TWG Tea Company

Advent from Dustin Day 7
Mmmmm. A chocolate tea done right. The base is malty and rich, with notes of raisins and baked bread. The chocolate is more in the aftertaste and works extremely well with the aforementioned notes.

Sipdown (210)

B is for…Bains de Rose and a mini battle of the rose teas with Vahdam’s Blooming Rose. Check out that note here: https://steepster.com/rachel12610/posts/420612

Thank you Roswell Strange for sending a sample of this to me! It was super pretty and loaded with roses but the first cup I had must have used all that leaf because this last little bit was just black tea. Figured I should mention that just in case it factors into the taste of this as a rose tea.

Lookswise, this particular tea is much clearer than the Blooming Rose. That could be because Blooming Rose has some other ingredients that could cloud the liquid.

Taste wise, this is super astringent. Like the rose that I do taste is good but it’s covered up mostly by a drying floral astringency. Is that age? Is that because this is the last of my sample? Is that the tea itself? I don’t know but I don’t like it. I see potential but that bitterness is hard to get past. Not a good start in the battle of rose teas.

Thank you Roswell Strange for sharing this one with me! I’d been starting to think I was a fan of rose teas again but this was not very good. It was bitter and tasted like potpourri. I have a little of the sample left and my hope is that it was my steeping (the recommended parameters) that messed it up. We shall see.

This tea was good, but not as good as the smell would indicate. A mellow white tea, tastes of flowers at first then settles into tangy fruit and and aftertaste of apricot. Refreshing and not overly tannic. Felt like i was on the edge of oversteeping by following the directions of 3 minutes.

I really do love this tea. Smells of bourbon vanilla, maybe a touch of cinnamon or warm spice that smells familiar. Maybe slight caramel? Like others have said, it smells better than it tastes, but taste is not bad at 90C for 3 min. Vanilla is not as present as the almost subtle chai flavor in taste.

I think it burns easily. It is a green tea/black tea blend, and the green is not robust and it tastes like a mellow black tea. Tannins are present just not super strong.

I liked this tea more than I thought I would since I don’t usually drink flavored black teas. I received this as a gift and found that it makes a pleasant cup. The black tea is quite smooth with just a hint of dryness. It isn’t very brisk. The berry notes in the tea are delicate but held up well with a spot of milk.

The strength of this tea is the balance between the black tea base and the berry flavor. They complement each other well, with neither being overpowering. In a way, this is a straightforward tea. What you see is what you get — there is no “complexity” to it, no varying flavors or aromas with each steep. But what it does, it does well. The bottomline is: it’s a good berry-flavored black tea that makes a lovely cuppa.

red rooibos with coconut flakes and cocoa bits. Smells strongly of coconut and red rooibos, but on first taste the rooibos dominates. Nice red/brown colour, unfiltered somewhat dusty and not clear. A nice early evening sipping tea.

1 sachet for 250mL water @90C, steeped four minutes.

Liquor: lightest gold.
Aroma: classic floran ti kuan yin notes with some appealing sharpness
Taste: the ti kuan yin of my dreams.

A dear friend brought me this from her recent trip to England. 1837 TWG Tea is new to me. The tea sahcets are cotton (!) and large enough to give the gorgeous leaves room to expand.

My entire office smells like orchids.

This is an excellent ti kuan yin. I look forward to re-steeping it.

I unfortunately over steeped this mug so it was like taking sips of deliciously sweet and floral rose petals if every third or fourth rose petal was burnt to a crisp. Nice top notes/body but harsh bitter finish. Bleck.

My morning tea today while watching the rain from my bedroom window – I know at some point I need to leave the house today to run some errands, but in the meantime it feels nice to get to watch the rain from the comfort of my bedroom, all bundled up with a mug of tea. This is definitely delicious – and a good rainy day tea! Like drinking sweet, fragrant Rosewater Turkish Delight in liquid form!

Received this tea from someone at work who knows how much I love rose in tea (if that wasn’t apparent from the MANY rose flavoured teas I had this week…) and I’m really appreciative of their generosity and thoughtfulness to share a tea with me that they knew I’d like. They were of course correct, this has an amazing rose flavour! Sweet, delicate and fresh – a bit more perfumey that some of the rose I experienced this week, but not in a bad way!

I actually made three mugs of this tea day I tried it out; I have a new roommate (one of the other two moved out last week) and for her first weekend in the apartment we all kind of sat down and got to know each other over a mug of tea – and that cleaned the apartment together as a group. It was actually a really nice activity and she seems really nice! I’m excited to have a new roommate who is maybe more sociable than the last, who also seems to have an appreciation for a cup of tea!

This’ one I’ve been coveting for a while, since the Urban Tea Merchant switched over to a ‘TWG Branded’ store. It came with a new lineup of employees, not the regulars I knew, and at first they didn’t have all of the teas in… Later I realized the main manager there just wasn’t fond of serving anyone who didn’t look ‘ritzy’ enough to make a reservation. Bluh. I tried a few times, but he couldn’t be bothered to check (I could physically see the tin labelled ‘Honey’). This time around I was the only one in the story, so got his attention long enough to grab this one (had an odd back-and-forth ‘Honey tea? No.’ ‘Oh, you’re sure?’ ‘Oh, honey tea, yes.’), but wasn’t able to inquire after anything else before being ushered to the till. Welp.

Anyhow—rant over, this smells STRONG, floral, like sweet pollen. The taste is more… waxy. Sweet, but not ‘sweetened’. I assume what honey MIGHT taste like if you stripped away the ‘sweet’. Sort of like… biting into a beeswax candle, almost. Waxy and floral. It’s different, and lives up to the weird hype I was building in my head in anticipation of trying it.

Not the weirdest tea I’ve tried from TWG… Honestly don’t know why more tea companies don’t carry a honey tea? I assume it must be a difficult flavour to source, and get right (I wonder how much like ‘honey’ this would taste with a sweetener added; an experiment to try, although I’m at that point where I straight up dislike sugar in my tea).

Edit: Forgot to add, very reminiscent of DavidsTea’s Wild Honey Matcha. Same flavouring? Feeling like I should buy some and try them together.