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Happy holidays to those celebrating! (And to those that don’t like myself, have a great day regardless, yeah?)

As per usual, the person that loves all the things on Steepster everyone else hates like hibiscus and licorice root, and loathes the universally loved “banana teas,” seems to have the exact opposite opinion as everyone else on here regarding this tea. All advent season, every post on this said, “It doesn’t taste like gingerbread, just a normal chai.” To me, this is the first gingerbread tea I’ve had that does taste like gingerbread to me rather than just a chai! I bought this pouch a year ago, so if anything, you’d think the flavoring would be even less potent for me than all the advent folks, but the second I finally cut open the vac-seal the dry aroma was rich, sweet, molassy cookies.

Steeped, the aroma isn’t quite as potent but is still very apparent, coming off as very sweet and cookie-like. The Chinese black base used for the tea really works, as I get notes of malty dates and just a subtle hint of smoke that really accompanies the flavors. The chai spices are very nice and not overbearing… for me I mostly taste clove (another ingredient I enjoy that seems to be disliked around here) followed by sweet cinnamon, with a bit of ginger, just enough for a slight kick but not enough to make the tea uncomfortably firey (a problem I’ve had with other gingerbread teas). The cup is overall pretty smooth and sweet and easy to drink. It’s fine hot with no additions, but yesterday I prepared it as a latte with some warm sweet vanilla almond milk which was very nice.

My taste buds approve, even if the common consensus says otherwise. I’d happily get another bag of this, especially since I haven’t yet had a gingerbread tea that nailed the flavoring quite as well as this one.

Rating: 50

Today is Festivus, and while I’m fairly certain I’m the only person on Steepster that observes it, I’ll throw a “Happy Festivus for the Rest of Us!” out there anyway.

And now I’m going to air some grievances about this tea. Sometime in the past I needed to put some extra things in an Amazon cart to get free shipping, so I decided to add some roasted buckwheat (sobacha) and roasted barley (mugicha). The packaging for this says “Black Tartary Buckwheat” by Ulthmok… the listing claimed it was Himalayan, but everything on the actual package says it is from China…

Not that I expect a lot from cheap Chinese tea left in an Amazon warehouse, but this is just nothing like the sobacha I had in the past from Japan. Is it just a different type? A different roast? The unfortunate victim of being a cheap Chinese product in an Amazon warehouse? All of the above? It is just sooooooooo flavorless! If I try brewing it hot with boiling water, one teabag left to steep indefinitely in the cup, it just tastes like slightly roasty hot water. Adding a second teabag doesn’t help much, either.

It is alright as a hot cuppa if I make green tea and throw a teabag in to steep with the green tea, producing a slightly roasty/nutty cup not that unlike genmaicha. The green tea adds the needed body and a bit of flavor backbone. But this came as a pack of 50 teabags, and I felt I’d have this in my cupboard forever at that rate, so I started throwing 4-6 teabags into a liter of cold water overnight and drinking the cold brew, which is also pretty decent. The super long steep brings out more flavor and the thinness of the brew isn’t so noticable in an ice-cold beverage. So hopefully I’ll use these up within a few more pitchers.

It was meh all around, and I couldn’t be arsed to make a full Steepster database entry for it because that felt like more effort than the tea was actually worth.

While I enjoy turmeric, that enjoyment is typically based around the accompanying spice blend, which often times is far too ginger-heavy for my liking. But this tea is quite nice, with a sweeter cinnamon coming forward on the nose and in the flavor, so the tea isn’t an annoying cup of mouth-burning. The rooty/earthy turmeric note is there and is definitely an acquired taste, but there is a nice orangy note in the background and the cinnamon and licorice root tame any aggressive spiciness of the turm or ginger without being too sweet. And though it may not be marketed as such, this is a pretty effective sleep tea, with lavender, valerian, and passionflower, and it works pretty well for me. It’s both a good and a bad… bad if I just want a turm/ginger-heavy tea for tummy troubles but don’t want to be knocked out, but great for a wind-down before bed (and tastier than I often find “sleepy teas.”)

There’s probably too many contentious ingredients in this blend to really recommend it, but I’m that weird person that likes most contentious ingredients and have been pretty happy with this tea, as a non-aggressively spiced turmeric blend and as a sleep aid.

I think at the time I ordered this I was thinking this would be a hibi/fruit tea with a lignonberry leaning, which appealed highly to me. It is actually something very different, but still incredibly tasty. The base, while including some hibi, is actually composed more of fluffy green blackberry and buchu leaves, but it isn’t really sweet. Sniffing the tea, it has an aroma of berries (leaning towards currant or grape on the nose) with a sort of bright pine needle aroma, and the flavor matches that pretty well. I have no idea exactly what it is in the blend producing that pine note, but I assume it must be the buchu leaf since I’m not particulary familiar with it. It is sort of crisp and a little savory leaning… a bit like rosemary but with a sort of piney finish, and since I love pine/evergreen notes in tea, I really like it! The berry note is rich and tangy, leaning a bit more toward the blueberry/black current line than brighter and sweeter red berries… the name of the tea had me thinking along the lines of cranberries or lingonberries, but it doesn’t really go there. I do really like the fresh pine flavor with the thick black currant notes, though. I don’t find the tea particularly tart (though I’m a terrible judge since I love hibiscus and can drink it plain), but I do think the sort of savory element of the tea would require a certain palate. Definitely a winner for me, though!

