Hazelnut Brittle

I’m adopting Rie’s system of making bits of the post that doesn’t really pertain to the tea in question smaller. That way it’s a lot easier for people who aren’t interested in that to just skip ahead to where the review is. I’ve been neglecting my social sites recently. I’ve fallen into this game, you see, called GeoGuessr. It plops you down somewhere on the planet and then you have to travel around and guess where you are using only Google Street View. It’s surprisingly addictive but takes a long time. I have a tendency to always get some deserted stretch of road with NO road signs what so ever.

Most of this post is a backlog. I wrote it while having the tea but didn’t have time to finish it, so it’s been languishing for a while. I’ve mentioned that I share tea at work with my boss, and sometimes we go to a local cafe wtih a fairly large selection of teas (and great cakes) and have a little “afternoon meeting.” I had told her about Fru P, so last time we went, we went in there first for a little explore, and I decided to buy some of this one.

My thought was that since the caramel one was such a disappointment, I’d just check the others of the same sort of family, and I figured that brittle was sort of caramel-y. Nut flavouring in teas can frequently make them quite sweet, so I wanted to see if I could get a fuller caramel-esque experience this way.

Like with the other teas I’ve tried from this shop so far, the aroma is strong and extremely promising. This one is heavily hazelnut with sweet sweet brittle underneath, and it makes me worried because with the exception of the vanilla, the others have all had this strong aroma but completely failed to deliver on flavour. I’m steeling myself for disappointment.

Now! This one actually has flavour. I’m getting a ton of hazelnut right at the first sip. Not so much in the way of base flavour, though, but it might show up when it cools a little more. The brittle part appears to be absent at this point, save for a slight sweetness.

The sweetness of the brittle increases as the tea cools, but the hazelnut is still the strong primary flavour. Unfortunately the base doesn’t really come through with much flavour on its own, but I find that this is really not as much of a problem as I would have thought, because hazelnut provides such a full flavour all on its own.

I’m pleased with this, but unlike what I had been hoping, it doesn’t fall into the sweetie-caramel-y sort of category at all. It’s quite nice on its own though. I might try and mix it with the caramel and see what happens then. I saw she also had a hazelnut and cocoa tea in her shop. I might try that one later on for comparison.