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So, the hubby and I actually first tried this tea when we got a sample bag of it attached to a box of their normal Chai last autumn. We saw a full box of it this season and immediately snagged it, because we really liked it when we first got to try it!

I had never tried an apple flavored chai before, despite the fact that when my husband and I picked it up, we were like, “This pairing is so intuitive, why haven’t we encountered it before?” I had just never seen any company that I normally patronize do a blend like that—I’m now aware, after having poked around here on Steepster, that plenty of other companies have done blends like this. Well, let me assure you, those of you who are fans of those other blends—this one is tasty. The apple flavor may taste a little on the fake side, but as small as the teabags are, I wouldn’t expect them to be able to fit many apple pieces in there. So, apple flavoring it is. I don’t mind it so much, since I have my chai with sugar and milk anyway.

So far, I am really loving this company’s flavoring techniques. I opened the bag, stuck my nose in, and WHAM! was hit in the face with grapefruit-y goodness. The base tea seems to be some sort of Dragonwell-like grade of tea, and smells very grassy, like matcha. In fact, when it steeped, it had some minimal green froth at the top, which also made me think matcha, because that’s the only green tea I know of that does that. The label doesn’t say there’s any in there, but I am wondering…

Anyway, the grassy green tea scent took over when I steeped it, which was to be expected. Generally speaking, green tea tends to take over any flavoring it’s blended with, unless it’s a particularly potent flavoring (which you would think grapefruit would be, but somehow, it didn’t surprise me). I could detect a TEENSY bit of the grapefruit in the smell, but only if I stuck my nose right up on it and hunted for it.

Anyway, it also didn’t surprise me that I had to sweeten this one to make the grapefruit flavor shine. That’s okay with me—when I eat grapefruit, I sweeten the mess out of it. This was a thoroughly enjoying cup, from beginning to end. The cooler it got, the more the grapefruit came out. The hubby came in the room and wanted some, so I made myself a second cup with him, and I sweetened it even more. I didn’t like it as much with MORE sugar, believe it or not (we really like our tea sweet)—it threw the balance off. I’m very impressed, and I will drink this one with enthusiasm!

Oh, dear. I opened my sample bag to make a pot of this for the hubby and me, and was smacked in the nose by the smell of MEDICINE. I think it may be the rooibos and the honey together producing that smell, but I almost couldn’t get past it, it was so strong. The berries just weren’t helping enough to mask the intense medicinal scent. We let it steep for about 4 minutes, I suppose, while I stayed far away…

I gotta be honest. It may be the pregnancy doing this to me (third trimester, yay!), so while I can only relate what I smelled, it’s up to you, dear reader, how seriously you take my opinions on smell. I have noticed certain things smelling a little off from what they smelled like before, but not everything.

Anyway, more recently I have found myself liking rooiboses less and less, and so I can’t say I was looking forward to this one, but I had wanted to try it so badly, I figured I’d better go through with it now that I have it.

So, with all that said, on to the tea itself. After it cooled enough to drink, the medicinal smell had dumbed down quite a bit, which was a relief. I still couldn’t quite smell the berries. My first sip wasn’t that impressive, but after a few sips I was finding that the honey did actually cover some of the rooibos flavors that I’d been shying away from lately. Rooibos just tastes too sharply metallic for me to really get into it anymore, and I can’t tell if it’s my tastes actually changing, or if this is just a pregnancy thing. Anyway, it’s definitely a well-blended tea- the more it cools, the more hints of strawberry and blueberry I get. I’m wondering how this would do iced.

I added a little milk halfway through the cup, but the tea had cooled so much that this hardly made a difference. Might try that earlier on next time and see what happens. Anyway, in overview, I’m not saying it’s my favorite, but I can definitely tell it’s a well-balanced tea that ended up being rather enjoyable.

As a side note, the hubby suggested that perhaps I should try to get more green rooiboses, since they don’t seem to offend me (I ADORE Teavana’s Rooibos Peach Bloom). I think an experiment is in order… Anybody got any good ones to suggest?

Wow! Peach-Y! I already have a peach black tea, so when this one came in my happy bag, I wasn’t all that excited about it. However, when I opened the bag and got THAT aroma… it had my full attention. It was like someone stuck a fresh peach right into the bag with the tea. And it was clearly a WHITE peach aroma, very distinctly, which earned it extra points. :)

The brew did not disappoint AT ALL. As I was sipping, I could almost taste the flesh of the peach. The peach flavor even went through that odd morphing of flavor that real peaches do—the flesh tastes different as you travel inward from the skin to the pit. All of those nuances were represented in there. Thoroughly impressive!

Tea of the morning. :) Prepared black, with a little less sugar than normal. This tea didn’t smell like it needs much sweetening.

The loose leaf is VERY marzipan! I’m not a fan of the texture of marzipan, but I love the smell, so I didn’t mind. I also smell the almond, and a little of the flower petals. My husband was very intrigued by the candied violets, which are present only sparingly in HUGE chunks. I made sure to get one of those in the infuser. :) After steeping, the black tea smell comes through to bind all those scents together. The marzipan is definitely present still, while the almond seems to have faded a little bit. Wonder if this foretells anything for the taste.

