Almost Tea

I’m noticing that each month’s release of teas is photographed in a different shape which is a nice way of grouping them visually. After much back and forth with customer service we finally figured out why I didn’t get the teas from last month. When it was ordered for me the gifter had the option of choosing the teas from the first or second month selections as my first delivery and chose the first meaning I didn’t get the second and skipped to the third. I’m glad it is resolved and nothing was lost in the mail, but it felt like pulling teeth getting the answer.

This tea was tasty hot and I had to set it down after drinking half the cup mindlessly and came back to it after it had cooled and I had more time to focus on it. It reminds me of Lupicia’s Framboise Chocolat. The taste is similar with the raspberry standing out with something deeper behind it. It was pretty smooth while hot too. When I came back to it cooled the hibiscus stood out more giving the raspberry a natural tartness that the fruit has. It’s not so much that I’m getting that metallic grossness that hib often has, it’s just enough to round out the fruit and bring out the chocolate notes which were harder to detect when hot. The front of the sip is the berry, the back of the sip is cacao and the finish is a little alkaliney with cacao. I’m really struggling to pick out any pistachio. I love pistachio and I’d really like to be able to taste it prominently instead of searching through the other flavors for it in vain. I like it, I’d drink it again, but Framboise Chocolate has a permanent spot in my cupboard and I don’t need such a close match.

This is a pretty tasty chocolate tea. I could see the cacao bits in the bag and it tastes very similarly to a cacao shell tea I have. The flavor is very natural with a slight bitter tang that dark chocolate can get. It’s good, but it doesn’t seem to have anything else going for it other than chocolate. With a name like Honey Hive I expected the taste of honey in there somewhere and I get zero. It says this is decaffeinated, but now that I’m sipping it in the evening I wonder if they just meant the tea. How much caffeine do the chocolate bits have?

In the steeping guidelines on the wrapper it asks you to think about your most memorable bee sting and concludes that they are all memorable. What an unpleasant thing to ponder while waiting for a relaxing cup of tea. There are plenty of bee stings that I don’t remember and then there is the one that is clearest in my mind where I realized I was now allergic to bees, broke into full body hives and welts, my face started swelling and my partner stabbed me in the leg with an epipen with all the might he could muster like he was John Travolta in Pulp Fiction…. in the middle of the pandemic. What a weird thing for a tea bag to ask me to recall.

This smells really juicy! It doesn’t taste as strong as it smells, but it still has a good amount of flavor on this green rooibos base. The passionfruit takes the main stage with banana in a supporting role. There is a little bit of tang in the sip which rounds out the passionfruit well. There is only mild rooibos mouth drying feeling here, which I appreciate. The finish is a little dull which leaves me wanting another sip. I like this one and I’d drink it again. Probably wouldn’t add it to my cupboard.

This tea is from the February ‘23 subscription. My feelings about this subscription are starting to be colored by having not gotten the January teas. Customer service didn’t help me with looking up if it had been sent or not, just referred me to tracking notification emails I never got. It makes me wonder if customer service has been farmed out to a third party who doesn’t have access to account info, just generic canned answers.

Anyways… it looks like this months teas are based off a chocolatier’s creations. The tea smelled lightly of caramel and strongly of sugary cereal, the kind that coats the roof of your mouth with a waxy substance. I’m glad to see it’s a green rooibos base. These subscriptions seem to be heavy on the rooibos. There is a light oil sheen on the surface of my tea. There wasn’t much there on the first sip. It was mostly in the finish that I got any caramel corn cereal hints. Sipping further gives me hints of banana, something I’ve never associated with corn before! The flavors are light and puzzling, but I feel like the whole thing is well balanced for being light and puzzling. It is very corn cereal like, which is strange for a tea. If I start sipping with more frequency there is almost a soapy taste to this cup on the sides of my tongue. I’m still unsure how to feel about this cup, but this is for sure a tea I would not order.

Last tea from this first Almost Tea box…

I’m not particularly a fan of straight chocolate teas, but this was surprised me a bit by how much the specific chocolate note appealed to me. Sort of a cross between a milk and a dark chocolate with a hint of that chocolate liqueur type of flavouring but with a slight oily/fatty quality caused from actual chocolate pieces melting down. Splitting the different worked for me; it wasn’t as fake as the liqueur flavouring is on its own but it wasn’t like drinking an oil slick either from excessive use of chocolate pieces.

