This tea is from my very first 52Teas order and the bag has been siting in my tea cupboard, unopened, for months because I already had so many teas open at the time and I didn’t want any to go stale. It was today that I had a look at my collection and decided “Yeah, today’s a good day for something new.”
I remember being excited about this tea when I purchased it – I love pumpkin pie, and it seemed like such an unusual tea flavour (of course since then Frank has come up with many more odder and more fascinating ones). It certainly smells wonderfully spicy in a way that can’t help but remind me of autumn and Thanksgiving. Unfortunately the flavour itself is rather underwhelming. I can taste the spices – mostly cinnamon – which oddly enough taste quite similar to Frank’s Apple Pie a la Mode. Actually I think they worked better in that tea than in this one; here they don’t have the creamy-sweet vanilla flavouring to take the edge off the spices and they come across as a little harsh. I can’t taste any pumpkin flavour – granted pumpkin isn’t a particularly strong flavour to begin with, but this is basically a spice tea…and nothing else.
From the reviews I’ve read of other pumpkin pie-flavoured teas, 52Teas isn’t alone in failing to meet people’s expectations. I wonder if it’s just that there’s simply no way for the tea industry to accurately replicate pumpkin flavour in a reliable way.
