Savoy Tea Co

Informal inventory of my decaf stuff reveals I’m way overstocked on rooibos/chocolate and rooibos/vanilla blends. Not a problem; drinking up the inequity will hurt no feelings here.

This particular blend smells luscious. (Yankee Candle, are you listening?) Thick, rich chocolate orange. Double up on the teaspoons, drop in a few extra cocoa nibs, walk away for 10 minutes…dessert!

This isn’t currently on the Savoy Tea website; it can’t have been that long since we were there…picked this up…uh, in September-ish?

It’s a nice blend of chocolate-orange; more orange than chocolate after a (recommended) monster steep time of 9 minutes. Rich and thick.

Savoy Pomegranate Grape Green

One thing I’ll say for this tea, it does smell grape-y. Like green grapes, very distinctively. Yeah, I know, the first ingredient in the name is Pomegranate, but that’s not really the flavor I get from it. To me, it
tastes a little like green tea and a lot like grapes.

A better tea snob than I might be able to distinguish the various dried fruits and elements. I’m nowhere near that discerning, but can say it’s a pleasant tea to start my day, mild and amiable. With pomegranates, red currents and raspberries on the ingredient list, I would expect this to be a bit tart. Instead, they blend together to give the whole thing an underlying sweetness.

It’s an unusual tea, not one I would choose to have every day. It isn’t that I OBJECT to it’s grape-y goodness. The flavor is amiable enough, but grapes don’t readily come to mind when I’m thinking of tea. There are times when this flavor is just not something I’m craving at teatime.

But by golly, if I’m in the mood for something grape-y, this is definitely my go to. It’s good hot or cold and stands alone just fine without any sweeter, an unusual quality in a fruity tea like this one.

I chatted with one of the owners at the Savoy Tea Co store about cold brewing and this came highly recommended. “It gets better the longer it brews,” he said. Since I like my teas cold brewed and am apt to leave the jar steeping in the fridge till I get around to drinking it, (which can sometimes be as long as a few days) this sounded like my kind of tea. I put a generous measure in a quart jar of water and tried it after a few hours. It smelled great, very tropical and fruity. Since I’m allergic to pineapple, it’s nice to have a tropical blend without this ingredient for a change.

This tea is very mango-ey. Enough to stand alone as a good, solid, fruity tea. I’m sure it would be great with coconut milk and sweetener (I doubt a splash of rum would hurt it any either), but it’s a tea that doesn’t need “help” to be good, which is the sort I’m most inclined to drink. All by itself this is pleasantly fruity and just the thing if you like mangoes (If you hate mangoes, maybe not so much.) Since the weather here is a bit wintry, I’ve taken a few cups of this cold brew out of the fridge and heated it in the microwave, and can say it’s quite good warm too.

There’s supposed to be rooibos in this one, but I’m not tasting it. I’m not sure I mind, though. The fact that a blend contains rooibos and I can taste ANYTHING ELSE seems a tentative step in the right direction… :)

Good stuff, especially for those of us in the middle of the country experiencing winter and beginning to tire of cold weather. It’s making me dream of tropical vacations.

I think Jamaica in the moonlight. . .

I decided to try this on Christmas day. It tastes. . .well. . . it tastes like. . . Rooibos. . .sigh. And maybe it should but I’m growing bored with rooibos blends. Regardless of how they are made, they all seem to be tasting more or less the same to me lately. I think the roibos tends to overpower every ingredient added.

This has vanilla, almond, and walnut added, but all I seem to notice is rooibos. So I tried it with coconut milk and sweetener and it’s a lovely dessert tea . . . Just like all the other rooibos combinations.

I want to say this tastes like cookies but it doesn’t. It tastes like rooibos and vanilla. I’m not catching any of the almond or walnut at all. It’s nice as a dessert tea and amiable enough if you like rooibos and don’t mind pouring it through a coffee filter to get all the tiny bits out of it. As far as cookies, though, I think they missed the mark.

