Spiced Apple Chai

Adagio Advent Calendar – Day 1

I haven’t had the greatest experience with Adagio in the past, finding the blends I’ve tried to be ho-hum at best. So I thought this advent calendar was the perfect way to really give them a chance by trying 24 of their teas. So here we are! :)

This happens to be perfectly pleasant. It’s a mild chai, mostly I taste cinnamon and ginger with a bit of clove thrown in there for good measure. The base tea doesn’t taste like much, in fact I’m having trouble finding it at all. I do like the apple, it’s fairly mild and doesn’t come off as artificial. It’s a nice cooked apple flavor, so overall the tea makes me think of apple pie.

Not bad, Adagio, not bad. A nice festive start to the calendar! :)

P.S. – I got the pugs an advent calendar, too: https://www.instagram.com/p/CIRzQ77AAvQ/

(today’s advent teas: https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQxllmAUip/)

First cup of the day to wake me up, more than for the flavour itself. It’s set to be the hottest day of the year here too, so it might also be my only hot tea of the day. Actually, I received quite a few bottles of grown up juice for my birthday so it might be my only tea of the day full stop! It’s weird having a birthday in lockdown, I can’t see my friends or my family and I can’t go out to celebrate. I’m spending most of the day doing online training, so it doesn’t really feel like a birthday at all. I did get a couple of novel cold brew teas as presents, so maybe I’ll make one of those later to cool down while I’m working.

There were quite a few pieces of ginger floating around the infuser while this was steeping, which made me nervous because historically ginger and I don’t get on so well. It is very strong, and definitely the overriding note of this chai, but it actually works pretty well with the tart apple and robust black tea, so I’m not mad at it. Like most of Adagio’s black teas, I added milk to temper the astringency. Not bad if you like heavily spiced chais, but for my it’s just too ginger-heavy to drink often.

Quickie Nighttime Sipdown #6 (I believe)

This time, it’s Adagio’s Spiced Apple Chai. Now, I didn’t write a tasting note the previous time I had this, and according to the steeping instructions you need 2 tsp per servings which means I only got two sessions out of the sample I bought.
Smell in bag is definitely what it says on tin. Getting those spices along with apples. I can actually see the spices as well as the apples, so that is a plus.
Prepped Western Style, 5 min steep with Boiling water. As per chai rules, added almond milk and two splendas afterwards.
Taste is… not too shabby. The Cinnamon, naturally is prominent. However, I can actually taste some cloves in there as well. Plus the apple. The apple is also coming in clearly.
There’s enough spices and complexity that the almond milk doesn’t completely wipe them out. The apple, while clearly there, is unfortunately a background note it seems like. I can taste it in the back of my mouth and throat, but not really on the tongue. If that sounds weird, it kinda is. I mean it’s good, and I do like it, I just sort of feel “eh” about it. Not the worst by far, but not the best. It is better than that Stash Chai Spice I last reviewed, so I suppose I can rate this one a B. I doubt I will order this one again, as there are chais out there I like better. But if you are looking for something with this flavor profile then you might want to give this a chance. Like I said- Good, but not Great.

The scent is exactly a spiced cider aroma, and the flavor is pretty similar. I don’t actually get much tea flavor (given that I don’t care for Adagio black in general, that’s probably good), so this tastes like a slightly watered down warm cider. That doesn’t sound appealing, but hot cider has a way of making me gag at the sweetness after more than a couple of sips, so for me, this is nice. I usually use a bit extra when making tea, and I do think this one you need to make absolutely sure you use enough of the “leaf” or it’ll just taste like boiled water.

This tastes spot-on like spiced apple cider. It tastes precisely like something one would buy at a farmer’s market from an Amish person. You could imagine them hand-mashing it, mulling it, and dropping in a dallop of cinnamon. Totally real ingredients, all the indulgence, with none (or almost none) of the calories.

To read about pumpkin-based vengeance on a cider-hog, read this: http://sororiteasisters.com/2017/01/07/spiced-apple-chai-from-adagio-tea/

I’m a big fan of apple cider, so was very excited about this. Drinking it with a spoonful of sugar and no milk, at first sip, it tasted exactly like cider – not much on the tea. Adding milk, however, made it taste more like the chai it is. With milk, it tastes like a good chai with some apple notes.

Sipdown no. 174. The rest of the sample.

For the finale, I gave this the stove top treatment. In addition to the chai mixture, I added Teas Etc.’s Assam Reserve and the Upton Turkish Apple. Two tbsp chai, two tbsp assam, 3tbsp apple.

Definitely an improvement on all fronts, so much so that I’m gonna bump this up a couple of points on the theory that prepared as nature intended chai to be prepared it did better.

It’s actually better than this number reflects, but I’m not bumping it more because a big part of the improvement is, I think, because I added the apple. The blend needed more apple from the get go, and if it had had that, I’d have given it higher marks.

It has taken me forever to drink through a bag of 15 tea bags with this tea. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this tea. At first, I really did not like this tea because it was just a watered down version of a chai tea (milk especially didn’t help. It only added to the watered down-ness of the tea). It wasn’t until recently that I found (as with so many other teas) if I sweetened it with light agave nectar, the taste was what I was looking for. It’s a nice spicy chai tea with a little kick of apple. Turned out to be a great tea for autumn.

Added 1t of sugar. The apple cinnamon flavor comes through making it seem more like an apple cider than a chai.

What happened? This used to be really good! I remember buying it a couple years ago and it was delicious, with lots of apple flavor. It was like apple pie in a cup! Now though, it’s a bland excuse for chai that smells more like apples than it tastes. Very disappointing.