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“Oh boy… So, let me start by saying that I actually greatly enjoyed the taste of this milk oolong. It’s very rich and essentially tastes like straight up buttered toast. Like, veryyyyy generously...” Read full tasting note
Premium oolong with sweet milk and light orchid notes peeking out from camellia depths.
A stunning tea of profound depth. Allegedly gaining its milky character from sudden shifts in temperature, the experience of enjoying Milk Oolong is as though velvet took liquid form and was blended with sweet light cream. You find yourself swimming to the bottom of a deep well of orchids. You find yourself reaching for another cup.
T. Kettle offers a large, premium assortment of original and new loose-leaf tea blends naturally sourced, certified vegan, kosher, and organic yielding rich flavours.
Oh boy…
So, let me start by saying that I actually greatly enjoyed the taste of this milk oolong. It’s very rich and essentially tastes like straight up buttered toast. Like, veryyyyy generously buttered toast. Creamy, luxe and super tasty. I haven’t had the DT milk oolong recently enough to confidently say if I have a preference, but it reminds me a lot of that one…
But I have some serious issues here too.
The lesser issue is the copy writing of this tea – it’s described as “A stunning tea of profound depth” and, just, no!? Like, it’s a good tea but to say there’s depth here is a stretch. I mean, it just tastes like so much butter. Very one note – but a damn good one note.
Issue two, and this is the biggest issue, is that T Kettle is claiming this is an unflavoured milk oolong. As someone who works with tea daily, loves milk oolong/Jin Xuan and has tasted dozens of milk oolongs both flavoured and unflavoured I am saying with 100% confidence that this is is ABSOLUTELY flavoured. It’s too rich/buttery and consistent to not be flavoured – plus, you can taste the actual oolong flavour notes underneath the strong buttery/creamy main sip.
Now, I’m not shitting on flavoured milk oolong – there are a lot of reasons why you’d flavour a Jin Xuan, the main one for a larger scale tea company being the need for consistency. The creaminess of Jin Xuan comes from cold snaps during the growing of it, and varies a lot from harvest to harvest because weather varies in different agricultural seasons. So, when you’re carrying a tea like this on a large scale as part of a core/yearly assortment you want to be able to guarantee that your customer base is going to buy the same tea at different times throughout the year or months apart and have it taste the same each time.
So the issue isn’t in the flavouring of the tea itself – but just in the dishonesty of selling this as unflavoured. There is just literally no way it’s not flavoured – and I’d respect the tea much more for the delicious buttery profile if it wasn’t marketed as a straight oolong.
Ugh. Ugh. I hate that. I’ve met wholesalers claiming to sell “unflavoured” Jin Xuan too and found it to be a straight up lie, so who knows if this is blatant dishonesty or a case of them not having anyone on-staff who is tea-savvy enough to see through this kind of thing.
Yes, that’s very true – it could easily be the case of their staff not knowing any better or the result of not having a proper regulatory department (because of how quickly they started up) to catch issues like that. I know I’ve noticed a few things in the ingredients lists that are either ignorant mistakes (like not listing sub ingredients on candied fruits) or deliberate omissions of information. I can’t tell which, though. With how new they are, it definitely makes sense that there are going to be some fumbles/a learning curve and I’m willing to accept that to an extent. I really struggle with the inaccuracies in the ingredient listings though; it’s so misleading to consumers but especially frustrating because one of their big marketing pushes out of the gate was to have more natural ingredients/vegan options/kosher and organic certified teas. When you leave out things like flavourings in your teas or don’t list the sugar in your candied fruit… of course it seems more natural… Bleck.
I also hate it when I visit a tea website and they don’t bother listing the ingredients list at all, just a vague description of the “flavor” of the tea. I want to know the exact ingredients in the blend! It always makes me feel like, “What are you trying to hide?” (I love you Lupicia, but I’m looking right at you right now… And yes, they do list them on the packaging, but I want to know before the tea is in hand, and they aren’t on the webpages!)
I’m not 100% sure about FDA, but technically that violates CFIA regulations – the ingredients/nutritional information needs to be available to the consumer at the point of purchase. I consider myself pretty lax in what I’ll accept from online tea companies regarding CFIA/FDA compliance, especially for small Indie and local companies, but I’m with you Mastress Alita – incomplete or missing ing lists drives me insane! Especially for larger companies like Lupicia that should have the means to declare them properly.
Every time I see flavour in ingredients list, I usually return the tea/snack back to the shelf. They changed their approach though and they now declare: natural flavours or natural identic flavour. Same with aromas. Saying aroma is so easy, but I wonder what is it! But why? Why they didn’t tell us everything?
Or often the ingredients is in such small letters, that even I have troubles to read it. Now there is a law it must be done with some minimal letter size and I think most of the companies actually comply.
Natural Identic flavouring is interesting too – it’s a European term, in Canada/USA the regulations surrounding flavourings are stricter and all natural identic flavouring has to be declared as artificial flavouring. Sometimes that bothers me when I see people complain that EU based tea companies carry “more naturally flavoured teas” versus North American based companies that seem to have a higher % of artificially flavoured teas. Certainly not in all cases, but in many, teas listed as naturally flavoured that are sold in the EU would be listed as artificial here…
(Though, personally I don’t really care whether my tea is art/nat/org flavoured at all – taste trumps everything else for me.)
Also, “aromas” in North America are basically always listed as flavourings – not sure what the EU regulations are though/how it’s differentiated there.
I don’t know either, it is quite wide topic even to understand. I searched after I wrote that comment for “natural identic flavours” and Czech Health Bureau said it is banned from 2011 I think? Yep, it sounds better to say “natural”, but actually mostly they are just artificial.
I don’t mind either how it is flavoured. But I don’t like saying natural while it certainly tastes artificial.