Tea Review: Russian Earl Grey by Steepers

 This is such a lovely variation on Earl Grey.  Steepers is a local tea shop in Campbell, California and I often enjoy the blends from their shop.  Thankfully, for those of us who do not live near their brick and mortar shop, they do have an online store where I can get my refills.

I am not often a big fan of the taste of lemongrass in my western tea blends as lemongrass for me evokes sense memories of Chinese and Thai food.  In this blend, the bergamot and orange changes that lemongrass flavor enough that my Asian food sense memory is not triggered.

So many Ear Grey variations turn to other florals to balance the bergamot - and while I like a good Lady Grey with the cornflower addition, other variations with rose or lavender become too floral for me.  Of course, those that add florals usually use bergamot oil instead of bergamot flower and you can see from the wet leaf blend above that there are bergamot flowers and very little oil residue.  I will also love the addition of orange over any addition of lemon since lemon peel or lemon essence most often tends to give me a stomach ache - so I dig the orange in this.

As dark as this brew gets (and oh how pretty and dark it does get), because of the addition of the orange peel and the lemongrass, this is one of the few Earl Grey variation blends that I can pleasantly drink black straight off the steep.  That having been said, this blend does hold up well to the addition of both sugar and cream.  Adding both pushes the lemongrass flavor more to the under-note and pulls the bergamot and orange further forward - so I very much enjoy it in that state as well.

This time however, I left it black and instead paired it with a cranberry orange welsh cake from The Welsh Baker.  The fruit in the welsh cake pairs SOOO well with the tea and the sugar on top of the welsh cake acts to sweeten the tea just enough to make my cuppa go from an everyday experience to a luxurious treat.