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Sad to be polishing this off :( I was so dense that I didn’t realize American Tea Room’s warehouse clearance sale was a going out of business sale until it was too late, so this really is the last of it! R.I.P, Brioche. You will be missed.

After a Celestial Seasonings hiatus of YEARS, I grabbed a box of this at the store because I need to bump up my tisane stock a bit and I remembered this had been weirdly popular on Steepster. It is pretty good, though the barley is a bit of an odd flavor in the mix. It does kind of taste like sugar cookies? I wish the orange peel came through more because I always used to put orange peel in my cookies and I miss it.

Got this as a recent sample. It is pleasantly bright and fruity, but doesn’t taste all that tropical. More flavor is coming through from the apples and cranberries than the pineapple and papaya.

The one and only rooibos tea I actually like. It’s just so buttery and festive.

Out of the blue Capital Teas sent me this subscription box. I thought maybe it was a deluxe Christmas promotion but I wrote to them just to make sure I hadn’t accidentally signed up for something. They said the box had been sent by mistake but that I could keep it. So that was a cool surprise!

I tried this one first since I’m trying to avoid caffeine right now. It smells like orange and bubblegum, it tastes like light spices and bubblegum. That sounds really weird but it’s actually a pleasant tea? The bubblegum isn’t overpowering, just lightly sweet.

I had to go to a doctor this week and it seems I may have irritable bowel syndrome, which sounds like something that would befall one’s crotchety great-aunt but apparently not. The doctor said it is mostly brought on by caffeine, stress, wheat, and dairy. I was like, sure, I’ve been living on caffeine, stress, wheat, and dairy, but it was 2017 in the U.S.A., was I going to skip ice cream when the country might implode at any moment?

So now it is 2018 and the consequences have arrived. I am trying to cut back on caffeine but I figure a little green tea is probably fine, most of the ones I own are fairly low on caffeine anyway, and drinking water and peppermint with no relief is more than I can stand.

God, I am talking about my health and diet, I have officially become an old person.

Sipdown. I liked the light cream/vanilla flavoring of this tea when I could get it right, but overall this tea was too finicky for me. It had a strong tendency to go astringent. I tried to be careful with my steep times, but I think there’s like a 15 second window between ‘not enough flavor’ and ‘whoops, now you’ve done it’ with this tea. I got it right about two times, and then it was very nice, but the cream flavor is so easily overwhelmed by the base, and it’s a base that can taste very rough if it’s just the least bit oversteeped.

Normally I adore A Quarter to Tea’s oolongs, but this one just isn’t doing it for me. It feels overly floral, with a sharp potpourri note. I do sort of get the cranberry, and the tea definitely has a holiday vibe, so that part is interesting, but I’m just too sensitive to perfumey teas to really be into this.

I bumped this up to a tablespoon of leaves and finally tasted something. This is a sweet, smooth tea with a little bit of butteriness. It’s nice, but the flavor is still really on the light side, so I guess it’s just one of those teas that you have to focus on to taste anything.

This seems more bitter than the last batch of gunpowder I got from Teavivre, or else the milder gunpowders I’ve tried from everyone else (NMTC, H&S, American Tea Room) have warped my memory. Must try cooler water or a shorter steep next time. Still, at least it’s punchy like a classic gunpowder ought to be.