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YAY OMG TEA.

It is the weekend and my Finum Brewing Basket came in the mail so there will be TEA at the workplace mmmhmmm. So excited about this development it’s freaky. Tea! Workplace! Yay! Because I’ve seriously missed my tea like a crazy person.

Anyway, I wanted to calm down with some tea from someone other than me. My Rishi order came in, so I’m really excited to try it. However, I really want to be alert and at full tasting capacity to dig into that stuff, so I figured I’d dive into some of this Auggy-sent tea.

I have to say, I’m not a huge fan. The leaves smell very prettily and strongly of almond and vanilla. They’re the normal black size, perhaps a bit more broken, but the little bits of almond in there really spruce up the look of things.

Anyway, the infusion is a very vivid red-orange color, and the smell coming off of it is very, very similar to Almond Cookie! I took this to be an awesomely awesome sign, because Almond Cookie is the bee’s knees. So yeah, very cinnamon-almond-pastry-like. Awesome smell.

The taste however… okay, bizarrely enough, on the first few sips, I didn’t taste anything at all. No tea taste, the tiniest hint of almond. Just… a void. But then the flavor kicked in, and it kicked in hard. The black tea base here is very rough and borderline bitter. There’s a bit of astringency, but the problem is really the bitterness. It just doesn’t pair well with the delicacy of flavors like vanilla and almonds.

I’m not really tasting vanilla all that much, and when I do, it’s more like those fake-tasting vanilla hard candies than actual vanilla bean or vanilla extract. The almond is almost chemical-like. It tastes like someone dumped rubbing alcohol in my tea. It’s got that really rough, almond extract taste that tastes awesome in baked goods, but it absolutely horrible to drink.

There’s a bit of pleasing sweetness at the end, which is probably the saving grace of the entire thing. But it’s really not enough to make up for the rest of it. Overwhelmingly robust and bitter black, accented by very mediocre flavoring.