Tiesta Teas
Tiesta Teas is a company I have been dealing with for at least or two or three years. One of the first I dealt with because they had a sample box.
The sample box I bought as a gift to myself had empty tea bags to try. It was easy to get the hang of them and lets you try loose leaf tea without having to buy any sort of tea balls. Oh yeah, you giggled at that you dirty little hedonists.
Really good teas
Going from tea bags to loose leaf tea is like going from a McDonald's cheeseburger to a real adult homemade cheese burger that drives the carnivorous part of your brain to drool and get ready for something good instead of a mix of sugar, cardboard, and pink food coloring.
What attracted me at first to gift sets I saw from these guys on Amazon were that some of them had what looked like empty teabags that you could put the loose leaf tea in to steep. I could dip my toes in without having to 'feel dainty' and buy some 'tea balls' *said like a lecherous drunken pirate in a Monty Python sketch*.
Tea Filters are a pretty cool ideal and it is doing the same thing as a tea ball.
There's some sort of of physics, chemistry, and biology magical processes that go on with loose leaf instead of ground tea. Surface areas for the water to get to. Not being turned to dust. The flavor is just so much better and not really that much more expensive.
I've a good share of their test taste sampler packs. I judge them all to be drinkable to really damned good. There are some of the fruit teas that would taste awesome if it was carbonated like a soda. The ones I didn't find as good were because of my own taste preferences, I'm not big on heavy citrus for example but still wanted to try the tea. It was good for what it was but not exactly my cup of tea. I am not going to fault the company for that. I was more interested in getting a bunch of teas to sample.
Well a secret for tea newbes, you can use that tea ball for two cups of teas. If you switch low/no cal sweeteners or even from sugar to honey there will be a huge difference in the amount of sweet you'll get. You can always add a little more you can't however take it away.
You can make up your sample packs with the tiny sized bag all the way up to a pound size. That another great thing about these guy is that they do have a range of sizes to order, thus a nice price line to work with.
I've made ice cream flavors with two flavors of their teas. If I had something that could just carbonize the tea water a few of the teas would taste so damned good as sodas. Some of the herbal teas are sweet enough on their own but when you add some honey or sugar they start to taste like a liquid candy bar.
