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Want a tea that tastes like sweet brown? Then boy does this blend deliver! Don’t get me wrong though, it’s brown in a good way. A very, very good way. Notes of fig, date, toffee/caramel, and honey all blended and mixed up together until you get something that’s just warm, ooey and gooey in a slightly fruity and slightly baked kind of way that also embodies the best element of the maillard reaction.

Also it’s good with milk.

Cold Brew Sipdown (2109)!

Figured it was getting silly to hold onto the last of this tea since it’s a blend I don’t particularly like and it’s very old at this point. The coconut is definitely beginning to have some funk to it, though not fully rancid. The brew was… fine. Not unpleasant but definitely very boring. Lemongrass and grapefruit notes were the strongest note aside from the rooibos itself, but they were flat and lifeless and the hints of peppercorn and coconut did nothing to make them feel more interesting.

In the end, I mostly used this cold brew for hydration – it just wasn’t a super good tea. I’m going to lower my rating as well; I think the 75 it’s sitting at right now is more reflective of my naivety from years ago when I didn’t have as many comparable blends to benchmark this against…

Tea Pop Sipdown (2110)!

Made this as a tea pop for a longer afternoon meeting yesterday, and it was pretty dang delicious! Not overly sweet, but definitely enough sweetness to balance out the slight mineral taste that our on tap fizzy water has in the office. The sakura almost tasted better this way, too? More floral and less candy like, and well balanced with the umami of the matcha. It had slighty “powdery” taste that made me think a tiny bit of cosmetics, but but nothing that was very unpleasant.

I don’t think I’d buy this one again (unlike Kane’s AWESOME apple matcha) but I was really happy that this was my parting mug of it!

Last tea from this first Almost Tea box…

I’m not particularly a fan of straight chocolate teas, but this was surprised me a bit by how much the specific chocolate note appealed to me. Sort of a cross between a milk and a dark chocolate with a hint of that chocolate liqueur type of flavouring but with a slight oily/fatty quality caused from actual chocolate pieces melting down. Splitting the different worked for me; it wasn’t as fake as the liqueur flavouring is on its own but it wasn’t like drinking an oil slick either from excessive use of chocolate pieces.

The tea had great body overall, and the chocolate note was very brownie-like thanks to the sort of doughy/raw “batter” quality that it had. Not a fluffy brownie but more of a dense and highly chewy one. Slightly under baked, even. It was very familiar tasting to me, and it’s not the first blend from this box that left me with a strong sense of Deja Vu. I’ll probably be mulling over what specific chocolate tea it’s reminding me of for a while…

Would I get this again? Nope. I don’t love straight chocolate teas, as I said. But this was a nice enough one to keep me engaged throughout the entire mug of it, and I feel like that’s a pretty solid compliment to give it!

The dry leaf aroma of this sachet was so familiar to me and it took me a long time to place why as it was steeping, but after taking a couple small sips I realized it was reminding me a lot of DT’s discontinued White Chocolate Chai/Jingle Bell Chai blend.

The two have fairly similar spices; the ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom all stick out a lot and something about the way the ginger and more citrus-y notes of the of cardamom combine reads as very cola-like in flavour. I think the overarching sweetness of the blend, which isn’t particularly caramel but is definitely present, doesn’t do anything to dissuade the comparison to coke for me either. It makes sense though because, at its core, coca cola is a sweet spiced citrus beverage.

It’s… kind of weird to taste in a Chai though…

I made my mug of this earlier in the week while at the office, alongside about two other mugs of tea that I was drinking in tandem with this one. At first, I thought this was my least favourite of the three cups – but it’s the one I wound up finishing the fastest and I did find myself gravitating more towards it than the other two so I think that definitely says something about the tea that I may not have consciously been able to attribute to it.

I appreciate that the name is clearly trying to dance around Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s trademark, but there’s something about the word “munch” that sounds so unappealing to me and, as a coworker pointed out to me, the image on the overwrap of the sachets looks a bit like tuna sandwich…

So I feel like there was a lot working against this before I even had a chance to taste it.

It’s not really that I feel like this is a bad tea but it’s definitely not one that I particularly enjoyed a lot. It’s very cinnamon, very creamy, and very licorice root. None of the flavours are bad but they’ve definitely stepped into cloying territory for me where the mug just gets a little sickly. I don’t especially love licorice root, so that note is a real kicker for me – in a negative way. There’s a familiar and kind of nostalgic “Saturday Morning Cartoons” quality to it though, so I guess points for managing to capture the feeling of slurping up Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal milk while watching TV in my PJs…

It was probably unfair to this tea to brew it immediately after having such an amazing apple flavoured tea from Momo earlier in the day…

The tea itself tasted fine enough, it’s just that it’s an incredibly simple blend. Green rooibos and flavouring. That’s it. The apple flavouring used is nice enough; it’s sweet but not cloying and it’s got a hint of something that could be interpreted as “boozier” to give off the cider element. However, I found its simplicity a little boring and I didn’t feel like there was enough going on flavour wise to justify a name like Spiked Apple Cider when it just tastes like a run of the mill apple blend. It could have been punchier or boozier or just… something more impactful.

