This is the sample I chose for virtual teasting #21. My experience with sTEAp Shoppe thus far has been that the blends are not flavourful enough for me, and I have to work to discern the flavours that are supposed to be present. Thus, I thought that choosing naturally strong flavours like lemon and ginger would work better for me. It turns out, I was half right.
This blend’s fragrance is very lemony. I could not really detect any ginger. To be fair, I didn’t smell the entire sample packet, just the bit that I spooned into my infuser. I have to remember not to smell the tea at the beginning of the steep: there’s the lemon scent, but there’s also something else, something a bit acrid. At the end of the steep, this unpleasantness was gone, and the tea smelled like hot lemonade.
I found the taste true to the fragrance: a perfectly balanced lemon herbal blend. Except it’s supposed to be a ginger blend, and I couldn’t taste any ginger at all. No bite, no mild burn at the back of my throat, no tickle in my nose, nothing. My relatively low rating is purely because I didn’t feel that the flavour was true to the tea’s name. If its name were something like “Lemon Fresh,” my rating would’ve been somewhere in the mid- to high 70s.
Tea amount: 1 slightly-above-level tsp
Water amount: 6ish oz
Additives: None, at first, then about ½ tsp demerara sugar. The sugar really went well with the lemon, making the tea taste like candy. Yummy.
1 http://steepster.com/discuss/3620-new-virtual-tea-tastings-free-number-2
All the best to you! Keep us posted on the What tea to drink during the hurricane thread discussion!