French Vanilla Chai Tea Review

I’ve decided to do away with the scoring for two reasons:

It’s getting really hard to rank the teas as my feelings when drinking the tea are directly influenced by my mood at the time. Take today’s tea for example; I really didn’t like it the first time I tried it, but today it made me think about home, and my opinion instantly changed.
It kind of takes the fun out of drinking the tea if I have to analyze it to give it a score. I think I’ve finally figured out what the experience of drinking tea entails, and it definitely isn’t rating it from 1 to 10!

So here goes:

The Tea:

Today’s tea was Twinings’ French Vanilla Chai. I got from a friend a while back and only tried it once before, so I decided to give it another go! According to the box, this black tea is ‘perfectly balanced with the flavours of vanilla, savoury spices of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and ginger’.

The Preparation:

This one is bagged so you just use one tea bag per cup and steep for 3-5 minutes in 98°C water. [Since it’s the weekend I don’t have access to my friend’s plethora of loose leaf teas so I had to make do with the bagged kind. ;)]

The Experience:

The cinnamon/clove combo reminded me a lot of home because my grandmother used those spices together often. I’ve cooked with that combination recently, but for some reason it hit me surprisingly hard tonight 😕 Despite the slight homesickness, it was an excellent way to destress after a long day!

The Smell:

I love the way chai tea smells, so any variation of it smells heavenly to me and this one was no different :-).

The Taste:

The label was correct: the spices in the tea were perfectly balanced 😀 It was a bit spicy, even more so in the after taste, but that really just added to the awesomeness that was this tea! It was so good that I wanted another cup immediately after finishing the first…but I was to tired to get up so that didn’t happen 😐

The Benefits:

Chai tea is supposed to be great for stomach aches and overall digestion, but I have yet to personally benefit from those properties. I’m not wishing illness upon myself, but if I ever have to test it out, I’ll let ya know how it works 😉

That’s it for tonight! Check back tomorrow for the next installment of 31 Days of Tea and hopefully, a positive recap of my first 5K that doesn’t sound anything like this!