Holiday Tea-son! This was my Bird & Blend advent calendar tea today, and I actually had a 50g bag of this stashed in my collection. Like most teas in my collection, I hadn’t tried it yet (yes, I’m a terrible hoarder!) so I simply opened up the sachet, added the leaf to my bag, and prepared 6g of leaf in a 16oz teapot rather than making a single cuppa with the teabag as my nightly herbal. Making an herbal in my Japanese dobin every evening has become rather ritualistic…
The aroma of the leaf is sweet, and a bit spicy, but also makes me think of apples somehow? I’m oddly getting hints of apple spice, though I can see gingerbread or biscuit from the sweet aroma, too. Brewed, the tea is a reddish-orange color, and smells pretty spot on to me as the dry leaf — sweet, and a bit like warm cookies and apples in spices. It reminds me of one of those “grandma’s kitchen” holiday scented candle fragrances, because it is so aromatic.
The tea felt a bit like a strongly spiced cider to me. The ginger note was reading quite strongly, and left a bit more of a warmth in my mouth than I tend to prefer, which surprised me since the aroma smelled so strongly sweet/fruity/biscuity. I could make out a more subtle hint of cinnamon in the background, and there were some sweeter notes that hit the back of the tongue that tasted a bit like caramel, almond, and cherry, likely coming from the rooibos base, but that strong aftertaste of ginger really dominated the cup. It certainly smelled like an unassuming chai, but about halfway into the cup I found I was going to have to drink this masala chai style. Because I’m a bonified spice wuss.
After drinking about half a cup plain, I swapped out for my largest mug, filled it with 100ml of warmed vanilla almond milk, then put the remainder of the teapot of tea in to take it latte-style. The sweetened milk tempered most of the ginger heat (there was still a bit of warmth left after the sip, but it did help considerably), and the vanilla/creamy aspect of the milk did help it achieve a quality a little closer to gingerbread… though to me, it never quite hit the mark. The ginger was definitely there, but I had a strong sweet amaretto taste on the finish, which I can equate with holiday teas, but not gingerbread in particular. I wonder if the milk brought out that marzipan/cherry taste too much? Maybe I’ll have to try just honey next time, but I’m uncertain if that would help cool down the ginger-burn enough for my spice-wuss-palate…
Certainly more to my liking as a latte, but never quite hit the mark for me taste-wise. Not exactly bad, but not something I see myself likely to want to reach for often. I have a different rooibos chai that I really like, and that is likely to be the one I keep in my cupboard, because the spice blend in it just appeals to me more. This really smells far more desserty than it turns out to be with that ginger-whollap.
Flavors: Almond, Caramel, Cherry, Cinnamon, Fruity, Ginger, Marzipan, Spicy, Sweet
