounced it delicious. That’s sayin’ something.

Crusty, wheaty, maybe a little bit of burnt caramel…it’s fine stuff.

I absolutely love chocolate and orange together—my mother-in-law and I share a propensity to snarf boxfuls of those chocolate-orange jelly sticks without realizing how much we’ve just decimated.

However, the notion of chocolate and grapefruit never crossed my mind until we saw and sniffed this blend at the savoy shop. Straight off the steep, the grapefruit hits you first; however, after it cools, you realize there’s a really fine chocolate base underneath. The problem is leaving enough in the cup to allow some to cool. Good stuff.

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The last one from my small Savoy sample order. This is a white chocolate and peppermint black tea, similar to something like DT’s Santa’s Secret (although I think that one is creamy vanilla and peppermint, but close enough). I guess it’s closer to Candy Cane Crush, but without all the candy bits and stuff.

It’s pretty good actually. The flavoring does actually taste like white chocolate, it has a buttery richness to it along with creamy vanilla. And there’s definitely some mint flavoring alongside the peppermint leaves, it’s nicely fresh and cooling without being over-the-top and reminding me of Vicks or something. The black tea is smooth but not super flavorful, mostly just adding a bit of body and hints of wood.

Would consider ordering this, maybe. I set aside one serving for my DIY advent calendar, because I don’t have a similar tea and I think I’ll enjoy having this in December. So we’ll see how I feel about it then!

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I think this one is currently winning for me in terms of pumpkin spice teas.

It has a great balance of desserty and pumpkin-y combined with spices that are strong enough to make it a chai – the cardamom in particular stands out nicely. And it’s a rooibos base, so it’s caffeine free, plus the rooibos just goes so well with the flavors.

Yep, definitely winning. I went to order a tin of this and they’re out of stock, boooo! Onto the restock notification list I go. :P

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This is a nice enough apple & cinnamon herbal blend. The apple tastes fairly similar to apple cider, and the cinnamon tastes like the spice as opposed to candy. The green rooibos also adds an oat-y flavor, making it taste a bit like apple cinnamon oatmeal. I do wish the apple were a bit stronger here, I feel like the cinnamon is the stronger of the two, and that makes it taste more like some kind of coffee cake or crumble, rather than apple cider.

But still, quite nice as an apple cinnamon dessert tisane. I would consider ordering this one if I didn’t already have several new apple teas from Simpson & Vail. :P

Now we’re talking. A little fruity, a little coppery, a little woody, and strong enough to jump out of the tumbler on its own. (1 1/2 teaspoons to 16 oz.) Added a little milk to get the ranks back in order and it was absolutely delicious.

Those of you who recall terriharplady’s Steepster posts know she often used musical adjectives to characterize a tea. Normally, I gravitate to baritones and basses—dark and deep. Braveheart is a brassy second tenor with lungs like Pavarotti.

(Oh, jeepers…that just completely derailed my train of thought…off to go find a tea that tastes like Rod Stewart or Joe Bonamassa….)

I was craving white tea last night — which, for those of you know know me, was absolutely out of character. After much pawing and rumpling, I found this forgotten pouch (shame on me). Bai mu dan leaves with just a teeny whisper of strawberry. It’s one of those teas that beg you to drink it slowly and calmly. (OK, maybe I was craving the slow and calm more than I was the white tea. But it worked.)

White tea never makes my shopping list due to my strong preferences for the strong black stuff. However, the search for the perfect strawberry tea continues, so when we saw a sample pack of Strawberry White, I caved and brought it home.

Usually, my first white tea internal comment is “where’s the tea?” But in this case, I picked up on faintly grassy, not-quite-flowery tasting whiffs, and the strawberry shards provided delicate hints of the real thing, not candy flavor.

I even ventured into a second steep and tossed in a couple extra freeze-dried strawberry slices of my own. The whiffs have petered out to skiffs and wisps, but both the leaf and the fruit are still detectible, even to my barbarian palate.

Definitely too refined for me to crave on a frequent basis, but when there’s a little time to be thoughtful about what I’m drinking, this will be a nice break from heavier fall and winter fare.

For a Day Out (we get them rarely, so it deserves capitalization), we did a run to Northwest Arkansas yesterday. Highway 12 slithers like a snake through tree tunnels for miles until you find an off-road that leads to War Eagle Mill, a working flour mill with folksy gifts and coarse ground cornmeal for sale. The way back always includes a detour to a picnic area on Beaver Lake—on a Tuesday, it was deliciously silent. We watched minnows do laps around the dock and a bald eagle do laps around the lake.

