Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to try this this morning in place of the bag of Stash chai that I have some mornings. Mediocre at best. You know it’s not fantastic when your first sip tells you to do everything you can to cover up the taste of the tea so that you can drink it. Every bagged chai I’ve ever had is better than this.
Inspired by a review of another K-cup beverage, I decided to open one up to see what it’s made of. There’s a little paper liner on the inside of the cup, like a tiny paper garbage bag. The tea (1tsp!) sits inside, with a gap between the bottom of the liner and the bottom of the cup. The leaves look like granules of coffee, rather than leaves of tea.
Out of even more morbid curiosity, I decided to brew the leaves in my tea pot, to see if I could improve the taste by removing the packaging. I only let it brew for just over a minute, since the K-cup system doesn’t really have long brewing time and it looked very dark quite soon after adding water. The results are, shockingly, better, but not enough that I would go out of my way to open up a K-cup every time I wanted a cup of this.