Tea Month 2025: Tea 10

Tea Review
Name: Blend No. 1851: Portland Breakfast
Brand: Smith Tea/Steven Smith Teamaker
Type: black
Tea bag

Notes:
This is a blend of black teas: Pu-erh, Keemun, and Assam. It has a bold flavor very similar to other breakfast blends, such as Celestial Seasonings' Morning Thunder, but it's a lot smoother. It would go very well with pastry. (It made me crave something buttery, at any rate.)

The description of the flavor on the package is as follows: A big, strong, full-flavored, no-no sense cup of tea with notes of malt, leather, spice, and just a touch of peat. Perhaps not quite as astringent as your typical breakfast tea. Rich, dark, and perfect for a rainy Portland morning-or evening for that matter. [I Sachet]

Yes, it oversells the tea a bit, as expected, but it accurately describes the flavor notes.

The brewing instructions are also worth noting: Bring spring or freshly drawn filtered water to a rolling boil. Steep 5 minutes under a postcard of Mount Hood.

Despite my enjoyment of the tea, I am deducting a star for not only the plastic net bag, but having a plastic net bag while having two different organic certifications and bragging about not having micro plastics on their website.

(There was also a joke hidden under the fold in the packaging I didn't find until I had finished up with the rest of this.)

Rate
Appearance: 9
Aroma: 7 1/2
Flavor: 8 1/2

Overall Rating: 3 1/2 stars

One of my goals is to use my phone less. To that end, one of the things I'm doing is trying to transition my daily puzzles from online to IRL.

On my phone, I was doing 13 puzzles a day:

( Read more... )

Now I'm averaging about 3 puzzles/activity book pages a day. The irl/analog puzzles just take longer, so doing more most days isn't reasonable. While I have other puzzle/activity books, these are the ones I'm currently working through:

Fall Seasonal Scratch Art: it's a set of six scratch art pages. Three are illustrated with camping scenes and three are blank. It came with a scratching stick and an on theme stencil. I am a little disappointed that under the scratch off stuff on the blank pages, it's metallic not rainbow.

The Golden Girls Search & Color book (by dreamtivity): The odd numbered pages are word searches themed on characters and episodes of the show. The even numbered pages are coloring pages, which are either stills from the show or quotes.

Deadpool & Wolverine Variety Puzzles volume 1 of 2 (by Kappa Books/Braintainment): I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It includes multiple types of mazes, spot the difference, word searches, sudoku, finish the picture, crossword, mad libs, Deadpool vs Wolverine quiz, fill-a-pix, & cryptograms. Yes, I also have volume 2.

Word Search Puzzle Book Volume 1 (by Bendon): It's a very basic word search book, but the puzzles are very large.

Kawaii Sticker Fun Halloween Activity Book: To be fair, this book is meant for ages 5+. It's Halloween scenes that you finish and give faces to the characters with the stickers it comes with. It was from Dollar Tree.

National Parks Advanced Coloring Book (by Bendon): I'm still not sure how I feel about this one. Each page is an illustrated poster for a national park. Instead of the usual white page with lines drawn you fill in, it's detailed pictures in grayscale you color over. The pages are nice and thick, so you can use wet medium like markers or paint.