#tea things

I remember this one from my initial notes on “first impressions of what the tea sounds like it might taste like just based on the component names” - something about how there was something appropriate about something Key West-themed mixed with what I could only assume was a dark pu’erh here, about something very eye-catching and vacation-oriented being upstairs while there’s all this dark backstory and dangerous experiments going on underneath. Now, for the heck of it, I’ll check out the actual descriptions of these components:

Right away, I’m a bit surprised, since I guess I had assumed that Key West would equal Key Lime. I suppose I thought it made sense that lime might go with the Earl Grey element, since bergamot is a type of citrus fruit along similar-ish flavor lines. However, although I still don’t know exactly what passionfruit tastes like in isolation, I can see some logic here as well - I don’t much care for mango on its own, but Whittard’s makes a Mango and Bergamot green tea that I’ve been rather fond of. Since the Earl Grey is specifically an “Earl Grey Moonlight” instead of just a plain Earl Grey, I decided to check this one out as well to see what the Earl’s been dressed up with.

An Earl Grey Creme! I usually love these, so that’s a good sign. I think I’ve read that apricot and vanilla also makes a good combination, in that the vanilla makes the apricot very smooth and sweet. Hopefully it will go just as well with mango.

And here’s the Pu’erh Dante, which it seems hasn’t been modified at all and is just a rather pleasant-sounding shou. Excellent. Might have to sample this on its own sometime; the lack of detail about age and region and etc makes me think it might be a good, general sort of pu’erh that would be good for drinking on the job, nothing exceedingly fancy. Sometimes you want the fine tea experience, but sometimes you just want a decent cuppa, you know? This is why the fanciest tea I’ve ever owned, the price of which per ounce I don’t care to recall, shared a shelf with a box of Twinings’ Lady Grey, the second tea I ever tasted and one of my enduring favorites. That, however, shall wait for the future.

Both the dry and the wet leaf smell absolutely delicious, like some kind of dessert - my initial impression was Earl Grey and lime due to the misconception about Key West = Key Lime, but after reading, yeah, it’s Earl Grey, vanilla, and some sweeter non-specific fruit, which I assume is a mix of the passionfruit and mango.

As hard as it was to refrain from just trying to munch on the tea blend itself, I nevertheless restrained myself and got a cup made. It’s not very dark, so I assume the pu’erh really will be a base note, something heavier at the bottom of the flavor profile to ground down the lighter elements and that there isn’t a lot of it in the mix. Probably won’t try re-steeping, then.

While I’ve been writing all this, something that smells like a really, really good banana pudding or peach cobbler or something along those lines* has been drifting across the room from the wood stove to me on the couch, and by now, I’m actually feeling a little hungry! This is especially bad in light of the fact I just ate supper, so I’m really hoping this will taste as dessert-like as it smells.

*sips a few times*

…it isn’t, but at the same time it is?

On the first sip, I got a very clear, not-quite-sweet fruit note that I read a mix of the pu’erh and the mango, but on the second sip, the vanilla started playing a strong, almost dominant, role in the ensemble. Every now and then, I taste bergamot, but then it dips into the wings again, as though it had danced its part for this scene and would await its next cue just off stage. Some sips were sweeter than others, almost evoking the pastry element of that cobbler it smells so much like…the flavor is just a *hint* too dry, too lacking in juiciness, to quite nail the dessert, but that’s okay - there’s a reason one traditionally drinks coffee or tea with dessert, and I suppose it has something to do with ‘balancing out the sweet,’ as we say here. In any event, I feel satisfied after finishing the cup, which I did at a pretty quick pace, and have to give this one two thumbs way, way up.

So there we have it - the Gravity Falls Fandom Blend sample reviews! Thanks again to @sovonight for blending them and to @dipperpines-kin for sharing that information with the community in such a way that it ended up hitting my dashboard. This has been tremendous fun for me, and has helped me get back into a hobby I loved for most of a decade before Hurricane Severe Depression hit my personality square-on in 2022 and knocked all the love for pretty much everything out of me for a few years. I also got a general black tea sampler and oolong tea sampler when I ordered these samples, and I’m quite looking forward to getting into that oolong - I loved oolong before The Interlude and am hoping I can learn to prepare it right again, as I did with the teas here - I’m not sure if I’ll document all that, since I’m gonna need to spend so much of March catching up on my February book reviews for @callireads, but I’m very much looking forward to it.

In conclusion, me being sentimental aside, Gravity Falls teas for the most part are very good, even ones that I was sure going in couldn’t possibly be very good for someone with my palate. My personal opinion about which were The Best are, in mostly** no particular order,

1. Stan tea (the version with Lapsang Souchong in it)

2. The Mystery Shack tea

3. Ford’s Lapsang-containing blend

4. Mabel Without Strawberry (herbal tea)

5. Bill Cipher (herbal tea).

Your tastes, of course, may vary, but there’s mine. This was fun!

* it’s a bit too far away to be sure which, but something nice…or maybe it’s specifically my mama’s blueberry-peach cobbler the smell reminds me of? I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried one, because Mama made up her recipe herself; my father wanted something sweet, but although she didn’t have enough of anything to make a normal pie, she reasoned that he’d eat anything with enough sugar in it and threw the first two things she had a little bit of together, which happened to be some peaches and blueberries. Daddy adored the result, it smelled so good she ended up sampling it herself, and ever since then it’s been a family staple.

