In Which The Tea Fancier Turns Her Hand To Tea Blending
I told you last week about the Bird & Blend tea blending workshop I went to. Now, the time has come, ladies, gentlemen, and non-gender-specific gentlefolk, to review the tea blends I put together there.
Black spicy chai with chocolate and coconut.
First up, we have a coconutty spicy chocolate blend that I confidently expected to be my flagship tea blend. I was bandying around names for it, like “Tea Fancier Tea Party” or “The Tea Fancier Fancy Tea”. Or even simply “The Tea Fancier Blend” if it was good enough. Readers, it was not good enough.
I know what I was trying to achieve, but unsurprisingly randomly bunging a bunch of different ingredients into a tea sachet all higgledy-piggledy wasn’t the way to do it. Although I should point out that the spices, as they were made available to us, presented a bit of a quandary.
We were given whole cinnamon sticks to use! I tried breaking one up, but those spicy blighters are tougher than they look. So, this brew doesn’t contain as much cinnamon as I would like. The cardamom seeds just got shoved in whole, but as they’re considerably smaller, that’s probably all right. There were also whole star anise pods on offer. I didn’t even attempt to smash one of those up by hand.
This blend contains black tea, cocoa nibs, coconut, cardamom, and cinnamon. And, sadly, it just tastes really insipid. Not being a professional tea blender, I’m at a loss as to how I would rectify the situation.
It doesn’t taste chocolatey, coconutty, spicy or tea-y enough. I can’t just add more of all those things, though. Because then I would end up with exactly the same blend. Just more of it.
Black tea with rose, orange and lemon.
Now, this is more like it. In contrast to the previous blend, this one isn’t half bad. If I were to give it a name, it would be “The Tea Fancier Tea Garden”. I’m not saying that rose and citrus is definitely a unique and original idea. Possibly Bird & Blend already have such a tea in their tea library. And I think Whittard’s Piccadilly Blend does something similar, but I’m still pretty pleased with how this one turned out. I will have no problems finishing off the rest of the packet.
Rooibos with chocolate and coconut
Tempted as I was to stick to black tea-based blends in my tea dabbling (black tea is my favourite), I decided to branch out a bit. I could have made a green tea blend or some kind of herbal nonsense. (There were chamomile flowers aplenty for the taking.) However, I decided to give a rooibos recipe a whirl.
As rooibos has a sort of cakey air about it, I paired it with cocoa nibs and coconut, and it worked out as tastily as you would expect. Coconut and rooibos are a great match. Although this supposedly chocolate tea could have done with a bit more chocolate in it.
I do have some cocoa nibs in the cupboard, so I could remedy this shortcoming if I wanted to. But you know what? I’m done with tea blending for now. And while I’m not ruling out a return to my new dream of producing a range of quirkily named Tea Fancier blends in the future, I reckon that for the moment, I’m going to leave such things in the hands of the experts.
Bird & Blend Tea Blending Workshops are run regularly in many of their stores.
