Orange Cream Lapacho

I’m a little excited now…I just meant to get the teas out on the table for tomorrow’s packing up swap stuff..and uh 2 hours later all my packages are bundles up and just need addresses before they’re ready to go out! It also means that i’m now in a great place to have a bunch of sipdowns tomorrow bwahahaha! which is good since i added 3 teas to my cupboard tonight.

I brewed this one up and sadly, forgot about it for an hour…DO NOT DO THAT! it makes it taste not as good. lol I really wanted cacao..but i only have enough for a small cup and that’s being saved for tomorrow…

Thanks to Indigobloom for passing along a sample of this one yesterday! Also, sipdown!

I’ve had a lapacho orange (without vanilla) before, and don’t recall being terribly enamoured with it, but after giving her pouch of this a sniff, I felt it was necessary to try this. The orange flavour here is quite strong, and combined with a lovely creamy aroma (vanilla), which came off as almost a yogurt-type smell when I poured the leaf into my infuser.

Flavourwise, this is actually rather good. Very orangey, in kind of a cross between orange pop and fresh orange sort of way (but thankfully not orange peel!), which is tempered by a creaminess. (I really seem to like citrus cream teas, though I don’t much care for citrus in tea by itself despite loving lemons/limes!) The lapacho isn’t even really causing “scratchy throat syndrome” too much (maybe a little), which it usually does for me.

I don’t think this would be a tea I’m too likely to purchase for myself, only because I’m wary of lapacho for a few reasons, and don’t like that it makes my throat feel scratchy, but the flavouring is pretty great here. If the base was honeybush or something, and the tea tasted the same, I’d probably knock my rating up to about 90, but given that it’s not a tea base I favour, it does lose a few points. I’m curious, however, how this one would be iced and/or made with milk and frozen into popsicles… (it tastes like a creamsicle, and how awesome would it be to have healthier creamsicles…)

ETA: Re-steep in half the water still has flavour, but I’m not in love with it.

I figured this would be another great mason jar tea so I steeped a huge batch of it up, and then to coax additional flavour from it, I let it sit for 10 minutes.

That might have been a mistake. I can really taste bark, and then a bit of orange, and then just a little cream. Huh. So I added a bit of milk and that toned the bark down and upped the cream, but this still isn’t as good as it smells. GUYS – this smells amazing. But the smell is just a trick.

I love this tisane!!
Hot, it’s a cup of soothing creamy orange yummy. A little rough on my throat for an herbal, but then it IS lapacho and I figure there is no way around that.
Cooled down to room temp, it looses most of it’s punch. Maybe next time I’ll add a dash of sugar and see if that holds better, because I was so looking forward to having this iced over the summer, or as a popsicle.
So here is my rating…. Hot: 85, Cooled: 65 Overall: 75

Another sample from Cavocorax!

I tried this last night at like 11:30, obviously needed something caffeine free.

The smell was a bit off putting, because it smelled like some kind of orange flavoured cough syrup I remember from when I was a kid. I have to wonder if orange flavoured cough syrup even exists anymore!

The taste was pretty good, though not super creamy, just orangey.
But something about the tea made my throat scratch, not a sensation I’m used to because I have no food allergies, so it was unpleasant enough to make me dump the cup. I will have to give the rest to my friend to try.

Thanks for the sample, Cavo!

This tea smells amazing!
It doesn’t taste as good as it smells, & it burns my throat a little, although I’m not sure why. I’ve drank Lapacho (pao d’arco, taheebo) from time to time, & have a powdered version of it from the local herbalist shop (Chery’s Herbs). Cheryl recommended it to me to improve my immune system to help with allergies, & if I used it like she suggested, it would probably help. But I tend to forget. It is somewhat bitter, but has never burned my throat,
so I’m inclined to think the the burning throat problem is from the ‘flavoring’ in the tea.

Thanks to my Steep Sister, Sil for sending the sample. It smells so awesome that I could sit around huffing the bag it came in until bedtime.
Sipdown! That’s 4 sipdowns today, plus I realized one of the teas on my list is no longer in my cupboard, so I’m down to 384, just like that!

SSTTB: Pick #4

I definitely have an interest in trying some of the HI blends in the box (I’ve tried some already too) and this one seemed like a nice starting point so I decided to cold brew it. I’ve never had anything with Lapacho in it so I totally wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to try something with it – and trying DT’s Orange Blossom blend recently has put me in the mood for “Creamsicle” type things so this was an easy sell.

My cold brew used up the last of what was in the box; hopefully no one else was dying to try this one out. Dry it smelled insanely fresh and juicy. I just pictured fat, plump oranges bursting from all the juice. Like when you fill a balloon so much it pops; but squishy, and with fruit…

However, this doesn’t taste quite like you’d expect given the smell. I mean, it is orange-y and there’s totally a vanilla cream quality and together that does equal “Creamsicle” but it’s not as strong as the smell would seem to promise, and there’s that third element; the Lapacho. It tastes like trees and nature – but in a bad way. I suppose the trees/nature thing makes total sense: Lapacho is basically bark, and I could see it rounding out the orange/cream and adding a fuller flavour if it wasn’t so strong tasting. Like this it’s just unpleasant. It tastes like the “bad kind” of health drinks.

Yeah, not a fan. I feel let down by this one. But at least now I know that Lapacho probably isn’t for me. That’s something I’ve now learned because of the box.

SSTTB

So I usually pass when it comes to citrus teas but this smelled so amazing I just had to give it a taste. Seriously, this smells just like a tasty orange creamsicle. Yum!

Tastewise, the creamsicle flavor is present but muted and the sip ends on a weird flavor that I just can’t put my finger on. It is almost a dry, earthiness that really takes away from the taste. With that said, I am enjoying this more than I thought I would, though I don’t think it is something I need to have around all the time.

Sip down. Ech, I’m kind of glad, too. These last couple cups were rather dicey. I got the exact same scratchy feeling in the throat that others have mentioned.

So that said, no reordering for me. If only this orange creamsicle were combined with a different, delicate base, it would be a winner.

This one came in my Herbal Infusions order today.

The scent is pretty awesome. Warm creamiscle. I have to say the taste is more orange than cream. My package of this specially says “Orange Lapacho/Vanilla”, but I don’t get vanilla.

On the upside, this lapacho type of tea is great! When I saw a comparison to rooibos/honeybush I was slightly concerned but there’s no bizarre medicinal taste here.