Florence

This is one of the teas that my wife gifted for Christmas. I was excited to see what she would think that I’d enjoy. I drank this one plain and I got notes of dark chocolate covered almonds. It was a little bitter on the tongue, so I want to give it a try as a latte. I think the milk would add more creaminess to the tea and it’d taste more like a milk chocolate bar.

I had some whole milk handy, so I steeped some of this up.

Good, but not great. It feels thin, somehow, like a lacklustre hot chocolate, even though I used a spoon and a half of leaf. Maybe two spoons next time.

One of these days, it would be good do a side by side taste test to compare this tea and DF’s Mon Petit Praline.

In other news, I booked my booster shot. Hope it and its aftermath go easily enough.

This smells like molten nutella in a cup. This makes me want to throw a blanket over my head and the cup and huff tea fumes, which is clearly a very normal thing to do. Chocolate teas can be hit or miss, but I’m already thinking ahead to when I can squeeze an extra cup in today.

Chocolate and hazelnut has always been a favorite flavor combination of mine. I mean, who doesn’t love Nutella? This is basically that: a Nutella tea.

Okay – it doesn’t quite have the flavor of Nutella – but it’s close. While Nutella is distinctly hazelnut-y, Florence from Harney & Sons has more of a generic nuttiness. I wouldn’t necessarily call it hazelnut flavored and definitely not almond flavored. If you served it to someone who didn’t know what it was, they would detect the chocolate/vanilla flavor of it for sure and probabaly also the nuttiness of it, but I doubt they would call it out as “hazelnut”. If you then told them that it’s hazelnut, they would probably be like: “Ah, that makes sense now that you say it”.

The dry leaves smell chocolatey, nutty and vanilla-y, and all the flavors translate into the brewed tea both on the nose and in the mouth, but they are more subtle now exactly as you would expect. The nuttiness of it makes me think of their SoHo blend which is flavored with coconut instead of hazelnut, but I think I prefer Florence. In fact, this might be my favorite of all the H&S chocolate teas.

The tea base of Florence is a mild Chinese black tea like the majority of Harney’s flavored blacks. It doesn’t interfere with the added flavors – in fact, it’s pretty difficult to taste the flavor of it behind all the chocolate, vanilla and hazelnut flavors. But then again, if I wanted to have the flavor of tea, I wouldn’t choose to drink a flavored one…

All in all, Florence is a lovely and decadent dessert-style cup of tea and a great one to try out if you want a chocolate flavored tea with a little something else – in the form of hazelnut. It’s probably also a good one to try if you love Nutella since Florence has a similar flavor profile to that famous Italian chocolate-hazelnut spread.

I am a fan of chocolatey teas, and this one is very nice. It (to me) is lightly flavored but I am still a bit of a fan, not sure yet that I will buy more than my sample bag from HT.

Chocolate tea. Yes, please. I love this tea with some raw sugar and a splash of half and half. So toothy, so satisfying. Dessert in a cup.

This tea smells insanely good. It steeped up quite nicely and was a tasty treat to start the day this past week. The chocolate and hazelnut flavors were both present, but it was a fairly standard, well-rounded cuppa tea. I wasn’t blown away, but I won’t have any trouble finishing what’s left of my sample bag. I’m sure it’ll make an excellent latte as well.

This is a nice solid basic flavored tea. The tea base is smooth but strong. The flavor comes across almost a bit as coffee to me while this is hot, and as it cools I get more nutty chocolate from it. It would probably be a great dessert with milk and sugar, but on its own it is nicely chocolate without being sweet. I wouldn’t serve it to someone I was trying to wow, but I think it has nice solid broad appeal.

Today was a day filled with annoyance. Starting with the discovery that the cost of the 60,000 service on my Dodge Dart would cost $898.55! :(
After much research and comparison shopping, I discovered the main reason for this price was the transmission service that was a hefty $676.65 ~ and the kicker is that the service can’t be done anywhere other than the dealer because is requires a “special tool”!!! GAW!!!
I was sooooooooooo fit to be tied. I was half way to the fridge to open a bottle of wine when I remembered…I have Harney’s Florence in the house :) A much better choice at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Such a great tea. Chocolaty flavor and a wonderful rich creaminess with a scent that just makes everything seem better!

It didn’t solve the problem with those idiots at Dodge but after my third cup, I did feel calmer (which is amazing with that much black tea) and better able to figure how to wanted to deal with the idiots.

Bought a sample pouch of this on a whim because H&S was having a sale on all their ‘city’ teas and this was one of the few I hadn’t tried before. I’ve had chocolate hazelnut teas from a handful of companies now, and they never seem to live up to their promise. This one is no exception, but it’s also no worse than the others. Don’t tea blenders know that chocolate hazelnut is just a fancy way of saying Nutella? Chocolate hazelnut is the most luxurious, the most decadent of all the flavors — or at least, it’s supposed to be. Personally I think it’s something that works as a coffee or hot cocoa flavor, but I’ve yet to find a tea that’s full-bodied enough to really do it justice.

Anyway, it was worth a shot, but Paris and Boston are still my reigning favorites.