Tasting Lab: 2023 Retrospective

Those that follow our newsletter will have noticed that we've been running a Tasting Lab Survey the past couple of weeks to gather feedback on your favourite 2023 Tasting Lab releases so far. If not--the survey is still up, link in our newsletter! Many of you have reached out in various forms already, from emails, to DMs, and reviews.

From the beginning, I wanted the Tasting Lab to be a mixture of my own interesting finds and experiments, with collaboration from enthusiastic tea-drinkers. To have a platform to explore ideas that are too small for a full store release, and maybe find new teas for our core lineup! So your feedback is valuable, and I'd like to share some of the results so far, and give an idea what to expect in the Tasting Lab's future.

Tasting Lab: Jane Austen Blend

Inspiration for tea blends can come from weird places. If you've ever had the pleasure of visiting one of the Murchie's locations in person, you'll find a constant rotation of lattes with interesting names and intriguing flavour combinations. We've had more than one request to be able to bring these teas home. Each latte is made up of a unique blend of several of our teas, so it's a reasonable request.

Our Jane Austen Latte was introduced just a few years back, and is still easily one of our most popular--we receive periodic requests for the recipe from out-of-province Murchie's fans, and the latte itself makes seasonal returns. So it seemed like a fantastic candidate to taste-test as part of the Tasting Lab, and to add to our Big Black Blend Book.

Tasting Lab: Sticky Rice Puerh

So far in the Tasting Lab, we've explored discontinued blends, old recipes from the blend book, and new blends following old techniques. It's been a lot of fun! But for May, we're swinging in a new direction, and trying something more single-origin.

This month's tea is a compressed puerh. Each piece comprises about five grams of material, enough for a two-cup pot, or multiple steepings in a mug. But what makes this tea unique, is it blends tea with semnostachya menglaensis, or nuò mǐ xiāng (literally 'sticky rice fragrance'), an herb that smells deliciously of cooked basmati rice, sweet bread and vanilla. The resulting tea has a rich, earthy, sweet flavour, with roasty cooked rice and vanilla notes throughout.

Puerh can be a daunting tea for drinkers to first get into. The dark colour it brews can be intimidating, and with flavour descriptions like 'earth', 'wood' and 'tobacco', it's difficult to know what to expect. This won't be an in-depth introduction to puerh (that's its own deep, deep rabbit hole!), but I hope to spur a little appreciation for this interesting tea.

Tasting Lab: No. 9

One of the more difficult aspects of reviving old recipes from our Blend Book, is that styles of tea production have changed over the years. For the particularly old blends, sometimes there's not a perfect analogue in available teas today. This leaves recipes open to interpretation, and can result in a lot of variation.

Tasting Lab: Okanagan Caravan

For 2023, I was able to bring back and showcase two discontinued blends from recent years. For 2024, I'm continuing that trend with our first tea of the year, but this time going back even further. Hidden in our blend book is a bold, malty, smoky tea that's perfect for fans of smoky Lapsang Souchong, Russian Caravan, Scottish Breakfast, and Storm Watcher.

It's only been just over half a year since the Tasting Lab project launched, and we've sampled four teas so far: two brand new blends, and two returning classics. From that, we've received a lot of feedback and kind words that have helped shape 2024's lineup. I'm looking forward to exploring even older blends (not seen in half a century!), and a couple interesting single-origin sourcings. We'll see where tasting takes us this year!