Tea tasting: Harney & Sons' Kenya Milima

Word is that Kenya is  producing some good quality teas.  Of course, it is a moral imperative that I try some and review them for my loyal readers.  

Today's tea is Harney & Sons' Kenya Milima.   The website description of the tea says: "Kenya Milima is Africa's most elegant black tea, with golden tips reminiscent of fine Assams. Produced with traditional methods at high altitude, this tea is light in body and tends toward citrus. – Overall a mellow brew."

Although some (clearly deranged) people recommend steeping this tea for 4-5 minutes, I recommend that only if one needs some sort of universal solvent.   A 3 minute steep is more than adequate to get a nice, dark brew.

The aroma is that of a strong, multi-layered black tea.  My favorite morning smell!  It tastes like the essence of black tea - that particular, wonderful taste that no other thing can duplicate.  It does, as advertised, most closely resemble an Assam, which is just fine from my point of view.  If there are citrus notes in here, however, I'm not tasting them except as the vaguest of suggestions.  All in all, it's a good quality black for people who like the taste of tea for its own sake.

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.   :-)

Alys's Tea Party Blend: Elizabeth's Caramel Apple Moxie

 Elizabeth's Caramel Apple Moxie is one of the specialty blends that I created through Adagio; it was designed as a blend of chai, caramel and apple.  Now that the weather is turning colder (and wetter), and hot tea finally sounds appetizing, I decided it was time for a tasting.

I don't like milk in my tea, so I am going to have to recruit some other tea drinker to drink this as "proper" chai.  I'm sure someone will take that bullet for the team.

In leaf/chunk form, this tea smells sweet and spicy, like a tin full of autumn.  Brewed, that scent lovely scent remains, with the apple becoming a distinct note amid the chai spices.

This tea tastes best with a teaspoon of clover honey -- the sweetness of the honey brings out the full flavors of the caramel and apple without eliminating the spicy chai.  Otherwise, the apple gets overwhelmed by the spices of the chai and can be found only in the scent.  The unsweetened version isn't bad by any means.  It's a lovely slightly sweet chai.  The cloves and the cinnamon are just strong enough.  But, adding honey or Sugar in the Raw lets the blend sing all of its notes.

I look forward to enjoying this throughout the fall season.