Yawn Advent Calendar Day 8 – Apple Crumble
Today’s Yawn Brew advent offering was a fruity tisane blend, and as there are only four such ‘teas’ in the whole calendar, I’m trying not to be grumpy about it.
Yesterday, I complained that there weren’t enough blends inspired by British foodstuffs, and this one is called Apple Crumble, so it ticks that box at least. It doesn’t taste of apple crumble, mind. It’s a very dark berry-y number containing apple, hibiscus, rosehips, cinnamon, elderberry, cloves, cranberries and natural flavours.
And, you know, it’s fairly pleasant in a hot Ribena-y way. But it’s not tea. I simply don’t care enough about hot fruit infusions to review them. Lots of people feel like that about tea, of course. They’ll say that PG Tips tastes just the same as fancy brands. And that’s fair enough, I guess. To me, teas from different regions produced in different ways taste vastly different and I get jolly excitable about it.
So, why is Camelia sinensis conflated with this dried fruit business all the time? It’s almost impossible to find a tea advent calendar that doesn’t include tealess tisanes. Nobody’s sneaking carob buttons and fruit pastilles into chocolate advent calendars and getting away with it. You don’t buy a coffee advent calendar and find out that half the windows have chicory and dried mushroom coffee-substitutes.
Yet this is par for the course for tea lovers. In fairness, this year’s advent tea supplier, Yawn Brew, are better at making this distinction than most. They sell a Supreme Single Origin Tea advent calendar that contains proper grown-up teas like Darjeeling White Tip and Ti Guan Yin. Maybe I should get that one next year. It’ll mean forgoing frivolous black tea blends pretending to be bakery products, though. If I’m non-serious enough to want mince pie- and gingerbread-inspired tea products, then it looks like I’m going to have to accept that my tea advent calendar contains some ‘teas’ that are simply not worthy of the name.
Current advent tea ranking:
- Pumpkin Whoopie (7th Dec)
- Pancake Stack (1st Dec)
- Cinnapple Green (6th Dec)
- Santa’s Milk & Cookies (3rd Dec)
- Sweet Ginger (4th Dec)
- Candy Cane Popcorn (5th Dec)
- Apple Crumble (8th Dec)
- Toffee Apple (2nd Dec)
