Fredsted

A lot of ginger in aroma, slight lemon notes.

Very gingery in taste, very spicy, with only subtle lemon notes and o tiny bit of licorice.

Very warming, quite soothing. Not bad.

Aroma dominated by strawberries and blackberries, quite mild. Black tea notes very subtle.
A lot of blackberries in taste, subtle strawberries. The fruit notes are nice, but the base black tea is very bland, so all in all I can’t recommend it.

Sweet aroma, smells like rhubarb pie with subtle flowery notes.
Earthy notes from black tea, subtle toffee, very subtle rhubarb.
All in all it’s quite good, not overflavoured.

This was not how we imagined New Year’s Eve…

Poor us.

Happy New Year everybody.

This. And a liquid diet. Day 3.

I’m SO hungry! (Doing better so may attempt solid food tonight, depending)

Sil, I hope to get to the post office today. Right now things seem stable so I might brave it. (Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be contagious. Not unless you ate the same thing I shouldn’t have eaten. I washed my hands carefully before packing anyway.)

Thanks to the awesome tea picking randomiser that Jon provided, I’m finishing off this tea. It’s the first tea I’ve had since this morning where I was trying to brew Gunpowder by a different method but forgot to time the ultra short steeps so it went terribly horribly wrong.

I’d quite forgotten I had this one, and most of it is fannings. I only have enough for one cup, so I have to remember to only fill the pot halfway up, or we’re in for a weakling cup of tea. I considered adding a pinch of the Pai Mu Tan or the white Darjeeling to it to stretch it to a whole pot, but decided that they were both too good for such a purpose. I’ll just have to randomise myself another cup afterwards then.

Due to the large ratio of fannings in this, I’m giving it a fairly short steep. It’s all orange! It’s been so long since I’ve had this that I’ve completely forgotten what it’s like. So yeah, the colour of the brew is surprisingly orange and it definitely smells of pomegranates. Pomegranates and perfume and something that strangely reminds me a little of jasmine. That same dusty floral sort of smell, but it’s just a hint of that.

Although I only made half a pot, I was still keen to drain it as well as I could. I did drain the pot, but right now, if you added another drop to the cup it would flow over. It makes sipping a little complicated, and involves me sticking my head down to the cup and generally looking pretty idiotic.

Ack! Even with such a short steep (I normally do about five minutes, give or take) it’s still got some bite to it. Clearly I underestimated the fannings. On top of that, the jasmine hint is still there! It doesn’t say anything on the bag about jasmine as far as I can tell, only pomegranate.

The pomegranate may or may not be there too, but the tea itself has gone so strong that more or less anything would have been drowned out, and it’s just making me thirsty and I have to remind myself that opening a can of the cola I’ve got in the fridge is a bad idea when I’ve got almost a whole cup of tea right here.

Looks like it’s just the day for steeping fail.

Oh, I like this new rating system. I’ll try to get around to fixing my old reviews. Eventually. I especially like the smiley for teas we don’t like, it’s cute. :D The steeping time and water temperature are nice touches too, although less relevant for me since most of my tea is brewed sort of on the fly. I can’t really figure out why they have thumbs up/thumbs down symbols though, but I expect that’s something that’ll get fixed eventually. (May I suggest a drop for water temperature and a clock for steeping time?)

Anyway, this is a backlog from yesterday morning. I had this in my travel mug on the train going to work. It was given to me as a present from a colleague who had seen it. I’d never seen this variation before, but the brand is one you can find in most danish grocery shops and supermarkets. They deal mainly in loose leaf as far as I’ve noticed. I haven’t seen much in bags from them, except chamomile and such. Quality-wise it’s a bit… I wouldn’t exactly say it’s an awesome quality but it’s not any worse than any other supermarket brand.

I think I oversteeped it a little because the tea had a sort of roughness to it that I don’t think should be present in a white tea. It wasn’t bitter and it didn’t taste stewed at all, it was just kind of… off.

As for the pomegranate… Oh, is that what it was? I couldn’t really find the pomegranate flavour at all. On the whole the tea was rather dry and I don’t know if that was the tea being dry or if it was the way pomegranates have a dry sort of flavour.

This all doesn’t sound like a tea that I found particularly enjoyable, does it? But strangely enough it is. It was well suited for a morning travel tea. It’s just a question of finding the right purpose for it.