Gingerbread Chai

I have more of this one. I thought it was about gone, but there is enough for maybe 5 more cups. That’s nice, because this is a nice choice for a chilly evening. The weather has been amazingly spring-like for the last week, but last night was windy, so my aparmtent was cooler than usual. Perfect for a cup of tea. I drank about half the cup when my brother called. WE ended up tlaking for nearly an hour and I when I came back to this is was cold. I finished it, and realized that this would be a nice cold brew.

This was a free sample from my order. I made it at a hotel using their lobby hot water, which turned out to not be very hot. Even so, I’m enjoying the flavor. It’s lightly sweet and honestly I do kind of get a cookie feeling from it. The ginger is pleasantly spicy. I bet this would be great with milk too. I usually find chai to be pretty boring, but I’d consider buying more of this one.

I kinda really like this. Being a rooibos based tisane, I didn’t expect to like it as much as I do. It has a nice ginger zing to it that overpowers any rooibos taste and leaves a fun ginger tingle in the finish. Doesn’t leave my mouth exceptionally dry either, which is a trait I find in many rooibos blends. If it weren’t for the huge shipping fee, I’d consider keeping this one in stock because it’s been a nice flavorful cup to reach for in the evenings. Guess that puts this in the melancholy sipdown category.

Sara sent me some teas instead of trashing them. :)

Mmm, it smells like ginger. And the taste… wow, there’s a punch in the face of some kind of flavor. Wow, I think that’s the ginger. I kind of like it. It actually burns my throat a bit going down. I wonder how it would be with a little vanilla almond milk.

Okay, with a little almond milk the burn is less. But it’s difficult to pick out any notes beyond ginger. Since this is a chai, I was hoping for a little more balance between the various spices that are typical in a chai. It’s not unpleasant, but it just tastes like a ginger tea to me.

When I was searching for this tea to review, I saw that Tea Chai Te also has a gingerbread chai. Now I want to try it.

Holiday Tea-son! This was my Bird & Blend advent calendar tea today, and I actually had a 50g bag of this stashed in my collection. Like most teas in my collection, I hadn’t tried it yet (yes, I’m a terrible hoarder!) so I simply opened up the sachet, added the leaf to my bag, and prepared 6g of leaf in a 16oz teapot rather than making a single cuppa with the teabag as my nightly herbal. Making an herbal in my Japanese dobin every evening has become rather ritualistic…

The aroma of the leaf is sweet, and a bit spicy, but also makes me think of apples somehow? I’m oddly getting hints of apple spice, though I can see gingerbread or biscuit from the sweet aroma, too. Brewed, the tea is a reddish-orange color, and smells pretty spot on to me as the dry leaf — sweet, and a bit like warm cookies and apples in spices. It reminds me of one of those “grandma’s kitchen” holiday scented candle fragrances, because it is so aromatic.

The tea felt a bit like a strongly spiced cider to me. The ginger note was reading quite strongly, and left a bit more of a warmth in my mouth than I tend to prefer, which surprised me since the aroma smelled so strongly sweet/fruity/biscuity. I could make out a more subtle hint of cinnamon in the background, and there were some sweeter notes that hit the back of the tongue that tasted a bit like caramel, almond, and cherry, likely coming from the rooibos base, but that strong aftertaste of ginger really dominated the cup. It certainly smelled like an unassuming chai, but about halfway into the cup I found I was going to have to drink this masala chai style. Because I’m a bonified spice wuss.

After drinking about half a cup plain, I swapped out for my largest mug, filled it with 100ml of warmed vanilla almond milk, then put the remainder of the teapot of tea in to take it latte-style. The sweetened milk tempered most of the ginger heat (there was still a bit of warmth left after the sip, but it did help considerably), and the vanilla/creamy aspect of the milk did help it achieve a quality a little closer to gingerbread… though to me, it never quite hit the mark. The ginger was definitely there, but I had a strong sweet amaretto taste on the finish, which I can equate with holiday teas, but not gingerbread in particular. I wonder if the milk brought out that marzipan/cherry taste too much? Maybe I’ll have to try just honey next time, but I’m uncertain if that would help cool down the ginger-burn enough for my spice-wuss-palate…

Certainly more to my liking as a latte, but never quite hit the mark for me taste-wise. Not exactly bad, but not something I see myself likely to want to reach for often. I have a different rooibos chai that I really like, and that is likely to be the one I keep in my cupboard, because the spice blend in it just appeals to me more. This really smells far more desserty than it turns out to be with that ginger-whollap.

Bird & Blend Advent Calendar 2021 – Day 16

Holy cow, this is way spicier than I expected it to be!

The beginning of the sip is nice and gingerbread-y, but then wham, the spicy ginger smacks me right in the tongue! I would guess there was pepper here if I hadn’t read the ingredients. It burns all the way down my throat.

Not a fan. :P

I had a sample bag of this sometime in the last 48 hours … not quite sure when (I tend to get up in the middle of the night and have a cup of tea before going back to bed, and I think this one was one of those midnight trysts). I wasn’t amped because I’ve not liked the rooibos I’ve tried so far, and I tend not to like spicy chais, and because I really don’t like clove (unless quite restrained), and gingerbread and chai flavors are usually long on clove. But I actually do LOVE real gingerbread (and I make mine very gingery!).

Additionally, it’s sort of difficult to form an opinion on one tea bag, since getting the right amount of water and steeping time is difficult in a single shot. However, this turned out to be quite a lot nicer than I expected — smoother, yet quite gingery, but not too clovey (if there was even clove), with something of a gingerbread flavor … and I didn’t notice the rooibos, which coming from me, so far, is complimentary. In fact, I may even include it the next time I make a B&B order.

This may all sound like faint praise, but I was pleasantly surprised, and I have both wanted to have a “gingerbread” tea, yet been too gun-shy to order one, so yay, random midnight encounter!

Adventaggedon Day 20 – Tea 3/6

Yet another spiced/ginger tea from today, but this is the most “Christmas themed” of the five teas today that were spiced. I can’t remember if I’ve tried it before, but it was familiar so maybe…

I sipped a cup of it while watching Home Alone tonight – I have officially shifted into Christmas movie mode, and until Christmas Day I will now be working through my list of four Christmas movies that are traditional for me to watch. It was an overall nice cup, but not something I would ever reach for on my own or purchase. What I like about it though is that, aside from the tingly and peppery ginger notes, it also has the dense/dark sweetness and molasses-y flavours that I think are crucial to pulling off a proper gingerbread tea.

Advent Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJCZpVTAt6i/

Latte Sipdown (280)

I never really liked this one. It’s ok as a latte but it’s mostly just a sort of vanilla/cinnamon rooibos. Nothing says gingerbread here.

this one wasn’t too shabby. I don’t get a strong gingerbread flavour out of this one – it’s a little on the subdued side however there’s a bite to this chai that i’m guessing is supposed to be rolled in to the "ginger"bread aspect? On the whole, a nice cup for today’s terrible weather but that’s about all i needed in my life :) Thanks VariaTEA!