drink 43 types of tea

Oh god I can’t believe this is the last one. I have a Nilgiri in my drawer to try. Plus some more from the Canton Tea company. I am very sad that this will soon be over.

But the tea… this is organic and fairtrade and has ginger, lemon-grass, pepper, cardamom seeds and cloves. To me the lemon-grass was too overpowering and it would have benefitted from adding cinnamon. It was still tasty though, much better than Twinings chai bags but not as nice as the Rooibos African Spice from Yogi Tea.

I am going to keep drinking lots of tea. I will be spending Friday afternoon at an International Tea Tasting festival with J_oW which should be fun but it will be a shame not to record all the teas drunk.

I don’t know the make of this as I had it in a pub last night (yes. I drink tea in pubs). I haven’t drunk Earl Grey for so long but it is lovely. Fragrant without tasting herby or fruity, clear and light but not weak. It always takes me back to twelve years ago when I went to Paris and drunk Earl Grey in a cafe overlooking the Notre Dame. So it is a kind of magic tea in that sense. Very nice.

I got a box of 20 bags for 20p from the same shop that sold the Co-op 99 cheaply. Unfortunately this is not as enjoyable. I’ve never had a cheap oolong before but this certainly is, I opened one of the bags and the leaves were very dry and dusty. It has a bizarre nutty smell and tastes of pipe tobacco. An interesting unpleasurable experience; I won’t drink it again.

I do love assams. This is less strong and more subtle than the Itakhooli. I’ve had three cups of it today and it has varied but it works especially well with extra milk I think as it has a creamy edge. Lovely favour.

Another from AllAboutTea. Itakhooli means brick storehouse and is in the far north east of the Assam Valley. The 2nd flush is regarded as the best quality and AAT describe this tea as having “a tremendous balance of flavour and restrained stregnth”. This sums up the cup I just had. It is certainly malty and strong and goes to your head but there is no harshness to it. I have yet to find an Assam to match Rington’s Borengajuli Garden Assam but this is still lovely.

This tastes exactly how I’d expected it to; redbush combined with honey. It’s not sweet though and has that floral edge to it that some honeys have. It’s nice to try something completely different once in a while and I would recommend this. Smells awesome and strange.

I got it from allabouttea.co.uk as part of a big order that arrived yesterday so I’ll be making more entries soon. I also bought 250g of the Kotiyagalla Ceylon which is now one of my favourite teas, before starting this challenge I’d always been wary of Ceylons and now I drink one almost every day.

I got this on a whim from my local indie healthstore. It’s organic and fair trade. The leaves are good quality and it was a lovely golden colour when brewed. It has a slight fruit taste; very drinkable.

I combined two teas in one entry and now it’s confusing so this is to fill the gap so that the number of entries matches the number of teas drunk.

Meanwhile some nice/ useful tea sites:
http://www.teaappreciationsociety.org/ they’re good on Facebook too
http://www.teamuse.com/
http://twitter.com/teamancipation
http://twitter.com/teamergency & http://twitter.com/tea_robot
http://teasquared.blogspot.com/ has good tea links

An utterly despicable tea with less sophistication than hot ribena. I didn’t even make it to the end of the cup it was so vile.

Both good, clean tasting, sturdy breakfast teas. I was enjoying them too much to take too much notice of any subtleties I’m afraid.