An Earl Grey with floral lavender and vanilla. What’s not to like? I actually don’t think I have had a tea with lavender before. Maybe I have had a herbal tea before but definitely not a black one.
It’s supposed to evoke the aroma of a London Fog, a beverage that consists of Earl Grey tea with steamed milk, vanilla syrup and sometimes lavender, so the ingredients in this tea definitely make sense based on this. I don’t know what makes it Victorian, though. According to Wikipedia, the London Fog beverage was invented in Vancouver, Canada in the 1990s, not during the Victorian Era like H&S claims.
The dry leaves smell mainly of bergamot and lavender. In my opinion, there is barely any vanilla here. If I focus really hard, I can perhaps detect a little bit of vanilla, but the bergamot and lavender are the two strongest aromas by far and they are about equally strong. The bergamot is possibly slightly stronger.
The steeped tea smells mostly of bergamot and lavender like the dry leaves, but the lavender is stronger now and the bergamot more subdued. The vanilla is there as well but it’s very faint. The vanilla flavor is not nearly as strong as in their other vanilla flavored teas like Paris, Tower of London, Florence etc.
There is something about the herbacious lavender that makes this tea smell a little like hay or chamomile to me. I don’t why.
When you taste the tea, you clearly get the bergamot and lavender. The vanilla is once again very subdued. I don’t know if the vanilla is supposed to be this faint – maybe I got a bad batch. I guess I will find out when I reorder it.
The black tea base is pretty strong, just like the tea base in their other Earl Greys (EG Supreme and EG Imperial). I would say medium to full-bodied in terms of tea strength.
All in all, this is a scrumptious Earl Grey with strong, herbacious and floral lavender notes and a touch of vanilla. It’s very, very good and is an excellent morning cuppa.
Flavors: Bergamot, Citrus, Floral, Hay, Herbaceous, Herbal, Lavender, Tea, Vanilla
