This is another free sample I received with a fairly recent What-Cha order. Apparently, this was meant to replace the previous English breakfast blend. A blend of African and Asian black teas, this particular blend is comprised of 30% Yunnan Black Gold, 30% Vietnam Wild Boar, 30% Kenya FOP, and 10% Rwanda FOP.
I prepared this tea Western style. I steeped 3 grams of loose tea leaves in 8 ounces of 203 F water for 5 minutes. I did not attempt additional infusions.
Prior to infusion, I noted that the dry leaves emitted malty, woody, and slightly chocolaty aromas. After infusion, the copper tea liquor produced more clearly defined scents of chocolate, malt, wood, brown sugar, and sorghum molasses. In the mouth, I detected a smooth blend of wood, brown sugar, chocolate, sorghum molasses, earth, leather, toast, roasted nut, malt, and mild spice notes. The finish was particularly smooth, pleasant, and expressive, offering a lingering malty sweetness coupled with a hint of astringency.
Truth be told, this was an enjoyable and surprisingly refined English breakfast blend. Unfortunately, I am at a point where I tend to associate English breakfast teas with earthier, woodier, more leathery flavors and more pronounced bitterness and astringency. As a matter of fact, I associate English breakfast teas with these qualities so much that I now actively look for them. With that in mind, I found this blend to be tasty, but I also found it to be a bit tame. Still, I think those who are looking for a smooth, flavorful breakfast tea could do far worse than checking out this one.
Flavors: Brown Sugar, Chocolate, Earth, Leather, Malt, Molasses, Roasted Nuts, Spices, Toast, Wood
Preparation
People who liked this
Comments
I got it for the terroirs he used. I used to like English Breakfast with cream and sugar, but my health nut tendencies have pushed me towards pure tea. It turned out nicely anyway. Whenever I make it, I always hope to replicate the way I had it in Egypt for the memories. I was at the Mena House Hotel looking at the Great Pyramid of Khufu through glass and wooden bead curtains. I think it was the scenery and the brown sugar cubes that made the tea taste so good.
I’m totally showing off at this point, but here’s what I’m talking about:
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/05/c8/fb/14/mena-house-hotel.jpg
The Mena House is awesome. And tea, very Egyptian.
Ever heard of it or been there, Evol?
Yes, I used to live Alexandria.
Sweet. I was an anthropology major before I decided to switch to Social Studies/History teacher and wanted to be an Egyptian Archaeologist. What brought you to Alexandria?
Work and life. As an aside, on the way to Abu Simbel, I met a fascinating group Egyptian Archaeologists from one of the universities in Chicago. A stroke of luck to be able to eavesdrop on them and converse about their studies in that particular context.
University of Chicago? I actually applied there for their programs. Got rejected, but went to MSU which I’m finishing up for senior year.
Possibly. I don’t recall. And yay you! Are you enjoying your studies?
For the most part :) Micro-econ and the history of Michigan were okay, but my social studies ed. focused class was a lot more enjoyable.
social studies ed. focused class
What themes were involved here?
This one is designed for the profession of teaching. Emphasis on teaching critical thinking above all else and making the content accessible to a diverse body of students, namely student with IEP’s and English Language Learners. The rest of it dialed on what the class as a whole was interested in for professional development and different styles of teaching. Some people excelled with lectures, other document based activities. I preferred the latter, though I don’t mind lectures too much.
The other portion was on teaching the cannon of history and social studies in an approachable way.
That sounds like a brilliant course. I’d like to take it myself. So, how does one teach critical thinking to a class, which includes students with various challenges, linguistic, cultural, cognitive, or otherwise ? Professional development is a fascinating topic as well. How many styles of teaching are there, and what are they? When you say document-based activities, is that to say research essays and such?
It is your intention to teach American high school students, right? Or am I dreaming this up?
Having an entire conversation on eastkyteaguy’s note lol.
I do want to teach American high school and middle school students, but my long term future goal is to be a community college professor. I’m up to teaching abroad if the opportunity arises and compensates well with my diabetes, but I think there is a larger need in this country.
Styles of teaching were more focused on in strategies of classroom management (think Jone’s Model) and our individual personalities in the class. We really focused more on the baselines of the best teacher, one that has fully developed senses of logos, ethos, and pathos. As in: a teacher who know’s their shit, is ethical, and has a quality that makes them human and connectable (i.e. personability). My professor totally appropriated them from Aristotle and we go back and forth nudging that fact in class. We mentioned “oh, he’s totally a lecturer” but did not categorize said teachers. We just started with personalities at work using the DISC test and the Big Five traits psyche test. DISC is Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Dominance is taking control of situations, arguments, etc, Influence is sociability, Steadiness is akin to harmony, and Conscientiousness perfectionism, logic, rules, facts, and so on. I ranked highest with Conscientiousness and Steadiness,a healthy fourth belonging to dominance, and a minimum to influence. I was not really a huge fan of the test because it was to binary. The categories at least had nuance. The Big Five, I think you might have heard of. Here’s my blog which gives you a good idea about the class. There’s a few things I need to clean up, but here it is. https://daylonthomas.edublogs.org/
Our class did not connect critical thinking with students with challenges explicitly (more implicit), but rather we were provided examples of how we would modify a curriculum or lesson for such a student. I’ve had the same question myself, and as a class we are still trying to answer it into this semester. I think that’s the question for a true teacher, really.
