Bottled Iced Teas: Some more from Teas' Tea

This weekend, I had the chance to taste some more bottled iced tea flavors from Teas' Tea.

The lightly sweetened Hibiscus Green Tea was quite nice.  I'm not a big fan of hibiscus, but this tea blended the hibiscus flavor with cane sugar and green tea to produce a nice sweet flavor.  This tea is definitely sweet, but reasonably so.   It was refreshing and hit the spot.

The lightly sweetened Peach Ginger Black Tea is very very strongly ginger-flavored.  There might have been some tea or peach in there, but it tasted more or less like drinking liquid ginger.   I can't recommend it except to people who really like ginger.

The lightly sweetened Pomegranate Blueberry Green Tea was deeply odd.  I can't decide whether I liked it or not.  It tasted far more like some sort of juice drink than anything tea-related.  I'm going to need to try this one again before I can opine for or against it.

Tea tasting: Harney & Sons' Cherry Blossom Green Tea

Harney & Sons' Cherry Blossom tea is a nice quality green tea infused with the aroma of cherry blossoms but not very much in the way of cherry flavor.   It smells marvelous, like a warm April day when the cherry blossoms are blooming.  To the extent it is there at all, the cherry flavor is a light, gentle underlayer beneath the green tea's natural flavors.  I recommend Cherry Blossom to green tea fans who want just that extra hint of something without losing the essential taste of tea.

Tea tasting: Harney & Sons' Cranberry Autumn

Harney & Sons' Cranberry Autumn is a good quality black tea lightly flavored with cranberry and orange.  The flavoring is not strong at all, and it blends nicely with the natural qualities of black tea.  The aroma is great for fall; it is a nice alternative to the ubiquity of pumpkin.

I can recommend this without reservation to people who like unflavored blacks.

Tea-rrific Ice Cream: Chunky London Mist

While wondering in the grocery store in a cold-mediation-induced mental haze, I found Tea-rrific Ice Cream's Chunky London Mist.   Tea and ice cream are two of my favorite things.  It billed itself as "The malty and citrusy notes of Earl Grey tea with a hint of vanilla, rich semi-sweet Belgian chocolate flakes and buttery roasted pecan chunks."  I love vanilla, semi-sweet chocolate and pecans!  This should be great, right?

Um . . . . nope.

Chunky London Mist tasted horrible.   The Earl Grey tea "notes" dominated, and they were overly citrusy, like being mugged by bergamot.  I never found or tasted the alleged roasted pecans.  There was no vanilla to speak of.  It was as if poor quality Early Grey tea with too much milk had been frozen and then had some semi-sweet chocolate chips mixed in.  

This ought to have been great.  I'm deeply disappointed.

In which bad diner tea achieves a whole new low

After teaching classes at the Heralds and Scribes event out in Rome, NY, a group of us went out to dinner at DiCastro's in Rome.   Tasty food, really nice wait staff, all in all an excellent place.  The iced tea was perfectly adequate as a caffeine delivery system to stave off my headache.

But.

There's always a "but" in these stories, isn't there?

+Juliean Galak ordered hot tea.  What he received was a cup of hot water with a tea bag from a company I had never heard of (a coffee company, to boot).   This tea was so far "off brand" that it was recognizable as tea only by the fact that it came in the classic bag-shaped form with paper wrapper.  It produced a bitter brown water with a disturbingly mineral-ish tang, rather as if someone had distilled the essence of Cooper's Lake's rock-hard orange water into tisane form.  Really, only the fact that the bag produced a brown brew rather than an orange one disproved this theory.   It was wretched and vile, and not even sheer desperation would have driven me to do more than taste it.  I tasted it only to provide this necessary warning to others.   Beware the off-off-off-brand Lipton knock-off.

Because I drink bad tea, so you don't have to.

You owe me.   :-)