Pistachio Macaron

When I was a kid, pistachios were too expensive for our family to buy. As an adult, I enjoy always having pistachios in my pantry as a sort of indulgence, and I use them in all sorts of recipes. I’ve made pistachio macarons before, and this tea is nothing like its name. I was surprised when this ended up very fruity and floral. There’s so much rose in here – why? The resteep was much too rosey. When I drink this cold, I do sort of enjoy it. It’s a decently refreshing fruity floral blend, but the name is all wrong. Though there are some whole pistachios in the bag, they don’t contribute anything to the flavor. I drank about four cups of this, and I don’t think I’ll have more since I’m tired of the rose.

I wouldn’t exactly characterize the flavor as ‘pistachio macaron’, but it’s a nice fruit/herbal tea with a smooth mouthfeel and noticeable pistachio flavor.

Ignoring straight teas and tisanes for a moment…

When I think of tea blends they usually (broadly speaking) fall into one of two different big buckets. The first is flavour recreations – AKA teas that are supposed to taste like or make you think of real life foods or drinks. These are the Strawberry Lemonades or Blueberry Jams of the tea world. The others are more ethereal. Sure, they might have flavour callouts but usually they’re more about conveying an idea or a feeling or the taste is a mix of flavours that compliment but aren’t generally a recognized or called out pairing. Pretty much every single tea from August Uncommon is an excellent example of this, but without DT specifically I would say things like Buddha’s Blend or Sleigh Ride would be solid examples…

I’m getting into that because I think it’s a really important distinction for this tea in particular which, naming wise, would appear to be more of that first bucket. Transparently, I like this tea but I do not like the name of it because I think it sets up people with an expectation for what this should taste like that might not actually be met – and that is, of course, a shame. There were a ton of other names we considered and I definitely preferred a handful of them to what was landed on. I’m not gonna get into, like, the minutia of why this one was picked though. Both for confidentiality reasons but also ’cause, like, naming a tea is HARD. Much, much harder than people would assume, and there are sooooo many factors that go into it…

So with that said, what does this tea taste like!? To start, I think it does taste like pistachio and it does have the kind of sweet pastry notes of a macaron. It’s just also, like, a lot more than that. The pistachio in particular is sweeter and reminds me more of candied pistachios that a salted/roasted or raw one, and it’s not creamy like Pistachio Ice Cream either. It reminds me a lot of Dammann Frere’s Cardadet Fraise Pistache herbal blend, which is my favourite fruit based tea they carry…

So what do I mean when I say this is more than just pistachio/pastry? Well, anyone who’s read the ingredient list will be able to clearly see there’s a lot going on with this tea. It’s also got hints of sweet floral rose, tart cranberry and other red berry jams, and an undertone of maple. Just this smash cut of fruity, nutty, and other decadent flavours.

So, going back to my original paragraph about the difference between flavour recreations and more ethereal tea blends… What does this tea taste like?

Well, it’s kind of the whole Parisian macaron shop rolled up into one. It’s walking in to the bakery at ten in the morning on a Saturday and being hit with the sweet intertwined aromas of the rows of fresh pastries in a literal rainbow of colours and flavours. It’s walking the streets of Paris and feeling the fresh air on your face as you nibble on that first macaron because it’s a beautiful day and why should you wait to enjoy something sweet and delicious on a perfect morning like this? And it’s the abstract feeling of dreaming about the same macarons days, weeks, months later and somehow both tasting the memory of each flavour individually and simultaneously all at once.

But that’s a lot to convey in a tea name.

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.

(DavidsTea 2022: 97)

Second tea I tried, and one that I found by total luck – a different pistachio tea was listed in the tea menu, but this one came up instead! And Ros hadn’t even added it to Steepster yet, which is really surprising! (Is it new, or is it a rename of something existing?)

Anyhow, it didn’t taste like anything I’d had before… buut, if I’m being honest, it didn’t taste like much at all. Didn’t really get pistachio, or macaron, it was just kinda fruity and sweet? I’ll have to give it another try. It wasn’t bad, but certainly failed to leave much of an impression.