Apple Cinnamon Oolong

Thank you Brenden for this tea sample!

Lovely aroma that takes me to the childhood that few people have these days. Bobbing for apples, bales of hay for hayrides. Who does this anymore? Some people do…and I did.

One time when my daughter was a teen we had a party and put cooked oatmeal in the large steel tub with the apples, then food coloring. The girls with long hair had a terrible time getting the oatmeal out!

I baked apple pies and other desserts for the Johnny Appleseed Contest in our town of Paradise, California. I do love apples and cinnamon!

For an Oolong?!? This surprised me! What on earth?!?

My appreciation for creativity without using chemical flavors (cheating) gives Brenden a thumbs up!

As for taste…I thought the flavor was spot on but light. It wasn’t the fault of the cinnamon or apple though, the base tea wasn’t quite the right oolong. It should have been a more buttery/floral oolong which would have tasted like a sun-ripened apple (like a yellow delicious). Mountain apples (not store bought) are quite sweet. I picked the apples I used to win the apple pie contests so I’m just sayin… I think it could have been a sweeter oolong.

That said, I love the idea.

I’m always amazed with the tea I get from Whispering Pines. When I opened the bag the aroma of cinnamon was sooo strong. I thought it was just going to be a cinnamon party. But it’s much, much more than that. It’s sweet with lovely roasty red apple notes. It has a lovely cinnamon background that compliments the oolong quite nicely.

WOW! This tea is the essence of a chilly autumn morning, waking up to mommas fresh apple cobbler and the dazzle of the sunrise over your oak-frame bed. Crisp, smooth, and refreshing, we’ve blended cinnamon pieces with a highly oxidized Indonesian o’olong with unbelievably strong all-natural notes of Washington red apples! This is a tea you just have to indulge in to believe!

I’ve been drinking this nonstop for like a week, and I can’t wrap my head around how perfect it is. :)

Infuses 5+ times!

The Perfect Cup
Infuse 1 tsp of tea leaves in 8 oz of boiling water for 2 minutes

Infusion #2: 2 minutes
Infusion #3: 3 minutes
Infusion #4: 4 minutes
Infusion #5: 5 minutes

Ingredients: O’olong tea, cinnamon

http://whisperingpinestea.com/applecinnamonoolong.html

A sample of this came with my order from Whispering Pines. At first I wanted to have this as my morning tea, but I got distracted by a random sencha I came across in my tea box and brewed that up instead. Then the very blah morning turned into a very blah afternoon, so I thought it would be the perfect afternoon tea. As I was steeping this, one of my friends (and his flatmates) stopped by for a quick visit, since I’d been planning on giving them a box of various teas to try out (a few of them are tea drinkers). We chatted for a bit, and when they left I suddenly realised that I was starving, so I thought I’d cook up an early dinner.

Well, as it turns out, that ‘quick dinner’ turned into ‘cook enough food for the next two or three days’. So on the plus side, yay, I have lots of food now, but oh no, I realised that I’d oversteeped my tea by a few hours.

So I rushed back to my room, which smelled like a warm apple pie, and took the strainer out of my mug. Since the tea base is an oolong, I had hope that it would still be drinkable. It still smelled great, after all!

I took a sip and was totally wowed by the flavour! With a tiny bit of sugar, it would basically be the liquid form of a freshly baked apple pie. It still tasted amazing plain, though, with a hint of sweetness. The apple and cinnamon flavours were perfectly balanced. The cinnamon actually tasted sweeter than what I was expecting. Or at least I think it was the cinnamon. It may have been the apple.

I’m so glad I got to try this out, even if I oversteeped it by a lot! I think I still have enough of the sample for another cup. Hopefully I won’t be so distracted then!

Well, I’ve come down with a sinus infection. Luckily for me it’s not a very bad one—I used to get them chronically. For now, at least, my tastes aren’t even off, so I’m not afraid to try out this sample!

Right out of the bag this smells exactly like pie or cobbler, and it only gets more intense as the water hits it. I was a little worried at first because I don’t tend to like dark oolongs, but it’s actually perfect for the apple and cinnamon flavors. There’s a maltiness to it that really compliments the apple flavor and reminds me of baked ones when they’ve soaked up all those spices and they’re practically falling apart right out of the oven. The cinnamon isn’t overwhelming despite how strong the smell is in the bag, instead becoming a sweet background note that compliments the oolong. This one is a gem! I’d definitely buy it.

Getting to the bottom of a 1oz bag so there are lots of cinnamon chips! I used water that was a little less than boiling. The tea smells—and tastes—like fresh red apples to me. It’s sweet with a little bit of a tart nippiness and a little bitterness that makes me think of biting into apple skins. (That bitterness is NOT a negative quality to me at all.) It’s spot-on! SO hard for me to believe there aren’t actual pieces of apple in this tea. The cinnamon makes it taste like apple pie filling. There’s a slight roastiness to this tea; a light mineral taste lingers after every sip. I’m wishing that the tea base was a little lighter, maybe more buttery or floral…but I know that’s where the apple taste is coming from. Guess I’m just being picky. It’s still a decent cuppa. (:

Thanks 221tea for the sample! I think this is officially my first blend from Whispering Pines? I hope I made a good choice, heh…

The amount of cinnamon chips in this intimidates me a little bit to be perfectly honest: I like my cinnamon in moderation and this looks like it could potentially be fairly overwhelming. Steeped up though it seems harmless enough, inviting even.

Taste wise this is much more mellow and gentle than I was bracing myself for. I almost wish it packed a bit more of a punch because while the apple, cinnamon, and oolong components can all be checked off and marked as present they’re sorta those classroom “ruffians” who sit in the back row where the teacher can’t notice them as clearly. And, when that’s the way all the flavour notes in the tea are behaving it doesn’t really work too splendidly. Someone has to be in the front.

I guess if I’d have to name a more dominant flavour it would be the apple? It’s slightly more noticeable than everything else in the aftertaste as you swallow the liquor: but only fleetingly.

So to summarize: I’m finding this a touch weak and it’s not what I wanted or expected but it’s still pretty good – definitely drinkable. I have one more cup left and since it’s about the same leaf amount as this one increasingly the leaf to up the flavour isn’t as viable an option so I’m probably going to see if I can push the flavour out a bit more by slightly extending the steep time.

I am coming back to add to my original review of this tea. After my original note, I decided to go for a fourth and fifth steep based on the recommendation from Whispering Pines website, and am I ever glad I did!

Surprisingly little flavor was lost in the 4th and 5th steep! I thoroughly enjoyed them! I was slightly tempted to try for a 6th just to see if I could, but I wanted to leave the tea on a high note for the day.

Highly recommend!

I decided to have this as my evening wind-down tea. I steeped it according to the package directions and added 1.5 teaspoons of sugar. I probably should have tried it unsweetened first , but oh well. Next time!

This tea is REALLY sweet. Definitely should have tried it unsweetened. There’s a lovely harmony going on among all the flavors, similar to what happens in a baked good: the ingredients get real friendly with one another, until they just mush into each other and become a new flavor entirely. That, and the fact that it’s really very sweet, makes this tea taste like a Hubig’s apple pie. For those of you not familiar with Hubig’s, they make individual size fruit pies, kind of like a turnover except with pie crust instead of puff pastry, deep fry them, and douse them in glaze. You don’t really want to know how many calories are in one of those things. ;) Anyway, I’m completely captivated by the bakey apple flavors going on here, and the cinnamon plays a perfectly in tune second fiddle. The oolong adds some nice honey and nut notes. Delicious!