La Taïga Sauvage

ashmanra’s Sipdown Challenge – “A tea with more than 5 ingredients”

When I saw this prompt, I immediately started thinking about which tea from my cupboard would possibly have the most ingredients. I didn’t actually go through and check them all, because I’m too lazy for that. But I settled on this tisane, which has 9 ingredients (and which I hadn’t yet tried).

Now I love woodsy teas, so of course this evergreen concoction is right up my alley. This has two types of fir, as well as spruce AND juniper. Plus Labrador tea, which apparently also has a piney flavor. I was a bit afraid it would be like licking a pine tree, but actually it’s quite lovely.

The main flavor is definitely those resinous evergreen notes, and I do taste a variety of them – some more sappy, others leaning a bit toward sage, but also with some fresh and sweet nuances. And then that sweet blueberry comes in and really smooths the edges of the whole thing, while also adding a subtle syrupy base note.

Lovely, and a perfect companion for contemplation when winter comes around.

Quite the list of ingredients, all harvested from Québec. A little thin but sweet, fruity and woody with a strong note of fir that evokes a feeling of near-winter, inhaling frigid, moist air through my nostrils and catching the clean, cool scents of a northern Canadian landscape. Or for those unacquainted, I’d say it’s like a Christmas tree in a cup. A hint of wild blueberry and a tangy-sweet quality. Brewed for the recommended 7 minutes, there is a drying catch on the swallow but it tastes so cool and comforting I don’t care. A long-lingering resinous sweetness follows.

Directions call for 2tsp/250mL; I opted for something like 5 teaspoons for half my glass teapot, so 500ish mL. The mélange of ingredients with differing shapes and sizes doesn’t make it easy to get a varied distribution, so I did do some hand-picking of the larger ingredients instead of incorporating them into my teaspoon measurements.