Please check out my Kickstarter Campaign to Take Over 52Teas!
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: 52Teas
Tea Description:
Following the popularity of our other marshmallow treat genmaicha blends, we’ve created a special one for Valentine’s Day, with real freeze-dried cherries, marshmallow root and organic marshmallow and maraschino cherry flavors. This is a treat for your sweet tooth.
Learn more about this tea here.
Learn more about 52Teas’ subscriptions here.
Taster’s Review:
After tasting a couple of cherry flavored teas lately that tasted more of cough syrup than tea, I cringed just a little (just a little!) when I read the announcement for the tea of the week of February 9th. But I was hopeful that this Cherry Marshmallow Treat Genmaicha from 52Teas wouldn’t go the same route as some of the other cherry teas I’ve tasted consumed in the past weeks. I hoped that this would taste as wonderful as it sounded, because the idea of having a cherry flavored marshmallow treat sounds delightful!
In fact, it sounds so delightful that before I brewed the tea, I asked my youngest daughter if she might be interested in trying the tea with me. She apparently thought it sounded yummy too, because she said yes. So, I brewed the whole 1/2 ounce package in my Breville One-Touch, using 1000ml of water. I set the temperature for 175°F and the timer for 2 1/2 minutes. These smaller 1/2 ounce pouches are just the right size for a teapot to share with a friend (or daughter!)
After allowing the tea to cool for a few minutes, I took my first sip. Mmm! I’m happy to say that while I taste cherry, I don’t taste cough syrup. This cherry flavor seems to have just the right balance between sweet and tart cherry flavors, because I’m getting a little bit of sweet and a little bit of tart. The tart tickles my taste buds in the aftertaste.
The genmaicha has a light, slightly grassy taste and adds a nice, toasty flavor and the rice notes add a rice cereal kind of flavor. The marshmallow adds a little bit of fluffy, creamy taste but I find myself wanting just a tad more marshmallow in this.
Overall, this is really tasty. My daughter enjoyed it too. I still favor the “Original” Marshmallow Treat Genmaicha – which I’ll be reblending when I take over 52Teas! Please take a moment to stop over at my campaign and support my efforts to save this small business while creating fantastic teas!
Christmas Fruitcake Iced Black Tea from Southern Boy Teas
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Zoomdweebies
Tea Description:
What’s Christmas without fruitcake? Not some brick of processed dried up yuck and colored cherries, but real, moist, sweet cake with cherries, oranges, cranberries, and pineapple–that’s the kind of Christmas fruitcake we tried to recreate here. And we did it, like always, with just premium organic Iyerpadi black tea and organic flavors. Enjoy!
Learn more about this tea here.
Learn about SBT’s subscriptions here.
Taster’s Review:
OK, confession time: I actually like fruitcake. I’m probably one of the only people on earth that does like it. I don’t like all fruitcake, but if I happen to find a bakery that does fruitcake right – something that’s been baked in-house with good quality ingredients and that’s been doused with brandy … yeah, that stuff, I’d eat happily. That, to me, is the best way to ingest brandy.
So I was happy when Southern Boy Teas announced this Christmas Fruitcake Iced Black Tea as a flavor for the week of December 29th!
I don’t taste brandy flavoring here, so I don’t know that it was actually utilized in this flavor. But that’s OK, because this is really tasty just the way it is.
I’m really liking the flavors here. Of the fruit flavors, I think I taste the orange most. I taste orange throughout the sip and into the aftertaste. I get a nice little sweet and tart citrus note in the aftertaste. I taste notes of pineapple and cranberry and cherry, and I appreciate that these flavors are nicely balanced. I’m not getting an overwhelming, cough syrupy cherry note which is good.
The cake notes are softer than the fruit notes, but they’re definitely there. I get a sweet, cake-y flavor that is really pleasant. I taste hints of a buttery flavor. I like the way all the flavors come together in one sip: the sip starts out with a sweet orange note, and shortly afterward, I pick up on hints of cranberry. Pineapple is present throughout the sip. Cherry weaves its way in and out. The cake notes are sort of a sweet undertone throughout the sip and if I happen to slurp the sip, I get more of the cake-y sweetness (although it feels a little weird to slurp iced tea, I’ve gotta tell you.)
Overall, a really good, fruity, fun iced tea.
