Butterbeer

Welps, I was right. This… is not a tea I can handle. Looking at the description, my instincts told me so and after brewing up a cuppa… I had a few sips but poured the rest down the drain. Something about the chicory root? makes my mouth go a bit numb. Coffee does the same, and I know they share many similarities. Bah. What I did get out of it, besides the nauseating effect, was really quite nice. Shame, I was so hoping to be wrong here!
Anyhow, I’m done whining, for now. This was my first sample from the traveling tea box! Hopefully my next one will be better.
And now.. I am off to bed. I know I have a bunch of unanswered emails but it has been a looooong day/week for me and I need my zzzzs.
(I’m now an official board member of my university alumni assoc. volunteer, but I’m mighty excited! sorry, I say things like mighty and golly gee when I’m zombified. ha.)

ohmahgrerd, this tea is sooo good!

The scent is so strong – buttery rootbeer all the way! And the taste is simply out of this world. The rootbeer element is quite strong, but there is a buttery note (and a super buttery smooth texture). The chicory & licorice root are masterfully blended – they add depth without adding a cloying, throat clogging yuck that many licorice hating people fear! Well fear not!

All this tea does is transport you to Hogsmeade on a wintery day while you chum up with your fellow Slytherins. For me anyways ;)

For the resteep I added some heavy cream – and in the future I will add some butter ripple schnapps, because that’s a key ingredient in my homemade butterbeer recipe. Maybe as well go all out!

And Frank, this new black tea blend is perfection! For reals. So smooth!

I ordered this because my eldest daughter is a Harry Potter fan and threw a fit when she heard about the blend! She is not, however, a black tea fan. In fact, she practically hates the stuff! She began drinking green tea for health less than a year ago but still had not made friends with black. Nevertheless, the Butterbeer we must have!

I made a pot after lunch today when daughter came to visit. The dry leaf has quite a unique aroma. There is a sharp high scent that at first reminded me – not unpleasantly – of camphor. But really, it was overwhelmingly a root beer aroma, and it had the strong, natural scent of the many, many sassafras roots I tugged out of the ground in my mother’s yard.

There is such a great, pure, natural root beer flavor to this. Don’t think of cheap soda, think artisan, old fashioned, natural flavors root beer. My daughter said if we added milk and vanilla we would probably be convinced we were having a root beer float.

One cool thing was that my daughter really liked it! The next cool thing was that my iPad dinged a notification just as we finished our pot of tea and it was a message from her boyfriend in N. Ireland saying that the box of tea I mailed him had arrived today and he had just had a cup of Butterbeer and loved it! He loved it so much that he said if all the teas in the box we’re as good as this one, then he would count himself very fortunate. To quote him, “I am hugely impressed.”

So, Frank, can we start begging, wheedling, pleading, for this one to come back somehow?

Merry Christmas Steepsterites!

Sort of a Backlog: Day eleven (you mean this is almost over!?)

I can’t put into words how delighted I was to open my package and discover this tea. Butterbeer has always sounded amazing to me. The expectations are high because of the name.

Dry leaves have a rootbeer smell from them. Apparently, licorice is present here but it manifests in a way similar to that particular soft drink. I steeped it in hot milk the first time, expecting something astringent. Even though I had the leaves in there for over five minutes the latte was surprisingly mellow and creamy.

My second try at this I had plain and in a pot. I steeped it for 2 minutes and 30 seconds with water well under boiling. The result is this soft buttery beverage that rolls of my tongue. It’s amazing. This tastes like a pound of melted butter that’s had a cup of something malty poured over top- it even has the salty sweetness of butter. How are my lips not greasy? There’s no milk or cream in my cup which is unbelievably deceptive! When I focus on the malty sweet licorice streak it reminds me somewhat of a rootbeer float.

Did I mention this was amazing and divine?

Another one I think I may have to order more of that I’m now fully stocked up on.

