17596 Tasting Notes
Early morning cuppa from last weekend! I’m honestly just continuing to really enjoy this Earl Grey – and it’s weird to me because that’s usually not a type of tea I’m into but something about this one is just really good. I wish I understood why; I’m sure it has to do with more than just the fact I enjoy the coffee leaf base. It’s something with whatever the bergamot Wize Monkey is using is – it’s just very nice.
Cold Brew Sipdown (593)!
Feels good to have finished this tea off – I feel like I really worked for this sipdown! Unfortunately, this tea and I never really completely “clicked”. I just find it too tart and sour for any type of “cream” profile (other than sour cream, of course – but that doesn’t seem to have been what the intent was). It’s also not really plum-y. However, if you ignore everything about what the tea should have tasted like, it’s actually a pretty nice cold brew for something fruity on a rooibos base.
Sweet, sweet floral honey notes with just a hint of a delightful pepperyness on the tip of my tongue in the finish. Basically a wildflower honey note? Such a beautiful, natural tasting tea – and I love how calming it is in terms of flavour while still having that mental boost because it’s on a mate base. One of the rare teas that lets me both have my calm and peaceful intro to the morning while still getting the lift I often need.
Petition to bring this tea back.
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 and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
AQ2T put the lime in the toasted coconut, and I steeped it all up.
(Just relieved that after not having this for a while it still tastes crazy bonkers good, and the coconut hasn’t gone funky at all yet – still have time to enjoy this one!)
Midweek post-work Gong Fu session!
This is one of those teas that is perfect for an evening Gong Fu session because it’s technically herbal and caffeine free, but I still get the “feeling” of drinking tea and the ritual of brewing Gong Fu without the caffeine boost.
As always, the tea was very sweet and floral – even from the first infusion. I only steeped like six infusions because it was late and I needed to get a good rest for the busy day ahead of me – but the profile really didn’t change much at all throughout the infusions, aside from getting a smidge less sweet over time. Still tasted like drinking a mix of elderflower and honeysuckle dipped in sugar water. Mmm!
Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/BwA_c77lFG1/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAkvb2Rhces
Sipdown (594)!
Finished off this DT Oldie as an iced latte – and it was a sad moment; this is definitely one of the better pumpkin teas that DT has done, IMO. The iced latte was amazing though; definitely still rich and sweet but with a denseness to it and a bit of malt. It’s kind of a pumpkin molasses flavour, and I find it pretty similar to a molasses heavy/chewier sorta ginger snap cookie? When I was like three or four years old, my mom used to drop me off at a family friend’s farm and their older daughter would babysit me. I don’t really remember much of it – I mean, I was four. Just sort of walking around and looking at horses, these horrifying “bedtime” stories she would make up about a psychotic rooster, and that she made the BEST gingersnap cookies. I mean, I’m sure I’m glorifying them a little bit in my head – but I do kind of feel like even today I’ve never tasted a ginger snap better than the molasses-y, dark ones she used to make. This iced latte reminded me of lot of my memory of those cookies…
Sad, sad sipdown.
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 and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
a psychotic rooster
I suppose the cookies made up for the trauma of the rooster stories. :)
Like, I’m sure that mentally I’m embellishing the stores a little or misremembering/understanding since I was quite young – but I do remember this rooster doing things like tricking the farmers into eating his brothers/sisters when they upset him. Which was sorta scaring as a small, animal loving child (who then later became a vegetarian).
wow! I can totally see how these stories would have been terrifying to a kid, especially one who loved animals. Maybe they contributed to you later becoming a vegetarian too.
Actually, reflecting on it now I feel like the moral was supposed to be “Don’t pick on/bully your siblings because there are consequences to your actions” but as a four year old that was DEFINITELY not my take away.
:(
Somehow “psychotic rooster” just makes me think of these awful self published books I have to catalog at work (the “Ross the Rooser” books) just because the author is “local”… but that doesn’t make the books good. Oh, at all. The art looks like colored pencil and the stories are just… so bad. Once my supervisor and myself found 5+ errors on the cover. They are getting worse and worse… I think the last one I had the farmer and rooster went from Idaho to Australia for some crazy reason, with one of the most uncomfortable drawings of Aboriginals I’d ever seen…
Though the title sounds awful, I highly suggest the children’s book “We Don’t Eat Our Classmates” by Ryan T. Higgins. That ended up on my cart to catalog the other day and I died laughing; it was the sort of book I couldn’t just catalog and put back on the cart, I had to read it and laughed through the whole thing. Is it dark humor? Yes, but it is also charming and funny.
Tried to Grandpa brew one of these little compressed cakes/pillows of oolong yesterday while I was crunching some numbers – I forgot just how small the majority of the leaves in this cake are though, and how light they are so I kept getting these tiny leaves or broken leaf fragments floating on the surface of the mug I was using which was annoying the drink from. I didn’t want to be literally drinking the tea leaves…
It also got pretty bitter pretty quickly, and topping up with fresh water wasn’t really seeming it fix that problem – so it just made for a bitter mug of very floral and very green oolong. Not the best experience at all. Some teas just don’t work Grandpa style though.
Iced tea with milk! Reminded me a little bit of Dairy Queen’s Cotton Candy blizzard flavour that they bring back most summers – but less sweet. That’s a good comparison, for the record – especially the less sweet part. Really enjoyed this one!
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 and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
Another tea that is being retired – but only in Canada, this will continue to be sold in the US/Online. This cup was iced, and with a pump and a half of agave because I found it had come out pretty bitter tasting, and very pithy. With the agave it was much better; a little bit more like a “Ready to Drink” style lemon black tea, but very natural lemon.
I can’t wax poetic about all the teas being retired; it’s just not realistic. I didn’t love them all. This is one of those ones that I just never personally really loved; and I’ve been saying for probably years now that DT simply has too many lemon teas so I’m actually kind of happy to see some of them gone now. There are definitely positives to keeping it in the US in my opinion; it’s modelled after Southern Style Sweet Tea/Lemon Iced Tea and that’s a crazy popular flavour in the US so there’s definitely a bigger market for the tea there. I also just feel like there aren’t a ton of fruity black teas right now, so until there are more I think not completely retiring this one is a good call.
I’m sorry for the people out there who were really into this one – it sucks when you lose a favourite. But yeah, this one didn’t phase me.
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 and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
I’ve been eyeing up this maple tea ever since CS announced/released it – and thankfully one of my coworkers went out and bought some before I had a chance to, otherwise I would have gone and got some for myself and wound up with 50g of a tea I just am not really into. Like, the dry leaf smelled good – natural maple and a little bit woody/malty. I just found the steeped profile very underwhelming. I know this is natural maple/not really flavoured at all so I didn’t expect anything overly intense – but the maple was so weak/light and not particularly sweet at all. I mean, the black tea base they’ve mixed it with is quite nice: woody, malty and a little bit of a honey taste. However, since the maple didn’t really bring much to the table for me I might as well have just sought out the base itself and drunk that instead…
But now I know, and at least I didn’t blind buy 50g of it.
