17303 Tasting Notes
Sipdown (616)!
Finished with just a small bit of milk. I feel like I have to up my rating on this one; it was just simply so good. Mild bergamot, and creamy, sweet raspberry notes. Every time I drank this one I simply LOVED it.
Serious Raspberry Danish vibes.
Sipdown (617)!
Finished this one off iced; two of the sachets steeped together for seven minutes. Even after such a long steep time I still just could NOT get this to taste flavourful or produce a striking blue colour (like it should have been able to, because of the butterfly flower). Instead it was vaguely the colour of anime pool water and tasted like the sort of lemon infused water you might get at a nicer sort of restaurant.
BORING.
Another DT blend that I’m sort of just ready to finish off.
This cup wasn’t bad; but I know that’s because I had a lot of counter measures in place to keep it more in check – underleafed, understeeped, and lower than normal temperature for steeping. Basically, all the things to keep the flavour from FULLY coming out. Makes for a more black currant oriented cup, and less of a stevia sugar bomb.
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk5Dwg5zm2U&index=3&list=WL
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
Drank on the way in to work yesterday;
I have a couple sachets of this lying around still so I grabbed one of those for my commute tea since I was running short on time and they were easily accessible. It also works out well because that puts me really close to a sipdown and it’s a pretty seasonally appropriate flavour.
This would have been a really nice chai profile; lots of cinnamon and cardamom with well balanced ginger notes and an interesting twist from the vanilla and sarsaparilla. However, it finishes with a really licorice root heavy note and that’s just… not my thing. For a couple sips, I even got flashbacks of the strong, strong levels of licorice root in Choconut Oolong (also from DT, years back). More vanilla please, less licorice root!!
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_efYhYU2A&list=WL&index=3
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
I think this is my first time cold brewing this tea!?
I was a little scared about what it might taste like – I mean it does have Lapsang in it and I struggle a little bit to see that as a flavoured geared towards being served cold. However, it was actually really bloody tasty, and also quite interesting as a combination of flavours. It’s actually been a long while since I last had this tea, so in some ways it was a little bit like rediscovering it all over again. Smooth, full bodied profile though with dominant notes of wet pine wood, petrichor, perfectly ripe cherries, and smoke. It all comes together to create this sort of imagery of a log cabin surrounded by cherry trees; smoke billowing out of the fireplace, and heavy rain outdoors.
For me, at least, that’s a very relaxing scenario to imagine. I mean, I find a borderline extreme level of peace in that kind of imagery. So, drinking a mix of flavours that evokes it!? YES PLEASE. Sign me right the fuck up. Of course, mind vanilla undertones to the profile are also a big win for me, and the light note of honey from the base tea.
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvDY9oUCv_Q&list=WL&index=2
Sipdown (618)…
Well, I’m pretty sad to see this blend finished off – but at the same time, any tea that I don’t have to move across the country is a win right now.
I do think this was my least favourite experience with this tea; though that’s not to say it was a bad cup. I just thought that this was the least cola tasting cup, and the cherry read as a little bit borderline medicinal to me. However, I still got a beautiful, creamy vanilla note and hints of sarsaparilla that I found delicious. A minute shorter of a steep time, and I think this would have been perfect. I just drew out the notes of the cherry too much and it’s distracting from the other flavours…
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xENutxPNSO8&list=WL&index=3
So, it turns out all I had to do to find a home in Montreal was complain on the internet about it – not even 24 hours after writing up my tasting note ranting about how hard of a time I was having apartment hunting I had managed to find and secure a place to live!
So, now I just have to start packing everything up and shipping it out to Montreal; I have a friend/coworker who has offered to hold onto stuff for me until my move in a month so I’m just going to slowly start sending stuff her way up until “Moving Day”. Now I get to deal with a whole new kind of anxiety; transporting my tea collection across the country through the mail. At least I found somewhere totally furnished, so I don’t have to worry about moving furniture…
(Can’t afford to have it professionally moved; mailing is the next best option since I don’t drive, and therefore can’t transport it myself that way)
Anyway; I drank this one a few days ago – and I swear something about my sense of smell and palate were broken that day because the dry leaf of this tea just smelled strongly and distinctly of mint chocolate chip ice cream. How weird and abstract is that!? At least, steeped up, it wasn’t as weird and wacky. I mean, I still swear that the tea had mint notes to it – but otherwise it was mostly very nutty with strong alfalfa hay notes and a bit of a “bluntness”/dull quality to the body. Just not a lot of bright or sweet characteristics.
Still decently enjoyable, though.
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgEaJw1wEB0&list=WL&index=2
Moving the teas was not scary. It was the teaware that had me super unsettled.
Did you have any breakages?
Thankfully not but I wrapped everything in bubble wrap. Probably excessively. I also put on a bunch of fragile stickers and kept the mugs tightly packed in smaller boxes.
Well, I guess I can’t claim that I had an unproductive day anymore since I literally just powered through over twenty tasting notes that I had backlogged from the week…
Phew; that took so long. It feels good to be starting fresh, though.
This was a cup that I had at work a few days ago; I found it less tasty than the first time I had it. It was definitely a little bit astringent and really woody tasting, and the combo made me feel a little bit like I kept licking a block of wood in between drinking cups of nutty, malty oolong tea with undertones of plum. Would have been nice, if it weren’t for that “wood licking” imagery…
Yum, I’ll have to write this one down to try at some point.