I recently picked this up in the grab cupboard of the communal kitchen. That’s an awesome cupboard! As close to a condiment Narnia as you can come. I thought the tea would be green, but it’s black. I also thought it would be vile, but, strangely, it’s not. It’s a very basic, not particularly artificial …
Almond Tea – A.C. Perch’s
I am completely confused by this tea. Picking it out blindly (see my note on Vanilla from Fru P) I thought it was a pu’erh, or something along those lines – it definitely didn’t smell like almond, or even bitter almond. So imagine my surprise when I read the label and realized it was ACP’s …
Vanilla – Fru P Kaffe & The
So it’s clearly time to start dipping into the samples from the EU box swap I did. These are chosen on scent and scent alone – I had no clue what it was I was smelling, as I wanted to try to choose as instinctively as possible. It’s easy to get bogged down with recommendations …
Passion de Fleurs – Dammann Frères
In the bag, just what I was looking for – lushly and ripely fruity, with a nice complexity – it smells like passion fruit and apricot/peach compote, if there was ever such a thing. (The brewed tea, on the other hand, smells like wet fruit leaf.) Taste wise, well – I tried this at 90 …
Mandarine-Verveine BIO – Comptoir des thés et des épices
I so rarely come into contact with verbena/vervain in any form that now, when I have this golden opportunity, it’s going to be very, very hard to not make at least one Vampire Diaries joke per sentence. But I will try. This is, according to my highly scientific calculations (I checked the tray of untried …
Le Thé d’Amandine – Comptoir des thés et des épices
Since I’ve been so deep into my Comptoir cups lately, I might as well keep it up into the new year. Reading about this one, I was excited about the almond-cherry combination. Artificial cherry can be so vile, but sometimes it veers very nicely into bitter almond, so I figured this tea could be a …
Cookie – Lupicia
I need to get started on my truffle-infused New Year’s preparations, so to finish off this (tea-) year in review, what better candidate than my favorite tea find of all from 2013? Oh, Cookie – no matter how you steep or how you brew, when I’m alone, I’d rather be with you; **** these other leafs, …
Printemps à Shangaï – Comptoir des thés et des épices
Oh. Oh. PEACHY. Really good, natural peach flavour is so hard to come by. But here it is! Right here! This tea is playing tricks on my brain in the best way. Smelling the dry leaf made my tongue tingle with the anticipation of soft-rough peach skin – this, in spite of the fact that …
Violette-Framboise – Comptoir des thés et des épices
I’ve been catching up on books and movies lately – the World War Z mantra is as suitable as any other for that process, or moving into the new year, or getting through the tea stash, for that matter: movimiento es vida. This has been a year of chapters closing, much like the year before it. …
White Mulberry – A.C. Perch’s
Again, I cheated a little. I surreptitiously emptied the tiny tiny sample left of this that I’d been clinging to into the extra super pretty Lupicia tin I got in October. Poof, gone! Because thanks to T. and her unsurpassed Christmas gift giving skills I now have a full tin’s worth of this. I could not be …