Dessert by Deb

I sipped this one down a while ago now. I remember liking it but wanting more out of the chai. I’d consider getting this one again on sale or if it was reformulated with more oomph

Mastress Alita’s Monthly Sipdown Challenge: a tea from a woman-owned company

Sipdown 2/27

Mastress Alita’s Monthly Sipdown Challenge: a tea with a name that begins with a Periodic Table abbreviation

Ba

This is probably one of my favorite of Deb’s blends. Tastes like a delicious blueberry almond muffin. There is a definite baked/pastry quality, with the blueberry and almond matching in intensity.

This round of steeping ended up with a lot less ginger than usual, and now I’m reminded of those little peaches and cream oatmeal packets. Those were always my favorite ones so I’m enjoying this cup!

I’m an absolute sucker for peach teas and this one is no different! It reminds me a lot of the peaches and cream oatmeal that you get in those variety packs, which is great because that’s always my favorite flavor!

The chai isn’t super strong here, which I think is a good thing. Full out chai would overwhelm the peach flavor. As is, they go together very nicely. I agree with other reviews that the ginger is a bit much, but not so much that it ruins the tea for me. Overall, I could see myself getting this again!

A tea flavored like your favorite pie – the prompt I went with in Mastress Alita’s Sipdown scavenger hunt. I haven’t actually had a lemon chiffon pie but I do like a lemon meringue pie and thought this may have been close. This is a lemon flavoured coconut tea. Does that make sense? There is some lemon, though not sweet or tart lemon like you’d find in a pie. Just lemon that’s there atop creamy coconut. There is also a butter crust element here that’s nice. It’s odd to be drinking a Deb tea and thinking it needs to be sweeter, but that’s where I’m at. Or maybe more tart. It needs to be something more.

Mastress Alita’s Sipdown Challenge January 2022: An Earl Grey

Something is super funky about this tea’s aroma. The lavender gives it a musty floral odor, the honey is sweet, and something(s) is (are) acidic sour: a fine recipe for bog compost. I’d left this tea untouched for a couple years but this challenge seemed like a good opportunity to both finally try it and drink it up. Maybe I was too quick to judge it?

To taste, it’s not half so bad as the smell led me to believe but it’s still decidedly not “cake,” despite the blend including honey, maple, sugar.. It’s a passable Earl Grey with lavender (but not a cream of earl grey like you’d expect). I’m happy to see it leave my cupboard though; the musty acidic tang carries over a tad.

Iced latte Sipdown (218)

My nephew brought the stomach flu home. I tried initially to fight the nausea with a tea with ginger. That, and even water made me sick. Even gravol didn’t fully help. So it’s been a while since I had tea and the whole time I’ve been readjusting to proper food since getting better, all I’ve wanted was a sweet iced latte. I ordered more of the chai concentrate but it’s not here yet so when I saw this tea, I thought it may have been a good alternative. Spoiler alert: it’s not.

My issue is this is not as sweet as I hoped. I really expected a Deb tea to be heavy on the sweet because usually it is. Granted the chai concentrate has sugar in it, but this has honey and other sweet ingredients. I wanted more maple and more “sticky” (I.e. caramel) but I’m getting chai. As in literal chai because this is tea and cardamom and ginger and cinnamon and not in a lovely spiced chai way but instead a muddied mix of spice. It probably would have been better as a hot latte. As it is, I’m disappointed and thus okay saying goodbye to this one.

Drank 1/13/22
I am going to preface this by saying I don’t like chocolate in teas. However, this has so little chocolate taste, I actually like it. Very peppermint heavy with a lot of that roasted coffee taste which comes from cacao nibs. Vanilla was present in a good way. Overall, this teas was a good tea. Did it taste like peppermint patties? Not really.
Free sample with order

Another one from the sub box.

This is going into my rehoming box, as I don’t enjoy almond extract/marzipan-type flavorings in tea – I tend to find it cloying. Marzipan is the main flavor here, and it’s accented by sweet and warming cinnamon. I don’t really taste coconut at all. It’s also a bit sweet for me, which is a common issue with Deb’s teas.

But I’m sure someone else will enjoy it, so I’ll put it aside for a swap or TTB. :)

A nice, toasty cinnamon hojicha, with some fruity background apple notes. I don’t really taste pumpkin/pumpkin spice here, but I still like it.

Sipdown! (22 | 22)

From the December subscription box, which was apparently the last one.

So, I was expecting a chocolate orange tea from this, given the name. However, there’s cinnamon in it, and to me it ends up tasting more than an orange spice tea because of that. I don’t get a lot of chocolate flavor from it. Maybe the cinnamon was meant to convey the “muffin” part?

It’s fine, but it’s not chocolate orange to me. I do enjoy Deb’s orange teas though, because of the real orange pieces. So juicy!

Wasn’t expecting to like this, because rooibos, but it’s actually pleasantly sweet and not too bad. I can’t really place the flavours (may have compromised my tastebuds with garlic again), it’s just kind of sweet, sticky fruits.

This really tasted mostly like a lightly sweetened lapsang souchong – and when you look at the ingredients, that’s what it is (plus coconut). So it’s fine, but for a tea called toasty marshmallows I think I need a good dose of vanilla as well, and that’s missing for me.

