Special Teas Inc

I’m working my way through the teas in the break room at work. This one is labelled as a black teas but is primarily rooibos. I’m confused as to how they missed that on the ingredient list.

There is a lot of rooibos flavour, so a bit woody and some minerals. I also taste some slight tannic bitterness from the orange peel and possibly the chocolate chips (if they are semi-sweet). I get a smell that reminds me of cheap dollar store chocolate (the waxy type with a heavy chocolatey scent). Overall not really a black tea but it made a nice latte with a dash of barista oat creamer.

Homemade Advent Calendar from Arby: Day 11

This tea does not brew up scarlet! :( Sad. I admit I wasn’t paying the closest attention while drinking it, but maybe there wasn’t a ton of nuance there? It was mostly just a mildly fruity chamomile. Inoffensive but not super memorable.

Homemade Advent Calendar from Arby: Day 5

Huh! This one is kinda wild. The ingredient list had me unsure what to expect. The dry leaf smelled… strange. Kind of like slightly stinky feet, but not aggressively so? Maybe feet that are on their way to requiring a good scrubbin’ but aren’t there yet. Brewed, the tea has a whisper of juicy, fruity bubblegum with a slight note of cream to buoy it. There’s also something sliiightly earthy or mossy. And it doesn’t smell like feet at all!

I don’t know how to rate this one. I’ll have to try it again before I can commit. But it sure was fun to try!

Had a craving for maple the other day but I didn’t want something super sweet/rich, so I ended up digging this blend out and it was the perfect fit for what I was looking for. Basically a toasty, smooth Genmaicha with an ever so slight hint of maple. Simple, but well executed. Really enjoyed it!

Cold Brew!

This is the one tea from Special Teas that my mom and I both bought. I ended up cold brewing it to sip on during one of the days in Victoria where our primary activity was outside the city as I knew I’d want tea for the road.

I liked chilled Genmaicha a lot, so predictably those toastier notes were as delicious cold as I’d expected. It’ll be interesting to see if the flavour balance is the same or similar when hot, but cold I thought the sweetness and bright notes of the apple popped more than expected but with that pleasant maple finish. I love the idea of a maple genmaicha, and maple and apple also taste wonderful together. As a blend, it’s sort of like DT’s now discontinued Movie Night but toastier.

After we took the ferry into Victoria our first stop was a perogie bar for lunch. As we were leaving the bar, we looked across the street and not four feet from where we’d parked was Special Teas – we’d completely missed it initially in our rush to fill our bellies!

Special Teas was a store I’d actually ruled out of my shopping list because I hadn’t heard of them before and I needed to balance my desire for tea shopping with my mom’s desire to do other shit. However, the fates must have been smiling down on me so we took advantage of the convenience of already being at the store to check this one off the list as well!

I picked up a decent haul of teas, but my mom actually grabbed a few things too – all green tea blends, which was surprising. Like I did with her Murchie’s haul, I made sure to steep a cup of each of them during the remainder of our trip. Aside from our one overlap tea we had both purchased, this was the one I enjoyed more from her two others. I didn’t expect to like it, the ingredients list is sort of wild and all over the place. However, when my initial sips were surprisingly just as creamy as they were fruity I sort of softened to the blend…

It tastes a little like vanilla custard, but if you crossed it with just a little bit of bubblegum and a handful of different tropical fruits – possibly the strongest of which was the sweet ripe pineapple note that poked through. I didn’t taste either the moringa or spirulina, for which I am thankful. Definitely a weirdly “smoothie bowl” type of vibe. I doubt I’d revisit this one, but seeing as it was essentially a free cup of tea I also can’t really complain about it. Weird as it was, it was pretty solid!

Advent Calendar Day 24

Haven’t had time to post amid all the festivities, but I hope everyone had a very merry Christmas! I missed family I wasn’t able to see because of COVID this year, but still enjoyed our smaller celebrations over the past two days. And having new tea to try just added to the fun! One more massive THANK YOU to Shae for organizing and Amanda for being an amazing swap partner. This was so much fun and I’m already looking forward to next year!

Now on to the actual tea…It’s been a couple of days since I drank this, so I don’t remember a lot of the details at this point. I do remember it being quite smooth and sweet but not very nutty…kinda like pecan pie filling without the pecans. Not a standout, but still enjoyable.

