Rose Tea

Thank you very much to Ricky for sending me a sample of this. I was quiet overwhelmed by the aroma of the dry leaves. They really smelt like a rose bush. It didn’t smell overly synthetic at all.

And it tastes like a rose—just like a rose. I like strong flavors and I like it when teas defy expectations. No daintiness at all here: it’s really like a rose. The tea gets lost amidst the rose.

I had a bunch of conflicting contradictory thoughts. I wanted more tea in my roses. Yet this tea was heavily evocative. I could imagine it being drunk by the Pre-Raphaelite painters. I could imagine it being on foot lotion or in perfume, as others have noted.

Most of all it made me really miss my mother. It’s one of those times when I really wish I could call her up and say “You wouldn’t believe what I just drank!” And she’d get excited. And we would have a long talk ranging from roses to beverages to a special bush that somebody planted in 1904.

So it is certainly an old-fashioned experience for me although I imagine that the ability to infuse tea with such exceptional flavor must be a newish technique.

I have no idea if I will wake up in a few days or a few weeks or a few months and NEED to buy a full container of this or if it will waft away into oblivion like yesterday’s perfume. I’m certainly glad I tried it but I wonder if it isn’t simply a novel-Tea.

I can’t help but compare this tea to the Rose Congou I had this morning. The smell of the leaf is SO much better (not that that would be hard, mind). While the other smelled sour and a little floral, this smells like roses. Actual roses plus maybe a tiny little hint of candy. The dry leaf battle totally goes to this one.

Wow, as this flowed out of my handy dandy ingenuiTEA, I’m hit with a soft wall of rose scent. It actually reminded me a bit of Teavana’s now discontinued Rose Marzipan. But, you know, without the marzipan. But now that the tea is fully dispensed into my Totoro mug, it’s muted a bit. I can smell the rose, but I can also totally smell the tea. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled the tea when we are talking about a flavored tea. It’s always hiding underneath the flavoring. But not this one! This makes me happy.

No sugar for this (though I do have some in my desk, just in case). Oooh, don’t need sugar though. This is nice. Smooth and sweet. Very rose-y, but not like I swallowed a flower bush. I seem to get it more of a distinct rose on the exhale after the sip. Otherwise is it a sweet, fluffy tasting tea. As it cools, I seem to get more tea flavor out of it.

This isn’t an overly deep tea taste-wise but it does have more… roundness (for want of a better word) than the Rose Congou this morning. This is better than the rose/floral aspect of Rose Marzipan, too. I think the roundness of flavor is coming from the tea base (Ceylon, it seems like?) and it increases as it cools. My last sip had a little edge of something that was delicious and I want more of but I’m afraid I’m too impatient to let it cool enough to get that.

This tea makes me feel like I’m strolling through my grandmother’s rose garden. She used to have rows and rows of bushes. Strangers would pull off the highway to compliment her. It was fairly impressive. And this tea makes me mentally wander down one of the rows. It’s not so overpowering that I feel like I’m stopping to stick my nose in the closest rose bush, just wandering through the nicely spaced rows, enjoying the scent of rose lingering in the air.

This isn’t a tea I’m going to reach for daily because ultimately, I find roses (both tea-wise and flower-wise) a bit too perfume-y and sweet (even (or especially?) when the flavoring tastes as natural as this) for daily contact. But this is a lovely make-me-mellow type tea. Again, mental rose garden.

So the rose tea battle goes to Golden Moon. I will still try the Rose Congou sugar-less some time in the future (this weekend maybe?) but I have a feeling it won’t be able to compete.

ETA: Did a second steep just because I can. Initially had the timer set for 4:30 but the tea looked a little light so I added a minute. It’s still a light (but pretty) bronze color. Still smells lovely but is more similar in scent to the Rose Congou this morning. Tastes a little more like it, too, since it isn’t quite as smooth. Much thinner too. In fact, this is a (still) smoother version of this morning’s tea but without sugar.

In other words, Golden Moon’s SECOND STEEP is equivalent (and actually a hair better) than a similar tea’s FIRST steep. Go Golden Moon. That being said, this tea is probably not the best one for a second steep.

Way too crazy a day today. Just enough time for one mid-afternoon steep, so I chose something floral and relaxing to try and carve out a little niche of calm. When I opened up the packet, I was hit immediately by the very strong rose aroma – I think there’s a fair bit of rose aroma added to what the petals included in the mix would normally provide. The smell moved into the realm that was getting close to air freshener territory, no longer so natural.

