Chocolate Rosemary Caramel

This tastes surprisingly lovely. The rosemary gives it a sophistication. I don’t taste chocolate, but the caramel is really nice. I might be coming around to rosemary in tea! This was great both warm and cold with sweetener and milk. I never do this, but I actually had to order some of this right after finishing the sample getanzt shared with me, despite the fact that I prefer not to buy from Plum Deluxe. It’s just that good.

Day 8 of the Plum Deluxe herbal advent calendar. This is so fragrant as soon as I open the packet! It has really powerful chocolate and sweet caramel notes that translate beautifully into the brew. I’m not really noticing the rosemary but that’s ok given how tasty it is otherwise (which is funny because the other tasting notes find the rosemary very strong – I don’t know what’s going on here!). I made the first cup with no additions and it was rich and flavorful all on its own. I thought this would be great as an oat milk latte but it was actually better with no additives! The oat milk somehow flattens the chocolate and caramel flavors, making them less robust and sweet. Better to just drink it straight.

I picked up a sample of this because the combination sounded intriguing. However, the rosemary seems to come through much stronger than the other flavors which was a little weird for me. While I love rosemary in baked goods, I apparently don’t like it as a strong flavor in tea.

Had this at the start of the week.

I picked it up from Plum Deluxe because I do tend to like herbaceous teas a lot, and I thought the combination of chocolate and rosemary was very unique sounding. The rosemary ended up being a lot stronger in the steeped taste than I would have guessed it would be – even outweighing the taste of the chocolate, but I liked it a lot. There’s a beautiful pine-y flavour to rosemary that makes my heart sing and I also think it works quite well with the more nutty and woody flavoured of the honeybush and rooibos in the blend.

I didn’t really get caramel at all and to be totally honest I was skeptical that I would given how strong both of these two other flavours (chocolate/rosemary) can be, and how hard it is to execute a caramel flavour in a tea blend in the first place. Most of the time it just comes off as sweetness. The chocolate was nice – not too strong, and I don’t love chocolate in general so I thought this was the right balance of chocolate for me personally. I do think anyone ordering this because of the chocolate might feel a little bit let down, especially if the idea of strong rosemary is a cause of trepidation for them.

I’ll finish this easily, I think – but may not be something I look at replacing.