Making chocolate covered cherry Christmas tea blend

Christmas blend tea ingredients (cacoa nibs, the unfamiliar one lower right)

I posted about making a version of Christmas tea blend last year, related to seeing Twinings versions and such around.  It seemed like a relatively standard version:  black tea, clove, cinnamon, and orange peel (the standard set), along with some dried dark cherry and dried tangerine peel and fruit.  The trick was getting the clove spice to balance.  The taste of clove is warm and a little spicy, great for adding a layer to some other flavors, but spicy tea can be a bit much.  As with masala chai--related more to ginger adding spiciness--adding milk and sugar were the obvious ways to offset that.

dried fruit for last year's version blend

So where to go next?  Christmas-theme flavors could include lots of different things, including candy-canes, a range of different hot drinks, and chocolates (see this blog reference covering lots of variations).  Chocolate; how to add that to a tea?  Blends mixing in real chocolate aren't unheard of (David's Tea sells a number of such blends), and I even dropped a Hershey's kiss into a tea once to see what that was all about, but it's not ideal.  The flavor range works but the texture is quite odd, I guess a little towards a hot cocoa.

Really adding anything to a tea or blend that's not completely water-soluble is unconventional.  Cacao or cocoa nibs are part of the actual cocoa beans used to make a tisane (herb tea, to some); that would seem an obvious way to go.  Related to that first naming split, my understanding is that the beans are cacao, and cocoa is a processed by-product used to make things like chocolate, or cakes, so the former might well be more appropriate.  But what's in a name.

Chasing down cacao nibs proved tricky; we don't have the same type of health food store options here in Bangkok.  Lots of things are quite equivalent here but that's not one; the selection tends to be a bit limited.  I was a vegetarian for the first five years we lived here--and a dozen years prior--and was surprised to find that protein powder, flax seed oil, and spirulina aren't easy to find, even in organic foods / health foods stores.  So strange!  I turned up a place outside Pattaya to buy the cocoa plants (I'll get back to that), and eventually sources for the cacao nibs (and one nice looking online source I didn't use), then bought some at Radiance Wholefoods here in Bangkok.  That vendor said people often use them with coffee; kind of makes sense, but I'd give them more of a grind if doing so myself, if I ever get back to drinking coffee.

But what theme / recipe?  Originally I was thinking black tea, clove, and chocolate might somehow balance.  Combining chocolate and mint seems obvious--like a peppermint pattie--but it doesn't sound good to me.  I thought back to my own experiences with Christmas and it hit me; we bought chocolate covered cherries for my parents every year as kids.

So how to make that next...  The cocoa / cacao nibs had that part covered, the sugar and creaminess were easy, just add sugar and milk or cream.  I ran across a foods display in our office building selling a version of dark cherry preserves.  Done!  I watched a China Life tea video on making an iced tea using preserves a few months back, adding a touch of fruit for taste, one video from a nice instructional series.  It sounded a little odd, slightly off the norm, but it makes perfect sense once you think it through.

2015 version; some modest-scale decorations going on

Better to keep the rest short:  I made the tea.  I added a vanilla bean I had left over from a trip to Indonesia a year ago--a great place to pick up spices.  It seemed boiling the nibs and vanilla first made sense, to draw out more flavor, since those weren't going to give up their taste after a four or five minute steep as dried tea leaves tend to.  I kept tasting the "tea" all through the process, mimicking how I cook.  The nibs and the vanilla were tasting pretty good on their own after about three minutes on low boil.  Altogether I simmered it for a little over five minutes without the tea added about the same with it in.  As with masala chai I tend to make a second batch from the same tea and spices to see how much flavor was left in it, and it was only a bit thinner, not so different.

You might wonder what cacao nibs taste like as tea, and now I'm the right person to pass that on; they taste a lot like dark chocolate.  Baking cocoa sort of doesn't, really, it picks up a chalkiness, and sweetness doesn't carry through as well, and something aromatic gets pushed aside related to other compounds stepping forward.  This wasn't chalky, or dry, or even a touch bitter, it was just like dark chocolate.

As for black tea half that I used was Hatvala Wild Boar black tea, really way too good a tea for blending, but I bought a lot of it last year so I still have some around.  Another friend gave me some standard CTC ground-up Assam awhile back I also added.

The tea was nice.  It doesn't require a taste-by-taste review since I've just listed the ingredients; it tasted like those, really close to what a chocolate covered cherry tastes like.  The balance was good.  A bit more cherry would have made sense, and swapping out milk for a mix of milk and cream would've worked better, but otherwise that was dead on.  I couldn't help but notice the only taste that wasn't exactly like those chocolate covered cherries was the tea.  Which leads to another natural thought, doesn't it:  why not try it without a tea added?  It was so well balanced there wasn't much other room for dialing in, just the bit about cream.


