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Day 1 of the 52teas advent calendar. I like that each day provides enough tea to play around with. Apparently I quite enjoyed the first version of this tea 11 years ago, though to be honest I don’t really remember it. That tracks though, since somehow I’ve already made this three times and finished it off! This is right up my alley. The gingerbread spice balance is just right, bringing to mind soft gingerbread rather than gingerbread cookies. I tried it straight, as an oat milk latte, and with oat milk and vanilla agave. I found that adding oat milk didn’t really change the experience, but oat milk + vanilla agave added that molasses-y quality of gingerbread and generally made this even cozier. Strong strong start to this calendar.  

Day 12 of the Lupicia advent calendar, one sachet of this. What am I even drinking? I tried to find an ingredients list and couldn’t. I couldn’t even find a specific flavor description outside of people’s tasting notes here. I’m getting maybe raspberry, grape, and apricot on a slightly tannic base? Generally in the stone fruit and tart berry vicinity. The gimmick here isn’t working for me, mostly because what if there’s an ingredient that someone is allergic to or otherwise can’t have? It’s a pleasant enough fruity black tea but the mystery-ingredients thing makes this a no for me.

Day 11 of the Lupicia advent calendar. I think the pattern here is that the herbal blends are loose and the teas are sachets. There was enough loose leaf to make one mug. I feel like I’m overusing “tart” as a descriptor. I need more precise language to articulate different kinds of tartness. The tangy, almost sour tartness of raspberry is different from the tartness of pineapple, for example. This brews up pineapple-tart and almost too sweet. Tastes exactly like I’d expect from the ingredients!

Hmm. Day 13 of the Plum Deluxe herbal advent. They suggest cold brewing this one, so I steeped it overnight. It’s not bad, but I want to try it hot as I suspect I might enjoy it more that way. I couldn’t quite place the flavor until I looked at the ingredients. It was registering as sort of a less-tart, less-sweet raspberry-like flavor. Which, to be fair, is a way one might describe apricot. And “apricot” does match now that I’ve seen it. This is tasty, I just want to play with it more. Maybe add a touch of agave…

Day 12 of the Plum Deluxe herbal advent. I’d call this a rare miss from them. Hard to tell what’s even going on here; the flavors are just so incoherent. Hot, peppermint is definitely dominant, but the ginger and cinnamon are still very present. Cold, the cinnamon comes to the fore. Either way, the flavors just aren’t melding well. This is a calendar-specific blend, so it’s not up on the website yet. The best I can figure from looking at the ingredients is that this is meant to be an anti-inflammatory blend of sorts. There are lots of ways to get anti-inflammatory blends/tisanes that don’t taste like chaos incarnate, though. I’m finishing what I have – it’s drinkable, at least – but I can’t recommend it and would not intentionally purchase it myself.

Day 11 of the Plum Deluxe herbal advent. My partner got home today from a work trip. We went out to dinner at a nice Italian place in our neighborhood to celebrate. It’s strange, earlier in our relationship we could spend months apart and it sucked but we managed, but now we get all sappy about spending just a few nights apart. This seems like it would be the perfect after-dinner beverage for that meal! I brewed up the whole packet in a large mug and added oat milk. I had it plain yesterday and found it a bit thin, so I hoped that more leaf-to-water and some oat milk would give it more heft. It still doesn’t really hit the right thickness though. I also can’t help but compare it to Teeccino because it’s meant to be a coffee blend. Maybe if I used even less water, it would be more similar. As it stands, chicory and cacao are the dominant notes almost to the point of drowning out the cinnamon and dandelion root entirely. Which is tasty! But doesn’t taste coffee-like. As a latte, it’s mostly just tasting like chocolate milk. I think this would be more aptly called “roasted chocolate” or “cinnamon hot cocoa” or something like that. Would recommend for that flavor profile, but not as a coffee substitute. Straight chicory will get you closer.

Day 12 of the Tea Thoughts box. Nazanin sourced this specifically for this box, and as far as I can tell is not selling it. Thanks to Roswell Strange for adding it to the database! Confession: I actually opened this one in advance and enjoyed it over the weekend so I could gong fu and savor it. I got two sessions out of the 14g in the packet. Probably could have split it up better and gotten 3 sessions, but I was eyeballing it.

The dry leaf smells very roasted and mineral. For some reason it specifically made me think of the smell of iron. Which, duh, tracks. The first steep definitely has that roastiness to it, but not as strong as the aroma of the dry leaf. This reminds me a lot of tieguanyin, and that’s because it is the same thing. I guess I had never seen this specific name for it before? I was literally sitting here wondering what the difference is between Iron Buddha and tieguanyin. A quick internet search revealed that there’s none, it’s the same thing, I just didn’t know that. I got what felt like endless steeps out of the leaf, with a pretty consistent flavor profile throughout. Eventually I stopped because I was trying not to over-caffeinate but it still kept me awake until almost 3am. The second time, I cut myself off earlier in the day in the interest of sleep!

Day 10 of the Tea Thoughts winter countdown box. Gong fu’d this just so I’d have an excuse to use the teeny tea tray again. This brews up a pale, medium-bodied liquor. It’s savory with notes of hay and mildly sweet crisp greens, like asparagus or snap peas. Slightly dry at the end of the sip. Perfectly cozy yesterday when it was pouring rain and I was super tired. Later steeps got a little bitter, so keeping steep time short is clutch.

Day 5 of my DIY advent. I’d forgotten that there was a non-Adagio tea in here. The Harney and Adagio orders arrived at the same time, so I included this Harney sample when I was making up the packets. I save chamomile teas/blends for bedtime in hopes that they will help me sleep. They never do! But I keep doing it anyway because hope springs eternal I guess. I like this specific chamomile! It’s got that clean chamomile flavor, a bit apple-like and very mildly sweet. None of that dry hay note that can sometimes creep in with chamomile and make it taste stale.

Day 10 of the Plum Deluxe herbal advent. I don’t get how “pomegranate” translates to “après ski,” but I’m also not a winter sports person so this might just be a knowledge gap on my part. The dry leaf smells strongly and not unpleasantly of pomegranate. The flavor is the same – sweet pomegranate with a touch of astringency. Nice hot, better iced. Reminds me of those bottled raspberry iced teas.