Diggity Tea: Queen Mary’s Sweetheart Rooibos

Maker: Queen Mary
Type: Flavored rooibos
Brew: 1 tsp per cup, boiling water, 7 min
Notes: Apparently discontinued.

This tea is literally like drinking a cupcake. A kind of stale cupcake, with somewhat off vanilla icing. Somehow the sweeteners didn’t work out as well as they could have, and while this is a novelty tea in every sense, a full cup of this can give you a headache. Just thinking about this tea gives me a bit of a stomach ache. Definitely do not use any sweeteners with this tea, unless you like a brick of sweet.

There are better, more subtle rooibos dessert teas out there, such as Rainbow Rooibos, which has an amaretto taste that’s quite a bit like an almond cookie. The blender I know not, but it’s available from tea shoppes like the Perennial Tea Room right in Seattle’s Pike Street Market.

Rating: 2/5—not a tea I’d run away from, exactly, but I wouldn’t pick it out willingly.

Diggity Tea: Republic of Tea’s get some zzz’s

Originally posted at Tea Derivations.

Maker: Republic of Tea
Type: Rooibos
Brew: 1 sachet per cup, boiling water, 5-7 minutes

I get the impression that from most posh tea makers, the idea of medicinal herbal teas is laughable. A lot of the ingredients aren’t the most pleasant-tasting in the world, so you need to find a blend with other ingredients to mask the herbal taste. Posh tea makers don’t care, but Republic of Tea, which is sort of a step up towards posh, does care. And Celestial Seasonings is quite famous for caring.1

My usual tea of choice for sleep is anything with valerian root. Usually passionflower is also involved; those are the two ingredients that will indeed knock you out. Celestial Seasoning’s Sleepytime doesn’t include valerian root, but Sleepytime Extra does.

But enough about other tea makers. We’re talking about “get some zzz’s”, which is part of Republic of Tea’s new line of red teas with health-enhancing ingredients, presumably blended so that the results are not bleaaaaargh. I’ve already tried “get happy”, which I’ll review later and does appear to work on all fronts.

And then there’s “get some zzz’s” which is a little less successful.

Oh, there’s no doubt that the concoction of “active” ingredients generally works. I have insomnia and this helps bring me down after a long, restless day… but at the very least I want something that tastes a bit more than meh. “get some zzz’s” has a taste similar to Celestial Seasoning’s Sleepytime, but a bit weaker—a little bit weird, because “get some zzz’s” has red tea in it, which is supposed to round out taste by giving it a good base.

These days my tea of choice for sleeping is Chamomile Lemon from Republic of Tea, that already contains valerian root and tastes more of something, so I’m covered there. I’m falling asleep so at some point I’ll review it later and…

zzzzz

Rating: 1/5 — An unpleasant meeting in the tea by-streets.