The tea had great body overall, and the chocolate note was very brownie-like thanks to the sort of doughy/raw “batter” quality that it had. Not a fluffy brownie but more of a dense and highly chewy one. Slightly under baked, even. It was very familiar tasting to me, and it’s not the first blend from this box that left me with a strong sense of Deja Vu. I’ll probably be mulling over what specific chocolate tea it’s reminding me of for a while…

Would I get this again? Nope. I don’t love straight chocolate teas, as I said. But this was a nice enough one to keep me engaged throughout the entire mug of it, and I feel like that’s a pretty solid compliment to give it!

The dry leaf aroma of this sachet was so familiar to me and it took me a long time to place why as it was steeping, but after taking a couple small sips I realized it was reminding me a lot of DT’s discontinued White Chocolate Chai/Jingle Bell Chai blend.

The two have fairly similar spices; the ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom all stick out a lot and something about the way the ginger and more citrus-y notes of the of cardamom combine reads as very cola-like in flavour. I think the overarching sweetness of the blend, which isn’t particularly caramel but is definitely present, doesn’t do anything to dissuade the comparison to coke for me either. It makes sense though because, at its core, coca cola is a sweet spiced citrus beverage.

It’s… kind of weird to taste in a Chai though…

I made my mug of this earlier in the week while at the office, alongside about two other mugs of tea that I was drinking in tandem with this one. At first, I thought this was my least favourite of the three cups – but it’s the one I wound up finishing the fastest and I did find myself gravitating more towards it than the other two so I think that definitely says something about the tea that I may not have consciously been able to attribute to it.

I appreciate that the name is clearly trying to dance around Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s trademark, but there’s something about the word “munch” that sounds so unappealing to me and, as a coworker pointed out to me, the image on the overwrap of the sachets looks a bit like tuna sandwich…

So I feel like there was a lot working against this before I even had a chance to taste it.

It’s not really that I feel like this is a bad tea but it’s definitely not one that I particularly enjoyed a lot. It’s very cinnamon, very creamy, and very licorice root. None of the flavours are bad but they’ve definitely stepped into cloying territory for me where the mug just gets a little sickly. I don’t especially love licorice root, so that note is a real kicker for me – in a negative way. There’s a familiar and kind of nostalgic “Saturday Morning Cartoons” quality to it though, so I guess points for managing to capture the feeling of slurping up Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal milk while watching TV in my PJs…

Had this one at work today! I had a few sips while it was hot that were pretty nice. Kind of like a steamed apple juice/toddy kind of vibe? Heavy on the flavouring so it had a little bit of an alcoholic taste, but not in the sense of a “hard cider”. If I’m being honest though I drank most of the mug after it had completely cooled down. Honestly, maybe that was better? It was a little more crisp tasting and I was noticing less of that boozy note from the heavier use of flavourings. It almost came off as a little more balance and refreshing.

Had this one last night and wasn’t particularly feeling it. What’s interesting is that, last time I made it, I noted that I wished it was a bit more boozy and alcohol like but this time around I felt like it was very boozy to the point where it started getting a bit fake-y “chemical apple” tasting in a way I wasn’t loving. Now that I’ve kind of experienced the two ends of that spectrum, I’m not sure how to feel about the blend overall – I need a Goldilocks cup that meets somewhere in the middle.

It was probably unfair to this tea to brew it immediately after having such an amazing apple flavoured tea from Momo earlier in the day…

The tea itself tasted fine enough, it’s just that it’s an incredibly simple blend. Green rooibos and flavouring. That’s it. The apple flavouring used is nice enough; it’s sweet but not cloying and it’s got a hint of something that could be interpreted as “boozier” to give off the cider element. However, I found its simplicity a little boring and I didn’t feel like there was enough going on flavour wise to justify a name like Spiked Apple Cider when it just tastes like a run of the mill apple blend. It could have been punchier or boozier or just… something more impactful.

I’ll finish it off easily though; there’s nothing off about the taste in any way. It’s just a touch unfinished feeling to me…

Another one I steeped today since the sachet format is so convenient.

This is for sure still one of my least favourite Almost flavours because of how artificial the raspberry and chocolate notes taste. However, I have sooo many more of these sachets than the other Almost offerings since they incorrectly sent me this Brownie Points box so many times. It’s still drinkable, so I just took the rush today as a good excuse to try and put a dent into finishing this one off.

So, as I mentioned in a previous tasting note for a different Almost blend, one of my subscription boxes was lost in transit. When I pointed it out to Almost they shipped out a replacement with basically no questions asked. I was really impressed with the customer service!

