Toffee Chocolate Hazelnut

This is a sipdown of the sample of this sent to me from TastyBrew. Thanks! When I drank the first half of this sample about a month ago, I was watching the last inning of a St. Louis Cardinals game, which they won. Coincidentally, we’re sitting around in PJs watching the Cards again today! It’s the 8th inning, & we’re playing against our nemesis team, the Cincinatti Reds, & currently kicking their butts, 11 to 2!

So this is a nice tea, rich & chocolaty, & today I’m tasting a little more of the hazelnut. I’m drinking it straight, as I’m doing a Whole30 right now, & so no sweeteners of any kind. Of course, adding a little sweetness would bring out the toffee flavor more, but this is pretty damn good as is! If you’d like to know what a Whole30 is, here’s the link:
http://whole9life.com/2012/08/the-whole30-program/

This smells delicious and wonderful this.. uhh.. morning.

Yeah, my sleeping schedule is completely out of whack. And surprise!! Tomorrow I’m working at 7am! Should be interesting. I need to plan my teas, so I don’t get sucked into drinking coffee.

This is a delicious dessert tea to celebrate Real Work. By Real Work I mean work I don’t do sitting around my house in my PJs.

Sadly, I think I understeeped or under leafed it. The tea isn’t coming through so well, although the chocolate, toffee and hazelnut are.

A good cup to absentmindedly drink as I organize for tomorrow. Thanks, CrowKettle!

I felt spoiled just reading this list of ingredients! Toffee, chocolate, hazelnut! yum yum. This is such an amazingly sweet cup. The first sips were a bit weird for some reason, but then is smoothed out to such a delicious flavor. I think the toffee, chocolate, and hazelnut were equally represented, even though there were plenty of huge toffee pieces in the infuser. Maybe that is why there were less black tea leaves in the infuser. I wish I had tasted the black tea better, since I had a lovely ceylon from Utopia a while ago, so I know they have amazing black teas. But the flavors here are worth it! thanks so much, Crow Kettle!

Nutella tea. Fleshy hazelnuts and vanilla toffee. So much flavorful sweetness. So much. This is smooth except for a bitter nut note. I bet this would rock my socks off as a latte. It already tastes like a flavoured coffee creamer.

Unlike the rose mango from Utopia Tea, which I’m saving for iced summer sessions, I feel this one would be better suited for the autumn and early winter seasons. It would’ve been useful to keep my chocolate cravings in check when I was gifted all those Purdy boxes. Still feeling the ramifications for that two months later..

Only complaints are this may be a little too rich for me and the tea base itself is not overly noticeable.

Thanks to Utopia Tea for sending me a free sample of some of their teas! I requested this one because toffee, chocolate and hazelnuts? Yes, please. The samples came in large sachets. I wasn’t sure exactly how much water it was appropriate for, but it seemed like more than a cup, so I went ahead and brewed it in my 16oz teapot.

The brewed tea smelled roasty and sweet and nutty, like you might expect. My boyfriend asked if I was having caramel tea… close enough! I brewed it for only 3 minutes like I do all black teas I’m not familiar with, but it probably could hold up to more without getting bitter, and I think more of the chocolate notes would probably come out. The individual flavors are fairly hard to distinguish, instead combining together pretty well. I can pick out the sweet, caramelized taste of vanilla toffee, along with a nuttiness and the light roastiness often seen in chocolate teas. The black tea base is light (possibly because of the steeping time), and slightly woody. Overall a tasty tea, and I definitely enjoyed my pot of it.

Hey Steepster! Long time no see. I got a HUGE tea box from TastyBrew and there was a big bag of this in it. The aroma is strong. Warm, melty chocolate notes with a nice nutty/toffee aroma. The flavor is nice. It has a nice chocolate flavor and then the hazelnut comes in. The toffee lends a bit of sweetness. There is rice crispy things in it and I feel like there is a nice hint of rice. I like this tea but I like the aroma of it more :) thanks again!

Another from the GCTTB. This one was interesting to me… I haven’t had much luck with hazelnut in tea previously, so I figured I’d give it one mo try to see if it was the tea or the hazelnut that I wasn’t liking. So here it goes…

They dry tea is filled with hunks of toffee, chocolate, hazelnut and popped rice (tbh they almost look like rice krispies.) The smell definitely delivers on the name as I can pick out notes of toffee (vanilla flavored?), chocolate and hazelnut, there’s a dark undertone from the black tea, almost a bit of maltiness, but not much.

The liquor is a dark, cloudy orange-brown and has quite a bit of film on the top of the cup (though it’s not surprising given all the oily ingredients). The aroma contains lovely sweet notes from the toffee which blend well with the hints of chocolate and maltiness, while the hazelnut gives a nice middle note to round out the profile.

The flavor however doesn’t deliver the same upfront notes as the aroma though… I pretty much loose all of the toffee notes (though the sweetness is still there) which makes this tea a bit flat in my opinion. The chocolate is there, but it has mixed with the malty notes to form more of a dark chocolate while the hazelnut just doesn’t mesh well for me. It’s there and it’s definitely hazelnut but it just feels like its not blending into the rest of the flavor profile. I also get a really oily mouth feel that I’ve noticed in others hazelnut teas as well (especially as it cools).

At this point I am really thinking that hazelnut teas are just not for me, which is fine there’s lots of other teas out there! That said (putting aside my dislike for the hazelnut part) its not a bad tea, there’s some nice flavors there and I’m sure that some sugar would help to bring out the toffee flavors more too, but it’s just not my cup of tea ;)

How could this not be good with these ingredients? This made for a very tasty first tea of the day. The nutty and caramelly-toffee flavours come through strongly. I steeped for 2.5-3 minutes, and think I’d prefer a longer steep as it felt a bit thin. I feel like this could/should be richer. And I want more chocolate. But, very tasty.

This tea isn’t one I would have normally purchased for myself since I’m not a huge fan of toffee, but I received a free ounce of it with my last order. It also has the dubious distinction of currently being the oldest tea I own and seeing that it is only about 4 months old that means I’ve made some real progress drinking down my stash.

Flavor-wise the brewed tea is sweeter than I prefer, but I think it would rock as a latte so I’ll have to try that next. You can definitely taste the caramelized but not quite burnt taste of the toffee, the nuttiness of the hazelnut, and the chocolate; although, I wish the chocolate stood out just a little bit more.

My biggest complaint about this tea is the oily residue it leaves over everything. I had to scrub my ingenuiTEA and cup twice before I was sure it was clean.

This smells better than it tastes, but it’s not bad. I think it definitely needs milk of some kind to highlight the chocolate and nut and toffee crunch flavor.