Bird & Blend – Pina Colada and Milk Oolong Chai
Christmas is hurtling towards like a big, festive juggernaut and, as followers on my Instagram account will already know, I am yet again marking Advent with a Bird & Blend Advent tea calendar.
We’re one week in and thus far we’ve had: Gingerbread Chai, Chocolate Digestive, Rhubarb and Custard, Snowball Hot Cocoa, Pina Colada, Earl Grey Creme and Milk Oolong Chai.
The eagle-eyed and elephant-memoried amongst you will notice that a quite a few of these have already been reviewed here on this blog. But the week has brought two brand-new (to me) teas, Pina Colada and Milk Oolong Chai, so let’s see what I made of them, shall we?
Pina Colada
Do you like Pina Colada? And getting caught in the rain? Personally, I don’t like either of those things. I’m not impressed with the making love scenario in Rupert Holmes’ song either. Midnight’s way past my bedtime and sand dunes are a very uncomfortable place for sexual shenanigans.
I’m not a big fan of Bird & Blend’s Pina Colada tea either. It’s a fruity tisane so it was a let-down as soon as I saw the orange-coloured tin on the little box. (I really like the little pictures of tea tins on the advent boxes, by the way. Excellent work Bird & Blend design team!)
It’s not QUITE as pointless as most non-tea teas because it has coconut and that gives it a little bit of oomph. The other ingredients are apple, rosehip, hibiscus, lemongrass, orange blossom, rose petals, orange peel, pineapple and natural flavouring.
That’s a lot of ingredients for something that’s basically an attractively scented slightly coconutty cup of hot water.
Milk Oolong Chai
This tea is a strange fish. By the time I’d finished the second cup (Bird & Blend put two teabags in every advent box which is very handy), I decided I did really like it, but it took me a little while to get there.
The thing is, it’s VERY milky. Milk to the max. Like drinking evaporated milk straight from the tin. It’s very disconcerting in such a delicately coloured tea with absolutely no milk in it.
The ingredients list doesn’t include ‘natural flavourings’ so the milk flavour is entirely from the milk oolong. “Well duh,” you might be saying, “it’s called milk oolong for a reason, Em. Milky flavour is this variety of tea’s USP.” Which is a fair point but, as I understand it, adding artificial flavours to regular oolongs and passing them off as milk oolongs is a commonplace shady practice in the teamongering community, so I figured it was worth mentioning.
This blend also contains ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, cocoa shells and chilli. And the warming spices complement the milky milkness of the chai quite beautifully. It’s not very spicy but that could be because the milk oolong is such a dominant flavour. Have I mentioned that this tea is super milky-tasting?
Ranking
Last year, I ranked the advent teas as I went along so you could see how, according to the Tea Fancier’s capricious pallette, they compared against one another. I shall, of course, be continuing that tradition. Here’s how things stand after the first week:
- Earl Grey Crème (6th Dec)
- Snowball Hot Cocoa (4th Dec)
- Chocolate Digestive (2nd Dec)
- Milk Oolong Chai (7th Dec)
- Gingerbread Chai (1st Dec)
- Rhubarb & Custard (3rd Dec)
- Pina Colada (5th Dec)
Today’s featured books are Drinking by John Cheever and The Perfect Christmas by Carolyn Bell.
This site uses Amazon Affiliate Links. If you click on an Amazon link from this page and make a purchase, I will – at no cost to you – earn a small commission.
