This is one I absolutely would have bought for myself based on scent alone – it has a caramel-sweet (without being cloying) apple compotey (without being artificial) roundness to it, which is very comforting all on its own. The dry tea itself is quite nice, too, full of large pieces of dried apple.
Steeped, the scent morphs into a brown sugar/calvados cake I sometimes make with my own apples in autumn. The caramel element really kicks in here, and it smells like sweet, gorgeous, baking pie crust. It would have been absolutely lethal if the slight booziness and the pastry scents carried through into the flavour, but they remain elusive throughout the sip.
This is all very ambiguous – I either want to like this a little more than I do, because the scent profile is so appealing, or I want to like it a little less than I do, because it’s not readily available to me. But I’m at a loss – I hate when I outfox myself.
What I do know, though, is that I wish this were a green tea. The base tea doesn’t really get to shine in this blend anyway, and the flavour profile as a whole seems so much better adapted to a green tea base.
Thanks for sharing, whoever put this in!
[Sample from the EU Travelling Box, autumn 2013.]
Boiling, 3 min