The tea brews up nice and dark, and fortunately the scent tones down the chemical overtones I got from the unsteeped leaf. The black tea it’s based on is unremarkable; so far this is just okay, so let’s see what happens when milk and sugar are added.

Hmm, I think that may have been a mistake. I’m losing the bulk of the rose flavor now – probably would have been better to steep it another minute or so if I was planning on using milk and sugar. The flavors have slunk into the background and aren’t doing such a good job of mixing with the cream; in particular, the combination of rose and cream are making it taste a little curdled. I checked the cream on its own and it seems to be okay, so I guess it’s some kind of interaction between the two. Not my favorite, but I won’t put the rating all the way down as it’s still okay on its own.

Thank you for sharing this with me… Azzrian?
I try, but I am terrible at keeping my sample piles separate. Not enough room and somehow they get all mixed up! ack!
Anyhow, this was a lovely tea. Similar to a rose congou, but the base is a bit different. Not as harsh I’d say. In fact, I found it rather smooth. and very rosy. More than I was expecting.
This I think, is the most memorable rose tea I’ve tried.
There are so many rose teas in my tasting history by now that they are more or less all the same. If I did a side by side comparison, I’m sure I could find differences but they are pretty miniscule.
I’d like to see a variation of a rose tea one day. Chocolate rose maybe? oooh, perhaps this is a mixing opp! :P
Rating: 86

Golden Moon sample No. 27 of 31. Only five teas left to sample. It will be bittersweet to reach the end, but it’s not like I don’t have a ridiculous number of other samples to try, both singles and sets. And next in this group is finally the Kashmiri Chai, which I definitely have to try today. I’ve been waiting for it for a while, and seeing it sitting there next in the stack is just too much for me.

But this isn’t about chai, this is about Rose Tea. I’ve had rose petals in a lot of teas, but their function seems mostly to be decorative. The only other tea I’ve had that really bills itself as a rose tea is the Numi Velvet Garden White Rose. I haven’t had it in a while, but I recall liking it. It doesn’t really seem a proper comparative vehicle here, though, as the GM Rose is a black tea, not a white.

Rose Tea smells utterly divine. I adore rose fragrance, the fresher the better. This smells very fresh. Like burying your nose in a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. The petals are a lovely purplish-reddish-pink and give the illusion of fresh softness. (If you actually pick one up in your fingers, you’ll find it to be dry and crisp.) The black tea adds a slight muskiness to the scent, but for the most part it is rose, rose and more rose.

The smell of the tea base is more prevalent in the aroma of the steeped tea. It has a sweet smell, suggesting sugar or honey, similar to the aromas in others of the GM black teas. The flavor is lovely. The rose predominates, but it is much gentler in the flavor here than it is in the Numi white. I’m not sure if that’s because the black base has more innate strong flavor than the white or for some other reason.

I don’t get any bath products in the flavor; nothing soapy or lotiony, or even perfumy. There’s a quaint nutty aftertaste that is unexpected and helps to banish all resemblance to bath products.

I like this a lot. It’s not something I could see drinking every day, but it’s something I would keep in my cupboard for when it’s the right taste for the right time.

With this in my cupboard, I could let the Numi go as a representative rose flavor without regret.

To me, the very idea of a rose tea is slightly strange, and yet I really don’t have any good reasons for why that should be so. I don’t eat rose petals, therefore I shouldn’t be drinking them in liquid form, perhaps? Even that reason doesn’t hold up, ultimately; some of my favorite black teas are my favorites because they remind me of hay in a hot barn. It isn’t as though I’ve ever sat down to have a big heaping helping of alfalfa.

Anyway, the scent is delightfully, definitely ‘rose’. That does not change over the course of the brewing. It still struck me as strange. Like…sipping on potpourri or those little sachets of dried roses that mothers and grandmothers seem to like tucking away in various drawers of clothing, irrevoccably tying the scent of dried rose petals to the little private and forgotten places within spaces belonging to the older women in my life. (And this is not wholly true; I think my mother has preferred lavender and cedar over time, but I smell the aroma of roses emanating from this cup and my memory still jingles to the tune of sachets and drawers).

I suppose I had forgotten about Turkish delight. One sip and I remember; that beautiful pink jelly that I seem to only ever eat dressed in chocolate, wrapped in shiny pink wrappers and made by Fry’s (though I can’t for the life of me remember ever eating anything else made by that company). The quality of the rose flavor is approximate, occasionally providing a flash of something sweet on the parting of the sip. I have a very minor astringency in the back of my throat, but it’s pretty mild.

Definitely not a tea that I see myself craving, but I wouldn’t send it back to the kitchen, either. If rose tickles your fancy or you happen to be a rabid fan of Turkish delight, I suppose this might be right up your alley.

