Candy Cane Herbal Tea

Sipdown 113-2021
This was a lingering packet from the advent that I just never really felt like drinking. But, I woke up with a bit of a sore throat, so it seemed like an appropriate time to finally drink it. I added a bit of honey, and it’s fine. Pretty much as average as a peppermint tea can get. Not candy cane at all. Just peppermint.

I decided to try another herbal tea from Plum Deluxe. I got back from my Sunday drive to charge the battery in this cold weather and picked this one out. I liked the last one from Plum Deluxe and Candy Cane sounded good. I did not enjoy nearly as much as last night’s tea. This one was a green rooibos base. In don’t always love rooibos, but green rooibos is usually less woody.

/i guess it was less woody, but it also tasted a bit grassy. I do not like grassy either. The mint was pleasant, but it did not make up for the rooibos. Sadly, this one was a miss for me.

Plum Deluxe Advent Calendar – Day 24

My very last advent tea for 2020! And my tea of choice while watching The Polar Express tonight.

Meh, this one is pretty lame compared to other candy cane teas. I taste a lot of the base and the peppermint leaf, which makes it taste closer to a plain mint herbal tisane than a candy cane-flavored one. I do get a little bit of the slightly sharper and cooler peppermint flavoring as well. For some reason I’m also getting a subtle fruity note at the end of the sip, and I thought I saw a dried cranberry in my sample, which is odd given it’s not listed as an ingredient…

So it’s not great, mostly tastes like a decent mint tisane with some green rooibos mixed in.

As for the advent calendar, it was an interesting one. I agree with Mastress Alita that the amount per sample seemed to vary widely, and I think that’s because it was portioned to be the same weight per packet. Obviously that’s a mistake, especially for heavy fruit tisanes. There was a decent variety of bases, though I would have liked to see more green and white teas, and perhaps an oolong. It felt like a lot of herbals to me. Most of the teas were fine but nothing special, and I’m struggling to remember any that stood out to me. I liked the packaging with the little purple envelopes, and it was nice to see an unorthodox color. This calendar was $35, which seems quite affordable to me. It was nice to have an introduction to so many of Plum Deluxe’s teas without paying their usual (high) prices. I’m not sure if I would recommend it, though…

(today’s advent teas: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJMA9FugSnn/)

The dry tea has a very fresh, sweet peppermint aroma. As the tea steeps, in addition to those notes I’m also smelling a somewhat dry herbaceous aroma.

I am getting a cooling peppermint, and there is a sweetness there that isn’t present in a straight peppermint tea (of which I drink a lot, for health reasons!) But I feel like it needs a bit more… oomph. It isn’t sweet/creamy enough to really mimic peppermint candy, and while I normally love green rooibos, here it feels a bit out of place, since I am tasting a dry, hay-like flavor beneath the peppermint. I’d be okay with this as a mint rooibos blend (it’s something different than the abundance of choco-mint red rooibos blends), but candy cane? I am just not really getting candy cane from it.

This was my only advent this year (I did purchase the Bird & Blend and DAVIDsTEA matcha ones, but did not “do them” as advents, I just ripped them open, yanked the samplers, and stuck them into my cupboard for smoothie purposes, heh), and also my first time doing the Plum Deluxe advent. Since I don’t care at all about advent packaging (which is probably obvious considering what I did to the B&B and DAVIDsTEA ones), I only got the teas in the closed envelopes, and I’d say it’s a good price for samplers considering most Plum Deluxe teas sell for $7 an ounce, so $35 for 24 different tea samplers is a pretty good deal as far as money. I found the flavors to be pretty varied as well (though it did seem a bit nut-heavy early in the advent… that tapered a bit later on). The majority were herbals, which would be either a pro or a con depending on your preferences (though maybe that changes from year to year?) I’d say the biggest con for me was inconsistent amounts of tea in the packages — some herbals made very weak cups, and some blacks came out incredibly astringent, because the leaf portions/ingredient distribution was so iffy from day to day. My personal favorites of the advent this year were: Decaf House Blend, Fogcutter, Porch Sippin’ Pecan, Coconut A La Creme, Kiwi Coco-Cherry, Holiday Embrace, Blood Orange Reflection Tea, Winter Wonderland White Chai, Raspberry Linzer Cookie. My most disliked? Not counting the inclusion of a banana tea (which I can’t drink due to severe food aversion issues), I’d say Buttery Shortbread! Banana tea aside, none of my cups were undrinkable, though!

Advent Day 24

Candy cane? Hmmm…. I’m getting a more savory mint than a sweet mint. And it’s dull instead of a sharper flavor mint. It smells very herb like and almost has a broth flavor to it. This can’t be right! I’m not into it, but it’s a source of heat and I’m in my cold studio at the moment trying to get my printer set up to run a new design with chilled fingers and I need that heat!

Plum Deluxe Advent Calendar – Day 24

This is the second of my two Candy Cane teas for the day. The first was the Candy Cane Matcha by DAVIDsTEA, which was awesome. This is a completely different take as it is a caffeine-free version on a green rooibos.

This one is more on the minty side. You get the base coming through a touch but not overly so since its green rooibos. I just wish there was more vanilla sweetness since its not quite reading Candy Cane to me.

They had this one in the advent calendar two years in a row, but I remember it being tastier last time. This time, it’s minty, but not really clear enough to be candy cane. I’ve had candy cane teas that are spot on, and this one just isn’t. There’s mint and rooibos, but it’s not perfect at all. Just sort of muddled and meh.