Teabloom

knittingopera Swap Advent Calendar 2025 – Day 3
Theme: A recent discovery
Song: There Is No Rose Of Swych Vertu by Mediaeval Baebes

Not gonna lie, was not excited to see this one. I don’t think I’ve ever had a flowering tea that I thought tasted very good, and it doesn’t help that you have to steep it for a long time to get it to fully bloom. But oof… this tastes like soap to me. I assumed it would be a jasmine green tea, but this is definitely flavored with some kind of strong floral, and it mentions fruit too in the description looks like. Very, very perfumey sort of chemical floral taste. :|

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=5YybkDkcTV0&si=LH-HQ3ddETcYDOlK
https://www.instagram.com/p/DR0kEGTj1ia

TTB! This was beautiful when it bloomed in the water, though I was unsure if I would enjoy the flavor. I’m happy to say that the flavor was quite nice as well! It also made a super strong resteep. It’s very floral, but the flavor is actually best if you allow it to sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours to mellow. And I kept the initial steep time relatively short as well, knowing my preferences with floral flavors. I didn’t have time to finish my cup before leaving on my three week long trip, so I put the cup in the freezer and enjoyed a lovely tea popsicle yesterday!

As a housewarming gift, Kiki gave me a nice glass teapot from HomeGoods that included a few flowering teas. Spring snuck (do you say sneaked or snuck?) in this weekend, so why not give one of them a try. Gosh, I don’t think I’ve had one for 12 years, since my dad sent me an awesome Numi flowering tea giftbox.

Directions say to brew with boiling water for 5-10 minutes but I can’t bring myself to do so, recalling how the Numi balls would become bitter. So 185F, enough to get the ball to unfurl. The flower tower isn’t standing upright; it’s definitely a leaner.

The tea itself is drinkable, mostly mineral with light cooked green bean taste and a hint of butter. It is so heavily perfumed with jasmine and maybe rose?, though, that I’d only be comfortable serving this to a matronly patron of Crabtree & Evelyn. A little peach hides behind that gigantic perfumed schnoz.

For me, it’s a fair complement to the sunny, windows-open day but not something I would buy. Much too strong and artificial.

It’s a delightful, light-on-the-tongue tea with a slight natural sweetness to it that avoids any cloying tendency—a big must for me. The package recommended a 2-3 minute steep time, but I went cough wild and brewed it for a full 3 minutes and 30 seconds. I’ll likely test that at 4 next time.

My first experience of flowering teas, and a happy one, I’m pleased to report! My brother and his wife bought me a gift set from Teabloom for my birthday, which contained a tube of twelve different fruit flavoured green teas. Now, while fruit teas are something I’ll happily drink, they don’t rate at the top end of my favourite blends. Green teas – I’m still exploring! Still, the concept of flowering teas has always intrigued me and I’ve been excited about trying out these (not to mention the teapot and teapot warmer that came with them)!

I chose the Pomegrante one first and I’m more than pleasantly surprised. This tastes unbelievably fruity. It’s juicy and flavoursome, rather than the watered down artificial-ness I get from a lot of the fruit teas in my cupboard. I was halfway down my cup before I even remembered this is a green tea! There is a grassy edge to this, but the fruitiness dominates by far. I hope I enjoy the other teas in the tube as much as this one.

Good morning!!

For Christmas my family gave me some clear mugs and a set of blooming teas in all sorts of flavors. I decided to give the melon tea a try first. Oh. My. Gosh.

The tea opens up with green on bottom with a maroon flower(almost reminded me of a raspberry) in the middle and an arch of delicate white flowers above it. It was gorgeous. The ball stayed together and didn’t lose any petals or leaves.

The flavor of the tea was fantastic. With my experience, blooming teas always end up on the bitter side. There was no bitterness with this one. The melon flavor was very light and didn’t have any artificial taste to it at all. The green tea was very light in this but had soft notes of sugar snap peas and honey.

I got two good steeps out of this little ball. For the first steep I used water at 205 F and the second steep at 185 F. The second steep showed off the green tea a bit more.