Featured & New Tasting Notes
Sipdown! (4 | 107)
Sipped through another bag of this, and it’s still just delightful. Perfectly balanced between sweet and tangy, and oh-so-refreshing for summer. To me, the predominant flavor is the orange and lemongrass, but I can taste tart strawberry as well.
So tempted to go ahead and place another order, but I want to make myself drink through some of my pound bag of Watermelon Cooler from Adagio first… XD
Flavors: Citrus, Fresh, Fruity, Juicy, Lemongrass, Orange, Strawberry, Sweet, Tangy, Tart
Preparation
This sometimes ends up a little thin. I overleafed it the most recent time, and then it was quite tart and slightly funky. It’s just not for me. It’s best cold with a lot of sweetener. Then it tastes decent, but I’d rather drink a different fruity tea.
TTB 2025
As the other tea notes say, this is very well balanced. I wish there was a bit more cinnamon, but nothing seems to be competing for my attention. I’m not sure I’d call it a chai, maybe chai adjacent or a spicy lapsang. Thanks for adding it to the box!
Neighbors had their 4th on the 3rd last night, which meant a late bedtime waiting for the pyrotechnics finale (I don’t mind the ones that go BOOM, but the ones that shriek make me nuts). Heavy-handed caffeine, cold, is the order of the day while I prep for VBS next week. (Fifteen cootie catchers folded; next project is origami hopping frogs. Wanna help?)
Tejava stays my favorite pre-bottled unsweet tea. Dark and strong without obnoxious citric acid. I never get the kick in the pants I need from iced tea, no matter how beefy, but this one at least provides a nice forceful nudge.
Ashmanra’s sipdown challenge – July 2025 Tea #1 -July 3 – Air Conditioning Appreciation Day – drink a cold tea
oh goodie — I popped a hot tea in the fridge this morning to have later when it’s cold, without even remembering that was the prompt for today. :) And that tea happens to be this one. Such a pleasant tea to have cold. It’s like the flavor is simply sweet, without any sweeteners. On a strong base. I have a couple steep sessions left with this and then I will miss it.
Sipdown. I didn’t take good notes while drinking this, but it isn’t my favorite 52teas blend. Rum is the dominant flavor here, and I do enjoy the taste of rum, but somehow it didn’t seem quite right. Maybe a stronger base, or the addition of some vanilla, chocolate, and/or cinnamon flavor, would have given the blend a bit more balance. Not terrible by any means, there are just other 52teas blends I enjoy more.
After touring Arundel Castle, we found this tea shop while walking around the town. They say they make their own teas, so I bought almost all their herbal blends. This one is unfortunately not a winner. The fruitiness is just kind of chemically. Combined with the rooibos, it’s just fake and unpleasant. Cold with almond milk is the most palatable way to drink it.
Sounds like a loser! You want fruitiness? Buy a bottle of “Ribena” at a corner market. I love that stuff! Essentially blackcurrent juice drink.
Got a mixed package for Christmas of the 3 Catspring’s varieties of loose leaf yaupon. This extra teabag was in the box.
I’d be fooled if somebody told me this is a lighter roast houjicha. Hit all the right notes this morning with a summer fog that was sprinkling fine mist on every surface. Mellow and smooth and sweet. Decent caffeine kick to boot.
Will come back to this for tasting note details when I break open the looseleaf :)
This reminds me of the turtle flavor from a few years ago. I taste chocolate and vanilla. It’s high quality and tasty cold with milk and sugar. I definitely prefer how 52teas does chocolate over any other company. It’s very natural. I liked it, though I’ve preferred other similar 52teas blends.
This is supposed to be rhubarb flavor, and I guess I can see that! Combined with the woodiness of the rooibos, it’s not my favorite, but it’s okay cold! I became obsessed with rhubarb & custard candies, so now I buy every rhubarb thing I see, just chasing that flavor ha.