In the first few sips, YES, there’s marzipan in there all right. The candied violets are there in the flavor as well. However, I’m not getting a very almond-y taste. Despite the fact that marzipan is MADE from almond paste, it never tastes very much like almonds to me, so I guess I was hoping that this tea would have more almond flavor—after all, there are almond pieces galore, along with the marzipan. I do like that the floral notes come through; after all, the name of the tea is Amandine ROSE.

The overall effect is a very creamy, sweet brew, with a somewhat astringent aftertaste. I was hoping that this would be an adequate replacement for my ever-dwindling supply of Almond Biscotti, which Teavana has discontinued, but it doesn’t look like it holds the same appeal for me. I won’t be having this one with shortbread or scones anytime soon. I will, however, drink it when I’m looking for something sweet but not fruity or caramel-y.

Backlogging… again. I made this tisane Sunday night, per request from the hubby. The smell from the bag is a little hard to figure out. It’s DEFINITELY a rooibos, but beyond that, I can only smell little hints of flavoring here and there. There doesn’t seem to be a very even stuff-to-rooibos ratio; just a few pink peppercorns, cinnamon bits, and cardamom pods peeking out at you here and there.

I had to make this one to go, because I had a class to go teach that evening. After sipping it a couple of times in the car, I pondered that I couldn’t really detect anything ‘tropical’ in this tisane. I wanted to… but it wasn’t strong enough. I can see in the ingredient list that it’s got some orange flavoring, but I didn’t get it at all. The flavor of the rooibos—which was good quality rooibos, don’t get me wrong—just took over everything, even the peppercorns. I did get a hint of cardamom, but not enough for me to call this a chai flavored tisane. The name sounds fascinating, but the flavors just aren’t there, and I’m afraid I don’t like just straight rooibos flavor enough to give this one a very high rating.

Tea of the morning backlog. I was looking for a chai, and we’re running ghastly low on my favorite chai, and plus, this chai had been on my shelf for a while. Apparently, it had been there too long, and I, having not stored it properly slaps self on wrist didn’t help.

So, long story short, it didn’t really end up tasting like chai. It didn’t even really taste like a decent quality black tea, sad to say. I noticed, as I was putting it in the infuser, that it was a CTC type black, so that probably had something to do with it. I more than half blame myself for this bad experience, firstly because I didn’t drink it as quickly as I probably should have, and secondly because I didn’t take care to store it properly. However, some small part of me thinks that it should still have tasted more like chai than it did. Like, the piece of king cake that I had this morning as part of my breakfast tasted more like cinnamon than this tea did. Anyway, meh. It served its function to a certain degree, in that it did keep me warm on the drive to school this morning. :)

All right, I’ll admit it, this tea is nothing special. The aroma of the steeped tea is very much like Lipton’s orange pekoe, although, being pregnant, my sense of smell may be off. Can’t really smell any of the green or oolong at all (even though I can VERY clearly see them in the tea bag—one thing I do have to give this tea props for is making you visually aware of what’s in it, if that counts for anything). However, the teas that they included in the blend must either be not very fresh or not very high quality… or both, I suppose. I tried to steep it at a lower temperature this time, to see if the green/oolong flavors would come out a little more. I gave it a scoop and a half of sugar, but nothing else.

As it cools, I do begin to smell a little of the green tea. Still no oolong.

In the first few sips, I get a bit more of an English Breakfast instead of orange pekoe flavor, with some Dragonwell-like astringency in the aftertaste. I’m glad that it doesn’t taste as Lipton-y as it smells, because I would probably throw it out if it did. As it cools, I can detect a few whispers of oolong here and there, but not enough to say that it really becomes present. It’s kind of like the middle child of the three—surrounded on both sides by the tasty and lovable youngest and the responsible, take-charge eldest. It can be hard for the middle child to get noticed sometimes, and I sympathize completely. However, these teas didn’t blend themselves, and since the middle child is actually my favorite of the three… I’d like it to shine a little more.

Since this tea was a Christmas gift from some cousins of mine, I’ll definitely drink it without complaining. Overall, it’s a rather satisfying, if rather run-of-the-mill, experience. Sometimes I’m not picky about complexity of flavor or quality, and when those moods strike, this will be the tea I go for.

Backlogging, again.

The hubby and I decided to experiment with making hash browns from scratch Sunday morning, and since I did a lot of the cooking, he picked the tea to go with breakfast. He selected this one, which I would never have thought of as a breakfast tea. Surprisingly, I liked it very, very much! We had sausages with the hash browns, and so it was the combination of all those savory/smoky flavors with the earthy sweetness of this tea that made breakfast a complete success!

I honestly don’t get the butterscotch flavor unless I’m really looking for it (which isn’t a whole lot of the time). However, the caramel is there in full force, and the pu’erh is a complex enough flavor that I don’t mind not having the butterscotch. I don’t miss it. It steeps to an interesting reddish color, with hints of purple/magenta, especially when milk is added, which I did (that’s just how we do it—if it’s a black tea getting drunk for breakfast, it’s going to have milk in it). Anyway, been a while since I had this tea, and I’m glad the hubby dug it out! :)