I bought this at a Natural Grocers packaged in store branding but the name and ingredients are the same as Tiesta Tea. Not sure if they are wholesaling from Tiesta or if both just have the same source, but there is quite a bit of overlap in the teas I bought there and Tiesta so I’m logging here instead of making duplicate entries under the “Natural Grocer” name.

I was craving blueberries a while ago and didn’t have any more flavored blacks or greens but did have a couple herbal options in my stash, so I settled for this. I really love it! It steeps a really lovely deep purple that looks like blueberries, and it has a really rich, syrupy blueberry flavor with a lovely tart finish. I love hibi/fruit teas but often find they sort of all taste “samey,” but this one really does have a very good blueberry flavor to it… the mouthfeel and tart punchiness of the hibi is there but it doesn’t really have the “fruit punch” flavor.

I’ve mostly been guzzling through pitchers of it coldbrew, which is normally my preferred way of drinking hibi/fruit teas, but I’m surprised to find I actually really like this one as a hot cuppa as well. It definitely hit that craving I was having and I will definitely have to restock this at some point.

This is a Dethlefsen & Balk sourced blend, and I’m uncertain if I’ve had it elsewhere, but I’m really enjoying it. I tried it warm and thought it was fine (I liked the hibiscus/cardamon combination) but it shines more as a coldbrew. It has a nice rich cherry flavor, in the vein of Kool-Aid/Popsicle and lacking any weird medicinal notes. The hibiscus is adding a lot of thick fruit punch notes. That little pop of cardamom in the background is nice even cold. Very quenching. It’s a nice enough cherry-leaning hibiscus fruit tea.

I usually don’t gravitate towards “sleepy time” tea blends because they tend to be chamomile-heavy or an overly-pepperminty herbal concoction to mask valerian foot-stink. But this tea, despite having both chamomile and valerian root got me interested, since the other ingredients seemed to lean in a sweet caramel apple sort of profile.

It smells really strongly of caramel, in both the dry leaf and the brewed cup. The flavor is very nice, too… it’s very sweet and has a nice caramel flavor, better than I find in a lot of caramel rooibos teas which tend to have a heavier red rooibos flavor than I’m getting here… I think the sweetness of the apple, blackberry leaves, and coconut is lifting it a lot (I’m also surprised that the coconut has held up nicely, I tend to avoid teas that have it like the plague not because I don’t like it — I love it! — but sometimes it is years after my purchase date before I finally get around to drinking a particular tea). There is a milder apple note that goes hand-in-hand with the caramel. I get a very subtle more herbaceous aftertaste (which is probably the valerian) but you’d really have to focus to pick it up. I’m really surprised how nicely all these ingredients have come together to make a “sleep” blend that actually appeals to me.

I’d recommend giving this a try, even to those that may find things like red rooibos, chamomile, or valerian unappealing (but do be warned this is not vegan/lactose-intolerant friendly due to the caramel/toffee in the blend). I bet this tea would also do well on gmathis’ “Will It Milk?” gameshow.

This tea has been my new cold mornings hot cuppa tea, and I’ve really been enjoying it! It has a lovely chocolately aroma with syrupy fruity notes on the nose. Chocolate tea in general can be hit-or-miss for me, but thankfully this one has a very nice chocolate flavor that comes off fudgy rather than oddly artificial or alcoholic, and it blends well with the black tea base which gives some backbone with the mouthfeel and adds a little bit of malty autumn leaf flavor in the background. The berry flavor in this tea is a melange of raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, and cranberry, and I mostly taste raspberry, with some sips getting a little more syrupy cranberry in nature. I’m not tasting the cinnamon that is in the blend, though.

This is pretty smooth, even with a decent steep time, and gives satisfying hot cocoa vibes. The website recommends making a latte with it which I haven’t tried yet, but it is on my list. It’s pretty great just straight-n-plain without the need of anything fancy. I shared some with my coworker and she also loved it! I think this scratches the “chocolate+berry” flavor profile very well while being a bit easier to access (in the US) than, say, Lupicia which has high shipping costs from Hawai’i.

I finally found another tea person at work, so I’ve been bringing her teabags of things to try, and today she brought me this, which I haven’t tried before.

I was a bit skeptical about grocery store bagged pu’erh, since that tea type is already not my favorite, but this is surprisingly pretty nice. It is very earthy and almost a little vegetal but it doesn’t taste “dirty” or “fishy.” I’m not getting the cocoa very strongly, but it does add a little richness to the base and the spices are quite lovely… the nutmeg is really popping for me which gives it a nice autumnal vibe.

I’m not sure if this is something I’d always keep in my cupboard, but I certainly wouldn’t mind a box of this around autumn when the mornings are frigid and gentle spices are so comforting.

I’m just finished off this box of teabags that was gifted to me from my friend Todd as a souvenir from his trip to Scotland.

The instructions say to use one teabag, but I found there wasn’t enough tea in the bag for a standard 12 oz. mug and the flavor of the cup was really weak and watery, so I had to use two teabags per cup. This provided a strong and flavorful cup with a very sweet berry aroma on the nose (makes me think of strawberry Jell-o) and a generic red berry flavor that has a sort of dessert-esque quality… there is something sweet here, and it comes off sort of biscuity? The citric acid adds a little bite to the end of the sip, particularly in a hot brew preparation.

While I’ve had a few warm cups, mostly I’ve worked my way through this box making liters of cold brew, for a sweet and refreshing fruity and thirst-quenching drink.

I quite like this, as long as it’s brewed strong! Thanks, Todd!