Hood River Rooibos from Beach House Teas is a delicious decaf herbal blend with rooibos, ginger, and honeycrisp apples. I love the fall, and sometimes I love extra honey sweet apple teas with lots of cinnamon and flavoring, but Hood River Rooibos has me re-thinking what I want in my herbal apple teas this season.
This tea is simple and delightful. The woodsy rooibos is flavorful without caffeine or bitterness. A touch of ginger root adds just enough sweet spice to make you think you’re drinking something special and seasonal.
The honeycrisp apples are really the ingredient that shines. The naturally sweet fruit flavor of the apples doesn’t need any sugar or honey to taste indulgent and refreshing. Because there aren’t any powerful spices like cinnamon or cloves, you get to taste all the apples for themselves. Even a chai-lover like me doesn’t miss the cinnamon in this blend.
This tea makes me nostalgic for the fresh fall apples in the orchard of my hometown. This is the perfect blend to warm you up when your picking apples off the tree, or when you’re just daydreaming about fall and all its wonderful flavors.
Here’s the scoop!
Leaf Type: Rooibos
Where to Buy: Beach House Teas
Description:
Hood River Rooibos is 100% organic rooibos tea blended with ginger root and Pacific Northwest Honeycrisp Apples. This combination of sweet apple mixed with the heat of ginger and the earthy flavor of rooibos is perfect for the winter season.
Learn even more about this tea and tea company here!
Master Han’s Wild Picked Yunnan Black from Verdant Tea
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Verdant Tea
Tea Description:
Master Han is a remarkably talented crafter of wild picked pu’ers and black teas whose workshop and ancient plot of tea forest is an hour’s walk to the nearest gravel road in a national forest preserve. We were lucky enough to meet him at his first tea conference. Tucked away in a hidden corner behind slick modern displays with uniformed reps from Xiaguan and Menghai, Master Han and his young apprentice seemed apprehensive about the operation. We were on our way to a panel on gongfu brewing when the sheer beauty of a bag of his wild-picked black tea caught us in our tracks.
NOTES: grape, olive oil, linen, scotch, honeycrisp, coconut
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Master Han’s Wild Picked Yunnan Black from Verdant Tea is a rather light cup, not that it lacks any flavor whatsoever, its just not as in your face with robustness as some teas. Robustness? Well spell check passed it so it must be a word. Regardless, this cup is lightly sweet with a sourgum like flavor, there is also a wild grape flavor coming to the top of the notes. The tea is clear to the bottom of the cup. The color is dark, like black tea should be but it is transparent. There is a slight drying sensation on the tongue while sipping, perhaps this is the linen note mentioned?
The flavor of black olive comes out as the tea cools just slightly and that is the note that lingers most on my palate. It is a lovely savory note to mingle with the sweetness of the tea, balancing it nicely. A lovely yam flavor develops more so as the tea becomes a bit cooler, and I am sure that further steepings will bring about that scotch, and coconut flavor I am looking for. Also I notice as the tea cools more the black olive note becomes more of an olive oil flavor which is interesting.
Verdant once again delivers one of the most unique tea offerings and I am so happy to have sampled some! Learn more about Master Han here.