And please consider supporting this small business with their Indiegogo Campaign! They’re looking to reach new heights with their company and they need your support!
Cherry Blossom Green Tea from Lemon Lily
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Lemon Lily
Tea Description:
One scent of this tea will encourage your senses to indulge in this Japanese delight. One sip and you’ll be whisked away to Kyoto for the Cherry Blossom festival. *plane ticket sold separately.
Ingredients: Organic Green Tea, Organic Rose Petals, Natural Cherry Flavour
Learn more about subscribing to Postal Teas here.
Taster’s Review:
My tenth edition of the Postal Teas subscription arrived a few days ago, and I was happy to see that more of Lemon Lily’s teas were being featured, especially after having been subjected to three (yes three) herbal teas last edition. I’m glad to find that Postal Teas remembered about Camellia Sinensis.
When I opened the pouch, I was greeted with a very strong cherry scent. It smells a little like … well, it smells like cherry cough syrup. That’s immediately what came to mind when I took a whiff of the dry leaf.
To brew this tea, I used my Breville One-Touch tea maker. I poured 500ml of water into the jug and measured 2 bamboo scoops of the tea into the basket. I set the timer for 1 1/2 minutes and the temperature for 175°F. Then I let the tea maker take it from there.
The brewed tea doesn’t taste quite as much like cough syrup as the aroma lead me to believe it would. It does have that strong, sweet cherry flavor that you’d taste in a cough syrup, but it also has some other flavors that soften the strong cherry notes.
The green tea is light and fresh tasting. It’s not overly grassy but there are some subtle vegetal notes in the taste, as well as soft, creamy notes that are almost buttery.
I think that the rose is the real star here though. I taste really lovely notes of rose! I like the way the rose plays with the cherry notes, adding some dimension into what might otherwise be a very sweet, almost too sweet cherry flavor.
Overall, this tea is just alright to me. I’m not loving it as much as I usually enjoy cherry green teas. I do appreciate the rose notes, but I think that the cherry veers a little too close to the sweet, cough syrupy flavor.
Not bad, but not great either.
24 Days of Tea Holiday Countdown – Day 24 from Teanzo 1856
Here we are, folks! This is the last day of my countdown with tea from Teanzo 1856! It’s been fun counting down the days to Christmas with this Advent Calendar and trying some pretty tasty teas along the way! I’m really happy that I had this opportunity to try a new Advent Calendar!
For today’s artistic inspiration, I chose another piece that I created for a swap that I hosted one year. It was the first year in a long time that I had what I call a “full size” tree – before that, money was really tight and we had a very small artificial tree. When we finally could afford a larger tree, I needed ornaments to fill it! And as I may have mentioned previously, I find the “boxed” ornaments to be just a little too ordinary. I like to think outside the box.
So, I hosted an altered art ornament swap that year. Basically, each participant was assigned an object to alter, and they needed to make six of those altered objects and send all six to me, and then after all participant’s ornaments were received, I would swap out the ornaments and everyone got one of each of the ornaments returned to them. They would send in six ornaments and they would receive six ornaments back, receiving six original and unique works of art for their tree.
This is one of the ornaments I made that year. My assigned altered object was “found object” and I used hot cup sleeves that I found at my local coffee shop. The town I lived in at the time was a small town, and at least once a week, I went into town and had a chai latte at the coffee shop. They had those cardboard sleeves to protect the hands from the heat of the beverage that made the paper cups difficult to handle otherwise. I liked the “tea cup and saucer” design on the sleeves, so I took a few of them one day, thinking that there was something I could do with them.
I rolled one of them up into a cone shape and turned it into Victorian-esque cone and filled it with little artificial flowers. I painted the sleeve with shimmering paint to give it some sparkle and added eyelets on either side to loop a ribbon for hanging. It was a cute little ornie, I thought.
Cherry Tea
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Teanzo 1856
Tea Description:
Cherry Tea is a deliciously fruity black tea. It has black cherries which lends a certain natural sweetness to the tea. This tea goes both ways just like most of our teas – iced or hot.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
As I said before, this is the last tea from my Teanzo Advent Calendar. I’ve really enjoyed this tea journey with Teanzo. If I could have “dictated” what teas would have been in the Advent Calendar, there would have been some changes made, but, for the most part, I’m really happy with the teas that I’ve tasted! And since there were some teas that I might not have chosen for a “custom” Advent Calendar in this year’s box, I’m actually glad that I didn’t choose the teas because this gave me the opportunity to try some teas that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself.
