Tea Leaf Boutique

Another new tea from my trip to Jasper. This one smelled heavenly in the store, very vanilla and a nice hint of bergamot. Even in the bag it smells not too bad, a bit more soapy maybe, but still tasty.

Unfortunately, when brewed, it takes on the smell of perfume, Chantilly I think, or whatever one it is that my grandma wears. The flavor is not bad initially, I get a black tea with bergamot, but the aftertaste is just too perfumy for me. Maybe the bag needs to air a bit before I make any more, I will try to leave it open and hopefully the flavor improves!

So far, not the tea for me. But I will leave a rating off in case airing it makes my thoughts change!

I dug out this tea today as I’m running low on mint teas and wanted something just in case my migraine resurfaced lol, it finally seems to be gone!! Hoping it stays away, now that the weather is kind of settling down. This is a crisp green tea with the mint cooling nicely. Tasty, I should have this tea more often! I also need to try it iced at some point. Oh and it doesn’t seem too fussy about water temperature, I am pretty sure the water was much warmer than it should have been for this tea but it still tastes fine. See previous notes!

I got this tea on the weekend at the little tea shop in Jasper, of course I would sniff out the town’s tea place haha. They had quite a selection too, but I narrowed it down to getting 50 g of this and 50 of the EGC (50 g was the smallest size you could get). Oh, I also got a lovely chinese mug, I will have to try it out, it is quite pretty!

This tea sold me because I haven’t tried an official Moroccan mint blend with gunpowder green tea, so I thought hey I might as well. The dry smell is very minty, mostly mint. I was a bit confused why there is lemongrass in this tea, as it was not listed in the ingredients, but oh well.

I steeped a little over a minute, with about 180 degree water and 1.5 tsps of tea. The resulting liquor is a bright green yellow color, quite nicely colored, and smells of mint still, very refreshing.

So the flavor is not overly exciting, mostly just mint to me, maybe a bit of added refreshing tartness from the lemongrass. It is a refreshing brew though, and will be nice to try cold brewed. I will drink the bag down at least, as for a mint tea, it is pretty tasty :) not a bad little find from Jasper!

Thanks to Lynne-tea for sending me a sample of this one!

The dry tea smells strongly of a chocolatey sort of ginger; brewed up I’m smelling chocolate and ginger and something else I can’t place my finger on. Which makes me uncertain as to whether I actually like the aroma or not.

The flavour of this one is quite interesting. Initially, I taste the ginger, which is at a perfect level for me (apparent and burns the throat a bit on the way down, but not overpowering), and then the chocolatey-cocoa flavours take over. I think the “odd” flavour might be the spicing, and again, I’m not sure if I like it. To me, this is coming off as a bit of a different take on a spicy hot chocolate. I can’t say that it’s entirely successful, as something in the blend is coming off a little strangely to me, but it’s an interesting idea! Chocolate ginger tea! My mom would be all over this sort of thing as she loves dark chocolate-covered ginger :)

The tea is somewhat improved with a bit of agave nectar added to sweetned it but it’s still not as fruity-tasting and flavouraful and I’d like. So this is another ‘meh’ tea.

Meh, it tastes like black tea with very little strawberry or currant flavouring. I love the smell of this tea, it’s deliciously sweet and fruity, but it doesn’t seem to transfere over to its taste.

So my first impressions aren’t all that good, but I’ll meddle around with the steeping a bit before I actually rate this tea.

Increasing the steeping time and temperature helped to improve the flavour somewhat, but I’m still left feeling like the green tea base is rather on the bland, flavourless side. It’s not bitter like some low-quality green teas can be, it’s just not really there at all, I guess. The berry flavours mixed with a faint touch of rose are nice and pleasent, and I think they could be even better with a bolder tea base. It’s almost a shame really.

I picked up this tea at a little shop in Jasper during a break in the epic 10-hour road trip to go see the Edmonton Indy. I seem to have this thing that no matter where I go I always end up bringing back tea; sort of like a souvenir. (I’m not doing it on purpose – I swear!)

Aaaaanyways, the steeping tea smells quite nice and interesting – a cross between strawberries and something tropicalish, accented with a bit of floral rose.

Unfortunately the tea tastes pretty weak with only a vague green-and-fruity flavour. I think that’s partially due to my steeping parameters – the ones of the packages were pretty vague and I guesstimated – which is why I haven’t rated the tea yet. I need to try steeping this tea longer/hotter before making up my mind.