Almost Tea

This smells deeply chocolatey and very much like a rich brownie. The flavor in the sip is a little muted and that is amplified as the cup cools, but the finish is where it is at. It tastes very heavily of chocolate and I can totally picture brownie. I’m liking this chocolate flavoring better than a lot of other tea companies attempt at chocolate. I bet this tea would taste fantastic as a latte! I might try that with my second bag.

Not into this one. There is something I don’t like about the sip. It’s a weird flatness that almost comes off as a salt free broth sensation with the dull woody flavor of rooibos. The finish leaves me with that dry rooibos mouth feeling, but I do get the apple cider flavors showing up and lingering.

This tea is really oily. Lots of cinnamon. It has a cinnamon stick taste in the sip and a dried and powdered cinnamon taste in the finish with a light almost baking soda like sensation flashing by. The rooibos flavor isn’t bothering me here! There is a sweetness to this tea from the licorice root. There is also partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil in this, which is a first in a tea for me and also a HUGE turn off. I try to avoid all partially hydrogenated oils in my diet. Maybe that’s what is floating on the top of my tea. I feel like I can pick out the toast part if we are comparing this to the similarly named breakfast cereal. I’m getting a little bit of rooibos dry mouth in the finish, which I dislike. Flavor wise this tea is enjoyable, but the ph oil is a dead stop for me.

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So this sounds very tasty, and the name makes me want cereal…

However, it’s mostly just a cinnamon rooibos. There’s maybe a slight buttery note from the cinnamon chips that melted and created an oily top on my cuppa. There’s also some sweetness, probably from those chips. Otherwise, there’s a slightly odd mineral note.

It’s fine and pleasant, but no more special or desserty than any other cinnamon candy rooibos.

This tea company didn’t last long. It’s sort of a shame and makes sense. I loved the idea behind it, to recreate favorite desserts as teas, but the blends often didn’t quite hit the mark. They were also really pricey if you wanted to buy your favorites, so it makes sense to me that it didn’t last. I only got to try 5 of the 6 sets they sent out because for some reason they sent me a repeat of one of them. Now I’m going through the remaining bags and reliving a couple of misses, like this tea. It really is trying, but it falls so very short of the delicious raspberry caramel fudge brownie pictured on the wrapper. It’s a little soapy on the sip, then a flash of something bitter, then some flavors in the finish while I notice irritation building in my throat. I’m dumping this cup. I really wish they had found a different blender for this project!

This is hitting a little flat for me, especially at the start of the sip. There is something extra artificial about the raspberry and it seems a little sour. It relies a little too much on being perfumey and is a really hard flavor to pull off in a tea. The fudge part is just background noise and the caramel part is really hard to pick out. Adding sugar just made the entire thing worse. Not into this one.

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So this one smelled really nice when I opened the wrapper.

The taste isn’t quite as good as the smell, which has a nice buttery caramel scent to it. I’m not getting much caramel in the flavor, mostly just a decent chai on a honeybush base. It has a nice balance of cinnamon, cardamom, clove, and ginger. It even smells a bit caramel-y, and I do taste a hint of a desserty note, but it doesn’t say caramel to me.

So really it’s just a nice herbal chai. Not something I would buy, given the price.

Last night I took the once steeped and my last fresh bag, put them in a thermos with hot water, honey, Jameson and a splash of smokey whiskey and had myself a really nice hot toddy type drink while sitting around the solstice fire, setting intentions for the new year with friends. This tea was perfect for it with the warming chai spices! I do wish I had more of this tea. I’m currently polishing off what was left in the thermos and it’s still delightful.

Still really liking this tea! Caramel on the nose, chai in the sip… it’s a pretty delicious cup. I’m having to pace myself because the cup is still too hot and I want to drink it quickly!

This is chai like for sure. I get the cinnamon cardamom flavors pretty clearly. The caramel part comes across as a richness in both scent and flavor, supporting the chai which is the main player. I drank most of this cup without sugar and liked it, but decided to add some to the last third of my cup and I don’t think it adds anything good to it. There is a sourness in the finish and something distracting in the sip with sugar. I can’t really pick out the honeybush. If the price point were lower I’d buy more of this to add another option to my limited non caffeinated options.

