Canadian Dream | Maple Tea

Oh. This one smells good! Maple syrup, and sugar, and malt. I always fear, with flavoured teas, that the scent will be far, far more impressive than the taste, and sometimes that’s the case. Sometimes, though, it’s not. And I’m overjoyed that it’s not this time! It’s still summer, and burning hot, here, and I shouldn’t really be drinking hot tea because it doesn’t help. I had to try this one, though, and now I have I’m going to try and save at least a decent amount for the autumn, because I know it’ll make a fabulous warm-up treat on a cold work morning. It might be hard to keep hold of it for that long, but I’ll try.

I used 1 tsp of leaf for my cup, and gave it 3.5 minutes in boiling water. I added a splash of milk because it brewed up pretty dark. There’s a definitely oily scrim on the surface, but it doesn’t affect the texture too much. I’d probably ignore it if it did, though, because I’m all about the flavour with this one. It tastes, to all intents and purposes, like maple syrup. It’s not quite as rich and cloying as that would suggest, but it’s definitely a full-on maple flavour. One point in its favour is that it’s not too sweet. It’s got an edge of almost “burnt” tasting caramelisation which helps to bring it back a little, although the initial sip is pretty sugary. I love it. And now I want more!

I wanted a dessert tea and this is it! Smells so sweet.

This sample is from my swap with Starfevre. I haven’t seen her around lately, I hope she’s doing well. I am a huge maple fan, and even though the maple teas I’ve had have been disappointing, I always want to try more! I would love to find a very strongly flavored maple tea for the fall and winter months. Anyway! This tea is a mix of very dark, generic-looking black tea leaves, little hunks of maple brittle, and some red peppercorns, which I avoided like the plague when measuring out my cup. Seriously though, why are they in there? It smells very sweet and maple-y, in fact I can smell it through the 4 mm thick bag even.

The steeped tea smells quite sugary with a light maple aroma. Hmm, this tastes kind of odd. The base tea seems kind of vegetal, and specifically reminds me of cooked green beans. The maple flavor is nice, perhaps a touch artificial but that’s okay. Overall, a very light-bodied tea. Definitely not my perfect maple tea, but not terrible either.

Burnt maple. Not too sweet. I like this one a lot.
I’m sad I only bought 25g of this.

Mmmm! I like this better on the second go. It doesn’t need anything added to it. I actually like it a teensy bit oversteeped—the syrup and the hint of bitterness is actually quite tasty.