Advent Calendar Day 22

I don’t think I’ve ever had a caramel genmaicha before and now I’m wondering why not because the combination works so well! This has a distinct caramel popcorn vibe, which I’m guessing from the name is exactly what they were going for! The caramel is sweet and smooth and the toasted rice adds a nice depth to it. I wouldn’t mind a bit more flavor from the base tea, but it’s still really nice.

Advent Calendar Day 17

Yay, Steepster is working again! From what I remember when I tried this blend first thing this morning, it had a pretty strong pumpkin flavor with a hint of spice and a slightly sour aftertaste. Pumpkin doesn’t tend to be my favorite, so I wasn’t a fan.

Home made advent day 9

This is my new go-to spearmint now that my previous sources are too expensive or no longer sell a spearmint tea. This is just plain spearmint with no added flavours. I like the sweetness that comes from spearmint and it has less menthol than peppermint. It also doesn’t induce heartburn as much as peppermint does after a meal. I like how fresh this spearmint is and that the leaves are broken into the perfect size (not fine dust but not too large).

Advent Calendar Day 6

This one smells really rich and caramelly! The flavor doesn’t quite live up to the aroma, unfortunately. The base tea is nice and smooth, but the flavor is more of a vague butterscotch sweetness than a true caramel. Pleasant, but nothing special. Still fun to try something from another new-to-me company, though!

For a tea that has ‘spice’ in the name, it’s really lacking in the spice department. It’s more like Christmas orange. The prominent smell/flavor is orange. Like cooked orange peels. There’s some rose, and a tiny bit of almond as well. But, mostly orange.

Yum! Genmaicha goes extremely well with the maple. Apple is pretty mild, and is more of an afterthought. But, the toasty popped rice and maple create a pancake experience that just works. Enjoying it with a Trader Joe’s pumpkin empanada, and it’s quite the tasty breakfast.

This tastes nothing like pecan pie, but I’m really enjoying it (I actually had it both the morning and night yesterday, which I rarely do). It’s more of a creme brûlée flavor than anything, which I’m absolutely not mad about. Raisins are listed on the ingredients, but I didn’t see any either time I had a cup…not sure how much a raisin would contribute to the overall flavor though.

This smells incredibly sweet and caramely. Unfortunately, even with the addition of honey, it reminds me of a bowl of oatmeal. Specifically, a bowl of oatmeal covered in whiskey and honey that I had in Northern Ireland. While I’m enjoying the flavor and the nostalgia it’s stirred up, it’s not quite the caramel flavor I was looking for.

I bought this because I need rootbeer tea in my life. I have to say-this isn’t quite the same as Rootbeer Tea from Earth’s Herbals…but it is still pretty good. I’ve only tried it iced, but it looks like it could do well hot. I appreciate the versatility in it going with milk or staying plain, served hot or cold.

It is slightly cinnamon heavy. It could also do with a bit less licorice root (or swap licorice with anise or fennel). More vanilla would also be welcome. Otherwise, I think it is a nice blend. More “warm winter spice” than what I think rootbeer should taste like, but def. not the worst I’ve had.

Arby Advent Day 8
This one is a pretty generic herbal tea. I can’t find it on the company’s website, so I’m not sure what the ingredients are. I know I taste mint. I’m not sure what else. It’s not bad, but not remarkable, just generically herby.

Teabox Tuesday! This is the last green tea in my teabox stash; it came from the Discovery Teabox, so thank you to Skysamurai for organizing and to those that participated for sharing! I decided to cold brew my sample since the leaf smelled a bit fruity and I’ve been drinking a lot of fruity iced greens lately.

Because of the hectic weekend I experienced I was unable to strain this when I planned, and I’m uncertain if in coldbrewing a tea can get “oversteeped” but that may or may not have made a difference (I usually always strain within 12-24 hours). The aroma smells, perhaps oddly to me, a bit like bubblegum… very sweet, jackfruit, and pineapple are coming to me in the aroma. The flavor is very sweet and fruity, but there is something vegetal about it, too… it has like, this freshness that makes me think of aloe, and it’s a little “watery” tasting too… not oceanic, as it’s lacking that saltiness of seawater, but it makes me think of wild freshwater somehow? I wonder if that’s the moringa? I’ve never tasted moringa before. I’d say that the sweet, vegetal note is the strongest flavor and overpowering the rest of the drink… I can taste some pineapple, and there is a sweetness left in my mouth as an aftertaste, but that strong “green” taste is very palpable. Reading up on moringa a bit, I have a strong feeling that is what I’m tasting. Interesting. I wouldn’t say I dislike it, but I do wish it didn’t feel quite so strong in this particular blend.

