Ooohhh boy…
So this is the T Kettle version/attempt at recreating DT’s “S’mores Chai” and, let me just say, I think that this tea is a hot mess.
For starters, I don’t think the ingredient list is accurate; there are clearly green leaves throughout the blend that appear to be green tea – but even assuming that they aren’t green tea, according to the listed ingredients in this blend on T Kettle’s website they aren’t accounted for. Not one ingredient they’ve declared could concievably look like those green leaves. So, that’s concerning – and while I have other reasons why I think the T Kettle ingredients lists are inaccurate (missing sub ingredients on things like candied fruit and undeclared flavourings) this is just adding to that growing list of concerns with the accuracy. We had a long conversation about it on my tasting note for T Kettle’s Guangzhou Milk Oolong – but I do not fuck around with inaccurate ingredient lists. That shit is important to get right.
Moving along though…
The dry leaf aroma is really strange to me. I mean, it smells like play doh!? My experience is that usually when a tea smells like that there’s probably nuts in the blend? But, again, no listed nuts in the ingredients list. So maybe it’s coming from the popped rice? That seems strange to me, though. I do think, however, that one of the flavourings in this blend might be an almond flavouring (or another nut flavouring) because in terms of taste I got a very distinct sweet almond note – so I guess maybe the play doh smell is me smelling the almond in the flavourings? To use an almond flavouring or other nut flavouring would make sense though; the DT blend has hazelnuts in it and you can see from some of the other DT blends that T Kettle has tried to dupe that they paid particular attention to mirroring the ingredients in their blends…
Lets talk about the taste though! This is not a Chai. I mean, to be fair, I don’t really think that S’mores Chai is a “Chai” either because the only spice in that blend is cinnamon – such is the case here. However, at least I taste the cinnamon in S’mores Chai. I didn’t really taste it here. What I did taste was the aforementioned almond note, a note of chocolate that read almost more as a chocolate liqueur flavour, and a prominent toasted rice note. It wasn’t great tasting but it wasn’t unpleasant either, however it really read more as a “Chocolate Genmaicha” profile to me instead of anything close to a Chai or a “S’mores” profile.
I don’t think T Kettle achieved what they were trying to do at all with this one, and even if you ignore the DT comparison I think the flavour is a big mismatch for the name so I would be either confused or disappointed as a customer based on that alone. Wish they named this it’s own thing – it would be better as a differentiated profile, and avoiding the Chai description altogether.
