Royale Tea

Backlog from yesterday.

I made a pot of this last night, since it seemed to be the right occasion—we’re getting the first snow storm of the season, and the snow began falling earlier yesterday, around 11:00. I’m not used to snow, nor temperatures that don’t get above freezing for days on end, but I suppose I’ll have to get used to it this winter. Lucky for me, I’ve got this tea to help take the chill off. :)

This tea smells strongly of orange peel and clove, which makes me think back to my childhood holidays, when my mom would let me and my sisters poke whole cloves into the skins of a few oranges, to make the house smell nice. We’d always try to make some kind of design, with varying degrees of success. Anyway, there are other spices there, too: cinnamon and cardamom, mostly, with a floral note, and perhaps some vanilla.

The spices don’t taste overpowering, so there’s plenty of orange in the flavor. The flower petals add a nice touch, and the vanilla is much more present in the actual brew. This tea is just enough of a not-quite-boring-orange-spice tea that it’s really quite enjoyable. The black tea is a… Ceylon? I really don’t know my black teas well enough. It’s light-bodied and complements the fruitiness quite well. Yum!

I bought this tea at a Renaissance Fair in late August, but I’m only just now getting around to reviewing it… The place is local (well, sort of—they’re a little over an hour from me), and apparently they have a little shop and deliver lunch to people on business days. (I only learned this after going to their website. They didn’t tell me all that at the Ren Fair.)

Anyway, I was very excited by this tea, as I’ve not before tried a tea that was just black tea and vanilla beans. The smell of the loose leaf is quite heavy and sweet, which promised good things for the vanilla flavor.

As it turns out, the vanilla DEFINITELY delivers. It’s almost cloying, but only because it’s such a rich flavor. I really, really, really like it. I will never tolerate an inferior vanilla flavor ever again. THIS is the real deal. As for the black tea, it’s a pretty light one, perhaps a Ceylon? It makes a nice couple with the vanilla, although I must say, the black tea is more like the man in the tuxedo escorting the ravishing femme fatale. I’m okay with that. They don’t both need to be front and center.