A relatively new addition to Epices de Cru’s tea assortment!
This was the last tea of the evening that Marika and I drank, and also the only flavoured/blended tea of the night. We also made it in a very large Western teapot, and she actually didn’t tell me what it was before trying it and had me try to guess the flavour. I do very much love that game, though when it comes to teas with spices in them I always feel so much pressure to guess them correctly given how much of a spice genius she is.
I was very proud of myself though! I tasted a lot of malt and cocoa from the black tea itself, though admittedly I was getting enough cocoa that I wasn’t 100% sure if it was only the black tea or if there was maybe a small amount of cocoa shell or nib in the blend tea. There is not though, it’s just a really pleasant bittersweet and dark cacao note.
In terms of spices, the big ones I tasted were cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice – all of which are present. There’s also ginger, and eventually I named that one too but it was really the very strong autumnal and wintery vibe of the nutmeg and allspice combination that was sticking out to me. Because those are spices we’re so conditioned to think of as linked to holidays, I was really interpreting the overall profile as a sort of gingerbread hot cocoa flavour – and I actually loved it. It’s a very, very smooth and tasty tea.
Welp, turns out it’s pumpkin spice. Except, respectfully, no it’s not. It’s delicious, truly! But I honestly don’t think that I’d have named the flavour direction as tasting like pumpkin pie even if I’d gone into my first sips with that context. The allspice is present, but where are the rest of the pumpkin spices like the clove? And the ratio just feels all wrong. But more than anything else I think the actual black tea base is working against the concept. It’s too naturally molasses-y and cocoa tasting. It gets the job done putting me in a seasonal mood, but it’s just the wrong season…
So conflicting because I drank a lot of this tea. Like, it’s tasty. It was just challenging to reconcile in my brain that I wasn’t drinking a gingerbread blend.
The Murchie’s version tastes like eggnog so I just pretend that’s what it is ha ha! It’s a gingerbread tea to you!