This tea is pure disappointment in dried form. Getting Pumpkin Chai from David’s Tea is like buying a Rembrandt painting at an auction house: you’re excited because it looks so authentic. Then you bring it home and guess what? It’s a fake. This tea smells excellent, like pumpkin pies baking and an assortment of spices all raveled into an orgasmic bundle of aroma. The unfortunate thing is that this doesn’t translate into your cup. The resulting tea is bland, lacking most of the flavour notes that your nose picked up from the dry blend. To me, this speaks volumes about David’s Tea’s philosophy: produce tea that smells amazing in order to make people want to buy their tea and place less importance on actually making the tea taste good.
The problem is with the ingredients: tiny pieces of pumpkin-shaped candies and bits of caramel mixed with a ton of aromatics. However, these ingredients don’t actually get extracted by hot water very well. The actual tea leaves are low-quality, so what you taste is a poor quality brew with minimal quantities of scent extracted from the other superficial ingredients.
The bottom line is that Pumpkin Chai from David’s Tea doesn’t taste as good as it smells and needs to be supplemented with plenty of sweetener and dairy in order to be halfway enjoyable. On the grand scale of tea, this blend (and most others from David’s Tea) are somewhat of an embarrassment and really shouldn’t be getting the praise they receive. Overall, this is a sad and disappointing attempt at a holiday-themed tea and doesn’t belong in anyone’s tea cabinet unless they pass by it once a day to smell it, but not drink it.
