Des Roses et des Bonbons

I am heading over to Camellia Sinensis on Friday to get some of this and Ombrelle de Papier for Roswell Strange (if anyone else would like me to pick up anything for them while I am there, feel free to let me know before then). Since I am running low on this, I decided to have a cup to see if I still really love it so I could decide if I wanted 25g, 50g, or 100g. Sipping on it now, I am thinking 100g all the way, especially because I will be moving away from the store soon :(. It tastes exactly like what the name suggests, candy and roses, and it is delicious.

i’m not sure how i feel about this one VariaTEA! It’s tasty..but it makes my nose sniffle. I suspect that’s the rose. So i drank it..and enjoyed it but i kept sneezing…and then sniffling. soooo yeah. lol that’s my story.

This smells so good! Fruity candy deliciousness. It smells like something I’ve sniffed recently, too. IDK what though.

I’m really getting cherry from it.

Oh wow, this tastes so good! For me, it is verging on perfume, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s tasty.

Thanks so much, VariaTEA! I definitely need to keep this company in mind. :)

I love the scent of this tea – it’s like a cross between rose petals and raspberry candies. The sample is showing its age so the flavour is a bit dull but I can still clearly taste the sweet rose flavour. It’s good taken either plain or with milk.

This was a swap from Lala (I think) a while back. Finally decided to try it after Jillian requested that some of it be added to the Great Canadian Travelling Tea Box.

This smelled and tasted extremely floral and perfumey. I didn’t add any sugar to it, but I wonder whether I should have, as a lot of different flavours were trying to dominate. I think I got rose and guava the most, and some chocolate too.

Anyways, as a result of this taste test and adding the sample to the box, this is a sipdown!

Sipdown (27/330)! I wanna reach 33 – 10% – by the end of the week.
This was a sample from VariaTEA. Thank you so much! I am so glad to have gotten the chance to try this tea and company. I only wish I could pick up more. ):

VariaTEA was kind enough to send me a two cup sample of this, even though it was one of her favourites! I’m glad she did, because I messed the first one up. I didn’t look at the instructions she’d written down, and assumed I should use boiling water since it was a black tea. I ended up with a bitter mess, and tried to cancel it out by adding milk. That just made the whole thing too bland, as I underleafed a bit too, and I was basically drinking warm, thin milk with a hint of roses. This cup, I paid attention and it paid off! I now have one very delicious cup of cherry and rose tea – a combination which I wouldn’t have put together, but it totally works. The dry leaf smells strongly of roses, and the cherry comes in after steeping. The scent of the liquid is sweet acerola cherries with a floral rose back note. I get rose notes primarily in the sip, rounded out wonderfully by the sweet juicy cherry which lingers. I added half a teaspoon of sugar as an experiment, and that really made the flavours pop! The cherry, especially, comes out more and is very juicy now. It’s a shame that this isn’t more readily available to me. It would definitely go on my reorder list if I could actually get my hands on some. It might have even become my go-to rose tea (I love rose tea). Sigh. Oh well. I guess I’ll have to think wistfully on what could have been.

Another Camellia Sinensis flavored tea from Roswell Strange! I think I have one more left after this. Now, I’m not a rose lover, but I figured I’d give this one the benefit of the doubt and try it anyway. It appears to be discontinued, as I couldn’t find it anywhere on Camellia Sinensis’s website. The black tea leaves are small, and there are white rose petals mixed in among them. Dry scent is tartly fruity and strong on the rose.

Yeah… So this is pretty much a rose tea. :P The flavor also has that powdery quality to it that I associate with rose. I don’t taste much fruit flavor, maybe a tiny hint? Mostly, it just tastes like some kind of powdery rose candy. Noop! :P

Thank you, VariaTEA, for letting me try this tea :)

The aroma and flavor remind me so much of some sweets from my childhood. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but I think it was, surprisingly, some hard candy! Very unusual flavor combination, I haven’t experienced these notes in any ther tea. It is kind of similar to MF’s Marco Polo in that respect. Because it’s so unique.

There’s rose in it but kind of… fruitified. More like rosehips? Also a note of caramel… But there’s also some balanced citrus in here! Very interesting.

Thanks to VariaTEA for sharing some of this with me! The name instantly grabbed my attention, and I was hoping for Turkish Delight or something along those lines. And it basically is. First sip was candied rose, but the more sips I took, the more the cherry came out.

The base is a little on the dry side but I like it here. The only drawback is the more you sip on it, the more the cherry starts to morph into a cherry cough syrup note. Part of me still wants more, and this reminds me of how I’ve been meaning to order from this company for quite a while. Despite the cough syrup note, I can still see myself enjoying this every once in a while.

After this morning/early afternoon I didn’t get in a ton of tea drinking. I decided I was going to take advantage of my day off and, now that I have some money do my grocery shopping. I ended up going shopping with my friend Kristina and she helped me carry all my groceries home.

As a thank you for that, and because my grocery budget was more than enough to cover what I bought, I ordered in pizza for the two of us and we spent the last few hours watching Netflix comedy specials. The only “tea” I had in that time frame was a can of Nestea’s Iced Tea (which is super sugared) since it came with the pizza.

Now I’m having this lovely, highly delightful black blend courtesy of the lovely VariaTEA who is going to pick me up an additional 50g of it before she leaves Montreal. I wanted to have a cup of her sample sooner, rather than later, so I could let her know how much to get me.

I’m wowed by how amazing and candy like the cherry in this is; it’s totally familiar and nostalgic, and yet I feel like it’s unique and true to only this tea as well. Definitely very amazing! And then, the super subtle floral edge of this makes it that much more interesting and very dynamic and fun. Lots going on with this one; but not in a way that’s too crowded or competing!

Really happy to currently have more and be getting even more!