This is a quirky, odd duck of a black/rooibos blend. But oddly, the apple fits with the rooibos which fits with the chocolate; it just leaves you a little pleasantly puzzled. Like those days when you discover a plaid jacket that doesn’t exactly not go with some pinstriped pants and you decide to take a fashion risk and then wonder all day if they really match or not. (Or maybe that’s just me :)

Rooibos fans will like this, I think.

More than really needed for one cup, but not enough for two…aw, heck, let’s just throw it all in and see what happens.

Figured an attitude like that would get me a bitter cup of citrus flavored mud, but with a 4 minute steep, we’ve got a nice dark toasty oolong with pleasant “show me your citrus peels” flavor. Sheldon would approve, even if it isn’t tangerine.

Work buddy surprised me with half a sample packet of this. She says it takes a little sugar well, but I had it straight.

The orange flavor trumps the oolong personality, but it’s pleasant stuff. Nice pithy-rindy-peely orange flavor, not tart or fakey.

Drinking this today, cold brewed from the fridge with nothing added. It is just awesome this way. I liked it well enough warm, but cold…well, it looks like I’ve found a new favorite. No temptation to add anything. It is pleasant, refreshing, just wonderful.

Unless you hate cardamom. Not a problem for me. I love cardamom, oranges, spices, everything in it. MMMMMM.

I used to do a lot of whole grain baking. The flour I used featured a recipe on the label for orange cardamom cookies. It’s one of those recipes I always intended to try and never got around to but it sounded good. I always imagined it would taste like . . . Well . . . Like this tea.

This is good. Nice mild orange flavor with no nasty acidity, pleasant cardamom, and a hint of vanilla. My only complaint is I am strongly tempted to add cream and sweetener, cause I know they’d be awesome.

I thought this was a new-to-me sample from Michelle. Evidently, so says my tealog, I tried this 11 years ago. Good grief. I can’t even remember everything I’ve done since breakfast.

However, since breakfast, I do know I have enjoyed another tumbler of this authentically chocolate tea and I’m loving it. Real cacao shells, and while I’m not exactly picking up vanilla separately, it makes the blend sweet and creamy enough to cover that whang-y mate flavor that I’m not enamored with.

The fact that this blend has stayed in the Savoy lineup is further evidence of its tastiness. On my short list next time we visit the storefront!

Sipdown, easy steep, pleasantly chocolatey—-reminds me of a very “lite” chocolate Zinger. Mate’, do your stuff—-the to-do list has already beaten me today and my eyes aren’t even open.

The chocolate-vanilla-mate balance is even; it’s pleasantly drinkable without additional milk or sugar, but if you’re hoping for the sugar buzz of a buttercream truffle or a glop of Pillsbury fudge frosting … not quite.

Eat an almond, then go try something flavored with almond extract. They’re both nice, but they aren’t the same. The scent of this tea is kind of a parallel to this phenomenon. I like pistachio nuts and I like this extract but it’s a different animal, more like someone’s fantasy of what pistachio ought to taste like than the real deal.

This tea has a lovely scent, but no real flavor. It would make a lovely bubble bath or extract for cookies (where all that sugar would no doubt “bring out” the flavor), but I take my tea without cream or sugar most of the time and expect it to stand on it’s own. It does not. As a stand alone tea, it lacks something and doesn’t really meet my standards. I love the fragrance that comes out of the bag when I open it, but this tea always disappoints me.

Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

Now if you like a dessert tea with cream and sugar, you’re in luck. These “bring out” the flavor. Indeed, I’ll likely be finishing this batch that way, and will no doubt enjoy every drop. However, I probably won’t be buying it again because I cannot afford the calories necessary to make this tea worth my time.

Your mileage may vary. J

Cheating is such an ugly word, so let’s just say we caught Savoy in an act of creative relabeling. You know how when you shuffle the basket of half-packets just so, sometimes one bubbles up to the top you haven’t seen for a while? And when it bubbles right next to the one labeled “Misty Morning” and you notice the ingredient lists are identical, well…

Not that it’s an issue with something this tasty. Orange, almond, peppercorns, a little sweet vanilla flavoring. It’s all good, no matter what’s on the package.

