So here’s the thing – I don’t really love earl greys, though they’re growing on me, but I do love vanilla. When I was placing my Cup of Té order, not a lot of the teas appealed to me but I noticed they had both this tea and a cream of earl grey aka a vanilla earl grey. I was intrigued and thought since this had vanilla bean, perhaps it would lean more to vanilla. If it didn’t, I figured I could use it as a base for London Fogs which you add vanilla to anyways.
Roswell Strange got a sample of this tea in a TTB and mentioned it not being very vanilla-y which had me putting off trying it because the vanilla bean was the whole appeal of this tea to me. Then September Sipdown happened and one of the prompts was to do something unique with a tea you don’t like. I have a unique recipe that uses earl grey teas (the hot chocolate ive made several times before) so I figured I could drink this on that day for that prompt. However, I figured I should probably actually try the tea to determine I actually don’t like it.
So, needless to say, I didn’t expect to like this when I started drinking it and while it’s an okay enough earl grey, I’m not really a fan. It’s too much bergamot and not enough vanilla for me to drink this plain. It also has an astringent/metallic note which I think is from bergamot oil. This is pretty much what I expected following Ros’s tasting note and similar to her findings, there isn’t much vanilla here.
BLERG-amot