Chai Wallah Margate – Autumn Blend
There’s not much of autumn left. We’re midway through November and now that Fireworks Night is over and Halloween decorations have been packed away, the build up to Christmas is officially underway. So, I knew that I was going to review Chai Wallah Margate Autumn Blend tea, I needed to do it pretty sharpish.
I’ve been putting it off, to be honest. Just looking at the Autumn Blend ingredients, I knew it wasn’t for me. For one, it’s a tea-less herbal blend. And as regular readers will know, I don’t have a lot of love for tisanes. I probably should eschew them all together, but I still have quite a few in the tea stash so this won’t be the last of them. (I bought this as part of Chai Wallah Margate’s Mixed Sample Collection.)
The second indication that this review probably wasn’t going to go well, was the fact that it contains liquorice. And as much as I love liquorice in other contexts, I find that in tea blends, it is invariably a bad idea.
This tea contains ginger, apple, rosehip, cinnamon, orange, pineapple, flavourings, and – of course – the dreaded liquorice. In its dried unsteeped form, it looks gorgeous – a delightful little potpourri in a range of autumnal colours. There are chunks of crystallised ginger in here that you can pick out a nibble if you’re so inclined. Which I was.
Once brewed though, Autumn Blend tea inevitably tastes of liquorice. Honestly, you can bang all the warming spices and exotic fruits you want in a blend, but once you add liquorice to the mix, all you’ve got is something that’s too goshdarn liquorice-y.
I love Chai Wallah Margate. They are one of my favourite teamongers, and their honest-to-goodness Camelia Sinensis blends are amazing. If you’re a fan of liquorice, spice and fruit, caffeine-free tisanes, you might want to give Autumn Blend tea a whirl. But I think it’s fair to say when the wallahs of Chai Wallah Margate were putting Autumn Blend together, I really wasn’t their target market.
Today’s featured book is Possession by A S Byatt. Just because the cover looks Autumn-y.
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