A bit on background context on that experience:  if I'd been drinking it while looking out on a snowy landscape, with Christmas lights blinking in the background, it would've been one of those classic, perfect moments.  But it wasn't like that.  It has been in the 90s in Bangkok for a few weeks now (in F; around 30 C).  That's not really a hot spell, just how Bangkok is, with the cool season running late.  It feels slightly cooler and dryer in the past couple days, to me, but some of that could be wishful thinking.  The same day I made that tea (and these notes) was my birthday, and I'd just made a pumpkin pie that is my token experience of Thanksgiving.  That was three days late, but there is no Thanksgiving in other countries.


I still enjoyed the tea.  I'm not really a flavored tea lover; plain is fine for me, with lots going on in better versions to appreciate.  But it was a bit awesome.  I'll tweak the mix a bit, maybe see if chocolate and clove really can balance in a tea, and see if my kids like a version closer to a cherry-themed hot cocoa, without tea.  I think grinding those nibs might work better, might really extract a solid blast of chocolate taste, as opposed to the moderate layer in the version I made.  My daughter and I ate a few small chunks after brewing and they seemed kind of close to eating a fragment of dark chocolate, not at all brewed to flavorless yet.


This past weekend I had a nice experience to fill in for missing Black Friday, visiting a crowded mixed-goods sale.  They had some good deals, and we bought some Legos, but it was horribly crowded and so, so loud.  Thai sales promotion often involves someone yelling into a high power sound system, as if attempting to override your central nervous system and your judgement.

the Legos section was a bit empty; it seemed un-American

I'm getting into the holiday spirit.  It's all going to be ok, another holiday season in a foreign culture, and even that mess the US is working through.  Appreciating the basics really puts it in perspective:  family, holiday foods and customs, and a nice cup of tea.

Farmerleaf Autumn 2016 Jingmai black tea (Dian Hong)

To start, happy birthday to me!  I'm 48 today, getting up there, or at least was when I wrote the initial draft, a day ago now.  I've had a cold lately but I'm ok enough to review tea this weekend, so I finally opened a package of samples provided by Farmerleaf tea.  It felt even more like my birthday; they sent an amazing range of types of teas.  I was expecting pu'er, which is nice, and kind of their thing--they produce and source tea based in Yunnan; see background here, and here--but it went way beyond that.  The tea I'm trying is an Autumn 2016 Jing Mai Black tea, but another is a Chinese version of an Oriental Beauty, and another is a moonlight white.


I've always really had a thing for Chinese black teas, especially well made variety Sinensis versions, sweet, floral or fruity, rich, and unique.  Of course these are going to be variety Assamica, which run earthier, but which have lots of potential to be amazing teas as well.

Review of their Autumn 2016 Jing Mai black tea

The tea is just beautiful, with dark, multi-colored, long and twisted leaves.  Being an autumn version brings up some interesting questions about character differences due to different harvest times; maybe I'll look into that background more later.


The taste is a bit earthy, full and rich, across a range of earth-tone aspects, more or less centered around an autumn leaf smell.  The flavors profile is clean, with next to no astringency, just a bit of fullness to the body.  From there it seems natural to try and break the tea into a flavors list, although the most impressive aspect is the way it works together, the general effect.  The tea is unique, another very nice way that black tea can be.  I've tried teas that are quite similar in style but this pulls the type together as well as any, perhaps a little better.  Back to the flavors-list.

A rich, earthy range stands out, with that autumn leaf maybe alternately described as medium-dark hardwood, but more complex than that.  With some black teas negative aspects that seem related to this flavor range can creep in, a bit of rust or fungus, or coarse astringency.  This tea's flavors and feel are clean and positive instead.  There is a mineral undertone, difficult to pin down as rock-tastes can be, but that's mild and well integrated, and serves as a positive contribution, a base for those other flavors.


Jing Mai pu'er--the few I've tried--run a bit floral (and also mineral; kind of standard for pu'er), but this breaks a bit in a rich fruit direction instead.  It's not so distinctly connected to one fruit that I can call it, maybe be in between cooked dark cherry and yam.  It seems based on personal review style a list-description might just include both of those, rather than to say an aspect lands in between, but that's how it seems.


The feel of the tea is nice, soft but really full, with a bit of structure but not really an edge.  There is a trace of dryness but at the same time it's juicy.  It all balances well.  It's perhaps even a bit soft for someone that prefers more edge and structure but for my preferences it's right where it should be, easy to drink but still interesting.  There's really nothing of flaws to talk about in the range of aspects; it could be a different type of tea, but for the type it's just right.

