Holiday Tea-son! New month, new theme, so this month I’ll be trying to crack out all the random holiday blends I have sitting around my house from years past, as well as working on my advent calendars (I didn’t go like, Cameron B. crazy on them, so I only have Bird & Blend’s 24 day one and 52Tea’s 12 Days of Christmas one). I don’t have an abundance of what I would consider holiday blends, so I might just throw in some flavors that seem to fit, or finally put progress toward the ol’ sipdown goal. My New Year’s Resolution is to make some major progress on sipping down my tea collection and freeing up space on my tea wall, and cutting down my tea spending by half (or more) next year.
So this is my first Bird & Blend advent calendar tea, an Irish Cream coffee inspired blend. Unlike most tea drinkers I know, I am not coffee adverse, I drank it for a good decade or more… in fact, I’m new in the scheme of things when it comes to the tea game. I had to go off of coffee to determine if caffeine was one of my migraine triggers, but I was so used to that “warm” drink in the morning I bought a bunch of bagged herbals from the store to make those few months of hell easier. After one month of worse headaches from caffeine withdrawal, one month off, then month three reintroducing caffeine, it was determined it had no effect on my migraines at all: didn’t trigger them, didn’t make them better (it can do both). So I could start drinking coffee again. But I’d been so impressed with the variety in tea, I just stuck with tea, and started exploring it’s caffeinated options at that point. I still can (and will) drink coffee, and like the taste. So there isn’t going to be any “Oh boo, coffee evil!” from me here. In fact, they absolutely nailed the aroma of Irish Cream here (at least, the flavoring, I’ve never had proper Irish Cream in coffee… alcohol definitely is something that gives me migraines!)
The flavor is quite nice for what they are going for… it does have that slight liquor sort of bite at the end of the sip, it’s quite sweet with some creaminess, very mild cocoa notes, with a nice roasted coffee flavor. But the coffee flavor is making me want a strongly caffeinated cup, so I’m a bit confused why this is on a rooibos base… perhaps the sweet/honeyed rooibos made the flavors pop more, since black tea would be quite malty and dominate the flavors more? It just feels like an odd juxtaposition, since my brain associates the coffee flavor with a morning drink, but the rooibos blend with a relaxing evening herbal. I’m sure all the blender was going for was trying to mimick the flavor as faithfully as possible, but sometimes practicality needs to stump ingenuity.
I enjoy the taste. But I have other blends with coffee beans in them, and they are on black, pu-erh, or roasted yerba mate bases, and I prefer them more as they know what they want to be: caffeine rescue drinks. This is little more than a novelity.
Flavors: Alcohol, Caramel, Cocoa, Coffee, Cream, Roasted, Sweet
