Monk's Blend

My only other experience with Monk’s Blend is from a rather unfortunate (and yucky) teabag so I wanted to see how the real blend tasted. The tea was slightly sweet-smelling but not heavily so, scented with vanilla and fruity notes (from the grenadine I’m assuming).

The flavours are not terribly bold and I get the impression that the tea base is supposed to take centre stage and that the flavouring is more a compliment than anything else, as opposed to an actual flavoured tea where you mostly get the flavouring rather than the tea.

The result in this case is a mild, smooth-tasting tea with little astringency and enhanced with notes of sweet pomegranate (some people have said that grenadine tastes more like cherry, but this one at least is distinctly pomegranate to me) and hints of vanilla. Not bad.

I pulled this out of my black tea box, steeped it, and by the time I had returned it to the tin, had forgotten what I had made. It was a fun game to figure it out.

It seems that the pomegranates are more prominent this time around, but the black base is slightly astringent. The sweet and bitter combination is interesting and will get me through the cup, but I’ll probably switch to something else instead of resteeping.

Day 5 of Lion’s Week of Tea challenge
Thursday | Black tea

I drank the decaf version last night with milk and it was quite tasty., the milk offset the bitterness and overly tannic flavour that this black tea often has. I recommend trying this at least once as a latte. The creaminess from the milk also mixes really well with the undertone of stonefruits (peach and apricot most notably)

Yay Monk’s Blend!

When my mom went to BC for her little ‘mini vacation’ over my birthday week, I told her that as my present she had to stop into a tea shop or two an pick some goodies up for me. Of course, she wanted to know what I wanted. I told her I wanted Monk’s Blend and then an assortment of whatever else caught her eye!

I cold brewed my first sampling of this; since Granville Island sources from MTC I have had this incarnation of Monk’s Blend before but it is ‘sort of’ a new experience because, of course, every store stores their teas a little differently and that factors into the flavour a touch. For example, this tastes fresher than the MTC Monk’s Blend that the Vintage Tea Room (in my city) sells. That could be because this may have been purchased more recently or the bag was only recently opened up, but I’ll wager part of that is that from the images of Granville Island that I’ve seen they store their tea in tins while Vintage Tea Room stores theirs in clear, glass jars.

Anyway; it was smooth and tasty! Lovely to be reacquainted with an old friend.