I had this twice cold, and it sadly never worked for me. The first time, it was much too mild. The second time, it was almost bitter, but the main flavor was the green tea with not too much other flavor shining through. I love white chocolate, and I sadly didn’t taste any here. There was a hint of fruitiness, but everything needed to be stronger.
My children told my mother to gift me some teas for my birthday. She gave me a pretty new tea pot and creamer with a gift box of 9 types of tea from this company. My guess is she picked them up together at on of the TJMaxx shops.
Grabbed my mug this morning and put the kettle on to boil. The tea bags appear to have finely ground powder in them. I steeped for about 5 minutes while putting together my breakfast, perhaps I could have let it sit a bit longer to increase the flavors. However, this is definitely the type of tea my mom would drink. Its a straightforward black tea with a hint of orange and clove. Nothing fancy and not too strong but absolutely ok.
Flavors: Clove, Orange
Preparation
The purple color is so lovely! The flavor is pretty light, requiring extra powder. The main flavor I taste is lavender, which is really nice. There’s a bit of something else like fruitiness, but I wouldn’t say blueberry specifically, and there’s definitely no macaron. I enjoy having a few herbal powders around for when I don’t have a lot of time, but I don’t think this is ultimately one I would repurchase.
I’ve tried a few from DavidsTEA that are decent, but not notable enough to recommend. I had some awful ones from T2 ha. I’ll let you know if I find one I love!
There are a couple from Blume that I really love – particularly their Salted Caramel and the Acai Pomegranate from their SuperBelly line.
TTB. Laos. I want to go. I want to go to all the tea-producing regions. Side note: Don’t go looking up the tea until after you take a few sips, or their tasting notes will influence what you taste. Nothing quite like yelling PEANUT BUTTER in the middle of a group tasting. I once told a lady (when I was 10) that poi tasted like wallpaper paste. She looked at me incredulously and asked: You’ve eaten wallpaper paste?! Funny how our palates and minds put things together.
Dry Aroma: None. That’s okay. Last of the bag.
Dry appearance is very nice. Dusty. Milk chocolate brown with golden buds.
Flavor: Dark fruits. Woody. Mahogany.
Wet Leaf: I wish there were a better way to describe this note. I sense it in many black teas. Some might say malt, maybe raisin bread.
This is another one that I feel might not quite represent the full tea so I won’t rate it.
TTB. Being an American that is allergic to dairy I am constantly seeing dumb things with dairy in them. When I first came across this bag tucked away amid the many others I immediately dismissed it. “What have they done this time?” Was my first thought. Maybe added butter flavor like they did in that Buffalo sauce. But curiosity got the best of me and I took it back out.
It does have a somewhat buttery aroma once it’s brewed vanilla butter with mint.The flavor is strong with mint but the vanilla finds its way around your palate. It’s quite unique actually… Mint overpowers so much generally that it’s all you taste and while this starts out with mint in your face the vanilla slides up quietly and leaves you with a gentle mouth feel in the after taste that is really quite nice.
That all being said I do grow and sell my own mint. And this mint is a bit stale in comparison
Buttermints are an “old fashioned” hard candy popular throughout the UK, though my understanding is they’re particularly popular in England – though I know them more from the Scottish import store I grew up living near. Think like a buttery toffee flavour mixed with a soft peppermint note.
I’m trying to think of a North American equivalent and, frankly, blanking on one. The only thing coming to mind atm is Rhubarb Custards, which are also a British hard candy.
Anyway, the point being that Twinings is trying to emulate a specific but actually quite common/nostalgic regional flavour. It just so happens to be one that is far less well known (and therefore maybe assumed to be weird) here in North America.
Ah!!! Thank you for the insight. I’m a big fan of Japanese foods and such so buttermint doesn’t seem to weird. I’m just glad it doesn’t actually have butter XD
I used to make something called Buttermints at Christmas and I assumed that was what this tea referred to, but I was wrong! They were candies made with butter, confectioner’s sugar, and peppermint oil and they were really just soft mints. They are pressed into molds or can be rolled into “snakes” and then cut into “pillow” shape. I did pillow shape, roses, and leaves. They were delicious! The butter is there just to bind the sugar together and you don’t particularly taste butter.
