Black Rose

My first glass, and the first tea of my birthday! I got this yesterday with a birthday voucher (along with chocolate chai oolong and a sunny t glass. It smelled amazing dry in store, and this morning it smells amazing while brewing.

Oh, and it tastes really nice! The rose is sweet, without being overly flowery, and the black is a great base and isn’t bitter at all.ooh, this is actually really tasty! I really like it. Good birthday pick by me!

Favourite tea from T2

I would recommend this tea to those that enjoy T2’s French earl grey. It is moreso on the fruity side but really shocks guests with its fun flavours

tasty, fragrant, nice for the afternoon – or the stroke of midday!

Sampler Sunday! Still trying to finish off all the sampler packets from the Great Sampler Order of January 2018, and it appears I only have three left! Getting there! While spring time does evoke a bit of a “green tea” mood in me (and I have been making a lot of fruity iced green teas again!) and two of the three are green teas, it’s a rainy gray morning today, which just makes me feel like brewing up a pot of black tea, so I opted for the last black tea of the samplers. But it is a rose black, so the floral touch does add a bit of seasonality. I love rose teas so as long as this has a nice base, this should be an enjoyable pot.

The tea has a strong fruity aroma, of stonefruits and mango; in fact, I’m getting very little floral elements from the scent, so it seems the fruit flavorings added to the tea are made to dominate here (which is a bit confusing to me for a tea named “Black Rose”). I am, however, getting more of the rose present in the flavor; the black base is lighter bodied (at least at my brewing parameters) providing a bit of maltiness that is present mostly toward the back of the tongue, but the flavors are left to dominate, with a fruity peach/nectarine/mango flavor filling the mouth until a very sweet floral rose finish closes out the sip. The flavors go well together and it’s a nice cuppa. There is an element of juiciness to it, and the rose flavor is pretty strong in the cup but isn’t a strong wafting perfumy aroma coming off the cup, which can sometimes be an issue for me with my migraine head sensitivities.

This is an enjoyable cup, and honestly the only thing that holds me back from the T2 offerings that I have enjoyed is the fact that they don’t sell their teas in sizes smaller than 100 grams, which I simply won’t purchase anymore. I spent all of last week rebagging teas from such large bags of teas to gift and/or cupboard sale off. In a single-person household, I just can’t deal with such large quantities of tea. Tea shops, seriously, you need to offer smaller sizes of tea for purchase or risk losing business!

This was the first tea I tried of the T2 flavoured black “selfies”/their version of a sampler set I suppose. I made the bold choice of starting with this tea, first.

I spent much time inspecting and sniffing all the teas they had on display and Black Rose was 1 of perhaps 2-3 that piqued my interest.

It was much as I expected – it had all the expected flavors – currants, rose, tropical fruit (in this case, my favorite, mango) with the cornflower blossoms to give it that pretty appearance.

Quite enjoyable.

Tomorrow I move onto the next in the box: Blue Mountains, which shares the cornflower blossoms, and swaps the rest of the ingredients with the specific “natural and artificial flavor”. We’ll see if I should’ve stuck to my original plan of just buying a larger quantity of Black Rose!

Supposedly this is an afternoon or dessert tea, certainly robust but I tasted this tea for the first time in the middle of the day. (I’m a tea rebel without a cause.) It was lovely, very flavourful, very sweet, a relative aroma of mango and it shouldn’t be brewed for any longer than 3 minutes.

The only criticism I can add is that there seemed to be many cast-off tiny tea leaves in the bottom of my tea. I only sipped it with a smattering of honey – it would be best not to add lashings of milk to this tea.