I’ve been meaning to review this tea for quite a while, along with the 30 other teas I have and haven’t reviewed yet. An argument could be made that I’m a bit of a procrastinator, but I’ll do that some other time (see I’ll even resort to really bad puns to put this review off). But I’m down to my last two teaspoons of this tea, and I prefer to review a tea while sipping it, so I’m kinda down to the wire.
My main problem with reviewing this tea is I didn’t really know what I thought of it. When I first smelled in the store I don’t know what type of mood I was in to decide to take it home with me, because it’s definitely not the type of sent/flavourful I generally go for. There’s an apple-y (from the pears), citrus-y (from the cranberries), vanilla scent to it. I can just assume the vanilla comes from the “natural flavourings” listed in the ingredients.
As an aside I just want to protest the constant use of “natural flavourings” by a lot of tea companies. While I understand they don’t legally have to list all the ingredients if they are under a certain percentage of the mix, for tea even a small amount of a spice makes a very big difference, tea companies should be aware of this, so their laziness is just inconsiderate.
When I first brewed this I didn’t like it very much, it has a distinct ‘Christmas-y’ taste to it that I usually associate with spices (that I really don’t like) like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves – those spices aren’t in here, but they’re equally associated with Christmas as whatever “natural flavours” are in this. The most prominent flavours are the pears (which do come across as apples), followed by vanilla, with bit of tang from the cranberries.
As much as I didn’t like this tea to begin with, it has grown on me. It’s a pretty light black tea, and actually pretty (wow do I ever need my thesaurus) smooth. It also has one of my favorite features in a tea, it allows me to be lazy (yep I am a hypocrite, I want to be lazy, but hate it when the tea stores are). I can just put a teaspoon of the leaves into my 16oz travel tea thermos and let them sit as long as it takes for me to drink it.
I probably won’t re-buy this one again instantly – my tea chest is getting a bit full, and I’m enjoying discovering new flavours. But I can totally see myself buying it again in the future. If I do buy it again I’ll be sure to ask the store associate to scoop around some of the fruit bits, I got a ton of cranberries this time which weight quite a bit, 60 grams of this looked more like 35 grams of Earl Grey.
