English Tea Shop – Chocolate, Rooibos & Vanilla
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Well reader, you find me all of a tiswas in my Tea Fancier Mansion today. It’s this here English Tea Shop Chocolate Rooibos and Vanilla that’s done it. And if you’ll permit me, I’d like to relate the story of how I got to this current state of confusion.
On my recent holiday, thrilled and over excited by the opportunity to shop in real live non-virtual shops, I went on a bit of a tea purchasing spree. In my giddy enthusiasm, I didn’t even realise at first that I’d bought three different products by the same company: English Tea Shop.
This led to a bit of duplication, most especially Chocolate Rooibos and Vanilla, which appears in all three of the collections I purchased. ‘No matter,’ I thought. ‘You can’t have too much Chocolate Rooibos and Vanilla tea.’ (Well you probably can, but fourteen teabags ain’t it.)
You’ll see from the photo that the designs of the tea packaging are quite different. When I made my first cup of this tea, I used the purpley colour packet with a hot air balloon on it from the No Brew Like Home collection. However, when I took my customary tea-and-a book-photo, I used a brown tea bag sachet from the Luxury Tea Collection box because I thought it would look more aesthetically pleasing.
I very much enjoyed that first cup of Chocolate Rooibos and Vanilla. Sturdy rooibos, sweet vanilla and subtle chocolatey notes all played nicely together in my tea cup and made for a very pleasant imbibing experience.
Flushed with the success of the first one, I swiftly made myself a second cup, using the brown tea bag sachet from the photo. And that’s when it got weird. The second cup, my friends, really wasn’t that nice at all. Gone with the toasty rich harmonies and instead, I had a cup of rooibos that was, quite frankly, hard work to get through.
I have tried several more cups in the spirit of scientific research and can confirm that the two versions are very different from one another. The third type of this blend I have is silky tea temple affair in a little pyramid-shaped box. Happily, this tastes like the nice version. (Although, confusingly, in a slight name change, it calls itself ‘Rooibos, Chocolate and Vanilla‘.)
Consulting the ingredients list confirms that while the brown tea bag contains the same ingredients as purple-hot-air-balloon/silky-pyramid-thing, the quantities used are quite different. Vanilla pod percentage, for example, has dropped from 3% to 0.5%. I probably should have made a graph to demonstrate. All of the tea collections have expiry dates in the first half of 2023. So there’s no clue there as to which one might be the newer version and which is the older version.
So you see my problem. I can’t in good conscience recommend this tea, even though half my Chocolate Rooibos and Vanilla stash is delicious. I just don’t know what version you’re going to get.
You’ll have noticed that I’ve given this to three stars, rather than going down what would probably be the more sensible route of grading the two recipes separately, but I can’t be bothered. Quite frankly, I’ve had it with English Tea Shop and their inconsistent teabags*. I’m just going to throw three stars in its general direction and walk away.
* I don’t mean I’m done with English Tea Shop forever obviously. I still have dozens more of their teas to try.
Today’s featured book is Lost Magic: The Very Best of Brian Moses, and I don’t know why that is either