I’ll finish it off easily though; there’s nothing off about the taste in any way. It’s just a touch unfinished feeling to me…

Cold Brew…

Ooohh boooyyy I have a lot of feelings about this tea. As some of you know, Sencha is notoriously one of my all time least favourite kinds of tea. So, when I was at the Toronto Tea Festival and saw Momo’s booth I was very tempted to just totally skip over it. All they were sampling was their sencha line and I just was so confident that I wouldn’t like it. However, that felt so strongly against the spirit of what the festival is supposed to be so I tried a couple samples and they were damn good. So good, in fact, that I bought a bag of two out of the three teas I sampled – including this one, which is apple flavoured.

Knowing how refreshing a good green tea can be when cold brewed, that how I decided to take this tea for a spin with my first at home tasting. I’ve been sipping on it throughout the whole day today and I think I’ve said under my breath “Damn, that’s good!” immediately after having a sip about five or six times now. I don’t know who I’m talking to; I guess my hamster!? It’s just so refreshing and nostalgic that I can’t help but vocalize it.

I think the best way to describe the taste is somewhere between a really good glass of apple juice and the more distinct and sweet taste of a Japanese apple candy. I say Japanese very specifically too, as they use a different flavouring than what’s commercially used here in North America – it’s harder to call it specifically red or green apple because it rides the line of sweet and tart so well, while also having a floral characteristic to it that isn’t prevalent in North American candy. So I guess the TLDR of that is that it’s simultaneously very natural and more candy like, and also not overly sweet or tart – with some floral elements.

The green tea base is also just so crisp and clean finishing – a little grassy and a bit umami but not the kind of ocean bomb or awful lawn clipping notes that I negatively associate with Sencha. It’s medium bodied and just a perfect back drop to the apple notes. On a sweltering hot summer day this would be a killer drink.

Followed up my cup of Vahdam’s Earl Grey Spiced with this new EG from DAVIDsTEA that quietly launched alongside Lemon Ginger Reset earlier in the week, as part of a wellness/adaptogen focused collection.

Honestly, it’s kind of crazy to me that DT hasn’t carried a Lavender Earl Grey before this because it’s not a super uncommon twist on the classic EG profile. I think, because it’s not unexplored within the industry, that’s why I wanted to do something with this profile that I hadn’t seen before – so we added ashwagandha to the blend! Ashwagandha is an adaptogenic root that been using in traditional medicine for ages but it recently becoming very trendy for its purported ability to help the body relax and adapt to stress.

For those reasons, it just seemed like such an incredibly natural combination with lavender, which is also used a lot in aromatherapy and traditional medicines for its relaxing properties. So, I guess you could think of this as a sort of “super relaxing” Earl Grey but without sacrificing the caffeine. Perfect for starting the morning or as a midafternoon cuppa when you don’t want to carry tension with you for the rest of the day, but might not exactly want to feel “sleepy”…

What does it taste like, though? Well, lavender. Also bergamot. It’s honestly pretty straight forward but that doesn’t mean it isn’t plenty flavourful. I find the bergamot pretty bold in this blend, and the lavender is also really distinct in both aroma and taste. It’s probably not a blend for someone intimidated or turned off by florals. Though, if you find it strong a bit of milk or cream really helps soften things up and make for a beautiful but still full bodied cup. Very “British tea time” vibes – you could for serve this at an afternoon tea time with your grandparents. Personally, I like to add a bit of honey because the combo of lavender and honey is just superb.

I’ll also say that it’s definitely not a sweet Earl Grey and it’s also not creamy either. Closer to DT’s classic Earl Grey than Cream of Earl Grey, and by quite a bit. Plenty of room to add whatever sweetener you prefer in whatever quantity works best for you, or to just not sweeten it at all. I don’t know that I’ll be adding this one to my own stash, as I do prefer a sweeter or more highly flavoured twist on an EG, but I’m happy this exists! It’s something we’ve been asked for so much, and it was really cool to challenge myself to find a way to take the classic Lavender Earl Grey and honor that style of EG while still kind of giving it something distinct.

Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts and feelings regarding the teas, and not the company’s.

Sipped yesterday morning in the lab while setting up for a tasting.

It was my first tea of the day, and there’s something about having an Earl Grey as your first cuppa in the morning that always feels just a little bit “more right” than other teas. However, it was a busy morning so the extra bit of spice that made this an even bolder and more intense cup gave it a bit more of a flavour push that amped me up a bit – in a good way.

It’s certainly not a favourite tea and I find that there’s an almost brassy metallic undertone to the bergamot used here (but I get that in a lot of EG), but situationally… it was a good cup!