I use the same molds to make rose-shaped sugar “cubes” for tea parties. You mix regular sugar (not confectioners) with the tiniest bit of water and press it into the molds and then let it dry.
This is more lightly flavored than some DavidsTea matcha blends I’ve had. One time, I made some meringue and put it on top and torched it. That made the cup fun, but the matcha was definitely overshadowed. I never had a cup of this I really loved unfortunately. Possibly the flavor profile is too indistinct to show up clearly. It’s certainly not bad, I just taste matcha and the tiniest desserty something extra.
I saw a Reddit post a few days ago from someone complaining that Twinings had added little mint candies to this tea and, if you’re looking closely at the leaf in the tea bags, I can see where the confusion would maybe be coming from because there are super tiny white balls mixed with the peppermint. This is not candy, though. It’s actually encapsulated flavoring. Basically, a solid version of flavouring that “melts” into your tea as its steeped. Much less common than the liquid flavouring that’s usually added in tea production which then coats all the ingredients.
There are pros/cons to both types. Encapsulated flavouring is much less aromatic, so the dry leaf aroma of a blend could be significantly less impactful if this type is used. That can be a big deal for physical tea shops where customers might be smelling the tea out of tins before purchasing it. However, since this blend comes only in prepackaged boxes that seems like less of a concern. One of the pros to encapsulated flavouring is that it tastes much longer for any sort of flavour loss to happen due to aging. If I had to make a guess, I think that might have been why Twinings made the change? Regardless, to the best of my knowledge there has always been the same flavours in this blend and it’s just the format of them that has been updated.
Anyway, after reading through that thread I decided to pull this out and make myself a mug. It’s just so wickedly smooth and creamy/buttery with such a crisp, cooling peppermint. I love this blend a lot!
Interesting! But for a tea intended to be sold as loose-leaf, I would be apprehensive about the potential for settling-out of the capsules, producing inconsistent flavoring.
Very interesting to learn about encapsulated flavors, I had not heard of them before! I’ll have to keep an eye out to try them in a blend sometime. It doesn’t look like they are available to purchase in the private market yet, or I might be tempted to pick some up!
Okay, I found the rose tea… and have been reading everyone’s reviews. I’e never encountered these tiny spheres, myself, in any tea product.
http://steepster.com/teas/whittard-of-chelsea/87187-tea-discoveries-english-rose-teabags .
@ashmanra: “doll house potting soil” Ha!!
@gmathis: doesn’t everyone tear open their teabags to get a better look? !!!
I suspect Whittard couldn’t fit all their ingredients into a teabag without them rupturing (and was unwilling to use pyramid sachets). So they tried the encapsulated flavoring, and encountered problems with stratification when portioning. So they ground-down the solids to make everything closer in size, by which time they’d ended up with a very different product. Or maybe Roswell_Strange has further insights as an actual expert. But that’s a good lesson for folks sharing a TTB, to tumble the tin/pouch before withdrawing a sample, to ensure even mixing and representative sampling!
Yes, the Whittards blend uses encapsulated flavouring! But I highly doubt the cut size for the teabags has anything to do with not being able to “fit” all the ingredients into the bags – the way you go about formulating teabags is just typically much more different than loose leaf teas (based on presumed customer use cases). Smaller cut size = predicability/consistency in dosing out the saxheta during manufacturing, which is done by weight, and more surface area for the tea to steep which makes for a faster and stronger infusion, generally.
Also, yes, to TeaEarleGreyHot’s point – one of the disadvantages to encapsulated flavouring in loose leaf tea blends is that it does settle. To be fair, this happens to a lot of ingredients with smaller particle size and greater density, but it is one of the factors of why encapsulated flavouring is just less common in LLT.
Speaking of how components in a blend may segregate in their bag, I today happened across this short youtube video that explains stratification (sometimes called “the brazil nut effect”) perfectly!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DOilqjKEhqo