I just found my pile of August samples and remembered I’d only tried about half of them. When I was tasting them before they were all seeming really acidic to me and it just wasn’t doing it for me. I’m not sure if it was me or something in the flavorings they use. I was in the mood for a black tea that could handle added cream today and contemplated both Low Country and Golden Arrow. Low Country won the sniff test of the dry leaf.
I think I followed the steeping instructions on the package for the other August teas so I went with that on this one too. Package recommendations were 3.5g or about 1Tbsp of leaf for 10oz boiling water, 4-5min steep. I used one scoop of my handy August clear plastic scoop (I think it’s 1Tbsp?) and 4 minutes (I actually set a timer this time!), will probably bump it up to 5 minutes if I decide to do a second steep. Glass tea mug with glass infuser…love this thing because it doesn’t give any weird metallic flavors like some metal infusers and it doesn’t absorb flavors/smells.
The dry tea smells really sweet and caramely, a bit boozy. A little smoke but it doesn’t punch you in the face like Golden Arrow. The steeped tea doesn’t smell nearly as sweet as it did dry…it smells more boozy and smoky. Before adding cream, I can taste smoke but it isn’t super crazy strong. I don’t really get the caramel that I could smell in the dry tea. The bourbony booziness I could smell is in the flavor but it has a weird artificial bite to me. This tea doesn’t do as well with cream as I hoped. Or maybe it needs more leaf to be strong enough to hold up to the cream. With the cream I’m mostly just getting that artificial bite and an aftertaste of smoke. It’s a bit disappointing because the dry tea smelled really good. I guess what I wanted was a strong black tea with cream plus the flavor of awesome homemade butter caramels and this just isn’t it. It’s drinkable, it’s just not what I had in mind for my tea today.