I’m enjoying a cup of this “iced” in my office today. That is to say steeped in a small amount of hot water, allowed to cool, then topped off with cool water from my water cooler. It’s a complex flavor. Rootbeer kind of hits your nose first, the first taste is all black tea, made a little stouter with the addition of chicory, but then you get the buttery-root beer on the back of your tongue and a hint of sweet licorice on the tip of your tongue. I did have a sip of it while it was still hot, with similar results, but the flavors are more pronounced when it’s chilled. I think as a hot tea it would be really awesome with some cream and sugar. As an iced tea, it’s quite an adventure just the way it is. I’m thinking I will have to make another cup. Oh, and the leaf smells amazing, like something from a dream: root-beery, buttery, licoricey—very exotic scent when they are all combined. I could just leave my nose in the package and smell it all day. I steeped it using hot water from my water cooler. Not sure how hot it is, probably at least 190.

This is turning into an old song, but here’s another one that I was highly sceptical of. Yes, I’m a Harry Potter fan too, but even while reading the books no amount of mentions of butterbeer made me want to try it. I don’t like beer at all (foul stuff) and I don’t like things that aren’t butter to have a strong butter-y flavour. I couldn’t even seek refuge in the Danish translation of the books because a) the translation is rather shaky in places and b) the Danish translator has chosen to translate it as ginger beer, which… ew, I don’t like that either. So no, I can’t claim that I’m in any way looking forward to drinking something that I imagine will taste like a combination of beer and liquid butter.

The dry leaf smells sort of like rubber. It’s that rootbeer-y smell that does it. I’ve only had rootbeer once in my life and at that time I wasn’t really certain whether I liked it or not, but was leaning in the direction of ‘acquired taste’. It was that rubbery note that broke it for me, as I recall. Well. It’s better than my initial thought of what it might be, I suppose.

After steeping the rubbery smell is still there, but it’s changed in character to something that smells a bit like Jenka chewing gum. (Has that ever even been available outside of Scandinavia at all?)

Flavourwise, yeah, I’m getting a lot of what I recall of the root beer, and also a certain degree of butter. The whole thing has a brownish, sort of murky flavour and it’s really kind of indescribable apart from that.

At least it doesn’t taste like beer. That would have been right horrid.

As it is though, it’s definitely not something for me. Sorry, I can’t drink this. It’s not working for me at all.

(backlog)
My Dad came over to visit so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to share the remainder of my 12 days of tea packet with him. The taste of the black tea and root beer complement each other quite nicely. I’m not usually a huge lover of root beer, but somehow this works for me. I’m glad I bought a full-size pouch.

As someone who sells stuff on etsy, holidays drive me crazy. Mother’s Day being the current one. I get hit with last minute emails of orders for me to crochet stuff and have it shipped to arrive on time. Majority of the time the people are SOL as I have to make the item. Then there’s the small percentage of buyers that bail at the last minute on a last minute order. Ick! Which caught me last night.

I decided with Butterbeer for a treat of a tea I haven’t had in awhile, something with a nerd reference to make me smile, plus black tea wake up after late night crocheting. I really got a good rootbeer flavor here with a hint of spice, yum!

(see previous tasting notes for review)

All my fears about this tea have been squashed thanks to Amanda for sending me this sample!
I was so afraid of a licorice / anise taste but nooooo its not like that at all!
I taste creamy milky butter and sarsaparilla root be it in there or not, it tastes like root beer and is yummy as the cup cools.
Will I run out and buy it – not that i need to go OUT lol but I doubt this will live in my perma stash but I surely would never refuse a cup offered!
We will see if I have any cravings for it sneak up but I still have enough for another cup for another day.
Thank you Amanda I was so curious about this one – curiosity cured and happiness that it was an enjoyable cup!

I’ve been having a lot of cold brew teas lately since the weather suddenly got really warm, in the 80s and humid. I thought this might be an interesting cold brew for today, but when I woke up this morning it was in the 50s! I made myself drink it anyway, because I needed some kind of caffeine for class.

This is definitely an interesting cold brew. I sweetened it to get a bit more of the ( what I imagine to be) butterbeer flavor. I think this would be really good with some addition to make it creamier, though I didn’t have anything. At first, I wasn’t sure if I liked it. But as I sat in class, I found myself sipping it more and more, and enjoying it. I think I might prefer this warm, but it’s definitely not bad cold.