Dorchester Selection – Festive Teas
I’m nothing if not fickle. One minute I’m espousing the virtues of ethically produced tea and vowing to spend more money making sure that my brews are making the world a better place. The next minute, I’m purchasing a pack of 30 festive teas from Poundland for two quid.
I’m not saying that Dorchester Teas aren’t ethical. I’m just saying that there is literally no information about their tea sourcing on the internet. And I bought them in Poundland. For two quid. You can probably draw your own conclusions.
Ah well, you may be thinking, do they at least taste nice? Dear God, no. And if I’d given the matter more than two seconds thought before slipping them into my Poundland basket alongside, I don’t know, plasters or toilet bleach or something, I probably would have predicted that.
Nevertheless, I have tried them all and put together short reviews of each of the six flavours. Even though the Peppermint Flavoured Back Tea is the only one with ‘black’ in its name for some reason, all of the teas except for Chai Flavoured Green Tea, claim to contain black tea.
Vanilla Tea
The Vanilla one started off being quite pleasant to drink, mostly because I’m always up for a bit of vanilla flavour with my black tea. But by the time I was halfway through the cup, it became apparent there wasn’t much tea taste going on here. Finishing the whole cupful was actually a bit of a slog.
Not that these teas get much opportunity to impart tea flavour. The teabags are tiny and sparsely filled. (A consequence of buying them in Poundland, I should probably have foreseen.)
Peppermint Flavoured Black Tea
I was a bit wary of this one because I’ve found mint brews to be a bit cabbagey in the past. I like peppermint essence, but I’m not so keen on dried peppermint leaves. Happily, this brew shows that there is another option. Not tasting like mint at all. Or tea.
What does it taste like? I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t be distracted by the brown colour and concluded that it does actually taste like drinking hot tap water. I’ve compared herbal teas to cups of hot water before, but seriously, no-one before has managed it quite so comprehensively as this supposedly black tea-based brew here.
Orange Spice Tea
This one isn’t half bad. It’s about 47% bad, but that still makes it more drinkable than the others in the set. I think orange and spice flavours are very forgiving. They are doing a good job buoying up the scant tea flavour and I did manage to finish the cup and even slightly feel like I’d had a cup of tea afterwards. Not a good cup of tea, obviously, but I am setting the bar very low here.
Apple Cinnamon Tea
You can see why I was lured into buying this tea selection. I mean they all sound like teas I would enjoy. There’s black tea and spices and stuff. This black tea with apple and cinnamon flavour has two of my favourite things in the description. (And I don’t have any particular problem with apples either.)
But once again, my fussy nature means that I want my tea to actually taste of tea. And this one doesn’t. It slightly tastes of cinnamon and there’s a sort of background sweetness that I am going to charitably assume is supposed to be apple flavour. But it really, really doesn’t taste like it’s had even a passing acquaintance with a Camelia sinensis plant.
Chai Flavoured Green Tea
This is the only green tea in the collection so I dutifully boiled it at 80° because, whatever it may sound like, I do actually want to give these teas the best chance to wow me.
There’s something going on in this cup but I’m not sure what. It doesn’t taste of masala chai or green tea but unlike some of the other contenders, it does taste of something. I couldn’t work out what it was though. I briefly contemplated making another cup of the stuff to try and figure it out, but whatever it tasted of wasn’t particularly pleasant, and honestly, I wasn’t curious enough to repeat the process.
Wild Berry Tea
I left this one til last to try because it seemed like the one I would like the least. And do you know what, it was absolutely delicious! Ha ha, just kidding. It was, of course, as pointlessly tasteless as the rest of the collection. There was a bit of fruitiness happening but absolutely no indication that the promised black tea had any hand in the blending process other than, perhaps, to provide the colour. It tastes like a bog-standard red fruit tisane that has been languishing in a drawer for a decade.
So what have I learned from this experience? Look, it would be easy to say, with hindsight, that buying a bunch of teabags from Poundland was bound to end in disappointment. But what if it hadn’t? What if I’d found an untapped goldmine of tea-based wonders at bargain prices?
And it really does feel like they targeted me specifically with this product. It’s like AI skimmed through all my Tea Fancier posts and constructed the six tea flavours most likely to lure me in. There was chocolate and warming spices and not a single caffeine-free fruit option in the set. As it turned out, they were all even more tasteless and untea-like than actual fruit tisanes, but clearly, I wasn’t to know that.
Whisper International, the company behind the Dorchester brand, have got my £2 now, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. Even I haven’t got the chutzpah to ask Poundland for a refund on the grounds that this no-name brand was of insufficient quality.
If however, some utterly tasteless tea sounds like just the sort of thing that you need in your life, you’ll be excited to know that the tea is currently on sale, and you can get the whole shebang for a mere £1. Perhaps you could purchase it as a gift for someone you vehemently dislike? Or you could ask me to send you my leftovers, of course. You’ll need to be quick, though, because the Dorchester Festive Tea Selection is headed directly for the bin. Then maybe I can put this whole sorry episode behind me.
