Last Chance To See: Bird & Blend’s Soon-To-Be-Discontinued Teas – Part One

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Bird & Blend – Terry’s Tea, Earl’s Paradise, Honey Bee Beautiful and Hot Mama Jama

Bird & Blend tea are “refreshing their tea wall”. This means that they are introducing (and reintroducing) a bunch of new teas to their extensive tea inventory. It also means that they are discontinuing many of their existing blends. You can find a list of teas that won’t be available after the 8th of May on their website.

This tea wall revamp is a bit of a nuisance if you are someone with a huge teas-to-try backlog, who likes to write reviews and who includes links to buy the teas on their website. If you are specifically me, in fact.

I went through the tea stash and I have seven teas from Bird & Blend’s execution list that I haven’t yet reviewed.

These are Terry’s Tea, Earl’s Paradise, Honey Bee Beautiful, Hot Mama Jama, Affogatea, Pink Prosecco and Coco Chai No.5. (A couple of these are free sample tea bags sent with tea orders. I love that Bird & Blend always do this.)

So, I need to crack on and review them all sharpish. Mostly because I (and indeed you) need to decide if there are any to stock up on before they are removed from Bird & Blend‘s tea shelves forever. (Or at least until they decide to restock them again later down the line.)

Here are my reviews of the first four teas on the soon-to-be-axed list. Reviews for the other three will follow shortly.

Terry’s Tea

First up is Terry’s Tea, which is, supposedly, a chocolate orange tea. As far as I’m concerned Bird & Blend can whip this one off their tea shelves as quick as they like. It’s horrible.

I started with this one because I thought I would like it. I love chocolate teas and I love a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. You can’t go wrong surely?

Well, as I learned the other day with Chai Wallah Margate’s Chocolate Orange Black, it’s entirely possible to go wrong with a chocolate orange tea. And weirdly this blend is horrible in a very similar way to Chai Wallah Margate’s version.

Terry’s Tea contains Sri Lankan black tea, cocoa shells, apple pieces rosehip, orange blossom, orange peel, calendula petals, sunflower petals, and natural flavouring. It tastes predominantly of hibiscus. This was also the problem with Chai Wallah Margate’s Chocolate Orange Black.

Why is this? How have two different teamongers – presumably completely independently – come to the conclusion that Chocolate Oranges basically taste of generic red fruity tisane? Maybe this is what everybody’s Terry’s Chocolate Orange experience is like and I’m just not getting it.

This oddly-pink-coloured hibiscus tea concoction was – as you can tell -not a big hit. Bye-bye Terry’s Tea you won’t – by me, at least – be missed.

Earl’s Paradise

It’s weird having a tea’s imminent discontinuation as a focus for a tea review. I’m finding myself judging a tea on the basis of whether or not I’m okay with Bird & Blend no longer stocking it.

This is despite the fact that (a) the decision has already been made and the die has been cast. And (b) I have absolutely no sway over Bird & Blend’s product development decisions.

Earl’s Paradise is a tropical twist on traditional Earl Grey. It contains Sri Lankan black tea, papaya pieces, strawberry pieces, strawberries, lime leaves, jasmine blossom and natural flavouring.

I am okay with Bird & Blend’s decision to retire Earl’s Paradise. This isn’t because I dislike it. Far from it. This is a really delicious brew. The thing is, for all its fruity and flowery additions, it’s basically a cup of Earl Grey. It isn’t really doing anything that other Earl Greys aren’t doing already.

I shall cheerfully finish off the rest of the packet but, once it’s gone, I don’t foresee there being an Earl’s Paradise-shaped hole in my life.

Honey Bee Beautiful

Honey Bee Beautiful is a rooibos and honeybush blend. I haven’t tried honeybush before. Like rooibos, honeybush only grows in South Africa and it is often compared to rooibos in terms of taste. I’m not sure where the rooibos ends and honeybush begins in this here Honey Bee Beautiful, but I do know I really liked the overall effect. I think I need to seek out some straight-up honeybush and see how we get on together.

Honey Bee Beautiful is absolutely delicious. In addition to rooibos and honeybush, it contains chamomile, nettle leaves, cornflowers, calendula petals and ‘flavour’.

Now, normally chamomile is one of my tea ingredient nemeses. I can’t abide this stuff usually and I’ve gone on record saying that it tastes of wee. Yet the inclusion of chamomile in this blend works surprisingly well. And you can properly taste the chamomile flavour here. I’m not just tolerating it because it’s been masked by other stuff. It’s like I finally found a context in which chamomile makes sense.

Obviously – given this tea’s name – this brew comes imbued with a delightful honey flavour. There’s no actual honey in it and I’m not sure whether the honeyness comes entirely from the honeybush or whether this is the work of the ‘flavours’. I shall know better when I have carried out my extensive scientific honeybush research.

I really enjoyed this tea and shall be sorry to see it go when Bird & Blend revamp their tea wall on the 8th of May. I shall be hot-footing it to the Bird & Blend website to check whether there is any left in stock and – hopefully – stockpiling it for my tea shelf.

Hot Mama Jama

Hot Mama Jama is quite odd. But in a really good way. It contains Chinese green tea, lemongrass, lime leaves, chilli seeds, hibiscus, rosehip, apple, orange peel, passionfruit, mango, lime and flavourings.

I was a bit wary of encountering the ol’ hibiscus, rosehip and apple combo again. I don’t think Bird & Blend have ever met a tea blend where they didn’t try to shoehorn those three ingredients in. They turn up everywhere.

Happily, there are so many other flavours going on here that our ‘generic red tisane’ trio barely get a look in. The main flavours here are green tea, lime and chilli (with a bit of fruitiness hovering around the edges). It’s a refreshing – and rather exciting – combination.

The lime makes the whole thing rather pleasingly sour, and the chilli gives the tea the kick that I was hoping for (without making the whole brew taste like a cup of hot sauce). And despite ten (10) other things on the ingredients list, the green tea completely manages to hold its own.

Hot Mama Jama is a bit like when you make a meal out of random leftover ingredients in the refrigerator, and the dish turns out to be amazing and beyond your wildest expectations. I am not sure why all the ingredients in Hot Mama Jama work so well together, but they really do. It’s the cheese and jam sandwich of the tea world.

It’s a shame to lose this one from the Bird & Blend tea shelves. I hope some of the new teas which will be introduced on the 8^th of May will be as delightfully bonkers as this one.

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