#bag tea

Even if you had never seen the label, you would know this tea is herbal from the second you opened the lid. The scent is floral and honey, like you might expect from the ingredients list. Honestly I think this is the first time I've seen "honey piece" on any ingredients label, but maybe I don't pay enough attention. At any rate, this tea is definitely honest.

This tea steeps to be a dark yellowish colour. It smells similar to the tea bags, though the sweetness of the honey is a little more obvious now.

The flavour is very floral, though a bit of the edge that most herbal teas have is gone, replaced with a bit of sweetness. It has a very clean flavour with no aftertaste. It's actually quite refreshing, and is more thirst-quenching then some other teas.

Double packaging. Yawn.

Once again, I do really like the design of the box for Twinings teas. It isn't too clunky but it does properly stay closed when you want it to.

Anyway, the tea bags smell very strongly of vanilla. It's sweet, almost a bit too sweet. However, that mellows somewhat once it actually steeps, as is usually the case. It is still pretty sweet though.

The finished product has a nice warm brown colour, similar to plain black tea.

The taste is a subtle vanilla, as you might expect. It's fairly sweet, but has a very brief bitter aftertaste so that it isn't overpowering. Honestly it isn't as flavourful as it could be, but then if it were any stronger I think it would get into disgusting territory.

As is the case for most teas, I drink this one black. It is nice with a splash of milk, but it make much of a difference in my opinion. I think adding sugar could make this too sweet, but that's up to you of course.

These tea bags smell very sweet. No surprises there. The is double packaging. No surprises there.

Interesting enough, this tea smells more like chocolate than mint. This is the opposite of how mint chocolate teas usually are, in my experience. I like this, because while I enjoy mint it isn't my favourite flavour, and there are so many mint chocolate teas in the world it's nice when they differ in more ways than just packaging.

This tea steeps to be dark brown, like black tea. It retains its sweet, cocoa scent through steeping.

Taste wise, it's what you'd expect. It tastes lightly of chocolate with a slight mint backdrop. Honestly there isn't much else to say because that is really all I thought it would be, and it looks like I was right. I find this tea has a little bit of an odd aftertaste - like how chocolate sometimes feels like it sticks to your gums for a little while after you eat it. However, this tea also doesn't come with a blob of cocoa sludge at the bottom of every cup like some other chocolatey tea do.

I have to confess: I did not buy this tea. I found this tea in our tea cupboard, way in the back. When I asked my roommate about it, she told me she had bought it a couple months ago and then forgotten about it, but I was allowed to have as much as I wanted. Therefore, this review seemed called for.

I have never heard of The Confidence Tea, and to be honest I'm not sure if it's actually the company name. The package is rather vague and confusing on that point. However, it is desperate for me to know that the tea leaves in this product come from Japan, making them very rare and Japanese. Apparently, this tea is "a must" and inspires "sharing, relaxation integrity and authenticity." How does it do this and what does that even mean? That is a mystery for our time.

Ok, so the weird inspirational messages are kind of standard for tea packaging, so I can't harp on it too much. However, I can harp on the steeping instructions. Behold:

"Add one tea bag of Japanese GREEN TEA [emphasis theirs] to one cup of boiling water. Let tea steep for 3 to 5 minutes."

If you know anything about green tea, you can spot one massive problem with that and one unnecessarily long steeping time. At first I thought maybe the other ingredients in the tea had something to do with these instructions, so I followed them exactly once. The result was a horrendously burnt cup of green tea that made me nauseous.

I might sound pretentious here, but the thing is that every other kind of green tea from a box that I have ever tried has always had proper instructions on it, even from President's Choice or other cheaper companies. I think a lot of people are familiar with the proper preparation of green tea just because it's really not that hard to find information on it, and if you burn your tea you get a gross mess and most people want to avoid it. There's not really an excuse for a company to give the wrong instructions on the preparation of their product, especially when green tea is a pretty normal thing for a lot of people to have kicking around their houses.

Anyway, on to the actual tea.

When you ignore the box and steep it properly, it looks and smells exactly like any other green tea. I don't know what else to say. And it tastes . . . like generic green tea. That's it. Nothing special, nothing horribly awful, just green tea. It's not anything particularly strong, it just kind of is. It also tastes or smells nothing like black currant.

In my experience, most people associate Tazo with Starbucks. It is the brand of choice for that chain when it comes to bag tea, it seems, as they sell it both by the cup and by the box (at least at the stores near where I live). Because I am not a big Starbucks person, I'd never gotten around to actually trying Tazo until this particular kind was on sale in the supermarket near my house. I didn't even realize this brand was carried by big name grocery stores until then, so expect to see more reviews of this brand next year, when I've had a chance to try more.

Anyway, on to the actual review.

I could see right off the bat why Starbucks uses this particular brand. The box has minimal designs and mostly just text in a clean font, with a couple photos of the ingredients (my grainy photo does not give you a good idea, unfortunately). It fits well with the chain's overall aesthetic. The inside of the box has a cute gray pattern, but there's double packaging, so I can't feel good about it.

Also, I'm a little iffy about the name "Zen." I don't want to sound like the "politically correct police" or anything, but the word "Zen" gets tossed around a lot in marketing and it always bothers me. It seems sort of disrespectful to use the name of a spiritual belief system that is very much alive to sell products like this. If anyone who knows more about Zen than I do (probably everyone, let's be honest) has any feelings about this, please let me know!

The tea bags smell mostly like lemongrass to me. After steeping it doesn't have much of a scent at all, but I find that is usually the case with green tea based teas. The steeped tea is a golden brown colour.

And what does it taste like? Well, not a whole lot, it turns out. Mostly just green tea. The other ingredients do mellow out the harshness that green tea's flavour can have. It's nice.

And that's about it. It's nice.