Nik select Send Message

Oh, friends, we were SO close! I love rose and I love lychee, but tart hibiscus and I are very rarely on the same wavelength. This blend is light, refreshing, suuuuuper lovely, and would have been even lovelier without the hibiscus. Prepared plain: it’s unsweetened, but it doesn’t need sweetener. I had no idea rose and lychee made such a great combination. If I ever get more of this, I shall try sweetening it with a drop or two of Rooh Afza, which is a rose-flavoured syrup.

Huzzah! I’ve been trying to hard to like the teas included in teapigs’ 2020 advent calendar and I haven’t been having much luck. But this is a nice one! It’s very light, very mild. I get the kind of grassy, green notes, maybe a touch of rice, but not the super vegetal flavour that gives a lot of green tea its depth. I’m happy with this “shallow” one. =] Drink it quickly, though—I could feel bitterness creeping in as soon as it started to cool.

Ach, this should have been amazing. Earl Grey is one of my favourite blends. And don’t get me wrong—it is nice, it’s just weak, like every one of their bagged blends I’ve tried so far. I have my Earl Grey with (non-dairy) milk and (non-sugar) sweetener; by the time I added just a bit of each, the flavour was gone. I’m not a fan of the added lime (and miscellaneous “natural flavourings”), either. I’ll stick to the bergamot-heavy Earl Grey blends that can withstand a little milk ‘n’ sugar.

The hibiscus is strong in this one. And there’s another flavour I can’t identify. Smells and tastes bad. Blech.

Oh, goodness. I’ve had chamomile tea before, but always a blend, never pure chamomile. This smells and tastes just awful. Not flowery, not with a hint of natural sweetness (as implied), just kind of flat. If this is how pure chamomile smells and tastes, I need to stay away and stick to blends.

I’m so irritated. The dancing figure on the packet, “bolly good,” “chai tea,” “the colour and vibrancy of India in a cup”—all of it. At least the ingredients are pretty close to proper chai, except for the vanilla. Prepared with (non-dairy) milk and a non-sugar sweetener, the blend is weak and needs way more ginger. I am engrumbled.

If you’ve ever had peach-mango juice or—even more similar—peach-mango water enhancer (those drops you put in your water to make it more palatable), this is just like that. It’s actually a little bit surprising to me that there are so many ingredients; all I taste is the peach-mango flavour mix. Anyway. I’ve never had a cold brew herbal tea sachet before and it’s really nice! It’s light and refreshing, as it should be, and the flavour is true enough that I wasn’t even tempted to add sweetener.

This is a very chamomile-focused blend, with a tiny bit of tang at the back end. I’m not a fan of tart, so I prefer this kind of herbal blend without lemon-lime flavouring. It also tasted a bit … vegetal? to me, which was really surprising. Pleasant enough, just not outstanding.

teapigs 2020 advent calendar, day 2. Needs more flowers. =) Nice fragrance, but gets too bitter, too quickly. I would blame the preparation if I hadn’t been so careful about the water’s temperature and the steep time. I’d also be happy to give it another go—just in case I goofed—if they hadn’t included just the one tea temple in the box. =)

It’s always strange to me when I see a tasting note from like eight years ago on a tea made by a company of which I’ve only just heard. I had no idea teapigs had even been around that long. New to their blends, I ordered their 2020 advent calendar thing so I could give them a try. This was day 1.

Spiced winter is quite nice. Ingredient-wise, it’s nearly identical to RoT’s “chai” (spoiler alert: not chai), which I recently tasted—except this this has a red rooibos base, unlike RoT’s base of black tea. It turns out I like this better. But I adore red rooibos and could drink it plain all day, so it was all but guaranteed that I would like this blend. I’m just glad teapigs didn’t call it chai. =P

Again, though, my complaint is that the flavour is too weak. I’m beginning to think this may just be a consequence of buying bagged tea, but I could swear I’ve drunk bagged tea before that was both bold and flavourful.

I generally like to prepare my first cup of a new blend plain and the second cup with some form of non-dairy creamer and non-sugar sweetener. Sadly, teapigs saw fit to include only one tea bag (sorry, “tea temple”) in their advent calendar thing, so I took just a couple of sips of plain tea before adding oat milk and stevia. I feel like I liked it better sweetened and with milk, but I’m not super certain.