I’ve been eyeing this one since last year? Or a couple years back when a group of interesting Christmas teas dropped, but the pandemic had closed down the DAVIDsTEA shops in my area.
I’m very, very slow to buy anything online, so I finally picked up this and a few others at the downtown shop during my monthly Tea Book Crawl through my favourite used book shops. I lament that Silver Bell Oolong is online-only, because that one definitely stood out the most to me, but I’ll settle for this and Winter Earl Grey.
The smell of this is white chocolate, while the first sip is a sweet mix of ginger-cinnamon-cardamom. It’s followed by a waxy, faintly oily chocolate/coconut oilesque flavour, which is pleasant at first, but quickly gets overwhelmingly sweet in the aftertaste.
I’ve become kinda hypersensitive to sweet things, and stupidly I missed the stevia extract on the ingredients list? It’s enough that it kinda bothers me, but isn’t so high that I think it’d be a general problem for anyone else. It highlights the chocolate, in that sorta silky mouthfeel of white-chocolate ganache way. It IS a very waxy, pointedly white-chocolate flavour first (obviously the intent), and you have to search a little for what the cocoa nibs bring.
It’s a very mild, pleasant chai, enough to be warming, not zingy. I have a feeling it’d be overwhelmed by milk.
We’ll see if the sprinkles and other additives will be a mess to clean out of my filter.