Well… that replacement box arrived on Wednesday and it ended up being a repeat of the Brownie Points box (which this tea is from) that I had already received. Not the one I was missing. I reached out again and, to their credit, their response time is really fast. However, they initially were kind of adamant that this was the box I was supposed to get even though I had very clearly listed in my initial email a few weeks back exactly what teas/themed box I hadn’t been delivered. It was a super frustrating back and forth this time around before they eventually agreed to send out the correct box. So, more waiting…

Anyway, I have extras of these teas now I guess. I gave 1/2 of the duplicates to a coworker to try and I kept the other half, and steeped this one up. Lower temperate and shorter steep time this time around, just to see it that would positively affect the taste of the raspberry which I disliked so much in my first tasting. It does, a bit. It’s still a very chemical tasting raspberry but it’s less harsh. Kind of like the flavour a corn syrup based “raspberry syrup” or jelly from something like a Pop Tart might have…

Anyway, I’ll take the minor improvement.

So… I think this was maybe the reverse situation of the Brown Butter Bourbon Blitz.

The name was pretty accurate to the flavour, but the flavour was bad. I think the main thing that killed it for me was the raspberry. The sachet overwrap has this mouthwatering slice of fudge on it with a huge glob of raspberry jam and it really makes you want that thick and rich raspberry flavour, but this is pretty heavily on the chemical side and even though it does have sweetness to it and an almost dense quality the fake raspberry taste just doesn’t read like jam to me in the way I want.

Honestly, the chocolate isn’t too bad. Definitely more of the chocolate liqueur/boozy side of things which I don’t inheritance find off putting, but it doesn’t help with the weird raspberry situation either. In the end it sort of just makes for a cloying cup that feels a bit wonky in terms of balance. I think milk would probably help here, but we didn’t have any in office the day I tried this to test the theory out.

There’s just, like, a lot of better raspberry chocolate blends out there.

We stayed at two different Air B&Bs during the trip – one in Vancouver and one in Victoria. Thankfully both locations had electric kettles, so I was able to brew tea in the cup and strainer I had brought with me. The first night in our Vancouver Air B&B we ended up ordering pizza from a restaurant named “Pizza Maru” that used a green tea/matcha infused crust for all of their pizzas. It certainly looked green, though I didn’t think it tasted like much outside of normal pizza crust.

The pizza was got was pretty interesting though – sweet potato, corn, kepwie mayo, and honey among a few other ingredients. Really cozy and fresh, and different from any other pizza I’ve tried. I had a few teabags I’d brought with for the trip, but knowing I was planning on buying a lot of tea I didn’t actually pack much with me. Thankfully, despite slim pickings that first night, I thought the warm butterscotch notes and darker earthy pu’erh base of this tea were a really fantastic pairing for this super late night pizza situation.

Been curious about Almost Tea for a couple months now when they first started popping up on a handful of different food and beverage focused trend (not tea specific) publications that I follow. Shortly after that they seemed to pretty quickly make their way into a lot of my IG tea friends cupboards by way of some seemingly really effective targeted ads, and then it wasn’t long after that they popped up here on Steepster too…

I probably would have ordered sooner but shipping to Canada just sucks, so I waited until there were a few boxes out so I could maximize my order by grabbing a bunch at a time instead of paying the monthly shipping fee…

This was the first one I made. Brown Butter is definitely having a moment right now in the food world and it’s cool to see that cross over a bit with tea. The blend just honestly sounded really good! Steeped up, it was very nice. Definitely on the simpler side but I found the pu’erh base really good quality for the price bracket this is in – especially given these are tea bags. It doesn’t really taste like brown butter or bourbon to me, truthfully. I’d likely call it butterscotch or maybe, like, a butterbeer? Sweeter and with those slight caramel-y notes for sure.

I’m excited to drink it again though! Name accuracy aside, it’s a very nice tea and since it looks like Tazo has discontinued their Butterscotch Blondie tea (which I ADORE) this could be a pretty solid replacement option for me…

Sipdown! (20 | 20)

Saved the one I was most interested in for last.

Sadly, this is not impressing me. I’m not really getting much cranberry or pear, mostly just hibiscus on a green rooibos base. Maybe it’s just that the cranberry and the hibiscus are too similar and I can’t differentiate between them well enough. There’s a touch of pear at the end of the sip, but it’s quite artificial-tasting.

Anyway, disappointing. I’d already cancelled my Almost subscription earlier this month since I don’t find myself as drawn to dessert teas these days, plus I just don’t need to be taking in any more tea. But if I hadn’t, I would probably cancel anyway after trying this second package, since none of the teas have really spoken to me. Oh well, was fun to try anyway!

Sipdown! (19 | 19)

Okay, I don’t know what gingerbread whoever made this tea was thinking of, but this doesn’t taste at all like gingerbread to me. The strongest flavor by far is the anise, which is something I wouldn’t expect to taste at all. I can barely taste the other spices under the strong licorice flavor.