I'm preparing it by a modified Western style approach, upping the proportion a little from a more typical Western ratio, for me a good fit for the tea type.  That unusual feel starts to stand out even more after a couple of infusions, a slight dryness coupled with juiciness, with an extra quality that hangs around the tongue after.  Unless I'm mistaken this is the aspect described as "resinous" by fellow tea blogger Amanda who writes My Thoughts Are Like Butterflies.  To be clear, that aspect is a good thing, although maybe that's just per having that preference.

The flavor range actually does transition a little, but it's hard to pin down.  It moves towards a light leather element that really was a secondary aspect giving the earlier aspect range more complexity.  This is going to sound crazy, perhaps, but I'm also going to claim that leather is one of the flavor elements that is positive in commercial blended black teas, like Lipton.  I've not been drinking those for ages, so maybe I've just walked off the map into my own imagination a little.  Put another odd way, it tastes like tea.

I haven't mentioned sweetness, but the tea balances fullness, earthiness, and dryness with a good level of sweetness, not really a "sweet" black tea but with the right amount.  Undertones / complexity in terms of flavors might come in the form of other root or bark spice trace aspects (which really needs some unpacking to mean anything), or maybe even that rich sweetness in  the smell of fermenting wet sawdust.


Which leads to a tangent:  how would someone know what fermenting sawdust smells like, or different types of fungus or rusting metals, different rocks or minerals, and forest floor?  As a child I played in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, sometimes barefoot, and we had an old lumbermill on the property, with an old sawdust pile fermenting through the ages.  Old versions of oil well equipment and iron smelting furnaces would turn up in different places, and of course we would play by damming up creeks and digging to see what was underground.  It was a great background for smelling different smells.  Later I lived in Texas, then Maryland, Colorado and Hawaii, and now Bangkok, getting out to experience nature in those places, and visiting the desert Southwest whenever I could.  Cooking helped with scent knowledge too, but that's a completely different story line.


On the last infusions the flavor profile thins a little but stays similar and very positive, and the longer infusion time required to draw out taste brings out more of that interesting feel effect.  None of the flavors go "off" in any way, two good signs of tea quality, brewing lots of infusions and later versions remaining positive.  This is being sold as an inexpensive, basic tea too (unbelievably reasonable, compared to similar versions), a great sign for other teas I have yet to review.

Farmerleaf vendor input:

Not so much related to this tea description, the vendor made some interesting observations about types of black teas, related to processing and how those types would age:


A lot of black tea is made on Jingmai mountain. There are two main types: sun-dried and oven-dried. This one belongs to the second category and could be considered the ambassador of it. 

Sun-dried black tea can age several years and somewhat improve as time goes by, however, just like Pu-erh tea, its fragrance is somewhat smothered; its power is not fully unleashed. 

Oven-dried teas, on the opposite, are not made for long term storage, they are best enjoyed within a year or two. In the months that follow their production, they give you a kind of bite on the tongue that makes you want more; you end up drinking cups after cups and hardly get bored. They are easy-drinkers and can be enjoyed by any tea enthusiast: even the hardcore pu-erh tea addicts would find it entertaining.

This black tea was dried at a relatively high temperature, which gives it a lightly roasted feeling: the taste of fire a.k.a. Huo Wei 火味. It was made from standard grade natural tea garden material from Jingmai mountain and treated well in the expert hands of a Dai lady named Ye Jing Yu and her team. 


That sounds about right.  There was more to this tea than it was easy to describe, a feel and overall effect that made it very enjoyable.

Silver Yeti silver tips style tea from the Nepal Tea Company

This tea was provided by the Nepal Tea company as silver tips, which relates to their Silver Yeti tea (with no mention of the estate / original source).  They sell a second really interesting looking white, a White Prakash by Kanchanjngha Tea Estate, which seems different in style.

I've reviewed teas from this vendor before, a Kanchanjangha gold tips and green tea here, and a black and oolong here.  Odd I was doing paired reviews like that, but somehow it made sense at the time.  Those were nice, good quality teas that were a bit unique in style, so it will be nice if this is more of the same.

It has nothing to do with these but I've also reviewed two other teas from Nepal in the past year or so, a Himalayan Orange and Shangrila White, again solid teas, unique and positive in character to say the least.  So I guess I like teas from Nepal.  It's odd how broad the range of styles they are developing extends.  Some are a lot like Darjeeling, which is relatively nearby, and some are quite novel.

Review

The tea has small needles, on the darker side, with a sweet, rich smell.  My take is that darker needles can relate to more oxidation occurring during the preparation process (not a bad thing, just one style / outcome), or to a tea darkening through aging.  Either way it's not necessarily a good or bad thing; the brewed tea itself tells that part of the story.

