Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Harney & Sons
Tea Description:
We are introducing our SoHo Blend in honor of our new shop in Manhattan. Emeric Harney, the shop’s host, came up with this flavored black tea concoction. Our SoHo Tea is a beautifully delicious blend of black tea with chocolate, coconut and vanilla flavors, and amaranth petals.
Learn more about this blend here.
Taster’s Review:
When I read the description of this SoHo Black Tea Blend from Harney & Sons, I really wanted to try it. Chocolate? Coconut? And Vanilla? That sounds too yummy to pass up. It sounds like … a candy bar in tea form! After checking through my reviews though, it would seem that I’ve reviewed this tea previously … so, consider this my second voyage with this tea.
The fragrance of the brewed tea is incredible. I can smell all the components: the rich chocolate notes, the creamy vanilla, and the sweet scent of coconut. I can even smell the earthy notes of the black tea in the background. I even smell very faint hints of flower, although these are somewhat obscured by the chocolate-y tones, which seems to be the most prominent aroma in this cup.
And this is a tasty tea. Unfortunately, it’s just not … quite as rich as I expected it to be. The body falls kind of flat and thin. Perhaps a more robust black tea base would help … something rich and malty like an Assam? Something with some heft that will not only support the chocolate, vanilla and coconut flavors, but also elevate them.
It’s not a bad tea. It has an agreeable flavor … I can taste the chocolate and the coconut and the vanilla notes. I can even taste the black tea. But, everything is just sort of … lacking in gusto. It’s a thin chocolate taste and you know me, I like a rich chocolate-y flavor. The coconut and the vanilla meld together to create a unified creamy note that’s a little bit coconut-y and a little bit vanilla-ish, but both of these flavors have the capability of producing a really rich, creamy flavor and I’m just not getting that from the sip.
Like I said, it’s a tasty, decently flavored tea, very much like my first experience, although I think maybe I liked it better the first time around than maybe the second. I guess it just goes to show that our palates change!