After a lovely week of downtime, I’m wrestling with a case of post-holiday, here-comes-January-and-taxes, darn-I’ve-gotta-take-down-the-tree, my-favorite-jeans-don’t-fit blues. Seasonal depression breathing down my neck like cold orc shadows.

In an attempt to keep from drowning my glums in the last of the Christmas candy in one gnarf, I made myself the tastiest tea I currently have to hand. I haven’t had marzipan in years, but this is what I think it tasted like. The orange-almond-vanilla combo in this is so sweet and confectionary, it’s a good dessert substitute.

A sample-sized packet was not enough of this!

Manomanomanoman, oh, man…I wish I had Smell-O-Net so you could get a whiff of this, dry. The smooth, marzipanny almond is so rich it’ll make your eyes roll back in your head. I want a candle that smells like this. I want pillows that smell like this.

The first fresh cup was fabulous—tasted every bit as good at it smelled. Orange and almond predominate, with the rest of the godies serving as backup singers (doo-wop!)

Second steep is still smooth; more almond, less orange, and oh, wow—there’s some pretty decent green tea under there!

Unfortunately, this isn’t on the Savoy website—must have been an in-store holiday-only treat. Locals, grab it while you can ;)

The problem with pearl teas is that you never come out with the right number at the end of the packet. So I popped in a Mandala Black Pearl and sailed the door with a cup of co-smoke-coa.

Don’t you hate it when you finally get a perfect cup of a sample tea that’s been elusive and hard to get right…and you discover you’re at the end of the sample?

The sweet spot was hit this morning…longer and stronger is better with this; the cocoa hints became cocoa statements at 5 minutes +. One more cup’s worth before the pouch is empty. Hope I do that one properly.

The pace at work the next three days promises to vacillate between screaminess and utter wild-eyed hysteria, so we’re at least starting the morning with a bit of calm and elegance before I start pulling my hair out in panic-induced wads.

This is sweet and subtle and cocoa-y. Stress subtle. Very good, but not for a morning caffeine jolt. Better for afternoon cookies, or for you gentle non-black-tea subtle people out there.

Phooey. Lost a whole rambly note on this one.

In short, it’s so light in color, even after 4-5 minutes, you wonder if there’s been mal-steep-function.

Conclusion: this is just supposed to be delicate. I don’t think I have a delicate or refined bone in my body; which may be why it puzzles me. (I expect black teas to wear ten-pound Doc Martens.)

My first dragon pearls! Savoy is fast becoming one of my favorite walk-in-the-door tea sources. For a cheapskate like me, they’re a leetle pricey, but no shipping/handling and no waiting. (That’s the walk-out-the door advantage.)

Dropped two of these little gems, about the size of your pinky finger tip, into a big clear mug, added the recommended 8 oz. water, and … at first, not much. Was a little worried about impending tea fail, even after four minutes, because the water seemed awfully pale for a Yunnan.

Not to worry. I ran it through a little tea strainer into a smaller, opaque cup, which showed a little more color—bronze. Flavor was pleasantly surprising. A little savory and brothy and yep! cocoa as advertised.

Off to try a second steep. (Do dragon balls bounce back? ;)

An appropriate sipdown after a damp, raw, wind-cutting-right-through-your-jeans afternoon running the last gift shopping errands. Was hunting for a classic children’s book for a friend who’s a new granddad (in other words, a package full of bonding time). But mercy—which one? One Fish, Two Fish? Goodnight Moon? Little Critter? The Runaway Bunny? A Fly Went By? Between overthinking a simple purchase and wistful nostalgia for a cuddly toddler to read aloud to, I’m now mentally and emotionally wrung dry :)

Savoy still carries this…a black tea counterpart to CS Candy Cane Lane. Even though I was down to the dregs of the packet, there’s still plenty of vanilla-minty goodness for one last cup.

Woke up with a crazy craving for this…it had bubbled up to the top of my half-drunk-up basket when I was rummaging yesterday. Vanilla mint. It still doesn’t make me think of candy canes, but it’s sweet and perky. (This morning I am neither of those…must do it artificially!)