Tick Tock – Earl Grey Rooibos
Online reviews for Tick Tock Earl Grey Rooibos fall into two camps. The first is rooibos fans applauding the nice subtle edge that bergamot brings to the rooibos and the second is those who brought the tea as a caffeine-free alternative to regular Earl Grey and are complaining that it tastes nothing like it.
Well, no, it doesn’t. It tastes like rooibos. It is unashamedly a rooibos tea with a little bit of bergamot. So, if rooibos isn’t your thing, you probably want to stay clear of it.
The bergamot flavour is subtle but it’s there. I drank a cup of Earl Grey Rooibos alongside Tick Tock’s bog-standard blend for comparison. (And you know, I really should review a regular rooibos tea one of these days. I feel like all my rooibos reviews are blends pretending to be birthday cakes, apple crumbles and other things off the dessert trolley.) Tick Tock Earl Grey Rooibos has a flowery flavour to it that takes the edge off some of the rooibos’s natural sweetness. It’s still a mellow blend (mellowness is pretty much what rooibos does) but the floral taste does take it in a new and very welcome direction.
I can see this one being a regular on the Tea Fancier tea shelf. I mostly drink rooibos just before bed. (And when I say ‘just before’ I mean it. Like when I fancy a cuppa half an hour before I plan to turn in for the night. I’m not one of those people who stop drinking caffeine after lunch.)
Much of my current rooibos stash seems to contain ginger, chilli and other things that are possibly not conducive to a good night’s sleep. Earl Grey Rooibos, on the other hand, fits the bill for a pre-bedtime beverage nicely.
Tick Tock is probably the most famous purveyor of rooibos teas in the UK. Their catalogue includes vanilla, chai and green rooiboses (rooiboi?). Of course, these days their name is more associated with the social media video hosting platform. At least it is with me. I keep accidentally typing ‘TikTok’ and then having to correct it.
This is a bit unfair given that Tick Tock the teamonger has been around since 1903. At least they can take comfort in the fact that they’ll probably still be around doing their thing in 2103 when TikTok is long forgotten, and the human race is having memes directly beamed into its eyeballs by sentient omniscient robots.
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This is actually one of my favourite earl grey teas, I prefer it to normal earl grey. Dragonfly teas also do an earl grey rooibos which is lovely as well! I think the Tick Tock one is stronger, and I always think it smells like lavender, despite there being no lavender in it.