Fortune Cookie Chai

TTB tea! I was excited to see this one! You know…it’s pretty accurately named! It’s a mild chai, and I really could imagine this as being fortune cookie flavored. I’m impressed!

Strange VariaTEA TTB #26

The dry leaf of this blend is LOVELY, with big chunks of cinnamon sticks and curls of coconut and it actually does smell like a cookie! I brewed it as an unsweetened latte and found the flavor to be more “cookie” than “chai”…definitely leaning more into a sweet, baked goods cinnamon flavor than the more spicy ginger and cardamom I associate with chai. I really liked the flavor as I was sipping, but (as with too many David’s Tea blends) the stevia took over in the aftertaste and tainted the experience for me. Without the stevia, I think this would be a favorite for me!

My advent tea is a honeybush, so I’m saving it for later and breaking into some of the tea from my latest order that just arrived.
It smells great in the bag. I notice big chunks of curled cinnamon bark in the mix and made sure one of them made it into my steeping basket. It’s a little hard to pick out the flavors when my cup is hot. It seems like the flavors are very light and delicate with a prominent sweetness that I have mixed feelings about. As it cools I get hints of what I’d call fortune cookie with some cinnamon. Every time I take two sips close together the second one ended up tasting more like the soapiness that coconut gets as it ages which doesn’t make sense since this is a brand new bag. The flavors are still really faint as it cools and leaves me searching for cookies and chai. I was expecting the flavors to be more bold with chai in the name. It indicates powerful spices in my mind. I’m not hating this, but I’m not loving it at the moment either.

I normally go out of my way to avoid stevia (and David’s Tea’s apple) but there are too many ingredients I that I do love here, including: aniseed, fennel, allspice, coconut, clove(!!) … also the promise of buttery crepe cookie à la Roswell Strange’s description (the tea delivers and I’m happy). I’ve also come to realize I enjoy creative puerh blends (as lattes), and this fits the bill.

A part of me does wish this was a little spicier (current pofile: soft cinnamon, light ginger, mellow fennel, etc) but appreciate that doing so would lose that delicate fortune cookie concept – which this tea totally nails (for my spice cravings, maybe it’s time I pick up a proper masala chai).

Adding milk helps the stevia “play well”, which makes me more inclined to keep it around during the cooler months. Lately, I seem to crave those sweet dessert teas that David’s Tea is known for; maybe due to fall’s nostalgia effect? I also just enjoy looking at this tea. The blend is pure eye-candy. There are big pieces of cinnamon sticks, coconut rind, and assorted spice seeds & pods, all making for a cozy collective of yellow, orange, red, white, black, and brown hues (again, fall, but also fortune cookie).

Another year of logging derailed. Oh well. I’ve also barely had any tea in the last couple months, due to a vacation and then a solid month of being sick and unable to properly taste/smell. Still sick, but I really wanted some tea tonight.

Not a bad chai, not quite my preference because of the anise, but it has a nice kind of gingerbready vibe. Not a fan of the stevia, as usual, but if I have it with milk, it’s not so offputting.

This is the other new blend that was released yesterday!

I think, as it probably clear after my many years of reviewing teas, I’m a huge personal fan of when story telling is built into the concept of a tea – and in particular when the ingredients are deliberately selected as a part of that story telling. This is obviously more easy with “ethereal” profiles over ones that are recreating specific/tangible flavours and foods – but that idea of ingredient story telling was heavily on my mind when I was working on this tea.

So, I guess let’s break it down…

To start, I wanted to chose a pu’erh base as the foundation of this blend because of it’s Chinese origin. Now, before someone calls me out on it – I know that Fortune Cookies aren’t actually from China, but that association is still very much present. There probably would have been other complimentary bases, but this one had the richness and full body that I wanted to give this tea while having that nod built in as well.

As for the spices, I wanted to use a spice mix that wasn’t something as common in our other Chai – especially the seasonal ones that often return each year. The inclusion of cinnamon was still important, but it’s more of a warm and bakery-style cinnamon instead of a sweet or red hot cinnamon, specifically because it’s adding to the bakery/cookie flavour illusion. The rest of the spices are more heavily aromatic and warming – not anything earthy or spicy. I love hot the allspice in particular comes out in the infusion. More teas should use allspice – it’s sooo underrated.

Finally, the coconut. I don’t think the taste of the coconut is necessarily necessary to create the warm, buttery crepe-like cookie flavour of Fortune Cookies (though it’s certainly complimentary) but I REALLY wanted to represent the “fortune” in fortune cookies. I’m sure this is a detail that most people will never pick up on, but the visual look of the large coconut shreds in the dry leaf is very reminiscent to me of the strips of fortunes within the fortune cookie – and for me that full circle detail is the cherry on top of creating a delicious Chai profile that represents its namesake on every level – from visual to ingredient origin, and of course taste.

Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.