I gave up on my advent tea a few days back. Now I get to focus on Xmas teas! I got the small subscription to Almost. This is a branching off from the Universal Yums box from the same company that we have had a subscription to off and on for the past three years. In that box they pick a different country for each box and choose snacks and treats that are well known in that country or are unique to that country. That subscription has entertained the entire house! When they decided to do tea, I was really excited. The thing for this subscription is they pick a favorite dessert maker of theirs, have samples sent to their tea blenders and try to match the flavor of the tea to the sweet. I thought it would be six treats from different companies that the teas were blended to match per month, but it’s six sweets from one bakery. The tea is on the pricey side, but fun for a gift. The small subscription is two tea bags of each of the six tea. The bigger one is five bags of each of the six flavors. For this mix they have two blacks, two rooibos, one puerh and one honeybush. They come in pyramid bags without a string.

This smells really good dry, steeping and in the cup. The instruction said to use boiling water, I ignored it. The flavors were a little more intense when first steeped and seem to loose a little of the magic as I write about the tea and let my cup cool. The sip is very blond brownie like, but light. It’s a little buttery and a touch underwhelming. Then the finish arrives and the brown butter richness really kicks in. I’m betting this would taste amazing with a little sweetener to round out the flavors and make it super brownie like. I think I can pick up on the bourbon part, but that is one of the flavors that eludes me a little unless it’s overpowering. I’m having a hard time picking out the puerh on it’s own. I think it’s making for a nice depth to the cup without standing out with that earthy damp flavor that puerh has. Adding sugar amplifies the flavors! It’s making whole thing more rich, especially the butter part. There is something distracting at the start of each sip, but it passes so quickly that I can’t pin point it. The sugar really makes it more decadent and full.

There is a little pamphlet that comes with the tea giving info on the maker of the dessert these are based on and it’s tempting to order some of the brownies to see how well they match the tea. They have a little QR code and I wish it took you to a page with all the flavors of brownies represented in these teas in a premade sample pack. It looks like they have a lot of seasonal and rotating flavors and two of the flavors of corresponding brownies were not available. If this box picks up in popularity it would be an interesting way to cross sell desserts and teas between companies.

I’m really enjoying this cup. I’d gladly drink another cup any time, but the price point of $30 for 30 sachets if I wanted to buy more is a little on the pricey side. If I really loved one of their teas I’d be more likely to consider buying more if it was 15 for $15 or if they had a mix and match $1 per bag with a minimum of 10-20 bags. As it is, I think two servings in the subscription to try out a new tea is perfect for this tea fanatic.

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Merry Christmas friends! I’ve had a holiday tea this morning, and now I’m just ready to jump back into sipdowns, so here we go!

I figured I’d get this one out of the way, since we all know it won’t be my thing ha ha… There were a lot of chocolate chips and cacao nibs in these sachets and not much tea, so I actually used a bit less water than I normally would.

Well… it’s not terrible. It’s actually not that chocolaty for a tea called double chocolate. It’s a somewhat mild chocolate note, more of a milk chocolate than a dark, and then there’s that boozy and artificial chocolate flavoring. Can’t taste a lot of black tea, but what’s there is a bit earthy.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find it a bit bland, since a lot of the mass was chocolate chips, and those don’t really add much flavor. Meh!

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So Almost is this new (I think?) tea company doing all dessert teas, and only in sachets. They offer a subscription and you can also buy the teas, overall it’s quite expensive at about $1 per sachet. I’d seen their ads a few times on Instagram, and Stephenia of Tea Leaf Project (on YouTube) has a code for a discount on your first box, so I figured I might as well give it a try.

They make the teas based on actual desserts, and their first collection is a collaboration with a company called Brownie Points, which I’ve never heard of but obviously makes brownies. There are 6 different flavors in my package, and I got the smaller size so there are two sachets of each flavor (for $10 total with the discount).

So we all know I’m not a chocolate tea lover, but the chocolate here isn’t bothering me, which is a plus. It doesn’t immediately make me think of a Tootsie Roll, which is a win in my books lol. There were some chocolate chips in the sachet, but not enough to make my cuppa oily or murky. The chocolate flavor is actually a bit on the subtle side, and it’s a dark chocolate. I definitely get more of the raspberry than anything else, and it’s a candy sort of raspberry, it lacks the tartness of fresh raspberries or the depth of jam. Reminds me of those raspberry hard candies that look bumpy, like a raspberry. I don’t get caramel at all, not sure if that’s one of the flavors or just only in the name.

The base is fine, it’s very mellow and not at all tannic. Not contributing a lot of flavor other than a vague woodiness maybe, but it does give a nice body to the tea.

Overall, this is a nice enough dessert tea. I think someone who likes chocolate teas might be more excited about it than I am. It’s not something I would buy (I prefer Lupicia’s version) but I did enjoy my two small cups of it. More Almost reviews to come!