Wow this tea was an amazing scentual experience from the time I opened the sample packaging. At first when black it was a little lacking I would have to say thin. It needed more body so I decided to add milk and sugar and on my first sip it was still just okay. Then on my next sip a little better, then again and again I drank this tea and it truly grew on me almost immediately. Fantastic, it reminds me of “Rose Milk” a drink I used to drink as a child. Such wonderful memories came to mind and I was almost immediately wisked away to India. Beautiful indeed. I do wish the rose was just a little stronger. I will drink this again. :o)

I have no opinion at all on rose teas. I’ve never had anything that has tasted of roses, so I don’t know what to expect from the mug that is steaming on the table next to my laptop.

However. I do know that the scent of roses is prone to make me run away, be sick, or cry. Let me explain. We used to have this bottle of rose spray in the bathroom. It was there to cover up the smell in case things got a little crazy in there. So if you opened the bathroom door and the first thing you smelled was roses, you knew to run away, because the scent of something much, much worse wasn’t far behind.

I was also unlucky enough to catch the swine flu towards the end of my senior year of high school (pretty much exactly a year ago). I spent a lot of time being sick in that bathroom, so the whole room smelled like roses for a while. I came to associate that rose smell with having to be sick again.

Lastly, when I graduated high school (again, about a year ago) my parents presented me with a bouquet of roses. We moved immediately after the ceremony, making me leave behind the bedroom I had grown up in, the sanity I was used to living in, and worst of all, the friends I had grown up with. It was a teary day, needless to say. So the scent of roses makes me think of graduation, which was the last time I saw any of my friends.

So. Now that I’m all nice and emotionally exhausted, we can get to the tea. If you’re only interested in reading about the tea, begin here: The tea tastes like a black tea, nothing fancy or special. All the rose really does is hang on to the end of the sip and highlight the astringency of the black base. You can taste rose, but it isn’t very identifiable without the package sitting right next to it. If I didn’t know I was drinking rose tea, I would have thought I was drinking a particularly astringent black tea.

I am sipping, and having a conversation with myself:

“No, this is strange!”
“No, it’s good-strange.”
“No. Honey Pear is good-strange, this is strange-strange!”
“Hmmm. I’m kinda getting you on the strange-strange, and now that I think of it, doesn’t it taste EXACTLY like Rose Milk body lotion from the 1970s!!?!?!?!”

http://www.amazon.com/Rose-Milk-Skin-Care-Lotion/dp/B000087L6T

“OMG it DOES!”

I then promptly stopped talking to myself, threw the tea down the sink, and am about to choose something COMPLETELY different for my evening tea!!!

My nose acknowledges four classes of rose: the flower, the perfume, the essence (as in rose water), and the soap/lotion. We use a lot of rose essence/rose water in our cooking in India, so I’m most familiar with the variety of tastes created by adding that to a beverage or dish. As well, when I was little I used to munch on rose petals. I like rose. A lot.

I was very happy with the fragrance of the dry leaves. Of the four recognised classes, this tea fell squarely in the “flower” one: the fragrance was fresh, pure, not artificial. Not even remotely subtle, and really lovely. The wet leaves and the steeped tea didn’t smell as strongly like a fresh flower, which was good, because it let the black tea come through a little more.

The flavour is where things just went all pear-shaped. The flavour, my friends, is neither essence nor flower, but lotion. Lotion! It’s wrong. So, so, wrong. To make matters worse, my first sip of the unsweetened tea hit the back of my throat with a distinct bitterness, which immediately shattered my resolve to wean myself off sugar/sweeteners in my tea. Straightaway, I added some sugar.

So now I’m drinking non-bitter rose lotion. Because I like rose so much, I’m reluctant to dump the tea, so it’s sitting here, and every so often I forget how disappointed I am and reach for another sip or two. What I’m finding is that as it sits (it’s just sitting, not really cooling, thanks to my super duper mug), the flavour is transitioning from lotion to flower, more like what I expected when I first cut open the packet.

In the end, I’m glad that I didn’t pour the tea down the drain. I still feel that there is a slightly lotion-y aftertaste, but to be fair, it is possible that this is mostly psychological. I’ll be okay getting through this mug, but unfortunately this isn’t a tea I’ll be stocking in the future. That said, I’d now really like to find a bold, rose tea that I would like to keep stocked. I tried a white rose that I really liked, but it was subtle. I’d like something more like this, with a nice, bold flavour, but with a rose infusion that’s more to my liking. I’ll keep trying, I’m sure I’ll find something. =)