Spiced Fig

This is my current favorite from the Winter Collection. All the comments about it being a really heavy tea that you don’t get a whole lot of “bang for your buck” with are accurate. In the 25g pouch I got from DAVIDsTEA, there’s enough for maybe three cups of tea.

The taste of the brewed tea is all apple cider spices. I can’t taste any fruit in this, but the spices are nicely blended and not overwhelming. I can see this being great blended with a tea with a stronger apple taste.

Resteep — 8 minutes, boiling water, 4tsp per 16oz: This resteeps really nicely! The spicy flavor didn’t degrade at all and it’s still nicely balanced. Yum!

I picked up about 15g of this while I was in today. I smelled this one last week when I stopped by and was immediately intrigued by the smell. The smell is a mixture of sweet and spicy notes while the favour, in my opinion tends to favour the sweet notes (especially in the last few sips!) I found that the dates really came through and I think that that’s where the sweetness comes from. I did enjoy the flavours but found myself disappointed that a 15g pouch was barely enough to make 2 mild cups! The tea is mostly made up of dried fruit as well which doesn’t tend to make a good second brew. I am glad that I tried this and really did enjoy it but like the gingerbread, I really cannot say I would rush out to buy it or even be disappointed to not see it return next year.

Today I went out and purchased both this, and the new Gingerbread holiday tea. Because of the amazing smell of this, I choose to give it a shot first.
I purchased 25 grams, and I feel like I had to use half for just one cup! This seems a little excessive to me. I know it is because the fruits are very heavy, but doesn’t seem worth it.
The taste did little to redeem it. At first the taste was very watery. However afterwards, the cloves and fruity flavors did come out as it cooled. I don’t know….I have mixed feelings. I am a huge fan of cloves and it was quite yum as it cooled off, but I think the overall flavour was too weak to be worth the price of this. I am pretty sure I won’t be getting any more. Oh well!

I have to admit, this tea is quite the letdown for me. I have given it three shots. Once with a sample pack that, scarily, did not even provide enough tea to make a decent cup, and twice with the tea I bought to give it a fair shot. The taste is not unpleasant, I like figs, I love cloves and spices with apple. In fact, if it were solely a question of taste, this tea might be alright. But… This tea is so incredibly heavy, I found it heavier than Merry Cranberry and that is saying something!! Also, it is just plain a weak flavour. My best shot with this tea was when I dropped it in my tea traveller and just let it steep for hours while the water cooled. This is such a disappointment. I love the flavour, but I can’t get this to brew a decent cup without so much babying that I have other flavours that I would go for first. If someone has a way, other than steeping for hours, to get flavour out of this tea, I would love to hear it! Otherwise, this is one I will get through my batch of but I won’t be stocking up on it. Too bad, because I was so excited for it!!

I’m clearly in the minority here, but I ADORE this tea. Top 5 favourite, ever. It tastes like the holidays—like drinking a clove orange! The natural sweentess is great, and I actually found it did really well on a second steep. The only down side, as others have mentioned, is how heavy it is— I got a 25g bag, and I got about 2 or 3 cups out of it! This makes it pretty darn pricey.

Sipdown 2020! 5/365

This was from a few days ago; unfortunate that I hadn’t written this then, since I don’t appear to have logged it previously. Oh well. It was a fairly sweet cup of tea due to the figs, and the cloves gave it a bit of a Christmassy flavour – I don’t remember much else. It was kind of middle of the road for me, although it was nice that it didn’t taste like yet another hibiscus nightmare, nor a clone of forever nuts. I’d probably pick up a sample of it again.

Additional notes: Eh, I don’t dislike this as much as I did before. It tastes like mildly spicy figs if I brew the crap out of it (for about a half hour) so at least it’s accurate to the name. And bonus points: no hibiscus. Raising the rating from 62.

This was more like essence of fig than spiced fig. I tasted no spice, and the tea lacked heartiness. It made me want to go find a real fig to eat instead of get teased by fig water. However, it was drinkable.

Sipdown. This was a really nice, autumy feeling cup. The dry leaf smelled strongly of clove, and steeped, clove was the dominant flavour. Under the clove there was a nice amount of fig, nuttiness, apple, sweetness and tart. If you love clove, this is great – the other flavours are well balanced, but the clove is powerful and punchy.

What is it about figs in tea? I love the way dried figs taste, but when they’re steeped there’s always this interesting nuttiness to them that I’m not sure I’m crazy about (it’s not bad), and that is not at all present when eating dry figs. That note is there in every fig tea I’ve tried, and it’s just odd.

Also this blend. Holy crap. Super dense and 2 tsp for one cup. I’m glad I didn’t fall in love with this, because this does not go far.

Smells delish and I was tempted to sample the dried fruit bits. There wasn’t really that much in the pouch though so I left them. Unfortunately my first steep turned out to be rather bland and watery. Clearly I need to add more than the one scoop I used and maybe steep it longer too.