Tea Review: Thotalagala Festive Black Tea

This is the second of the four teas included in the brand new Thotalagala Single Estate Tea Gift Set, two flavored, two unflavored, to keep purists and non-purists alike happy 🙂

The Festive Black tea is flower petals and subtle flavors, while the Lemongrass Earl Grey is a room deodorizer in comparison.

This collection of teas has only organic ingredients, no artificial flavors, so you get a more subtle but more real scent and flavor of roses and flowers. A fresh palette will notice them. There is less of the black tea in this, as I’m not getting the caffeine impact I get from the Earl Grey.

While there is rose, it is not a rose tea, it is, as the name suggests, a more generally “festive” tea. It does not have as much rose-flavor and scent as dedicated rose + camellia sinensis tea combinations (white tea is often paired with roses).

Overall, I liked this tea more than I had anticipated. It is a more subtle flavor, but with a fresh palette you get the flavor and the scent.

I followed the same brewing strategy as the Earl Grey.

These are the tea leaves, “liberated” from the pyramid after the infusion:

Next up from this collection is the black and green teas 🙂

3 thoughts on “Tea Review: Thotalagala Festive Black Tea”

    1. Thanks for the comment! All four of them in the Thotalagala set have caffeine because they contain either black or green tea.

      Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way for us consumers to measure caffeine. Sometimes I can guestimate based on how much I get wired after drinking it, but that also depends on what other teas or coffees I drank beforehand. I think the Festive Black tea has less caffeine than the other two black teas simply because there’s less tea in the tea pyramid.

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