To brew this Cherry Tea, I used my Kati Tumbler (yet again!) and poured the contents of the sampler package into the basket of the tumbler. I then poured 12 ounces of boiling water into the tumbler and let it steep for 3 minutes.
The brewed tea has a very distinct cherry scent to it. It smells a little like a jar of maraschino cherries. There are some that might say that it smells a little like cherry cough syrup. I happen to like cherry cough syrup so that smell isn’t a bad thing for me, personally.
The flavor is very cherry. It tastes a little like a cross between maraschino cherry, bing cherry and a tart cherry. Maybe a ratio of 2 parts maraschino, 2 parts bing, and 1 part tart cherry. Now, imagine these cherries being macerated in brandy and then strained. Liquefy the cherries and add a splash of the liquid to black tea. Yeah, that’s what I’m tasting.
It’s a little sweet and a little tart. My aforementioned comparison to cherry cough syrup is appropriate for the flavor too, because I do get a hint of that kind of flavor (which is why I made the macerated in brandy reference in the previous paragraph. Cough syrup tends to have a slight boozy taste to me.)
The black tea is a pleasant tasting black tea – smooth and nicely round. It isn’t bitter and it isn’t overly astringent. There is a slight “pucker” of the inside of the cheeks toward the finish, but it’s slight and not unpleasant. It’s not what I’d call an aggressive tea but it is a strong tea, strong enough to stand its own with the strong cherry notes.
As the tea cools, I notice more of the tart notes emerging. Some of the sweeter notes of the tea start to come forward because of the tarter cherry notes. I’m noticing more contrast with the cooled tea.
It’s an interesting tea. Not my favorite from Teanzo – but I’m glad I got to try it.
Cherry Chocolate Flavored Iced Black Tea from Southern Boy Teas
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Zoomdweebies
Learn more about this tea here.
Learn about SBT’s subscriptions here.
Taster’s Review:
Occasionally – perhaps more often than ‘occasionally’ – Southern Boy Teas introduces a flavor that I’m not too sure about. I find myself wondering how well those flavors will meld with iced tea.
I’ve tried 52Teas (Southern Boy Teas parent company) Cherry Cordial Black Tea as well as their tribute to one of my all time favorite ice creams: Cherry Garcia. I enjoyed both of those. So I didn’t have a problem thinking that the flavors of chocolate and cherry would work with black tea. But how would this taste as an iced tea?
Well, it tastes like what the name of the tea suggests: It tastes like a chocolate cherry flavored iced tea!
To brew this, I used the hot brew method, heating 1 quart of water to 212°F and let the “jumbo tea bag” steep for 2 minutes. Then I repeated the process, letting the second quart steep for 2 1/2 minutes.
With my first few sips, I found myself looking for the chocolate flavors. You know me, I’m all about the chocolate! By the time I was finished with my second glass of the tea, I realized that even though the chocolate flavors are a bit lighter here than I would like them to be, the balance works. It works so well that I didn’t want to stop drinking it!
Right about here is where I’d say something like more chocolate = better. However, even though the chocolate notes here are not quite as chocolate-y as I would normally like, I find that as an iced tea, the lighter chocolate flavor works. If this was a hot tea, I’d want more chocolate, definitely.
But I’m enjoying this as it is! I think that a stronger chocolate flavor – while it would be awesomely delicious – it wouldn’t be as “refreshing” and “thirst quenching”. I think that a stronger chocolate note would be heavier on the palate. Here, the chocolate is strong enough to be tasted and enjoyed, but still light enough to be an iced drink that refreshes me.
The cherry is a sweeter cherry note. Because it melds with the black tea and chocolate notes in a harmonious way, it doesn’t come off as tasting cough syrupy to me. It is just a light, sweet, fruity note that accentuates the chocolate and black tea.
The black tea is a brisk, invigorating tea that doesn’t overpower the chocolate notes. Instead, I think that the chocolate and black tea play together very well, creating a slightly creamy, decadent, bittersweet chocolate flavor that melds with the black tea notes seamlessly.
A really tasty iced tea.