Day 70: Bewley's Pure Rooibos

I think I was at a Bewley's hotel in Dublin about six or seven months back and took this one with me to go.  (I love taking tea packets from hotel rooms...or hotel breakfast rooms...my only rule is that I can't take so many as to be greedy, and there's a fine line. How many do you take from your hotel room? One or two?  Some people drink a lot of tea, and that's what it's there for.  I generally take the ones that I like, and leave a few for the room.  If I got bad service, though, I take them all.  That's right!)

Okay, tangent over.  So this is a 'pure rooibos', which can go either way.  Some rooibos teas are lovely, and some are pretty dark.  I really like this one - Bewley's chose well here! There's that slight bush-flavour, as though the tea leaves just came out of the dirt...but good clean dirt. It's hard to describe. It's not too heavy, if you don't oversteep, and has that slight caramel or toffee taste, a sweet tea without any sugar in it.  Lovely to drink at night before going to bed, too, because it's caffeine free and won't keep me awake for hours.

Walk/run length: 40 minutes

Day 69: Twinings Blackcurrant, Ginseng and Vanilla

You can tell I'm hitting the bottom of the barrel here.  I'm not a huge fan of ginseng - it's a really powerful flavour like cardamom or ginger.  But, this is a tea I haven't had on this blog yet, so here we go!

In this instance, the ginseng (as with the other intense ones noted above) just takes over everything. The blackcurrant is a pretty serious fruit, and is no mean competitor, but ginseng insists on having the last word.  Vanilla is a bit of an afterthought, like something they had to scrounge around for at the end, when they realised that things weren't going as smoothly with this tea as originally planned.  And the only vanilla I actually taste is probably something that's in my head because it's listed on the packet - they could have left it out and I wouldn't even know!

My walk today (Wednesday) was an excellent one - I went out in the morning, as planned, and came back rejuvenated and enthused, as planned.  Check!

Walk length: 35 minutes

Day 68: Whittard's Peppermint

I'm a bit worn out on blogging the last few days.  I've been walking (and even running some) faithfully every day, but I have to confess it's been a struggle to find a new tea, taste it, photograph it, and blog about it every day.  So, I'm catching up on a series of days. 

Today's was Whittard's Peppermint. The thing I like peppermint tea for is when I have a cold. When it's chilly and raining outside, and I'm snug in my bed with the duvet wrapped around me and warm socks on and a cup of minty tea for my throat, which is aching.  This wasn't the case today, which is good in many ways, but it does make it kind of odd to just randomly have a cup of peppermint tea.

Peppermint also made me think of those American sticks of candy, the striped ones? My sisters and I went to a place in Arizona called the Blazin' M Ranch, and they had a little sweet-shop that sold those striped sticks, and I bought several of them.  I think I was supposed to give them as gifts, but somehow they just ended up in my house, so every once in a while I pull one out and enjoy it.

I think I'll do that tonight!



Walk length: 35 minutes

Day 67: Whittard's Spiced Fruits

I mentioned earlier that I am beginning to run out of teas in my house.  I do have a whole sampler of Whittard's teas that was given to me as a gift, so I've got a few days out of those still!

I was making a card for a friend who is in hospital, and decided I'd share some of the joy of tea whilst doing it.  I've seen these cards before, with the little slot in them for a tea packet, so I decided to make my own, and was quite pleased at the results!  I spent a lovely hour with pens and paper and colours and craftiness and then slotted in a tea packet and away went the card!

My absolute favourite of this sampler is the Spiced Fruits. It tastes just as it ought to...fruity, but not overwhelmingly so or with a thick aftertaste, as many combination-fruit teas have; and with just a little tang, as though someone added chili powder and lemon, or some sort of odd addition like that. It's very different, but it works!

My walk today was to the train, from the train, to someone's house to look at a camera, back to the train, back home!  I was pretty exhausted actually! Those hills in Edinburgh get fairly steep, especially when carrying around my camera and lenses on my back.  I was glad to get home and chillax for a bit before going out to see a film in the evening.

Walk length: 1 hour

Day 66: Rest

No blogging, walking, or choosing of teas today.  I am enjoying some reruns of those I love though!

Day 65: Green Chai Tea

This was another one from my friends at Tea's Me Cafe, and another one that I bought because it sounded amazing, not because I loved the smell or taste of it.  I am learning my lesson to smell the loose leaf tea, and if possible try some before buying 75g of it!  I like it all right, but chai is very, very powerful, and this one is no exception.  Even smelling it kind of blows you away! 

When you smell it, it does kind of remind you of a green Christmas.  Cinnamon, cardamom, green leaves, spicyness...it's a sharp and tangy taste, powerful, with hardly any of the 'green' taste at all.  As a chai it's very light - without the milkiness of a usual chai, it's not heavy, and I think it could be a good one if combined with some other teas or flavours. 

Or perhaps I should try it as a proper chai!

Walk length: 20 minutes

Day 64: Fog Tea

This is a tea that I got at Souvia in the States, and I did something different and bought it solely on the basis of its name.  I live in Britain, so I figured a green tea that included the word 'fog' would not only be applicable, but a perfect match for a wet or drizzly or gloomy or foggy evening.

Unfortunately, this is the first green tea I really just don't like.  No matter how I steep it, it tastes like green tea that has sat around too long. I'm not sure what taste I was expecting from the word 'fog'...maybe a green tea that was fairly soft, not too bitter, with not much of a taste at all, I suppose.  I looked up the description on Souvia's site, and it said that it's a combination of green teas that are grown "high in the Wu Lu mountains where there is always clouds or fog".  And so the plant produces more chlorophyll...and there we have it.  Unfortunately there I have it, an entire package of this loose leaf tea, but I've had the brilliant idea of mixing my own loose leaf teas with all the ones I have, so I may do that soon!

Walk today was hard, but good...and right at the end I was running past a guy who was watching me come, and I thought 'ah, maybe here is some encouragement'. I was very near the end of my walk and usually I just walk the end, but I thought I'd push on and even run most of the end.  I was pretty proud of myself for being able to do that, since I'd run a good portion of the rest as well.  Unfortunately, all I got as he neared was, "You can go faster than that!"  Of course, as we all know, the initial response is nothing, or something useless, and then when you get home you come up with all these brilliant returns that would make him feel like a fool.  I don't know why I didn't think of, "So can you!", but I was pretty worn out, and that was a pretty discouraging thing to say.

On the other hand, it certainly stuck with me, and there have been days after this one that I thought about it and realised that although it wasn't true then, when he said it, there are times when it is true. I'll just take it for when I need it, and ignore it the others!

Walk/run length: 40 minutes