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Yum! It’s apple pie! Just as tasty and American as Steve Rogers!

United States: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, From Sea to Shining Sea.

Our Glorious Nation: Back-to-Back World War Champs.

Uhhh… I’m out of patriotism. It’s not my forté at all.

This is a very good tea.

Before sipping, I noticed that this tea smells like a decaying and possibly haunted house.

I guess that’s the pu’erh?

The taste is very strongly orange rind. It’s like very citrusy & acidic. If you miss halftime orange slices at childhood sports events, this will take you there.

This tea is o-kay, but it’s a bit one-dimensional. Aaaaaaaand it makes my burps taste like orange rind. So there’s that.

SIPDOWN! (I love typing that. I will never not love typing that.)

I only had enough tea to make about half a cup, so I filled in the gap with Harney & Sons Vanilla. Like a philistine.*

*(I have a friend from England who says mixing teas or wine is the mark of someone deeply uncultured. I say, if you have some dregs, smash ’em together. Do it for science. Do it for adventure.)

I wasn’t sure what the vanilla addition was going to do with the base tea. It was a win.

Let me make a suggestion, 52teas: if/when you re-release this blend, put some vanilla in there. It makes the raspberry and nut stronger, somehow. I have no idea how the science works, but yum. I liked this blend to begin with, but it’s now leveled up.

Fun suggestion from mtchyg: Try this iced! I used half this, and half regular Earl Grey (Cream of Earl Grey by David’s Tea, but I don’t think it matters). It’s super sassy and vivid. Really brings out the sweetness in the coconut and cinnamon. I give this a 75 hot and an 80 cold.

Quite tasty, but unmemorable. This tea doesn’t have oodles of personality.

I’ve been seeing the word “vegetal” thrown around here as a positive thing.

I never thought I’d locate a tea I’d describe in that way and like, but here we are. On the Internet. Writing/reading this review.

Here we have a very sweet, vegetal, mossy, creamy, syrupy oolong tea. A solid, tasty contribution to tea-dom. I’m really glad that mtchyg hooked me up with this. I never would have chosen this for myself, but I really like it.

Oh! And the flowers in it are pretty.

Do they serve a flavor purpose? I have no idea. I just like to look at them.

I had this yesterday, and refrained from leaving a note because it tasted weird. I thought that maybe the genmaicha I’d had previously had tainted the gravity steeper and/or mug I was using. So I scrubbed both out and left them to dry.

Today, I used my strainer ball and a totally different mug on this mix. As a control. For science.

And the conclusion is: this is a totally weird mix that tastes nothing like cranberry, nuts, or basically anything resembling food.

It’s like the sugary byproduct of some kind of food manufacturing process. Like maybe if you went to a Fruit Roll-Up factory and licked the floor.

So I tried icing it. If you ice it, you can kind of taste the nuts. I guess. But it’s still not great.

I daresay it’s… not my cup of tea.

(cymbal smash)

Nope. I am not a genmaicha person. I’m glad to have that crossed off my list as a thing I am definitely not.

I have tried and failed at many things. In case you were wondering, I am also not:
an athlete, a singer, a clarinet virtuoso, a video game player, a journalist, a poet, a cat owner (allergic), a gardener, a knitter, a frisbee thrower, a sculptor, an actor, or a sober bridesmaid.

PS – One of my coworkers saw this in my strainer and said “are those… worms? What are you… eating?”

Update: One of my other coworkers took a sip of this and declared it delicious. “It doesn’t have that weird throat feeling that tea usually has,” he said. So there’s that. Take what I have to say with a grain of salt.

A nice malty, vanilla-y black tea. It smells like a graham cracker, but doesn’t taste like it.

Kind of like when you’re chasing an elusive Pokemon in Pokemon Go, and you think you’re really going to find it, but when you get to its location, it disappears. (This happens to me a lot. Stop being a jagoff, Pikachu. I want to evolve you.)

That said, it’s still a nice tea. I enjoy it. Just don’t go in there expecting graham cracker, per se, and you’ll be good.