A nice, simple blend that seems sure to make for a winner.

…I assume it’s just the cinnamon, but when I pour the hot water on, I’m instantly reminded of my grandmother’s pumpkin rolls. She hasn’t been able to make them for a few years, now, since the dementia started attacking her ability to cook first, but they were excellent, everyone loved them. Everybody would freeze a few to have through the year after the autumn was over.

The finished cup smells more distinctly just of cinnamon with an orangey undertone, which still isn’t bad. As for the taste….

Minimal mess opening, maximum mess scooping, but we sorted it out. An attractive blend visually.

Just throwing this in here to verify - yep, same teapot I’ve been using, sampling as standardized as I can really get it.

And this was yesterday’s cup. Lovely color, but when I tasted it, I was so confused! All I could taste was ginger and rooibos. That was it. Not a hint of anything else, including the caramel flavor that was supposed to go along with the rooibos by default. Where did all my lovely caramel go??

Today I woke up with a severe headache and just wanted something warm and caffeinated, and I vaguely associate ginger with illness, so I brewed up another cup of it…and when I tasted it, I was so confused! The predominant taste was now rooibos, the ginger only showed up on the swallow, and I found my caramel again! It was now only a pale shadow of itself, but it was there.

I’ve concluded that this is one where you can’t be too sure that a given spoonful is well-blended, so I’m going to try a third experiment with it: dumping the rest of the sample into my two-and-a-half cup glass pot in the morning and then drinking two and a half cups of presumably well-blended tea. I couldn’t make that experiment today, though, because I had pressed the glass pot into service for another job last night and it was still half-full as a result.

My little glass pot - originally half of a tea for one set from Whittard’s; I don’t care for the cup that came with it, but the pot is excellent - is one of my favorite teapots, if not the favorite, but a couple of years ago, I lost the infuser basket that fit it properly, which has limited its usefulness ever since. Then about two weeks ago, though, I was in Target, and I saw a loose tea infuser basket for six bucks, and I decided to be a nice person and get one for my aunt, who has started drinking this tisane she thinks will lower her blood pressure better than her blood pressure medicine will, but who has had an awful time figuring out how to prepare it, since herbal tea mixes oddly with the Keurig pod. As it turned out, though, Aunt was away that day, and something about the proportions of this infuser kept nagging me, and since I’m not that nice of a person, I ultimately ended up opening up the infuser and trying it out with my little glass pot…where it fit perfectly! The lid even fit perfectly while on top of the basket! So hurrah - had to get my aunt another one, and I’m not crazy about the fake gold color, but I have my favorite teapot back in full working order, and have been happily using it a lot for everything except these sample tastings ever since.

I already sampled the first Mabel, the watermelon-mint-strawberry thing, in hot form, so last night, after the relative success of brewing the Dipper sample up in a bigger pot and loading it with honey, I decided to attempt an experiment with the rest of the Mabel sample. I put it all into the infuser basket, poured on the water, and after a few minutes, I lifted the basket back out long enough to stir a good amount of honey into it. Then I put the basket back and let it continue steeping until the pot was no longer warm to the touch, at which point I removed the infuser and put the pot of tea in the fridge. Mabel Juice was, after all, a summer beverage from the refrigerator, so it seemed only appropriate, even though it’s currently an unusually cold February in my corner of the world….

Well, this morning, I poured half of this chilled, sweetened infusion into a glass and used it to take my meds, and it was surprisingly lovely. Nothing at all like the offspring of coffee and nightmares, so it can’t count as out of universe Mabel Juice, but I can see this being an excellent refreshing beverage in the summer. The watermelon and strawberry had melded together with a new aspect of the mint to create a rather floral, rose-like flavor, and it turns out that rose and spearmint is apparently a pretty nice combination. I enjoyed the glass, but then, since it was after all 5am on an unusually cold February morning, I put the other half back in the fridge, and am sipping on it now. I don’t know if it continued to evolve over the course of the day or if the state of my sinuses somehow contributed to this, but it tastes different this time - the strawberry is pretty clear, overriding the watermelon, and the spearmint has gotten sharper. Still not bad at all, though, and might be worth keeping a pitcher around come summertime.

(Answer: almost any time. But tea also has L-theanine, which is soothing, supposedly, and it’s either tea or eating Cadbury eggs until I make myself sick. Option one sounded better, so I made tea).

I have finally come around to the last of the three Ford teas in the Perfect Fandom Box, and with this, I will have tried all the teas in the first box. I have also emptied three little tins: the original Ford tea got its four remaining servings dumped into my two and a half cup glass pot this morning, brewed up quite strong and with a bit of milk in it. It tasted dramatically different from my first impression of it - not bad, but different. Too bad I didn’t make tasting notes, what with it being 5am when I did that…but on to this tea.

For the first time, I managed to open one of these tins without any of it erupting onto the table! Still made a mess using the spoon, but hey, it’s progress.

Actual tea was…odd, again. I could taste Assam and what I registered as cheap vanilla flavoring, like vanilla teabags from the grocery store. Now, I’ve no objection to grocery store tea - Twinings, of all people, make the only jasmine green I like; I’ve tried supposedly astronomically higher-quality blends, loose leaf, brewed western style, brewed gong fu style, what have you, and have never found another which actually tastes outright pleasant to me for some reason - but it certainly wasn’t what I expected from the ingredient list.