Tea and Me

For those of you who might be interested (not just me, surely?) the results of the poll have been released for the four teas that Bluebird Tea Co. will be keeping as part of their permanent range. You will recall there were 9 original contenders, of which I have tasted 5: Carrot Cake (not yet reviewed) Bears Like Marmalade Chocolate Digestives Lemonade Sangria Summer of Love Ginger Beer G+Tea Bramble Ramble Now, I don't want to cast any doubt on the result or suggest that the placings of the tea in the list made people think those at the top were better than those at the bottom (which was definitely not the case in my opinion) but the eventual winners were the top 3 teas and the Ginger Beer tea (for which I, as the founder member of the Ginger Beer is Best party take full credit for helping win - thank you to everyone who voted for it).  To be fair, the Carrot Cake tea is lovely and I haven't tried Bears Like Marmalade yet as I really dislike Marmala...

This week's tea is Chocolate Digestives . It was another of the entries in Bluebird Tea Co. ’s recent poll to decide on 4 limited edition teas to transform into part of their permanent stock. The last time I looked at the poll this was one of the high performers so it’s clearly very popular, although I have to admit, not with me. Ingredients: Ceylon black tea, cocoa shells, cocoa nibs, chocolate sprinkles (sugar, cocoa mass, anhydrous  milk  fat, fat-reduced cocoa powder, whole  milk  powder, natural flavouring), fenugreek, liquorice, cardamom, caramel pieces (condensed skimmed  milk , sugar, glucose syrup, butter, humectant sorbitol E420 from  wheat , emulsified E471, natural flavouring)  They describe it thus: “The Chocolate Digestive… arguably on top of the biscuit pyramid, we thought it was about time it had its own tea blend. A velvety smooth, caramel + chocolate delight, best enjoyed whilst dunkin’ the real thing.” So, I b...

So, I haven’t had much time for tea tasting recently as I spent last weekend at the Harry Potter convention called LeakyCon  which was held at the Citywest Hotel in Dublin — if you were there you would have seen me dressed either as the Fat Lady, Doris Crockford or in my Slytherin robes. It was an amazing weekend, full of magic and fun, but it was also pretty non-stop so there wasn’t much time for sleeping. As I already knew this was going to be the case I prepared in advance by making up my own tea bags — Morning Kick to wake me up and get me going in the morning, Apricot and Garden of England to get me through the afternoon, and Milk Oolong Caramel for the evening wind down. I didn’t just drink my own tea, though. Over the course of the weekend, I also had several excellent pots of generic tea in the hotel lounge (as well as quite a few pints of their rather marvellous Orchard Thieves cider). However, unfortunately, despite my best attempts, I didn’t manage to try...