Adagio Custom Blends

Candy Corn is a Halloween classic so how could I resist picking up a Candy Corn tea for this October!? Let me tell you a secret though; when it comes to actual candy corn it’s not a flavour that I enjoy…

It’s a testament to the power/influence of it as a Halloween icon though because I see basically any Candy Corn inspired thing other than real Candy Corn and I immediately want to buy it because motherfucking Halloween! Shockingly, there are probably a DOZEN different Candy Corn inspired tea blends on Adagio so I had a lot of range to pick from. I chose then one that had the most appealing to me flavour composition and not the one I thought was most accurate to actual Candy Corn, which is basically just a mix of fondant/icing that tastes like pure sugar. No thanks…

So this is essentially caramel/orange/cream with black tea and honeybush. I guess I have seen cream and caramel flavour candy corn so it’s not totally off base in the interpretation of the flavour – but orange seems more out there and I would guess is only included because of the actual colour of candy corn. I’m okay with that, though!

The taste is straight forward – literally all of the flavours I just mentioned are represented, including a malty backbone from the black tea and that sweet and nutty flavour of honeybush that is so distinct. I would say the strongest flavours are orange, cream, and honeybush. It loosely reminds me of Candy Corn, but whether it’s accurate or not isn’t really the goal that I wanted from this cup – the important thing is that it tastes good, and it does. I find it a little thin, and the caramel could be better but I enjoy the orange and cream combo a lot – and I get the FUN of Candy Corn for Halloween which is exactly what I wanted.

I also drank this while watching Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror episodes which was a massively fun and nostalgic Halloween evening activity that only made the tea that much better!

Couldn’t resist stocking up on a bunch of Halloween inspired tea blends to sip throughout Spooky Season this year, and I do love a good caramel apple so this was the first one that I tapped into when I got the order earlier in the week!

I had this one at my office, but the idea is to drink these blends while doing fun Spooky Season activities throughout the month – like watching TV shows/movie and pumpkin carving. I did over steep this by a hearty ten minutes because I got caught up in responding to emails, and my inattention to steeping was punished with a hefty dose of astringency. However, the flavour of the blend itself was good and I could see from the taste that with proper steeping I would have enjoyed this a lot. Very sweet, bordering on caramel with hints of apple, cream, and cinnamon. Caramel is an infamously hard flavour to capture in tea – this felt a bit more like the thin and sort of artificial/generically sweet caramel like might see used as a Sundae syrup? On the cusp of nailing it, but just a bit off.

I look forward to brewing it properly later this monthl.