Um…tea. Oh, yeah.

Eventually, you have to drive back into civilization with some upscale big-city shopping venues, including Savoy Tea. We hadn’t been in the shop since before the plague, and it’s been streamlined—instead of a tea parlor vibe with curlicues and frills, it’s leaner and cleaner and looks like a tea lab.

However, the Great Wall of Tea is just as much fun as it ever was with little sample sniffy jars and we brought home a nice little cache, including these dragon balls, beautiful little dark-and-gold orbs.

The scent of the steeped cup this morning was so promising I expected eye-rolling pleasure, but due to operator error (I over-watered and under-balled), the melba toast flavor I expected was only barely detectible, even though the texture was nice and satiny on the tongue. Eh, there’s always tomorrow!

Liking this better with every cup—just gotta make sure you get a little orange peel in each spoonful of dry leaf to enjoy the full orange-cinnamon effect. I have yet to add milk, but I’m thinking that could only improve the frosting-ness.

One of our favorite weekend goodies has always been those Pillsbury frosted orange rolls in a can. Savoy has captured the scent perfectly and the flavor pretty doggone close. This morning’s cup was a little heavy on the cinnamon, but I think it was sloppy scooping on my part—I didn’t snag much orange peel in the spoon.

The addition of milk turns this into a slightly less sweet take on caramel corn minus the corniness, although the butter flavor is very mildly salty, which fits the theme. Tasty and different!

The Carthage, Missouri square is about fifteen minutes from my front door and is an anomaly in this part of the world—a real working town square with more storefronts open than closed; lots of antique shops and art emporiums, an old fashioned honest-to-pete hardware store, and The Pie Safe. Pie. Oh, such pie.

And also at the PIe Safe…a display shelf with a small assortment of teas from Savoy Tea, a nice little shop in northwest Arkansas. Husband surprised me after a strength-sapping workweek with a chicken pot pie, a mini pecan tart, and a tin of Caramel Buttercup. Doesn’t that sound cheerful?

Caramel Buttercup lives up to its name! I’m not sure what kind of black base they used—keemun or congou? I’ll have to pay more attention to that next cup. The caramel is mild but not artificial, and it’s the butteriest butter flavor I think I’ve ever had in a tea. I kept thinking I needed to wipe my mouth with a napkin.

If I were at the actual Savoy storefront, I might have chosen something different for myself, but it’s a fresh and fun new tin to play with. Next cup, with milk!

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Mastress Alita’s Sipdown Challenge (October) – “A pumpkin tea”

So I ordered a few samples from Savoy, and this was one of them. I think it was Teas by Dani who was talking about them on YouTube? She loves their Squash Buckling Chai, and of course I had to order a sample since it’s the perfect time of year for it… This and two other season-appropriate teas came along for the ride. :P

Anyway, this tea smells so good in the bag. It’s sweet, spicy, creamy – like a pumpkin roll or some other pumpkin confection. Makes sense given the name. However, it’s just not great steeped up for some reason. The flavoring is nice, but it’s not strong enough IMO, and the base tea has an odd musty wood flavor to it. So if I steep it normally I get a somewhat weak tea, but overleafing doesn’t really help because that musty flavor gets stronger as well as the pumpkin. I guess I could try overleafing combined with a short steep? But that just feels too high-maintenance for me, especially for a tea I would probably only drink during the fall.

So still on the lookout for a pumpkin spice tea that I like enough to keep in my cupboard. :P

From my Sips By box for November. Also a sipdown.

This tea smells so amazing in the pouch, creamy and pumpkin-y and luscious. I was so excited for it! Even steeped up, it smelled delicious. I didn’t approve of the mini white chocolate chips, but I was willing to forgive.

Sadly, it’s quite bland. For this second mug, I overleafed by quite a bit in an attempt to get more flavor. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to help much. There’s some very mild spicing, mostly clove and a bit of nutmeg. There’s also a tiny bit of cream in the background. But mostly it tastes like a musty base tea. And my first cup, with a normal (for me) amount of leaf, tasted like mildly spiced water.

So disappointing after the lovely smell… Ah well, it joins the ranks of many other underwhelming pumpkin spice teas.