Tea Reviews | It's All About The Leaf

Posts Tagged ‘Fennel’

I did a double-take as I was typing up the ingredient list for this review: it isn’t a typo or an omission on the part of my new bifocals; I’m not seeing “pear” anything, are you? It doesn’t matter: whatever mix of blending mojo, culinary science, and olfactory alchemy Distinctly Tea has used to create this works and works well!

If you play a “Where’s Waldo?” game with the packet, you can visually account for everything: medium sized tea leaves, wisps of calendula, stripy whole fennel, and the apple and orange bits. Together, they give the dry blend a sweet and creamy scent.

As far as steeping goes, flavored green or white tea can be a little finicky—the time/temp combination one normally uses to coax the fruit flavor out of hiding often makes the tea go bitter. Not so with this tea—keeping exactly to the package instructions results in a gorgeous gold ambrosia that tastes and smells a bit like baby-food fruit or a skillfully diluted syrup from a can of fruit cocktail.

Should you need a light and fruity tea to celebrate first day you can sit in the back yard with bare feet—or a wicked winter day when you need a reminder that spring will come…eventually…Pear Cream Supreme makes an excellent and fruitful choice.

You can purchase the Pear Cream Supreme directly from the Distinctly Tea website.

Wonderfully aromatic! Sometimes pear flavored tea will smell fruity but not specifically pear. This one definitely is PEAR. And cream. The aroma carries through to the brew. Looking at the ingredient list, I was suprised to see fennel seed – I don’t tend to mentally connect fennel and pear flavors, but on my first sip I was sold. You don’t taste fennel, but rather a lovely blend of pear flavors and tea flavors. Very nice!

This tea deserves sitting on a veranda with a friend, talking and sipping. Very comforting, very yummy. I tried this both hot and iced, and while I prefer hot, I bet this would be lovely sweetened and iced on a summer day. Yum.

You can purchase the Pear Cream Supreme directly from the Distinctly Tea website.

Organic herbal blend, caffeine free.

5 Minute infusion reveals a medium brown brew.

The package is really neat, a silk pyramid filled with cacao, cinnamon, fennel, licorice root, cardamom, ginger, cloves, black pepper. After the 5 minutes, the silk pyramid is full except for just a teeny bit of space at the tippy top of the pyramid. What I really like about Tea Forte is the attention to detail, the pyramid is like a work of art with a cute little green leaf that wraps delicately over the rim of my favorite tea cup.

Smell after brew time is of cinnamon and chocolate (like a really nice expensive chocolate).

First sip revealed a hot cocoa taste with melted chocolate inside. This tea would make a great dessert tea and an even better before bed kind of drink.

Rich and yummy, a dieters dream come true… all the taste of chocolate with zero calories!

This is definitely going on my shopping list, good job Tea Forte.

You can purchase Tea Forte Coco Truffle Tea directly from their website, and in various high-end establishments around the world.

Sweet treat time!  Opening a Coco Truffle pyramid, can tell why it was recommended to me just by the smell.  Yum in a bag! Almost smells like a chai. It is a pure herbal blend, naturally caffeine-free, beautiful as a dessert tea.

Steeped it in boiling water for five minutes and the smell of all the spices are coming through, the cardamom scent is a bit strong though.  Tastes good but a bit weak.  Steeped it for three more minutes and the blend has balanced out.  It’s brewed a beautiful dark steep.  Truffle magic, here I come. Can taste and smell the cacao goodness now, like an exotic candy bar in a cup, this is really delicious.  This is the very best, zero calorie indulgence I’ve had in awhile.  I don’t crave sweets very often but I will be reaching for this one the next time I have a chocolate crisis!

You can purchase Tea Forte Coco Truffle Tea directly from their website, and in various high-end establishments around the world.

This is a herbal blend from Tea forte who describe it as “a rich, chocolate reward, nearly as gratifying as a velvety truffle”. Well, I don’t know if it’s all that but it is very good.

Being a chocoholic I prefer the real thing – dark and melting on your fingers. I’ve been disappointed many times by teas that promise a real chocolate taste and deliver only a hint. I was pleasantly surprised by Coco Truffle; not only by the sweet aroma which with eyes shut could make me believe that it was a mug of hot cocoa rather than tea, but the rich almost milky taste had tons of real chocolate flavor.

The ingredients are listed as cacao, cinnamon, fennel, licorice root, cardamom, ginger, cloves, black pepper. The flavor from the cacao beans was the most pronounced. I suspect that the cardamom gave the tea it’s creamy characteristic but the other spices, fennel and licorice root only came through as an aftertaste. I think that either fennel or licorice root and not both would have been sufficient but overall the combination was a success.

I followed Tea forte’s guidelines and brewed it for 5 minutes in water that was just short of boiling. A second cup made with the same tea bag had very little of the coco flavor left but the other ingredients came through and it was almost like a weak chai. Tea forte’s signature pyramidal tea bags are very elegant looking and the design seems to give the tea plenty of room to steep but they are very expensive at $1 per bag so it’s unlikely I would be buying these regularly but perhaps as a special treat or as a gift.

You can purchase Tea Forte Coco Truffle Tea directly from their website, and in various high-end establishments around the world.