Neptune

Neptune is good, but not my favorite. It has a light fruity and honey like flavor over a black tea base. There’s some astringency. Probably wouldn’t seek it out, but if someone gave it to me, I wouldn’t opt out.

Another sample from The Cookie Lady! This one reminded me a lot of Piccolo, except with a black tea base instead of rooibos. It has the same jammy fruit flavor mixed with honey. Quite nice (and probably even better with sweetener!) but not something I’ll be running out to buy, as I prefer more of a fresh fruit flavor in my fruity teas.

This one was on my wishlist for a while, so I tried the sample from the Book of Tea 100 that my family had. I’d forgotten that Lupicia’s honey flavoring and I don’t always get along, though. There’s something too potent about the smell of it, which is the case here. It’s just too rich and also a little stale-seeming. The tea base is also somewhat bitter. That aside, the fruit notes are pleasant, but overall this one isn’t for me.

I got a sample of this tea from sweet Marzipan!

It smelled wonderful…I was so excited! But like many other teas with honey flavoring, it just tastes like chemicals to me :(

This was the other tea I purchased on my first trip to Lupicia. The bag of 10 tea bags was on sale and ended up costing $5.25. It smelled good, so I thought it was worth a shot. I like it but in a very general way. It tastes like a very slightly fruity black tea with a bit of honey added. It was nice as the first tea of the day and I was able to get three steeps out of the bag. Although the third was noticeably weaker, it was still a good cup. This made me more optimistic about trying their other flavors in bags if I ever see them on sale. I probably wouldn’t feel the need to grab this one again, though.

Another Lupicia sample from mj! I love how vague the description is for this tea – “honey-preserved fruits”. Well, sounds lovely to me, so let’s do it! Dry, it’s a mixture of small to medium-sized black tea leaves and yellow flower petals that I assume are there for visual interest only. The dry scent is extremely sweet and honeyed, and I’m unsure whether I could pick out a specific type of fruit – it has more of a general candied fruit smell. Okay, so I made a bit of a boo-boo with the steeping… I set my electric kettle to 200 degrees, and I didn’t notice until I was pouring the water that there wasn’t quite enough for an 8 ounce cup… So I had to add a little bit of room temperature water, bringing the temperature down a bit. I had planned to steep for 3 minutes, but I let it go an extra 30 seconds because of this.

I think this came out a tad weaker than it would have had I not messed up the water temperature, but still tasty! It doesn’t have much of an aroma, perhaps a vague sweetness. The dried fruit flavor is also vague, but delicious, and it goes perfectly with the honey. If I had to take a guess, I’d say perhaps dried figs? And maybe a touch of dried stonefruit? There’s also definitely a touch of vanilla to me, although it’s not listed as a flavor here.

So, long story short, this came out quite tasty despite my shortcomings (doh). I’m sure it’ll be even better next time, when I steep it correctly! :P

I’ve had this forever and never tried it til now (or this week anyway, this is a backlog). It has long, thin, twisty black leaves interspersed with marigold petals. The tea does smell like honeyed fruit, I will give it that. The taste is a bit bland though. It has a generic fruit taste with honey. If I had to name a flavor, I’d say the skin of a kumquat. The black base is very boring. Meh.

My first Lupicia tea! I split an order with the amazing mj1851 and she shipped it out to me 7 days ago, telling me it would take 2-3 weeks. It came early: awesome! The box was really beat up but the content was not: bonus!

The dry leaf aroma is out of this world. I just think of fruit drenched in syrup, and I also of grenadine. The liquid form is just as sweet, but the addition of the malt of the base makes it even better. As soon as it hits my tongue, I think honey, and jam. It’s hard to describe the fruit flavour…Strawberries? Cherries? Something like pineapple? I bet this would make an awesome cold brew.

Tea #5 from the Traveling Tea Box C Round 2
There wasn’t too much left of this one, just about a tsp and a half ish, so I made a larger cup than I usually do when sampling stuff from one of these boxes.
Brewed it has a honey and peachy/fruity smell to it. Taste wise it’s kinda just meh. It’s vaguely fruity tasting though nothing that jumps out, and the honey is there ish, but not in a sweet way. Just sort of in a ’here’s a honey taste’ sort of way.
Adding some truvia doesn’t really make anything else stand out, it just gives the current flavors a bit of a base to stand on.
If I had ordered this myself, I wouldn’t have necessarily been disappointed in it and I would’ve drank through it, but it wouldn’t have been one I would reorder. As it is, I’m glad I tried it first from the box. ^^

Sipdown! (181)
And that’s it for this. Like I said before, it has some nice fruity notes, but it’s nothing exceptional.

Happy Easter you guys!

Apparently Easter in Ontario means NOTHING is open Friday or Sunday. Or practically nothing. :O We tried to go shopping on Friday for groceries and all the big stores were closed – EVEN the Walmart. Today we wanted to go look at an XBOX One but NOTHING was open except the EB Games at Eaton center (the heart of Toronto, ntxbye)…

Some of you are used to this. I’m from BC – I’ve worked plenty of Good Friday’s and Easter Sunday’s so I didn’t expect anything but Government stores to close today…

:P