The taste of the brewed tea is bright, rich, sweet, and full, right in the normal range for good versions of white tea.  The main aspects in terms of flavor are floral, a typical, pleasant outcome.  I'm not remarkably good with floral scents but it might be in the range of lavender, perhaps a little lighter, with sweet and more neutral flower scents in that range also relating to different types of orchids.  "Under" that flavor range there is the typical warm, neutral tones typical of silver needle style teas, dried hay and sunflower seed.

I've been off this page for awhile, similar white teas, so I'll need to refer back a few months for comparison.  I have been drinking a couple of Bai Mu Dan style whites quite recently, one from China and one from Sri Lanka, but those are quite different, richer in a sense but more subtle in a sense, without the same pronounced floral aspect.

Brewing the tea just a little stronger changes that profile a little.  I'm preparing it Gongfu style so it's easy to shift time around, from a relatively short infusion time of 15 seconds or so up to a bit over 30.  A tea like this really would produce a comparable outcome made in a more Western style, dropping the proportion of tea to water and increasing brew time to 2 to 3 minutes (or longer, depends on preference), but you miss a bit in experiencing aspects transitions.  The floral aspect remains, still pronounced, but light mineral undertones strengthen, something like limestone (hard to pin down since one only smells rocks, not taste them).  The dried hay / sunflower seed doesn't pick up in the same proportion, dropping back even more into the background.

It seems a nice white / Silver Needle style tea.  As a baseline, a version from Indonesia (from Bangkit Wangi, reviewed here) might have showed a slightly stronger bright floral aspect, in a very similar range, maybe a little sweeter, but both are nice for that same aspect.  It's impossible to compare the range of supporting aspects; my taste memory is better than my memory of names or phone numbers, by a lot, but I don't retain that level of detail.  I scanned through the Bangkit Wangi white tea review and it sounds pretty close, but I'm not far along with this one just yet so it could change.

coloring reminds me of oolongs I've been drinking

The next infusion tells a similar story, with flavors transitioning from the bright, sweet floral to that combined with a nice range of other aspects.  The profile transitions more to that clean, mild mineral range. A different interpretation of a similar flavors range would identify it as a very mild muscatel, and the tastes complexity does extend across a good range.  The mineral moves from limestone into struck flint.  I love the smell of struck flint, by the way, although I have to go back to the early parts of my life to reference it.  It wouldn't work nearly as well without that sweetness and floral aspect, and the rich depth from the hay / sunflower seed aspect, which comes across as a clean, integrated, sensible range.

Next infusion, more of that same shift.  I think it might work better than it sounds.  That mineral taste couples with a cool feel, a hint of both the taste and reaction your mouth experiences when you suck on a penny, but only a hint of that, so it works.  There's an odd way that the experience passes across your tongue, with that feel I just mentioned occurring on the sides in the back, which transitions to a mineral aftertaste.

This might well be a relatively more oxidized version of a white tea, but I wouldn't really be able to say that with certainty, it's more a guess.  The brewed tea color is a bit dark for the tea type, not the light golden yellow but a dark golden yellow instead.  That is subdued in light infusions but the color difference is still evident.  I wouldn't really say that the taste experience and general effect is closely leaning towards a black tea, since it's completely different, but it might move towards a distant version of common ground, in some senses.  Along that line it shares aspects in Darjeelings though, not an Assam, Ceylon, or Chinese black tea.  It makes sense, since regional characteristics are closely tied (it's nearby, some tea plants are common to both), so of course it does.  Darjeeling is also made as either white tea or versions that fall in between those basic Chinese oxidation-level styles, so a white tea with a bit of oxidation would be similar.

How would I know if the tea hadn't been affected by storage, instead of oxidation being the only factor in that slightly darkish color and flavors shift?  It's a good question, but one I probably shouldn't even be asking.  I've kept previously opened silver needle for a good while before, over a year, due to just misplacing a version.  In that case I've seen an example of how those changes go, but it wouldn't be fair to extrapolate based on so little.  Doing just that anyway, the tea darkened in that case, and the flavor did shift, not losing a lot in terms of brightness or sweetness wearing off but more related to picking up depth in other aspects.

tasting assistant, not much help today

From there it just seems to fade slightly over many transitions, not changing further.  The general effect shifts a little within the same range as longer infusions are required to draw out taste, relatively common across the range of different styles, although some teas do shift at the end more.  The tea is quite nice, a good example of the type.  There was a time when I didn't really love silver needle style teas, more about just not relating to the aspects range than taking issue with any, but now I get it.

This was supposed to be a simple tea review, covering familiar ground in a quick tasting and write-up.  Oh well.  I still have a couple more samples from this vendor so I'm not off this regional subject yet.