Who knows what’s in Adagio’s teas?
The website waxes poetic about the tingly ginger in this, but there is no mention of ginger as an actual ingredient in the website ingredient listing. So I was ready to accept it was part of the “natural spice flavor”, until I saw that the sample packet does include ginger as an explicit ingredient!
I drink a lot of Pu-erh teas, both sheng and shou, usually straight but sometimes with orange/tangerine. And I like black tea with spice blends, so I was optimistic when this arrived in the week’s sampler box from Adagio. Steeped as directed, with two additional re-steeps. Goodness sakes, the pungent cinnamon overwhelmed everything! I could not detect any notes from pu-erh, nothing of orange, nothing of anise, but yes, there was a faint tingle of ginger. (I didn’t expect to taste safflower.) Even in the third steeping, whilst the cinnamon was muted, so was everything else. It was just a weaker cup of cinnamon. Although I could see bits of orange and maybe ginger, I’m going to chalk the imbalance up to stratification in the bulk spice, giving my packet too much cinnamon and too little puer, especially since other reviewers did detect those flavors. I suspect Adagio is using Chinese cinnamon, Cinnamomum cassia here, whereas true Ceylon cinnamon, C. verum is much softer and would be a superior ingredient (Also, C. cassia is 20 times more pungent and contains 13 times more of the toxin coumarin). If you choose to buy this blend, I suggest you buy loose material and re-mix it well before taking a portion to your cup/pot. Since I can only evaluate what I received, I will not recommend this, and consider it imbalanced and give it a rating of only 25.
Flavors: Cinnamon, Ginger
