Teapigs – Hot Cross Bun Tea
Just before Easter last year, I launched this website with Bird & Blend’s Hot Cross Bun tea. It wasn’t the most positive opening tea review. Bird & Blend’s Hot Cross Bun tea contained Lapsang Souchong and was therefore disgusting. (Lapsang Souchong always tastes like something has gone horribly wrong in the production process. It’s the tea equivalent of serving someone blackened toast.)
On the positive side, this years’ Good Friday effort, Teapigs’ Hot Cross Bun Tea, doesn’t contain any Lapsang Souchong. On the negative side, it doesn’t contain any actual tea either.
(Also, you can’t actually buy this tea on the website anymore. Sorry about that. I bought this tea at some point in the last 12 months (presumably in a sale) and kept it squirrelled away for Good Friday. And now it’s not there. Although there is a picture of it on their Easter Teas page.)
Hot Cross Bun is a herbal brew that contains apple, cinnamon, apple pomace, roasted chicory root, sweet blackberry leaves and flavourings.
You may be wondering “What the devil is ‘apple pomace’?”. It was a new word to me, and Wikipedia informs me that it is “the solid remains of fruit after pressing for juice or oil. It contains the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems of the fruit.” Which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to find in a fruit tea, to be honest. It’s strange that I haven’t come across the word before.
Sometimes herbal blends are a bit nothingy and taste mostly of hot water. Not so Hot Cross Bun which – if anything – has too much flavour. It’s a bit like drinking perfume (minus the alcohol content). The fruit and spices are rammed up to 11 here but unfortunately, with no tea notes at its base, for me, it doesn’t really go anywhere. It mostly tastes of undiluted apple squash.
What it doesn’t taste like – in any way – is hot cross buns. Look, Teapigs, it doesn’t how much cinnamon you throw at it, this is not a bun-flavoured tea.
Apparently, hating Hot Cross Bun flavoured teas is now an annual event. I look forward to seeing you all on the 7th of April 2023, when I will no doubt be reviewing another Hot Cross Bun tea I really don’t like.
Note: Lest you think I hate all hot cross bun teas, I really loved T2’s Baxter’s Buns tea which, while not explicitly a Hot Cross Bun tea does describe itself as having “all the fruity doughy goodness you would expect from a hot cross bun”. That one was smashing.
Today’s featured book is The Last Day of A Condemned Man by Victor Hugo which seemed appropriate.
