Cocoa Canela (Organic)

Here’s Hoping Tea Box #1
Well here goes my journey with this box. I love this one! Its literally mexican hot chocolate but tea version. The smell is so delicious you can taste it through smelling it! The spices and creaminess from the chocolate was superb. I added milk, tiny bit sugar, and cinnamon on top! Perfection! And perfect to relax with after work! http://www.flickr.com/photos/20741867@N05/10564089135/in/photostream/

Great Canadian Travelling Tea Box

Ohmygawsh! This tastes so similar to Davidstea Stormy Night… except it needs a lot less “leaf”. I used 2 tsp in a 12oz steeping mug and it is delightful! Yay! I’m keeping this. It’s chocolatey and cinnamony and yum (I added a dash of sweetener)!

So I wanted something comforting and warm and I’ve been craving chocolate for the past week so I pulled out some Cocoa Canela, brewed it up but it just wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Time to I decided to experiment! (don’t get me wrong it was still good but I really was looking for something richer and creamy, to be honest I should have just gone downstairs and gotten a real hot chocolate but oh well.)

I started off by adding some cream to the mix, not bad. It certainly added the creaminess that I was looking for but for whatever reason it tasted a bit odd so I added just a touch of sugar to blend things out and that helped. I’m still not sure about the roasted mate flavor with the cream but in the end this was really pretty close to actual hot chocolate… just with a bit of banana and cinnamon mixed in.

Ooo 1600 ooo… :D

I had this as an eggnog latte. It was pretty good! I liked the extra cinnamon, and I like that this tea isn’t the sickly sweet candy cinnamon flavour.

I don’t think I’ll be repurchasing this tea, but it was tasty while I had it!

One of the heavy ironies of my new job is that I seem to be drinking less tea. Sure, I’m surrounded by it; but I don’t drink more than the 1-3 cups I’ve long had at work, because there’s no bathroom in the back and I hate public washrooms. (Plus, I’m working!) And my hours are so much longer now…which is good, but it means less time to drink tea at home!

I like this one, yet I don’t. I don’t know. It’s chocolate-y, but not too much. It’s got a nice strong cinnamon overlay, but it’s not overwhelming. The flavours blend fairly well. It won’t exactly bowl you over, but I’ve had it as a latte, and it was really good as a latte.

And that’s really about all I have to say about it. I don’t know. I guess I’m tired today. And somewhat tired of sweet/chocolate/“cake” teas today, for reasons I can’t identify. I’m feeling the tea equivalent of blue balls at the moment. Nothing is satisfying me at the moment, and I don’t know why.

Maybe I’m just wiped out. One of our new staff has been a bit of a no-show lately, and I’ve had to pull overtime hours on top of full time. So yeah, maybe just too tired to really absorb the stuff I’m drinking lately.

Not that I’m complaining! Work has mostly been fantastic. Although yesterday was so slow that I don’t know if we even made enough to cover staffing costs. It’s not even like we could really sample much, because the mall was so dead that pretty much only FedEx and UPS guys were walking by in the hall! I’m scared we could get into trouble for that, but I don’t know what else we could have done. We only got a shipment of one box, and ran out of things to clean. So I just worked on my training manual, my coworker read some Sherlock Holmes, and I said to him at one point, “You realize we’re getting paid to sit and drink tea? What a great job.”

Then the most awesome customers came in! A white guy and his [presumably] Chinese wife who told us that they’d been living in China for 10 years before coming back to Canada. They were curious about Japanese tea – especially matcha – and looking for a variable temp kettle. I tried hard to sell them on either the Breville One-Touch or the Zojirushi. They seriously considered both, but agreed that neither worked because they need something with a longer spout for the Chinese tea ceremony they do, which I’m afraid I didn’t recognise.

Then they spent an age talking to us about tea! They told us horror stories from other tea shops they’d tried farther north in the city, then we talked about matcha. I was blunt about the quality of mall tea, and the fact that our matcha is not exactly top grade – which they didn’t seem surprised by, haha – but they wanted to try it anyway. So we did them up a couple of matchas on the house to show them how it works. I made the husband a ceremonial bowl (and I was super stoked to get really pro foam when I was explaining it!) and my mix master co-worker whipped up some flavoured combo of oolong and matcha. They thanked us and told us we were doing really good for people so new to tea and working in a tea store, way more professional than other tea shops in the city, that they appreciated “all you do,” and that they’d be back with some Chinese greens for us to try. YAY!

They didn’t buy anything, but you can tell the difference between a customer who truly wasted an hour of your time with no intention to ever buy, and a customer who will definitely be back. They’ll be back, and I look forward to seeing them again.

So begins the backlogging of tea. I was a little busy this weekend with my sisters wedding. This was a sample with my latest order. It smelled super sweet. It tasted to me even sweeter and I LOVE chocolate. But there just seemed to be too much chocolate for me. I know too much, but there really was even for my tastes. It wasn’t bad but not something I’d keep on hand all the time.

Mmm this smells delicious.
Taste is slightly earthy from the mate. Chocolate-y but not fake or overly sweet.
The cinnamon gives in a nice smooth finish but adds a nice kick. There is maybe a tad bit too much cinnamon for my liking, but it is still really good.

I think my go-to chocolate mate is still Chocolate Rocket

Loved this! It was the tea of the day, which they feature iced. I opted to order it hot, with skim milk. It is very nice. Naturally has a sweetness to it, the cinnamon is strong. cocoa is smooth, definitely going to buy this one!

Well, this isn’t joking around. It tastes EXACTLY like Mexican hot chocolate. I made it as a latte with sugar. This was very fun to try! Thanks a bunch, Kaylee!

Ahhhh I really should have used the entire sample and added milk. This seems like one of those that’s just flat and nasty unless there’s a stronger background for it.

It wasn’t too bad like say, cococaramel sea salt, but it just seemed like it could have been so much better if there was something creamy about it. For chocolate cinnamon, it really would have made sense but I wasn’t really awake yet when I made it. Bah.

I guess I can do it with the tiny bit I have left, mixed with something else.

Thanks Kittenna for the sample~