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We were in the Disney store yesterday to pick up our copy of Frozen and spotted these. I couldn’t resist! I love that their heads are the cups and the little spoons are just perfect.

Backlog from yesterday, coldbrew sipdown (381/359, due to replacing our Kokomo green yesterday).

I remembered seeing this on the wall the other day, so I wanted to try our little package of it before we headed to Davids and see if I needed to stock up.

It’s very good, exactly as advertised. A sweet strawberry with white tea. It’s tasty, but since I have a 100g of blazing strawberries to satisfy my coldbrew strawberry cravings, it’s not one I feel the need to stock up on. It’s just good, not amazing.

I am surprisingly not hating this blend. It’s rather good, actually! It tastes like thai curry with fresh coconut on top. I love that the coconut isn’t artificial tasting, it taste like the fresh coconut my Dad used to take apart with a hammer and nail when I was a kid. He’s also the one who taught me to have a deep, abiding love for thai green curry. I will enjoy finishing this cold brew if only for the memory it evokes.

Oh! And it’s a sipdown! (381/359)

Sipdown (382/365)

Holy cow I am sad to see this one go! I hadn’t had it before, and it is so good. Juicy and fruity and just plain good. I really taste the mango and as a coldbrew, this is wonderful.

Gonna have to pick up some more.

Rewarded myself with a coldbrew of this beauty. It’s sweet and minty and citrusy and wonderful.

Golden Peach from Tealish and Organic Guayusa from Butiki Teas

I want to both get rid of the straight guayusa and ramp up the caffeine in this coldbrew, so I used about half guayusa and half golden peach. I’ve been sleeping way, way too much lately, it’s starting to freak me out. For instance, last night we went to sleep around 11 and got up around 7:30. At 8:30 I went back to bed because I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and slept until 12:30.

So, I’m hoping a little jolt of caffeine will help me keep from crawling back into bed again.

However, I should have picked a stronger blend to mix the guayusa with. This is all guayusa, earthy and green, with just a hint of peach. I will not be mixing these again, nope.

Coldbrew sipdown (383/366)

I do not like this tea. I drank it down ages ago and then my wife came home with more >.< She doesn’t even like it. Ah well, second bag down, thank goodness.

It tastes like creamy cardamom >.< No thanks.

Sipdown (384/367)

Wifey and I decided to go through our stash of tea and put together a sipdown box to get rid of the stuff we never reach for anyway. Then, of course, we wanted to drink ALL THE TEA, so I opted to have the last cup of this hot. She decided to gongfu a lovely Golden Fleece from Verdant. I feel I chose poorly.

This tastes like those cheap truffles you see at Christmas with bad chocolate and too-sweet fruit filling. With some coffee thrown in because why the hell not?

Uuuuugh. This has way, way too much going on and none of it is good.

Coldbrew Sipdown! Yay!

I’m actually sad to see this go. It is tastier than expected and it’s keeping me from passing out in my seat. Yum. I added vanilla agave, and it’s a roasty toasty cinnamon vanilla treat, with the roasted mate just rounding out the flavor. Beautiful.

Arg. This tea is so good…when done right. I don’t know what the hell they were thinking at Davids when I got this to go. My wife was envious of my carry travel mug, so we stopped in to get one for her, as well as pick up three replacement infusers that somehow got lost in the move. Anyway, as I’ve always understood it in Davids store, when you buy a travel mug, the first fill is free. We have 2 timolinos, a carry travel mug, a kid’s spill-proof mug, a bodum travel press and three of the iced tea specials. And every other time, we’ve gotten a free cuppa. So today I asked for iced Grape Expectations, because the wifey didn’t want anything, and when the girl went to ring us up, she said she forgot to charge us for the tea to go. Ah….no? Am I wrong? Is the first cup not free? We had already started the debit transaction, so she let it go, which is good, because if I had paid for this, I would have demanded a refund.

So they open the new travel mug and offer to run it through the dishwasher. I appreciate the thought, but the mugs are handwash only (something they should know) and that would heat the metal inside, which would not at all help keep my iced tea iced. I declined and asked them to just rinse it. Then came the weird part. They must have filled the infuser with leaves, filled the mug with ice and then hot water, and then put the infuser and top on the mug.

Um…no?

I asked if it had agave in it and she said no, even though I had asked for agave. So she opened it back up and that’s when I saw the leaves. As I was trying to figure out why the leaves were there, she proceeded to put four pumps of agave in the mug, going for a fifth when I stopped her. I asked for “a fair bit” of agave, but that’s excessive.

I stepped out and immediately dumped out the leaves. My wife offered to go back in with the infuser and lid to ask them to rinse it out and I agreed. She came back and now there were a fair number of leaves on top of the lid, the part you drink out of. When I took a sip, I had cold agave water with the barest hint of grape.

So…yeah. This is not the right way to make this tea, I don’t recommend it XD.