French Breakfast

It smells and tastes like…black tea. Yep. Just straight-up, run of the mill, black tea. It’s the type of baseline black tea that Mum used to make chai whilst I was growing up. As someone said in an earlier tasting note, it’s like a “way better Lipton.” (Mum used Tetley, but eh, same diff.)

Like using The Fifth Element to demonstrate the benefits of a superior home cinema, I’d use this to demonstrate the benefits of proper loose tea to Lipton and Tetley drinkers: it’s familiar enough that anyone should be able to taste how much better this does the basic tea they’re used to drinking. In spite of its obvious quality, it’s not a tea I’d run out and buy again. As you probably know by now, I like my tea with a little more oomph, a little more flavour. If I had more than a sample of this, I would likely have blended it with something else for my next cup.

Beautiful deep amber with golden lights. Flavor is very clean and smooth, but essentially just a nice tea—not remarkable, but nice.

Brews up dark amber. Malt and baked apple in the nose. Mild honey taste with a bit of a peppery bite. Moderate astringency. Mildly bitter. Leaves are medium size but broken and dusty with fannings (maybe due to sample size packet).

A nice, basic tea. I can’t taste any bitterness and it smells and tastes really good. I could see myself drinking this on a regular basis, but it’s not as good as some of the other black teas from Golden Moon Tea.

This tea really does remind me of the tea I drank for breakfast when l was in France. Good tea with a nice wither.

Instead of brewing coffee, I decided to use another golden moon sample and go for a black tea.

Oh so delicious! But I feel it’s a tad watery. Maybe the sample wasn’t enough leaves for how much I steeped. It has a very cozy warm feeling when you drink it, I don’t even need to add any milk to it and it tastes perfect. Very drinkable and sweet without using so much sweetening.

Either way, I think i diluted the taste a little too much which is pretty disappointing. I love the flavor that the tea has.

The colour of this tea was distinctly different from the previous one, more of the typical tea-ish golden brown colour. Interestingly I found this tea to be more astringent than the English Breakfast – it’s not horridly so, but I didn’t find it very palatable without the addition of some milk. Milk gives it a nice smoothness and there are some faintly sweet undertones.

I’ve come to associate Ceylon as the default black tea and that’s definitely what this one feels like to me. It’s a higher quality of ‘default’ than most, but I have a hard time getting excited about it.

Since I had had a sample sachet of this for a while now, I decided to have it this morning. It wasn’t particularly remarkable even though I was hoping there was some Chinese tea blended in… as it seemed a bit sweet.

Unfortunately, now I read that it is just Ceylon tea, the one kind which instigates zero interest in me (although I must admit that it is pretty awesome iced), which would explain its almost mediocrity to me. Almost mediocrity, because I did detect some pleasant floral notes. I only wish they were a little stronger.

Also, the tea didn’t resteep very well. The second steep was really mild and weak even though I added 1,5 minute to the original steeping time. Not a bad tea, not anything that was a challenge to finish, but nothing particularly flavorful or sophisticated either.

Well all, I am starting to feel better, it seems whatever was wrong with me is mostly on the mend, the only problem is I am bushed. I keep feeling really exhausted and sleeping a lot so my sleep schedule has gotten weird and I have some serious confusion as to what day it is! A few hearty meals and some rest should have me back to normal in no time. I did use some of my time today working on a new origami piece, a modular star themed kusudama that was a real pain to assemble when using slippery chiyogami, but worked quite well with junky memo paper.

Break out your Beret, because today’s tea is French Breakfast by Golden Moon Tea, a classic black tea from Kenilworth Estate in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon if you are old fashioned about it). The website recommends this tea for people who like ‘standard’ black tea or who are starting out on their adventure into loose leaf tea. I am most certainly not new to loose leaf tea, but I am always on the hunt for a new breakfast tea. The aroma of this tea is bright, bold, and malty with a hint of pecans and dried leaves. Very much a standard black tea indeed!

The brewed leaves are very bright and quite sweet with a berry like quality to it that blends with an oak wood aroma. It does not have a brisk quality, just bright and sweet. The aroma of the liquid sans leaves is malty and sweet, like caramel, with a nice oaky finish.

This tea has a nice mild briskness, just enough to wake you up but not too much, no need to worry about your moth turning inside out. There is a bold malty and oak wood taste that fades to a sweetness reminiscent of berries. Adding cream and sugar takes away that mild briskness and replaces it with a very smooth morning cup. I agree with the company’s description, this is a great beginners tea, but it has enough going on that it does not bore a more experienced sipper.

For blog and photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2014/04/golden-moon-tea-french-breakfast-tea.html

I drank this tea in my new color-changing whale mug from DavidsTea this morning. I’ve never owned a color- changing mug before, and it’s AWESOME! It’s like magic, like it shows the color only while you’re drinking the tea, so it’s like tea is the magic element! Ha!

This tea is a solid breakfast tea, but I like the flavor profile of Sinharaja loads more. Honestly, the delicious honeyed smell I get from the dry leaf didn’t really come through in the steeped cup. Maybe I’m killing it by adding soymilk? I don’t know, but I do know the whale mug is AWESOME! :)