Lily Chai Tea

Tried hot-brewing this today. Honestly the blend looked a little scary for me to prepare hot, what with all the unidentified berries and multicolored flowers, but it turned out all right. The liquor is a very pale gold. The aroma is more fruity-sweet, with less of the earthiness I noticed before. The flavor is also sweeter, with a light, honey-like quality to it. The earthy/muddy aspect is, again, much weaker. A short infusion time (3 min) compared to the cold brew may have affected which notes come out. Overall, this one is pleasant and mild as a hot tea, but more interesting cold.

Again, I really hope they list ingredients for these blends in the future. While I don’t have food allergies, I’m hesitant to share or recommend this for those who do.

This is another tea blend I bought on my first visit to Lily Chai Tea. In-store, the flavor of this blend was described to me as “a little dirty”, which may not be the most appealing-sounding, but it piqued my curiosity. While there isn’t an ingredients list (something I hope they’ll fix soon), I can see green tea, blue cornflower petals, and various kinds of berries in it. The dry tea has a fruity, earthy smell.

I brewed this one cold and enjoyed it as the afternoon’s iced tea. There is much less of the fruity sweetness in the flavor, and the earthiness dominates much more. There’s a tiny bit of tartness and some interesting herbal/vegetal flavors well. So yes, it is kind of dirt-like, but in a good, refreshing way. While the blend may resemble some of Teavanna’s fruity ones, which I know have very mixed reception, I think it’s much more unique.

Yet another “almond milk with almond tea” experiment…and the result is the best thing ever. Pure delight. That is all.

The weekend means it’s time to try new teas!

This is an almond and coconut black tea blend I bought from a local tea store, Lily Chai Tea, that opened recently. As I already have the Paromi Coconut Almond blend, I brewed both under the same conditions to compare.

The dry leaf mixture for both look about the same—black tea with a lot of coconut and almond shavings. The Snow Flake smells much more prominently of sweet almond, a very marzipan-like aroma, which I love. The Paromi smells more like a balance of the two, but more like cocoa than either of the ingredients.

Both teas brewed to the same amber-orange color, and both had some minimal droplets of oils from the coconut and almond float to the top…ah well, that probably won’t hurt. Even though I had two visually identical cups, there was no mistaking which was which by the aroma. In terms of flavor, the Snow Flake blend definitely favors the almond as well. It’s very smooth, and I can taste that the black tea itself is of fairly good quality, crisp with a natural fruitiness. The Paromi is richer and slightly more astringent, with the flavors more difficult to tell apart from each other but working well as a mix.

Overall, I prefer the Snow Flake more as a summery breakfast blend, though both are enjoyable. If anyone is in Orange County (southern California) I’d recommend checking out Lily Chai Tea, they have a lot of creative blends as well as unblended teas, and the staff are helpful and not pushy at all.