Diggity Tea: Queen Mary’s Creamy Earl Grey

Maker: Queen Mary
Type: Earl Grey black tea
Brew: 1 tsp / cup, boiling, 3 min

While Earl Grey’s brisk citrus flavor is quite welcome, it can sometimes pack a punch—hence why it’s often a favorite tea to mix with milk, especially if it’s a black Earl Grey. Such a milk and black Earl Grey drink is popular enough to have a name: the London Fog.

For the dairy-intolerant among us, or for those without easy access to milk, there’s still a way to have a London Fog kind of experience: by softening the taste of the bergamot oil with another ingredient. While such blends normally use cream and/or vanilla flavoring to do this, Creamy Earl Grey instead uses malva flowers.

Malva is otherwise known as marsh mallow, which sounds familiar to you if you’ve ever had S’mores. Marshmallow confections these days have no actual marsh mallow ingredients, but they used to use the roots of the mallow.

The malva/mallow flowers are quite effective softening taste—they can be used as a thickening agent after all—and do so without adding what may to some be too much of a milk flavor. In contrast, some Earl Grey blends use corn flowers, which look pretty but seem not to do much for taste. Lavender softens taste in another way, by adding floral notes, but for flowers in Earl Grey, nothing beats malva for me.

Rating: 4/5—an excellent everyday tea for a more subtle afternoon Earl Grey

Diggity Tea: Queen Mary’s French Vanilla

Maker: Queen Mary
Type: flavored black tea
Brew: 1 tsp / cup, boiling, 3-4 min

When I sipped French Vanilla this morning, I was surprised. I’ve drunk this tea in the past, of course, but it’s only been lately that I’ve really expanded and start to analyze the taste of a tea. Compared to Queen Mary’s Coconut and Strawberry Pepper, there was a distinct smoothness about the cup.

So for the first time I examined, rather than glanced at, the ingredients.

China black tea. Whereas Coconut and Strawberry only specified “black tea”. I looked at the rest of my Queen Maty teas, and discovered that my favorites—Creamy Earl Grey and Lady Grey—were also China black teas.

What’s the difference? you may ask. There are actually two main branches of the tea family that are commonly used to make black tea: a Chinese variety, and the so-called Assamese variety. They actually do differ on taste, but one isn’t naturally better than the other. However, the smaller leaves of China black are much less prone to breaking, whereas the larger leaves of Assamese are. I think the result is that China black teas will more often taste better than the often more broken Assamese.

This is all a long way of saying: French Vanilla is great. The vanilla is more subtle than that of Harney & Sons’ Vanilla, as well as Mighty Leaf’s Vanilla Bean, but that quality befits a French vanilla taste. And the background of smooth China black tea means the taste is nice and full.

Rating: 4/5—a more subtle yet working vanilla tea is always welcome in the cabinet.

Diggity Tea: Queen Mary’s Strawberry Pepper

Maker: Queen Mary [product link]
Type: flavored black
Brew: 1 tsp per cup, boiling water for 3-4 min
Notes: only available loose

You know, photographing tea isn’t too hard. I wish more review sites did it instead of co-opting pictures from the tea distributors’ and/or tea blenders’ sites, but that’s just me. This isn’t the best of quality; simply my iPhone underneath near-natural lighting.

Anyways: Strawberry Pepper. This may seem like a rather strange combination, but it works. The sweet slight tartness of strawberries (real pieces, dried, as well as flavoring infusing the tea leaves) combined with the slight bite of pink peppercorns—which aren’t anything like, or even related to, most peppercorns—brings out the best in each flavor. Why? It seems magical to me; perhaps it’s like melody and counter-melody in music.

However, and most unfortunately, this is counterbalanced by an unfortunately bland harmony. I must be developing either a tea palette or a tea snobbery, because I can now taste the differences between the base of a black tea, and it’s only a bit above mediocre in this otherwise fine tea blend.