Sipdown! (19 | 19)

So I’m wondering if Deb starts with pre-flavored teas for her blends, because this tastes almost identical to the other two strawberry green teas I’ve had. Same base, same strawberry flavoring, and I’ve never seen a non-green strawberry tea from her. Just a thought.

Anyway, it’s fine. A mellow and smooth dry grassy sencha base with a somewhat candylike strawberry flavor. There’s a slight honeyed note to the strawberry as well, and a gentle sweetness overall. I wish I tasted more of the toasted rice, I’m only getting a hint. So not getting much “toast”, just strawberry.

Sipdown! (14 | 14)

So I was shocked when I opened this pouch and it really did smell like panettone – sweet with raisin and citrus and a richness from the vanilla.

However, it doesn’t really translate to the steeped tea, which is sort of a bit bland? I do taste hints of all those things – raisin, orange and lemon, a woody boozy note from the vanilla. But it’s all very subtle and the earthy/woody base takes over a bit. I will say this base tea is very smooth, which I appreciate after not liking some of the other black teas with a more tannic base. Also, there’s no sugar here which is always a plus.

Sipdown! (4 | 4)

This seems very similar to Pumpkin Pie Tart, just with a hojicha base instead of Chinese sencha. It’s nice enough – softly spiced with a nice toasty base and just a touch of creaminess. I appreciate that there’s no brown sugar in this one. The coconut does make it a tad bit oily, but nothing major.

I do think I like it better than the regular green tea version, as the toasty hojicha goes well with the autumn vibes of pumpkin pie. Still probably not something I would feel the need to order, as it’s not far off from some of the other spiced hojicha, and I think I prefer the cinnamon raisin or apply cranberry versions.

Sipdown! (11 | 11)

So to me, this is very similar to Deb’s cinnamon raisin hojicha.

It has the same sweet cinnamon sort of flavor, maybe with a bit of extra spicing from the pumpkin pie spice. The apple and pumpkin seeds don’t seem to be adding anything IMO. I do appreciate that there isn’t any sugar added to this blend, but at the same time I prefer the other one heh heh…

Pumpkin spice hojicha, but a bit light on the pumpkin spice. Also, why coconut? Not that I taste it anyway.

Just finished up the last of this tea. It was delicious. I have not had many black tea/ rooibos blends, but I really enjoyed how those two distinct flavors mingled together. Needed sugar to get that real Maple Syrup taste, but overall this is one of my favorite teas from Deb.

Sipdown! (2 | 2)

I like the idea of this one. And I like the peaches & cream part of it too.

But there’s too much ginger IMO, and it throws the whole thing off. The dried ginger root makes it taste too sharp and almost earthy, and takes it in a more savory direction. Also, there’s no cinnamon, which is odd when something like peach cobbler would generally have cinnamon. Maybe Deb was afraid it would be too similar to Peach Crumble Cake if it had cinnamon?

If she had reduced the amount of ginger and added some cinnamon, I think I would’ve liked this a lot more. As-is, it’s not a winner for me.

Sipdown! (26 | 515)

Another of Deb’s chocolate hojicha blends. Although this one has toasted rice in it, which is different.

It’s not bad, but it’s falling a bit flat for me. Interestingly, I’m not really getting chocolate despite the generous amount of cocoa powder. I think the toasted rice is the strongest flavor for me, and then there’s the roastiness of the hojicha. I like both of those things, but for some reason I’m just not feeling it in this blend… Maybe the sweetness of the maple is throwing me off?

Anyway, it’s okay but there’s nothing cake-like about it, and it somehow ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

Oops All Pumpkin 3/10!

I drank this one while watching Nightmare Before Christmas, which was really fun. I think I would normally enjoy the tea itself more than I did today, but compared to all of the pumpkin teas I had I found this one the thinnest in body and flavour. Though, it was also the least spiceed which was kind of a win for me personally. Mild as it may have been, I did loosely get caramel though – along with a lot of coconut.

One of the bottom teas from the day.

Tea Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/CkYo7Xju3Rv/ (Third photo)

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVuToMilP0A

Technically I “paired this” with the entire movie Soundtrack, but of course This Is Halloween is the most iconic of the songs. Here’s a bonus video though, of one of my favourite covers/AMVs of the song, though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qztch6_Uhuk

It’s crazy just how perfectly the animations from Soul Eater line up. For me, it’s simply not Halloween if I don’t watch this AMV at least once.

When I was writing all of the daily advent tasting notes there was this kind of mental adrenaline to it that kept me pushing through the exhaustion/fatigue of keeping up with it all and helped me remember all the details of the many, many teas I was drinking in that condensed time frame without confusing them…

However, come December 25th it was like this massive crash and my brain finally took the pause it so, so badly needed and just sort of shut off for a day. I drank several teas on the 25th but I don’t remember the details of most of them. Thankfully, I wrote notes for the bulk of them on the same day but for whatever reason I didn’t do that with this tea. So…

I remember liking it but feeling like it tasted nothing at all like the name. I’m going to absolutely need to retaste though to give anything more concrete than that in terms of flavour. Gotta build back up to more of a halfway point from the total brain/memory shut down versus operating on high capacity like I was.