‘Samurai’ Traveling Teabox – Tea #12
Another interesting one to see in the teabox. I wasn’t paying attention to the instructions though and made this as a normal tea instead of the latte. This is the finest ground rooibos I’ve ever seen. It almost looks like rooibos matcha but they say to put it in a teabag. The ingredients say rooibos, vanilla bean and fenugreek for some reason. The resulting brew is surprisingly light. The flavor is vanilla enough but there is also the tiniest hint of an off flavor, like onion or something? I looked up fenugreek and it says it should have a maple flavor?
Steep #1 // 1 teaspoon for full mug // 10 minutes after boiling // 3 minute steep
Steep #2 // just boiled // 3 min
Another day: The second steep session, I tried to steep how they say on the bag: A teaspoon in a teabag in half a mug of water for five minutes (or less), then add milk to it. I don’t usually adding milk to my teas, but I wanted to try the LATTE brew. I can’t say I liked it better this way. It was fine. The milk really brought out that onion flavor though. If you can ignore that, it DOES really taste like caramel. But it mostly just seemed like milk. I’d rather just drink this brewed normally, without any milk.
Edited to add the next day: on the second steep, I brewed for about 30 minutes at boiling (despite the warning of bitterness on the package) and it was very good. No onions this time, which is odd that it disappeared if I brewed it longer. It’s only about the strength that I expected this tiny of rooibos to be. But the cup was tasty anyway. More maple.
Fenugreek does have a semblance of maple to me. Nothing at all like onion.
hmm… I wonder where the onion is coming from…