A Tea That Isn't

Several years ago, Disney moved on from a large corporation (Nestle) for their coffee, and to the surprise of some, ended up contracting with a small company out of Tampa for all of their coffee and tea (well, outside of Starbucks) called Joffrey’s Coffee and Tea. To say that it was a dramatic improvement would be underselling the change. I wouldn’t buy Nescafe in the stores, but I have purchased several bags of coffee directly from Joffrey’s since the change.

That all being said, we haven’t really tried any of their teas before now. And the tea we chose, isn’t really a tea! All regular teas come from a single plant - camellia sinensis, and any “teas” that don’t have the leaves of this plant are more properly termed tisanes. These herbal teas have flavors that are far-ranging, from fruity to flowery to spicy. The African Celebration tea from Joffrey’s uses an herb called rooibos (or redbush) and it is particularly popular in South Africa. It has no caffeine (somewhat to our dismay) and has a woodsy, smoky flavor. In the blend we tasted, it has hints of vanilla and citrus. For me - it tastes somewhat like the way a wicker basket smells. I needed a bit of sweetness and cream in mine - not my favorite herbal. Lindsay seemed to like it quite a bit, though!

We’re on the lookout over the next few weeks for a new wholesaler for our blends. The black tea we have on hand is just a bit too astringent for our tastes, even at low steeping times. Hopefully we’ll be back into making our final adjustments to our Earl Gray recipe and get it out to taste testers soon!

-A

More tasting

One day we’ll get ahead of our work for the semester and will get another blend going. But until then, we’re still drinking tea. This week, we tasted a yummy Citrus Blend from Harney & Sons.

It was nice and lightly citrusy; very smooth and easy to drink. There was more Earl Grey flavor than the Winter White Earl Grey we tried before.

Until next week!

-L

Sidetracked!

We had a lot of grand plans for the week. We were going to taste a bunch of different teas (6 of them, in fact), and taste and iterate on our own Earl Grey blend. How many of those did we get to? 0.5 of them. We tasted our Earl Grey and are getting closer to the base flavor that we want. We'll be putting together another try at our blend, and we have a good feeling that it'll be the one! Assuming that the other distractions start to lighten up.

-A

An Excuse to Drink Tea

This week has been all about research! We got a bunch of tea from NYC and, thanks to Tim and Meggie, we got some awesome samples from Huntsville. Needless to say, we've been drinking a lot of tea. We're still getting through all of it, but thus far, the winner has been the tea from Piper and Leaf (www.piperandleaf.com). Their approach of sourcing produce locally and working with the best tea producers abroad is something we strive for and I personally love that there are tea blenders out there like us!

We're also on attempt number 2 for our Earl Grey base. We got the pipettes in and immediately put together a new recipe to try. It's aging now and we'll be trying it early next week. We are also on the hunt for more suppliers of black tea, and if I can convince Lindsay, of green tea as well. The black tea we're using is great, but we want some different varieties to use as a base.

-A