Birdhouse Tea Company – Jammie Hearts
It’s another Guest Post! Get Lippie has returned with another biscuit-based tea review!
Hello! Get Lippie here again, continuing my occasional venture into all things biscuit-flavoured. Honestly, you write one love letter to a biscuit inspired tea, and all heck breaks loose.
This time, I’m taking a look at Birdhouse Tea Company’s Jammie Hearts tea which is inspired by a famous biscuit I shall dodge naming directly, because why give something its proper name when you can coyly describe it as “vanilla shortbread biscuits sandwiched with jam” in best Great British Bake Off style instead? Besides, if Birdhouse themselves can avoid mentioning Jammie Dodgers in their description, then we can too, right?
[cough]
Moving swiftly on, Jammie Hearts (to give the tea its correct name) is a blend of black tea, raspberries, vanilla, and strawberry. There are plenty of dried fruit pieces visible in the tea and it is those that give it a delightful and yes, I will go there, jammy aroma.
Sipped black, the fruits are discernible, but there’s a nice bitterness from the tannins in the tea that offsets any sort of “hot squash” sensation. I find this to be a more full-bodied tea than the Bourbon Blend I also tried recently, and I appreciate this a great deal. This also gives it a pleasing dissonance between the fruity smell and the bitter tannins that I like very much – you go in expecting a bog-standard fruity tisane and boom! It’s actually a proper cup of tea!
Adding milk gives the tea more balance between the sweet pink fragrance and the background tannins, adding a creaminess that gives it a much more rounded mouthfeel, and this allows the vanilla to shine. Well, a bit. It’s more of a dim twinkle than a shine, really. I’ll be honest, I don’t really get much vanilla from this tea at all, and I think that’s a real shame, because I love vanilla, and think the tea would only be helped by a large dollop of it.
This is a tea that really, really benefits from a drop of sweetness, something I discovered by accident when I took a sip after a breakfast morning snack of fudge, and the sugar lingering on my palate made the tea do a fruity ZING!!! in my mouth. There aren’t nearly enough fruity ZING!!!s in my life, so, whilst I don’t normally take sugar in my tea, I’ll definitely be adding a few grains whenever I make this again, as it really ups the fruitiness and brings the full biscuit-effect to life.
All in all, a lovely cup with enough going on to please the drinker regardless of how they take it. I’ll take mine white, with an eighth of a teaspoon of sugar, please.