It’s not horrible, as I do actually like black licorice, but gingerbread it is not.

Sipdown! (16 | 16)

And we’re back to the Almost subscription teas, hoping to finish them off today.

So this one is an oolong base, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it’s a rolled green oolong, as opposed to the generic oxidized strip type I often see in blends (looking at you, Adagio). I used both sachets for a 16-ounce pot, and I probably should have used a bit more water, because my gravity steeper was half full of leaves once they unfurled. So maybe these sachets should be used in 10-12 ounces of water.

Anyway, so the flavor is quite strong because of that, but still pleasant. The oolong itself actually seems like nice quality, it has some floral notes and a silky texture. Not my favorite type of oolong, but still seems nice. The lemon is somewhere between lemon drops and Pledge, although it may just be the floral from the oolong that’s combining with it to give me those cleaner-y notes.

It’s tasty enough. Does it taste like pie? No, it just tastes like a sweet lemon oolong. There’s nothing that reminds me of meringue or crust, just sweet and candy-ish lemon.

Sipdown! (13 | 13)

All right, this one I can get behind. It has a nice, slightly creamy banana flavor that sits somewhere between the real thing and Laffy Taffy. Does it taste like banana bread though? Ehh… There’s maybe a hint of a caramelized flavor to it, but nothing cakey or bready.

To me, it’s more like banana pudding? The green rooibos base gives it nice body without interfering with the lovely flavor. Overall, I approve.

Sipdown! (12 | 12)

I figured I would get this one out of the way since I most likely won’t like it. I am thankful there’s only one chocolate tea this month though! I’ve never had a Boston cream pie, but I have had the doughnut version. Not exactly the same, but I get the concept.

Unfortunately, this just tastes like a pile of artificial chocolate flavoring. It’s super boozy and the black base is actually quite musty and earthy, which makes for an odd combination. I don’t really taste anything resembling cake or custard, sadly.

As expected, not for me!

Sipdown! (11 | 11)

Got my Almost subscription for… I guess December? It’s a little confusing because they don’t ship it out until the end of the month, so does that mean it’s supposed to be for that month or the next one…? No idea. Regardless, this is the current one.

Decaffeinated black tea… why?! I don’t get it, especially when there are three other caffeine-free blends in the set. The leaf was tiny tiny, basically like fannings, so I didn’t bother cutting open the sachets. I only steeped it for two minutes because it got dark quite quickly.

As far as the taste, it’s not bad. It does have a gooey brown sugary flavor that could be a sticky bun. To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a sticky bun, all of the rolled bun type things I’ve ever eaten have had cinnamon. But this does have a caramel flavor to it, so makes sense I suppose. The black tea tastes like nothing and is super thin, sigh.

The flavoring is pretty nice though, it does taste like a caramelized brown sugar syrup, almost like black sugar boba.

Sipdown! (46 | 449)

Last one from Almost!

I was excited to see that this is a green rooibos when I opened the sachets, as the wrapper and ingredients just say “rooibos”. It also smelled wonderful. Tastewise though, it’s just okay. The base is coming to the forefront a bit more than I’d like, it needs a stronger apple flavor to it. Also I feel like they leaned a little too hard into the “spiked” aspect, there’s a boozy note that’s almost stronger than the cider.

So overall, needs a lot more flavoring in my opinion. As for the subscription as a whole, nothing really wow-ed me, at least not enough for the cost of repurchasing. I’ll see what December’s package brings!

Sipdown! (44 | 447)

Figured I should finish off these Almost teas, since a new package of six should show up any day now.

This one is pretty good. The puerh is only noticeable for me at the very beginning of the sip, where it has a wet potting soil sort of earthy note. From then on, it tastes like a rich and buttery caramel sauce. Almost butterscotch-y, really. I don’t get much in the way of bourbon, not that I miss it.

I would say for someone who likes flavored puerh and/or caramel teas, this would probably be a hit. I could imagine it being scrumptious as a latte. I would maybe consider buying some if it were on a black base, but I don’t reach for caramel teas often as they can be a bit cloying for me. But I would recommend it for caramel lovers!

This smells deeply chocolatey and very much like a rich brownie. The flavor in the sip is a little muted and that is amplified as the cup cools, but the finish is where it is at. It tastes very heavily of chocolate and I can totally picture brownie. I’m liking this chocolate flavoring better than a lot of other tea companies attempt at chocolate. I bet this tea would taste fantastic as a latte! I might try that with my second bag.