Tea Reviews | It's All About The Leaf

Posts Tagged ‘Orchid’

Black tea with Madagascar vanilla and coconut slivers? hmm, hmm, hmm. Now we’re talking. The dry tea pyramid smells fantastic, can’t really make out the coconut smell, reminds me more of hazelnut for some reason.

Steeped for four minutes in boiling water. Can smell the coconut and vanilla now and it’s killing me to have to wait for it to cool (debating whether or not it’s worth the risk of a burnt tongue). Decided to wait – last two minutes. This yum in a cup. Rich and full bodied, smooth with a coconut twist, and sweet enough on it’s own.

Made it through three steeps with this one before it fizzled out. Ripping the pyramid bag open with the next one, thinking I might get one more good infusion out of it if the leaves are loose.

You can purchase the Orchid Vanilla directly from the Tea Forte website.

The fancy teabag/pyramid/thing had a wonderful fragrance when I took it out of its packaging. The vanilla was deliciously fragrant and smelled like actual vanilla bean rather than some random perfume or extract. I could smell the tea base underneath which had an oddly lightly spiced sort of scent. I had to concentrate for my nose to pick up the coconut, but I think I detected it up. There’s something about coconut that just seems to blend really well with vanilla.

Unfortunately it pretty much all vanished as soon as the water hit the teabag, and just smelled like steeping tea. The taste of the tea started off rather weak and somewhat flat and only slowly did the flavour creep in, first the tannic flavour of the tea (which was fairly gentle and mellow compared to many of the bases used in flavoured blends – a point in this tea’s favor) followed by a sweet, vanilla-ish flavour. It’s not really the bursting-with-vanilla-flavour taste I was expecting, and it was kind of a let down in this regard. Not really getting the coconut flavour either.

This tea might benefit from adding a bit of sweetener and possibly milk too, although I think it would have to be steeped longer, as right now I think it’s too mild to stand up to the milk. It’s not a bad tea – it doesn’t have me jumping for joy, but it’s a nice easy-drinking black tea. I gave this tea a Steepster rating of 72 out of 100.

You can purchase the Orchid Vanilla directly from the Tea Forte website.

Through my use of the tea tray, I have come to determine that it is a wonderful product.
At first, the tea trays seem a bit frivolous. The question that initially came to my mind is “Why would anyone spend money on something created specifically to hold used tea bags, when they could just as easily use a small plate, or even just dispose of the tea bag straight away?”
So, determined to answer this question, I prepared myself some tea (Tea Forte’s Orchid Vanilla, as the trays were clearly meant to be primarily used with Tea Forte pyramid bags).
Here were my findings:

Great things about the tea trays:
-They’re small, thus conserving the space used on one’s desk/table/etc. (This was especially helpful on my desk, which has a lot of papers and other items on it, and where a small plate for used tea bags would be a waste of space)
-They provide a drip-free resting place in the chance that you want to save the tea bag for another steeping.
-The tea trays are aesthetically pleasing, making them great to give as gifts or to add a bit of decoration at tea time.
-The size of the tea trays is such that they could just as easily be used with other tea bags as drip trays.
-The construction is really solid. These trays are not going to break easily if they are accidentally dropped.

Not so great things (that might not matter) about the tea trays:
-These trays really are not so special and innovative that one would go out and buy them to complete one’s collection of teaware.
-The shallow indentation in the tray was not deep enough, and the excess liquid in my teabag ended up overflowing the lip of the tray’s depression. (I may not have let the tea bag drip off long enough.)
-Because of the shallow indentation, when I picked up the tray to drain it off and clean it, the smallest tilt caused tea to run off the edge.

You can purchase the Tea Tray directly from the Tea Forte website.