Irish Breakfast Tea

Ah, a nice strong black tea to start the week. The dry leaves smell surprisingly fresh and fruity, almost like a rich plum jam with hints of spice. I’ll steep it for five minutes as I’m in the mood for strong flavors right now.

Great aroma! Bready, fruity, jammy, and spicy. Wow! Lots going on there. The taste is strong – good stuff – but not overpowered by any one note. The tannins are there, but they wrap themselves easily around the other flavors. I’m getting the flavor of cinnamon rolls with this…wish I had one right now to go with it.

I’ll try the second half of my serving with cream and sugar. Whew, still a strong cuppa, but I like it. This could definitely serve as a great Monday morning wake-up tea for me.

What a great tea…it is a perfect start to the day. It is rich in flavors, it tasted medium to bold. I tasted the malt in this tea but I will say before it cooled off It tasted a little sour almost tangy. It threw me off a bit but after drinking it some more I really enjoyed it and will drink it again.

This tea reminds me of the Golden Spring from Adagio that I like so much, with a slightly darker, slightly less savory flavor profile, but definitely more fruit, and a lot of depth to the fruit flavors you can detect. It has a lovely aroma. In terms of taste the ‘ripe cherry’ quality they tout is not difficult to find at all. Neither is the prune, though there isn’t as much here of that flavor as I’ve noticed in other blacks, perhaps because the malt quotient here is slightly less. There’s something else here in the flavor that I’m trying to identify and having a difficult time placing a name too. It isn’t bread…oh, what is it? It drives me a little bit nuts when I can’t place a subtle flavor with its analogue! Something roasty.

I like it quite a bit. There’s enough savory sweetness to the cup that I could easily drink this all of the time. In fact, if I hadn’t ordered quite a bit of Golden Spring, I would probably be content to consider making this my default Easy Drinking Black for a while.

So this is my first sample from my Golden Moon Sampler box. I was bummed that it was so tiny…I usually use 4tsp. per mug and this was maybe 2? I used the whole thing with about 8 oz. water and I wish I would have used even less (water). It was good but I didn’t get everything out of it that most of the reviewers did. I’m chalking it up to being a newbie or maybe the tea water ratio. I still enjoyed it, just not as much as I was hoping to and since it’s gone there’s no “do-over”.

Did I mention that I ordered the sampler from Golden Moon? The one with a sample of every tea they carry? It comes in a really pretty box as well.

This tea is wonderful!! After it brews it smells like TEA. I think that when the aliens come to earth and ask about tea, this might be a good one to give them.

So. Pretty!

I’m finding that I really love the way teas with golden tips look. The black and gold just look so amazing and beautiful together… it really makes the experience all the more worthwhile.

Anyway, when I opened this little packet by GM this morning, I was hit with a lot of different and complex yummy notes. Earthy, fruity, dark, complex. Even some sweetness thrown in there for good measure.

The wiry leaves are very pretty; the whole thing just looks high-quality. So I steeped up a teaspoon of this in the IngenuiTEA. The leaves didn’t expand all that much, but they did unfurl a bit, and the resulting cup was a deep copper. Not as dark as some Irish Breakfasts I’ve seen, but still fairly dark.

On first sip I was in happyland. There’s actually a lot of complexity in this cup. It’s fairly smooth at the forefront of the sip, with lots of notes of fruit, and a slight subtle sweetness. As you swallow, a subtle maltiness presents itself, with just a bit of astringency. There’s a lot of the earthy flavors that are present in most blacks. I have no idea what prunes taste like, so I couldn’t find that in my tea. But I could see the cherry, and even perhaps some honey as an aftertaste. There is a mild sweet component to this tea, which I liked. It’s a fairly complex and subtle black by itself, so I don’t think this is one IB that you’d want to put milk into immediately.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more of a malty “kick” that I associate strongly with a good Irish Breakfast, but the interesting flavors that kept peeking out of this cup more than made up for that lack. It tastes like it’s high quality, and I think it could function on two levels: as a daily drinker, and as a fun, tasting journey as you try to nail all of those components that are highlighted in each sip.

It’s become apparent to me that I can’t really tell one black tea from another. Not yet, anyway. This isn’t the best cup of black tea I’ve had, but it’s very nice. Its fragrance is comforting, as the tea smells exactly like what I think when I think black tea. This is a very humble, unassuming tea; it just ambles along, dum dee dum, doing its thing. It’s that A- student that gets her grades by keeping her head down and getting her work done, not by wriggling in her seat with her hand in the air every time the teacher asks a question.

I… expected to like this more than I did. It’s ok, but I’m pretty sure I’ve had Irish Breakfast teas I liked better. It’s too fruity for me, I think, and too light for an IB. The 2nd steep was still drinkable, but noticeably lighter in color and flavor (orange rather than red).

3.5g, 12oz water, milk and sugar; 2nd steep 6 minutes

I guess you know what dropped on my doorstep yesterday? Well if you guessed the GM sampler you’d be CORRECT! I decided to wait till this a.m. to try something and a pulled out all the breakfast blends as I’ve never had a tea that had breakfast at the end of the name it was between English Breakfast, French Breakfast, and Irish Breakfast. I picked (obviously Irish) and it really does hit the spot.

Dry leaf is green and golden tipped and the dry leaf just smells of tea. Steeped a cup for 5 minutes and I have a reddish golden cup what I think Jim Marks in one of his posts referred to as chestnut color.

Steeped it tastes like tea a very smooth cup with the tiniest hint of astringency. If this tea is what I would be served with my breakfast while in Ireland I wouldn’t complain. :)

This isn’t bad by any means, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. I was hoping for something strong, robust and malty. It looked promising in the cup — dark liquor, fragrant. But then I sipped it and was … underwhelmed. I had to add a little sweetener to bring out the flavor, and the flavor was OK, but not strong and powerful. It was a mild black tea flavor with a hint of plum. Kind of nondescript. Drinkable, certainly, and pleasant, but not something I see myself going out of my way to drink again.

When it comes to Golden Moon’s black teas, Sinharaja is my favorite so far.