Thanks for sharing! I appreciate getting to try new ingredients I haven’t been exposed to before!

Teabox Tuesday! It’s in the herbal hours of the evening and I’m getting low on teabox herbals, but I do still have this one from the Discovery Teabox, so thank you to Skysamurai for organizing and to those that participated for sharing! Brewed up my small sampler of this one in my little Japanese doubin, which holds about two cups.

The dry leaf smelled faintly tropical to me, mostly of pineapple. Hmm. Perhaps the sort of thing I should cold brew, but the water is already boiled so let’s do this.

Brewed, the cup is faintly pink, and since I am a fan of hibi-hip teas, that’s a fairly good sign for me… but the aroma I get now isn’t fruity at all (why did the dry leaf smell of pineapple to me, I wonder?) but… chamomile. Hooboy. Welp. Yup. That is mostly all I taste. Strong, thick chamomile. If I could actually taste hibi-hip, that would be an improvement for me, because I’m not a fan of chamomile. Looking at the ingredient list, there are a lot of florals in this cup, but I’m not really picking out any other distinct flavors… there is a hint of a sort of aloe taste, but the chamomile is just so strong to me it’s overwhelming anything else that might be in this cup. I’m definitely not picking up any huckleberry, which is supposed to be the flavoring added to this tea.

Maybe if I was a fan of chamomile I’d be alright with this, but as is, this isn’t my cuppa. I added a teabag with a small pinch of hibiscus and rose petals from my dry herb stash to a tea bag and let them soak for a bit in the tea, then added a spoon of lemon-infused honey, and though my tea turned considerably more red, it still tasted of chamomile. Guess I should’ve used more than a pinch, and actually made this tea a Scarlet Dragon… Perhaps that’s what is most disappointing to me. With a name like that, and with the hibiscus and rosehip pretty high in the ingredients, why is this such a chamomile bomb? Probably good news for 99.9999% of Steepsterers, but sadly, I’m in that 0.0001% that would’ve prefered a juicy tart hibi-hip drink because chamomile tastes like soap to my particular palate.

Also, my birthday present to myself arrived today! Since I decided the teapots I inherited from Grandma were too delicate to use as actual teapots and needed to go into storage, I still wanted a larger, “English style” teapot. My birthday is St. Patrick’s Day, and I just happened to see this one looking at English-style teapots… and had to have it.

https://www.englishteastore.com/shamrock-teapot-earthenware-6-cup.html

Isn’t it cute? squee I have such a weakness for cute teaware…

Teabox Tuesday! I’ve been migraining all day, so I haven’t made any tea yet. Thankfully I haven’t completely exhausted the herbal options from my teabox stash, though I am getting close. This one is from the Discovery Teabox, so thank you to Skysamurai for organizing and to all who participated in sharing tea!

The leaf has a very nutty aroma. Steeped, the tea is very much a deeply red rooibos color, and smells nutty but has the sweet rooibos notes I’m familiar with, honey and a touch of vanilla or caramel. The flavor is pretty nice; not quite as strong as I’d probably like, but I tend to steep my herbal teas a little overleafed, and I had the very last serving in the box on this one, so I’m using a little less rooibos for the cup than I’d probably use left to my own devices. That said, it is still pretty tasty. The rooibos base is pretty heavy, but it’s a nice rooibos with more of the sweeter notes I like, and lacking in the brassy/woody/medicinal notes. I taste a lot of honey, caramel, and a touch of subtle woodiness. The flavors that come through most strongly are a nutty note and vanilla; I’m not sure if I’d say I really get “pecan pie,” but at least I’m not just tasting heavy marzipan like I do with so many nutty dessert teas.

It’s a very satisfying cup and makes a nice sweet dessert tea before bed. I’ve never seen this company before and have a few more herbal option samplers to try from them from the box, so thank you!

Sipdown (268)

Arby loves this tea and was so kind and sent me a sample. Alas, I let it sit for quite some time but I have finally gotten to it. Though I am not having the same experience with it Arby had, I can appreciate that it is a nice milk oolong tea. It’s almost got a bit of a coconut/mango sticky rice vibe to it. Thank you for sharing Arby!