This is a very old sampler I got from… I think the first Adagio order I ever made, sometime in the summer of 2017? And I don’t order from them anymore, so… it at least feels like a long time ago, now. It was my free zodiac birthday sampler based on my birthdate. I had every intention of getting around to it last month and somehow never did…
I think part of why I haven’t gotten to this sooner was the mix of tea in what appears to be mostly herbal ingredients, when I’m always in the need for more herbals to drink at night, but it looks pretty scant in the black tea leaves listed in the ingredients (and I didn’t even notice the white it boasts in the ingredients…) so I figure the caffeine must be pretty light in this. It’s a Friday night and I’m off tomorrow, so a lightly caffeinated herbal should be alright tonight, so I figured I’d finally drink this one off, in the mammoth-pot. (Probably a bit over-leafed, but maybe that will make up for the age of the leaf and the fact those Adagio sampler tins, while “looking cute” have pretty much no air seal on them at all, so I’m expecting some bad flavor deprivation…)
The tea is dark red, and the aroma smells heavily of rooibos and chamomile. I’m not a big chamomile fan, but the rooibos is very rich in this blend and helps balance out that flavor a lot for me, so it isn’t quite so overwhelming and overbearing for me. Mostly I get a strong, forward rooibos flavor that is a bit woody, grassy, sweet, and floral in flavor; likely these flavors are amplified by the heavy taste of chamomile that comes out midsip to finish and lingers on the tongue. This tea apparently has orange and grapefruit flavoring, but I’m not tasting any flavoring at all, so either it is the age of the sampler, or because I’m very sensitive to the taste of chamomile, it is just drowning out any other flavors for me. I feel like there is a very subtle hint of citrus left on my tongue in the aftertaste, but I can only pick that up after the thick chamomile taste finally subsides, and during the sip I can’t notice any citrus notes at all. So this pretty much just tastes like a rooibos/chamomile blend. I honestly can’t taste any black/white tea notes and don’t know why they would be included in this blend; it seems silly to add caffeine to this when they aren’t really adding anything to this blend in regards to flavor.
This is pretty meh. Since I don’t really like chamomile and this isn’t providing much else, this Pisces tea just isn’t for this particular Pisces, I guess. To be fair, the rooibos is making this much more palatable for me than many chamomile teas I’ve tasted, so I will finish this pot rather than dump it, so it does have that going for it.
Flavors: Citrus, Floral, Grass, Rooibos, Soap, Sweet, Wood
