Salted Caramel Pancakes

middle of the road for me here. I’ve had this a few times now and it’s not blow your mind, but it’s not a bad little tea. Don’t need to restock it but i’m fine having purchased it. Kinda feels like a maple genmaicha more than a black salted caramel tea.

Sipdown! (19 | 149)

This was in my subscription box for January/February! I didn’t order any of the teas from Deb’s brunch collection, as I didn’t know which ones would be in the box and I’m trying not to buy tea anyway. It turned out to be this tea and Cereal Milk (yay!). I may have to order the Banana French Toast once it’s restocked, just because BANANA!

Anyway! It’s pretty good. I do think it does a good job of capturing both pancakes and caramel. There’s a strong maple note plus the graininess of the toasted rice, which together do remind me of pancakes with butter and syrup. But I do also get some darker, caramelly notes (plus the butter helps there as well).

Overall, it’s good, but I feel like the added ingredients to tea ratio is too high, as I don’t get much from the black tea. And because of that, it just ends up tasting very thin. So because of that, I don’t think I’d order this one. It was fun to try though!

Just received my Dessert by Deb sub box today, yay! And with it came my January order as well. So many goodies! This tea was on top, so it was the first I opened.

I hadn’t previously processed that this is a black tea with popped rice (like in genmaicha) – very interesting, and not a combination I’ve ever had, without green tea also in the mix. The popped rice kind of dominated the flavour, which I have mixed opinions on; I also picked up some saltiness and sweetness but it didn’t quite come across as salted caramel pancakes to me. I think this tea might require a bit more experimentation to get right.

Another sample snagged from Sil. Thank you!

Salted caramel is always appealing to me but I’m so off pancake teas that I decided to skip this one. Also I knew Sil was getting it and she’d let me try it.

The dry leaf smelled deliciously caramel. Drinking it though, it leans more strongly into the pancakes side of things than caramel. For me, that’s a plus because it means I don’t need to place an immediate order for more of this.

Now that I have had this tea a few more times, I do like it, but I am not sure if it is my favourite Dessert by Deb blend. I like the addition of the toasted rice in here – it gives it a crunchy sort of feeling. The bag also smells like the most delicious toasted caramel!

However, I think this tea is missing something. I think it needs a much stronger brown sugar and caramel presence. I also believe adding just the tiniest bit of sea salt to this would have really elevated it to the next level.

I also think a better name for this tea would have been, sweet and salty popcorn