Curiously, a similar strawberry blend has popped up elsewhere, and I may partake of it to see if the tea is fine, or if it’s traditionally such that less fine teas are popped in for a flavored tea. Harney & Sons don’t seem to skimp in this manner, but perhaps it’s just par for the course in the tea blending world.

Rating: 3/5—we may part, but it’ll be on amicable terms.

Diggity Tea: Queen Mary’s Sweetheart Rooibos

Maker: Queen Mary
Type: Flavored rooibos
Brew: 1 tsp per cup, boiling water, 7 min
Notes: Apparently discontinued.

This tea is literally like drinking a cupcake. A kind of stale cupcake, with somewhat off vanilla icing. Somehow the sweeteners didn’t work out as well as they could have, and while this is a novelty tea in every sense, a full cup of this can give you a headache. Just thinking about this tea gives me a bit of a stomach ache. Definitely do not use any sweeteners with this tea, unless you like a brick of sweet.

There are better, more subtle rooibos dessert teas out there, such as Rainbow Rooibos, which has an amaretto taste that’s quite a bit like an almond cookie. The blender I know not, but it’s available from tea shoppes like the Perennial Tea Room right in Seattle’s Pike Street Market.

Rating: 2/5—not a tea I’d run away from, exactly, but I wouldn’t pick it out willingly.

Diggity Tea: Queen Mary’s Coconut

Maker: Queen Mary
Type: Flavored black tea
Brew: 1 tsp to 6 oz boiling water, 3 min
Notes: Loose leaf only

As coconut-flavored teas go, Queen Mary’s Coconut isn’t a bad tea; it’s just middle-of-the-road, although this still puts it above the likes of a large number of more commercial teas.

Coconut isn’t the most delicate flavor in the world of cooking and baking, but it seems to be so here; despite being a black tea, QM Coconut needs a 3-minute brew time. Any more and the bitterness of a semi-good black tea base takes over.

However, of my coconut teas, this is a welcome tea in the mornings. The others are a green tea, an oolong, a rooibos, and a traditionalish tisane. Hmmm. Rather a nice theme, that.

Rating: 3/5 — enjoyable when a necessity

Accidental “Holiday” Tea

So I managed to create a blend I find alright, very drinkable, if imperfect compared to professional blends. Recording the results here so that Twitter won’t scroll off the research results.

Experiment #1

2 tsp Queen Mary Vanilla Cream Rooibos
1 tsp dried orange peel bits
2 whole cloves
1 inch cinnamon stick
1 star anise

14oz boiling water. Brew for 10+ minutes.

This turned out quite alright, if not spectacular; star anise has a very strong licorice taste, and it overwhelmed the cup somewhat.

Experiment #2

2 tsp rooibos
1 inch cinnamon stick
1 tsp dried orange peel bits
2 whole cloves
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract

Repeat water/temp/brewing.

That was really stupid. It should have been 1/8 tsp of each of the extracts. As it was, I had to throw it out. Yuck pthbb it burns

Experiment #3

2 tsp Queen Mary Vanilla Honeybush
1.5 inch cinnamon stick
1 tsp dried orange peel bits
3 whole cloves
1/2 star anise

Repeat water/temp, 8 minutes brewing.

This smelled much nicer than the other experiments, and was mellow as honeybush is, compared to rooibos. Star anise “petals” can be broken off to halve a single “flower”, and this turned out to add the holiday-like spice without overwhelming the cup. Very nice, and I want to try this with rooibos soon. However…

Experiment #4

Experiment #3, switching out the Vanilla Honeybush for Queen Mary Earl Grey Rooibos and omitting the orange peel due to the redundancy it would have combined with the bergamot. This did not work out well; the amount of bergamot, while pleasant alone or combined into a London Fog-style blend, obliterated all the other flavors. You can’t get to a Kusmi-style complex tea easily, as it turns out.

Oh Kusmi, can you make some complex rooibos blends?