As for what we did do, lesson differentiation, or differentiating lessons enough to address different styles of learning was emphasized, and as for students with linguistic and some cognitive challenges, we were taught to simplify and not cookie cutter our lessons. We were encouraged to use concise and direct language with English Language Learners, and to use multiple forms of media outside of lecture and reading. I thought it was kinda ironic how often a lot of us referred back to primary source document reading, essay writing, debate, and lecture most of all for teaching, but we have another semester and a whole internship to go. Media literacy was a huge topic especially with the election ever present in our heads and in our classrooms-we approached by comparing and contrasting Eisenhower’s “I like Ike” to “Make America Great Again”, for example. It is also a primary source lesson, technically. No essay required. It was concocted by my class mate, but it was a stellar conversation.
The rest of the course was more focused on dealing with social studies and history content itself. The course assumes that if you teach history and the other social studies properly, then you will provide an intellectual environment to foster critical thinking. By encouraging your students to realize the limits of time, record, sourcing, and perspective, they should understand that history is a reconstructed story told with a purpose, a specific paradigm, and an intended audience. The same goes for maps which portray specific ideas, political campaigns, advertisements, legal arguments, etc.
I got it for the terroirs he used. I used to like English Breakfast with cream and sugar, but my health nut tendencies have pushed me towards pure tea. It turned out nicely anyway. Whenever I make it, I always hope to replicate the way I had it in Egypt for the memories. I was at the Mena House Hotel looking at the Great Pyramid of Khufu through glass and wooden bead curtains. I think it was the scenery and the brown sugar cubes that made the tea taste so good.
I’m totally showing off at this point, but here’s what I’m talking about:
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/05/c8/fb/14/mena-house-hotel.jpg
The Mena House is awesome. And tea, very Egyptian.
Ever heard of it or been there, Evol?
Yes, I used to live Alexandria.
Sweet. I was an anthropology major before I decided to switch to Social Studies/History teacher and wanted to be an Egyptian Archaeologist. What brought you to Alexandria?
Work and life. As an aside, on the way to Abu Simbel, I met a fascinating group Egyptian Archaeologists from one of the universities in Chicago. A stroke of luck to be able to eavesdrop on them and converse about their studies in that particular context.
University of Chicago? I actually applied there for their programs. Got rejected, but went to MSU which I’m finishing up for senior year.
Possibly. I don’t recall. And yay you! Are you enjoying your studies?
For the most part :) Micro-econ and the history of Michigan were okay, but my social studies ed. focused class was a lot more enjoyable.
social studies ed. focused class
What themes were involved here?
This one is designed for the profession of teaching. Emphasis on teaching critical thinking above all else and making the content accessible to a diverse body of students, namely student with IEP’s and English Language Learners. The rest of it dialed on what the class as a whole was interested in for professional development and different styles of teaching. Some people excelled with lectures, other document based activities. I preferred the latter, though I don’t mind lectures too much.
The other portion was on teaching the cannon of history and social studies in an approachable way.
That sounds like a brilliant course. I’d like to take it myself. So, how does one teach critical thinking to a class, which includes students with various challenges, linguistic, cultural, cognitive, or otherwise ? Professional development is a fascinating topic as well. How many styles of teaching are there, and what are they? When you say document-based activities, is that to say research essays and such?
It is your intention to teach American high school students, right? Or am I dreaming this up?
Having an entire conversation on eastkyteaguy’s note lol.
I do want to teach American high school and middle school students, but my long term future goal is to be a community college professor. I’m up to teaching abroad if the opportunity arises and compensates well with my diabetes, but I think there is a larger need in this country.
Styles of teaching were more focused on in strategies of classroom management (think Jone’s Model) and our individual personalities in the class. We really focused more on the baselines of the best teacher, one that has fully developed senses of logos, ethos, and pathos. As in: a teacher who know’s their shit, is ethical, and has a quality that makes them human and connectable (i.e. personability). My professor totally appropriated them from Aristotle and we go back and forth nudging that fact in class. We mentioned “oh, he’s totally a lecturer” but did not categorize said teachers. We just started with personalities at work using the DISC test and the Big Five traits psyche test. DISC is Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Dominance is taking control of situations, arguments, etc, Influence is sociability, Steadiness is akin to harmony, and Conscientiousness perfectionism, logic, rules, facts, and so on. I ranked highest with Conscientiousness and Steadiness,a healthy fourth belonging to dominance, and a minimum to influence. I was not really a huge fan of the test because it was to binary. The categories at least had nuance. The Big Five, I think you might have heard of. Here’s my blog which gives you a good idea about the class. There’s a few things I need to clean up, but here it is. https://daylonthomas.edublogs.org/
Our class did not connect critical thinking with students with challenges explicitly (more implicit), but rather we were provided examples of how we would modify a curriculum or lesson for such a student. I’ve had the same question myself, and as a class we are still trying to answer it into this semester. I think that’s the question for a true teacher, really.
As for what we did do, lesson differentiation, or differentiating lessons enough to address different styles of learning was emphasized, and as for students with linguistic and some cognitive challenges, we were taught to simplify and not cookie cutter our lessons. We were encouraged to use concise and direct language with English Language Learners, and to use multiple forms of media outside of lecture and reading. I thought it was kinda ironic how often a lot of us referred back to primary source document reading, essay writing, debate, and lecture most of all for teaching, but we have another semester and a whole internship to go. Media literacy was a huge topic especially with the election ever present in our heads and in our classrooms-we approached by comparing and contrasting Eisenhower’s “I like Ike” to “Make America Great Again”, for example. It is also a primary source lesson, technically. No essay required. It was concocted by my class mate, but it was a stellar conversation.
The rest of the course was more focused on dealing with social studies and history content itself. The course assumes that if you teach history and the other social studies properly, then you will provide an intellectual environment to foster critical thinking. By encouraging your students to realize the limits of time, record, sourcing, and perspective, they should understand that history is a reconstructed story told with a purpose, a specific paradigm, and an intended audience. The same goes for maps which portray specific ideas, political campaigns, advertisements, legal arguments, etc.